Star Tribune
Investigators find parents of newborn Jane Doe left in ditch in 1980 near St. Cloud
Investigators said Tuesday they have solved the decades-old mystery of who were the parents of a newborn girl whose remains were found in a ditch south of St. Cloud, but lack the evidence to charge anyone in connection with the death of the child.
Two women on their usual walk along a road on April 3, 1980, spotted the baby wearing only a disposable diaper and alerted the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office. The discovery set off the long-running investigation that included multiple autopsies, an exhumation and numerous search warrants executed within and beyond Minnesota in order to collect DNA from anyone who might be related to the child, known throughout the years as Jane Doe.
Sheriff’s Lt. Zach Sorenson told the Star Tribune that his office has determined the identities of the parents. Sorenson said the mother has died, while the father is living in Minnesota and has spoken with a Sheriff’s Office investigator.
Sorenson said that once the case is considered closed in the coming weeks, their names and other details of the investigation will be released.
In the meantime, Jane Doe is back in her initial resting place in St. Cloud at Calvary Cemetery — Block 11, Row 5, Grave 1A —after her exhumation in 2018.
And just as it was upon her initial burial a few days after being found, Jane Doe’s plot still lacks a marker.
While one mystery has been put to rest, the Sheriff’s Office is resigned to solve another: whether the baby was alive or not when left by the side of the road near the St. Boniface Chapel in St. Augusta.
And lacking that determination, Sorenson said, there is no way his office can send the case to prosecutors for consideration of charges.
“We haven’t been able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there is a criminal element to the child’s death,” he said. “We couldn’t prove the baby was alive or dead when left there.”
Sorenson declined to specify the one or multiple breakthroughs that led to learning the names of Jane Doe’s parents, but the decades of investigative work put into the effort were outlined in a search warrant affidavit filed last week in St. Louis County District Court that allowed law enforcement to collect DNA from one prospective relative.
According to that court filing from April 2022 that was unsealed only last week:
The full-term newborn’s remains were sent to Hennepin County for an autopsy, which determined that she was white, wearing a soiled diaper and no obvious cause of death. She was buried four days later as Jane Doe.
Law enforcement searched the area for leads that might reveal the names of the parents, checked a government list off all females born in the county going back to November 1979. No luck.
A court order in August 2018 allowed for Jane Doe to be exhumed by Ramsey County Medical Examiner Michael McGee.
McGee “opened the cherub and removed several bones from the deceased infant’s body for the purpose of developing a DNA profile,” read the affidavit signed by Stearns County sheriff’s office investigator Tony Kotschevar. However, the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) told investigators that there was not enough DNA in the samples to build a profile.
Investigators went back to the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office and learned that it retained small pieces of Jane Doe’s organs during its autopsy, soaked them in formaldehyde and sealed them in paraffin wax.
These samples allowed the BCA to develop a profile in 2020 that could be used to check various DNA data bases for a match. A lab in suburban Washington, D.C., issued a report in May 2021 that the DNA indicated that the Jane Doe’s family would have traits that include fair to very fair skin tone and green or hazel eyes.
Two men are dead and one woman was injured in a shooting at a homeless encampment in south Minneapolis on Sunday afternoon, police said. It was the second shooting at a Minneapolis encampment this weekend.
At about 2:20 p.m. Sunday, police responded to a reported shooting in the 4400 block of Snelling Avenue near the railroad tracks at the small encampment between Snelling and Hiawatha avenues. At the scene, officers found two men with fatal gunshot wounds, said Sgt. Garrett Parten Minneapolis Police spokesman. Responders rendered aid, but both men died at the scene.
A woman was found at the scene with life-threatening injuries and was taken to a local hospital where she was being treated Sunday night, he said. Police have yet to say whether the three were living at the encampment.
Officers detained three people, who Parten said have since been released after police found they were not believed to be involved in the shooting. No suspects had been identified as of 6:30 p.m. Sunday.
The shooting is the second at a southside homeless encampment this weekend. One man died and two were critically injured early Saturday at an encampment shooting near E. 21st Street and 15th Avenue S. On Sunday, the man was identified as Deven Leonard Caston, 31, according to the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office.
“We don’t know if there’s a connection between this homeless encampment shooting and the one that occurred yesterday,” Parten said on Sunday. “That is a consideration of the investigation. We can’t rule it out.”
Ward 12 Council Member Aurin Chowdhury, who represents the area and lives nearby, was at the site of the shooting Sunday afternoon. She said officials need information about what happened to better understand how to address situations like this long-term.
“This is an absolute tragedy, and this type of violence should never occur within our city,” she said. “It really makes me think about how we need to look at this more systemically and not just take a whack-a-mole approach and expect the problem to go away.
During Sunday’s Twitch stream, Walz and Ocasio-Cortez played Madden while discussing making homebuying more accessible, building affordable housing, eliminating student loan debt and raising the federal minimum wage.
After the match, Walz showed off his Sega skills in a round of “Crazy Taxi,” the Y2K-era racing game where gamers play as a taxi driver picking up passengers and taking them to their destination for cash.
Walz called himself a “first-generation gamer” and recalled playing “Crazy Taxi” when he bought a Sega Dreamcast. He also mentioned the Minnesota Star Tribune’s coverage of how his old game console was sold and ended up with a Plymouth resident, who still has it.
Afterward, Walz and Ocasio-Cortez watched a short clip of Trump denying on Rogan’s podcast that he lost the 2020 presidential election. Democrat Joe Biden won that year.
Ocasio-Cortez during the livestream also showed viewers her farm on the cozy, indie game Stardew Valley. Walz said the game reminded him of Minnesota: “You’ve got mining,” he said. “You’ve got agriculture. You’ve got snow.”
Before Walz headed out to a rally in Nevada, he pleaded with viewers to vote. More than 12,000 viewers tuned into the livestream on Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitch channel. More watched from Harris’ channel.
”Hey guys, they’re now scrambling and trying to call us Nazis and fascists,” said Alina Habba, one of Trump’s attorneys, who draped a sparkly ”MAGA” jacket over the lectern as she spoke. ”And you know what they’re claiming, guys? It’s very scary. They’re claiming we’re going to go after them and try and put them in jail. Well, ain’t that rich?”
Declared Hogan in his characteristic raspy growl: ”I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here.”
Trump has denounced the four criminal indictments brought against him as politically motivated. He has ramped up his denunciations in recent weeks of ”enemies from within,” naming domestic political rivals, and suggested he would use the military to go after them. Harris, in turn, has called Trump a ”fascist.”
The arena was full hours before Trump was scheduled to speak. Outside the arena, the sidewalks were overflowing with Trump supporters in red ”Make America Great Again” hats. There was a heavy security presence. Streets were blocked off and access to Penn Station was restricted.
In the crowd was Philip D’Agostino, a longtime Trump backer from Queens, the borough where Trump grew up. The 64-year-old said it was appropriate for Trump to be speaking at a place bills itself as ”the world’s most famous arena.”
”It just goes to show ya that he has a bigger following of any man that has ever lived,” D’Agostino said.
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