Estimated read time: 6-7 minutes
- Jenna Gerwatowski's DNA test linked her to a 1997 cold case.
- Her grandmother, Nancy Gerwatowski, is charged with murder after DNA evidence surfaced.
- Nancy's defense argues the baby was stillborn and seeks case dismissal.
NEWBERRY, Mich. — It was the middle of Jenna Gerwatowski's workday at the local flower shop in Newberry, Michigan, when she got a call from an unknown number.
The now 23-year-old doesn't usually answer unknown calls but says she decided to pick this one up in May 2022.
To her surprise, it was a detective from the Michigan state police.
"He was like, 'Have you heard of the Baby Garnet case?'" Jenna told CNN.
Jenna had heard of it. In 1997, a deceased infant was found in a campground pit toilet at the Garnet Lake Campground – right where Jenna grew up. Investigators couldn't find any leads on the identity of the baby or anyone who witnessed a person abandoning an infant, according to a news release from the Michigan attorney general's office. The case went cold, and the "Baby Garnet" case became a known murder mystery in Jenna's small town for decades.
"Your DNA was a match," Jenna says the detective on the phone told her. She was related to the dead infant from 1997.
Jenna was in shock. The detective sounded sure, Jenna said, but she wondered how he had even obtained her DNA.
About six months earlier, her friend had gotten a FamilyTreeDNA test for Christmas and Jenna decided to order her own. DNA from other Baby Garnet relatives led detectives to Jenna's FamilyTreeDNA kit, according to court documents.
The detective said a woman from Identifinders International, a genetic genealogy investigation firm, would call her about her DNA to help with identifying closer relatives, according to Jenna.
According to court documents, detectives reopened the cold case in 2017 and then worked with a forensics company to extract DNA from Baby Garnet's partial femur, before sending the results to Identifinders International.
Jenna explained the situation to her mother when she got home from work.
"It was just crazy," Jenna said. "We were both sitting there like, I don't even know who (the mother or father) could've been. We were both so confused and we're like, it's got to be somebody that we don't know, you know, like a distant cousin or something."
Jenna said her mother, Kara Gerwatowski, started to wonder whether the detective call was a scam.
Jenna's grandfather had just been scammed by someone claiming to be a detective, so Kara told Jenna to be cautious about giving out personal information or passwords.
Misty Gillis, then a senior forensic genealogist and cold case liaison from Identifinders International, called Jenna that night, according to Jenna and court documents filed later in the case.
Jenna claims Gillis requested her FamilyTreeDNA password to be able to upload her DNA into a separate database. Jenna was concerned it was a scammer and refused to cooperate, according to court documents.
"I hung up the phone on her, not even thinking twice about it. And we went about our day. I was like, how weird. What a weird thing to scam people about," Jenna said. "I wholeheartedly did not think that it was real."
'You need to come home'
One week later, Jenna was working at the flower shop when she got a distressed call from her mother.
"She was like, 'I really need you to come home. … It's an emergency. Like, just please come as soon as you can,'" Jenna said.
Jenna rushed home thinking someone died. Her cousin was sitting with her mom at their round wooden kitchen table. Police had contacted her cousin, who works as a victim's advocate in the county prosecutor's office, to explain the Baby Garnet situation to Jenna. It turned out it wasn't a scam.
"My mom had tears in her eyes," she said. Jenna's cousin had "just pure shock on her face. … You could hear a pin drop in there."
Even though Jenna knew she had nothing to do with the Baby Garnet case, she was terrified police would think she was trying to hide something because of her refusal to speak with Gillis. She immediately called her.
An analysis of Jenna's DNA kit showed she was the half-niece to Baby Garnet, according to court records.
On June 1, 2022, detectives spoke with her mother, Kara, who agreed to provide her DNA. Kara was the half-sister of Baby Garnet, according to court records.
"I feel like that is when, like, all of the puzzle pieces kind of started falling together for her," Jenna said. "And she told detectives that, if it's going to be anybody, it would be (her) mother."
Meanwhile, Kara, now 42, had not spoken with her mother, Nancy Gerwatowski, since she was 18 because they had a bad relationship, and Jenna had never met her grandmother. Regardless, both were shocked Nancy, who was living in Wyoming when police questioned her, would be the one behind their town mystery.
"I had grown up knowing about the case my whole life and then come to find out it was my grandma that did it?" Jenna said.
What happens now
The Michigan attorney general's office alleges Nancy "delivered the newborn alone at her Newberry home, during which Baby Garnet died due to asphyxiation, and that this death could have been prevented by medical intervention (Nancy) Gerwatowski did not seek.
However, in a court filing, Nancy's defense argues she unexpectedly gave birth while in the bathtub and the fetus "became trapped inside her birth canal." She "attempted to pull the fetus out of her own body," the filing says, but couldn't deliver the fetus and lost consciousness "at some point in the delivery." When she was finally able to deliver the fetus, it was dead, the filing says.
Her defense argues that Nancy, like the average person in the county in 1997, did not have access to a telephone or cell line, so she couldn't call 911. While she concedes in her legal filings she placed the stillborn fetus in a bag and left the remains at the campground, her defense attorneys argue she had been in shock after having had no pain medication during the traumatic birth.
Nancy is charged with one count each of open murder, involuntary manslaughter, and concealing the death of an individual. Open murder carries a potential life sentence.
While she concedes in her legal filings she placed the stillborn fetus in a bag and left the remains at the campground, her defense attorneys argue she had been in shock after having had no pain medication during the traumatic birth.
In a hearing Thursday, Nancy's defense argued that the case against her should be dropped in its entirety because the state cannot prove the baby was born alive.
If the court allows the case to proceed, the defense argued, Nancy's statements during police interrogation should be excluded because she was denied her right to counsel — a contention the state disputed.
If the court does allow her statements to be a part of the trial, Nancy's lawyers want her comments about considering an abortion and not seeking out prenatal care to be excluded, while the state argued the comments are relevant to a possible motive.
Judge Brian D. Rahilly said he hopes to reach a decision on whether or not to drop the charges by next week or around the end of the year at the latest.
"It was a very hard time … very traumatizing and very nerve-wracking," Jenna said. "I've never met this woman, so it was hard for me to even grasp that concept, but even harder for my mom because that was her mother."
