09-04-2025
Will new testing finally ID a baby found 35 years ago in the Richland landfill?
Thirty-five years ago Richland landfill workers made a grisly discovery. A baby's body was found amid the piles of trash.
Now the Benton County coroner is hoping to solve the mystery of the child's identity.
Bill Leach exhumed the body of Baby Doe from Richland's Resthaven Cemetery on Tuesday morning. Thanks to a grant from a Texas-based laboratory, he plans to extract DNA from a bone and search for a genetic link to the baby's family.
This is the second of four unidentified bodies at the Resthaven Cemetery that Leach has exhumed.
'This has always been on my radar,' he said. 'A baby born and then put in the ground unknown is a terrible thing.'
Baby Doe was discovered in May 1989 by a heavy equipment operator at the landfill. The infant was likely a day or two old and still had its umbilical cord. The baby's gender has never been made public.
Police and landfill employees called the discovery a 'freak accident' because of the large volume of garbage coming into the landfill each day, according to follow-up story written in 2004.
The Richland Cemetery Association donated a burial plot for a proper burial and helped pay for a grave marker. Einan's at Sunset Funeral Home arranged for a graveside service.
Richland police searched in vain for the child's identity. Leach said the initial autopsy determined the baby was not born premature and it wasn't clear if the baby was alive or dead when it was dumped, though there were no signs that it was killed.
Investigators at the time sent samples in for DNA testing, but the technology was still new at the time and it didn't net any results, said Leach. Even a decade later, there was little hope of discovering the baby's identity.
The baby's DNA will the second case the Benton County coroner has sent to the Texas-based laboratory Othram.
The first was from the body of a woman discovered in the Columbia River near the blue bridge in September 1986.
A person researching grave sites discovered the Jane Doe on and called Leach to ask if he had any information about her.
After testing, searching databases and interviews, Leach and Benton County sheriff's deputies determined it was the body of Patricia Kay Rodriguez.
The mother of four disappeared after stopping by a Yakima restaurant on her way to work in 1983. While police weren't able to use the information to determine how she died, they solved part of the mystery for her children and other family members.
Othram uses forensic genetic genealogy techniques to solve cold cases and to determine the identity of bodies. They compare their samples to publicly available databases looking for relatives.
The lab has solved several cases around Washington state. The Woodland, Texas company's technology enables the U.S. National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, according to their website.
The laboratory has helped solve a 1978 murder in Spokane, identified the body of a man found in a wooded area near Newport and ID'd a man based on a small fragment of his skull found in the Spokane River.
They also helped identify a body discovered on Franklin County's Scootney Reservoir in 2021.
The search for Baby Doe's relatives may be more difficult because the child appeared to be abandoned shortly after being born, Leach said. The baby isn't likely to have a birth certificate and there may not be anyone looking for them.
'We're hoping to find a sibling or, ideally, the parents,' Leach said. 'Finding the family is the ultimate goal and putting a name with the baby and then maybe reuniting the baby with the family so it can be in the right place.'
It's not clear at this point whether there was a crime involved.
Leach said the search won't be easy.
'If somebody is aware who this is, if they were just to call the Richland Police Department and speak to Detective Cameron Fancher and explain to them what they know that would be a huge benefit to this investigation,' he said.
