7 days ago
A DNA technique is finding women who left their babies for dead
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Then, one day in 2023, his phone blew up. Former colleagues at the sheriff's department were calling to say that a 45-year-old woman, Maricela Frausto, had been identified as the baby's mother.
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Frausto, a mother of two who owned a restaurant in nearby Hondo, Texas, with her family, had been identified using a relatively new technique known as forensic genetic genealogy. Using DNA data from thousands of volunteer donors, investigators can create family trees and use them to match DNA found at crime scenes.
Frausto was arrested and charged with murder.
Law enforcement investigators have been flummoxed for years by cases of newborn babies who were abandoned and apparently left to die. They are known as Baby Does: unidentified infants whose remains were discovered in wooded areas, garbage cans, or roadside ditches. Such cases historically have been hard to solve.
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That changed around 2019, when police first used the enormous public DNA databases that have been created for amateur genealogists to trace their lineages as a resource to solve these crimes. Since then, law enforcement investigators have used the technique to identify nearly 40 women as the mothers of newborn infants who were found dead around the country, most of them decades ago.
'In the past, these cases were unlikely to be solved, and now it's very likely that they will be solved, and that's because of investigative genetic genealogy,' said Christi Guerrini, a professor of medical ethics at Baylor University.
For police officers, these identifications help close cases that may have gone years without a resolution. But for the women being identified, many of whom have married, pursued careers, and given birth to other children, the new technology has brought the unearthing of long-hidden tragedies and the upending of their lives.
At least two women among the dozens of cases reviewed by The New York Times took their own lives after being approached by investigators armed with DNA evidence. Others have been sentenced to years in prison.
The circumstances that could have led a woman to abandon her newborn many years ago can be far more complicated than a simple DNA match can reveal, according to civil rights advocates, doctors, and defense lawyers. They say the new technique is raising questions that the courts are not yet prepared to answer.
Some of the women who have been identified in these Baby Doe cases say they did not know they were pregnant until they went into labor. Some of the women who have been charged told police their baby was stillborn. Determining the truth of the matter can be difficult.
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In the case of Frausto, who insisted that she had never heard her baby cry or take a breath, the medical examiner concluded that the baby was born alive on the basis of a lung test that has been widely criticized as unreliable.
'These women have been lumped in with other kinds of criminal cases, as though they're all the same,' said Diana Barnes, a psychotherapist who specializes in issues surrounding women's reproductive health. 'And I guess what I would say is that no, they're not all the same.'
In the past, law enforcement officers working on Baby Doe cases relied on CODIS, the national DNA database run by the FBI, but that generally includes samples only from people who have been charged with crimes. Mothers of abandoned newborns typically have little, if any, criminal history, and thus are unlikely to appear in CODIS.
Genetic genealogy now makes it possible to find them anyway.
The breakthrough came in 2018 when police used the technique and the public DNA databases to identify a serial murderer known as the Golden State Killer. Less than a year later, police in Sioux Falls, S.D., announced that they had used genetic genealogy in a Baby Doe case, connecting a woman named Theresa Bentaas to the death of her newborn son in 1981.
Frausto was 25 years old in September 2004, living in Hondo and married to an older man after growing up in an abusive household. According to what she later told her lawyers and an investigator who worked for them, she did not know she was pregnant.
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One afternoon, she went to the bathroom and fainted, she told the lawyers. When she woke up in pain, she realized she was in labor. She gave birth, but never heard the baby make a sound. Confused and overwhelmed, she put the baby in a closet, her lawyers said. Two days later, she left the baby by the side of the road.
After she was arrested nearly two decades later, she was adamant with her legal team: She did not kill her baby.
But from the beginning, sheriff's deputies believed they were investigating a murder: The medical examiner had concluded that the baby was born alive.
By the time genetic genealogy became a law enforcement tool, Springer had left the local sheriff's office, but other detectives had stayed on the case. In October 2022, working with a private forensic genetic genealogy company, Identifinders International, the detectives uploaded a DNA profile of the baby to two public genealogy databases.
After a DNA analysis confirmed that Frausto was the baby's mother, she was arrested and charged with capital murder on Nov. 20, 2023.
Frausto insisted that she had not killed her baby.
Anthony Welch, one of the public defenders who represented Frausto, said that there was a strong case to be made that the baby had been stillborn, meaning that Frausto could not have been guilty of killing her. And the statute of limitations had long passed for any charges involving mishandling of human remains.
