At-home DNA test leads to arrest in cold case mystery of newborn’s death

What one woman thought was a fun activity turned out to be the act that would help close a decades-old cold case involving the murder of a newborn baby.

Jenna Gerwatowski took an at-home FamilyTreeDNA test in 2022, and in May of that year, she received a call from the Michigan State Police. She told CNN that the officer asked her, “Have you heard of the Baby Garnet case?”

She had. According to CNN, most locals knew about the case. On June 26, 1997, an infant was found dead in a pit toilet at the Garnet Lake Campground, near where Jenna had grown up. The Mackinac County Sheriff’s Office had been called to the campground after a commercial sewage company found the baby when workers were pumping out the men’s outhouse.

At the time, police had no leads on the baby’s identity, and no one had witnessed the child being put in the pit toilet. The case went cold and became the small town’s murder mystery — until Jenna took that DNA test.

“Your DNA was a match,” Jenna, age 23, said the detective told her. Detectives had reopened the case just a few years earlier in 2017 and worked with a forensics company to take DNA from the baby’s femur, sending the result to Identifinders International. That’s how they found Jenna’s DNA test results and learned that she was a relative of Baby Garnet.

“It was just crazy,” said Jenna, who went home and told her mother, Kara Gerwatowski, age 42, the news. “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.”

Misty Gillis from Identifinders International, a genetic genealogy investigation firm called Jenna, and requested her password for FamilyTreeDNA so that she could upload Jenna’s DNA into a different database, reported CNN. But Jenna hung up on her, having begun to think that her call and the call from the detective were part of an elaborate scam. A week later, her mother called her at work, upset.

“She was like, ‘I really need you to come home. … It’s an emergency. Like, just come as soon as you can,'” said Jenna. When she arrived at home, her cousin, who works as a victim’s advocate in the county prosecutor’s office, was there. Her cousin told Jenna that it wasn’t a scam. So Jenna called Gillis back.

It turned out that Jenna’s DNA had revealed she was the half-niece of Baby Garnet. Jenna’s mother then agreed to provide her DNA and learned she was the half-sister of Baby Garnet.

“I feel like that is when, like, all of the puzzle pieces kind of started falling together for her,” said Jenna. “And she told detectives that, if it’s going to be anybody, it would be (her) mother.”

Kara had not spoken to her mother, Nancy Gerwatowski, in 24 years, since she was 18 years old. Jenna had never met her grandmother, who was now living in Wyoming. According to Court TV, police called Nancy, who denied being the baby’s mother. But after detectives took a sample of her DNA, she eventually admitted that she was, in fact, Baby Garnet’s mother. She told police that she was going through a divorce when she got pregnant and was not sure who the father was. She hid the pregnancy and went into labor at home, alone. According to court documents, the baby got stuck in the birth canal and though she tried to pull the baby out, she lost consciousness. When she woke up, the baby was fully born but was blue and not breathing. She put the baby in a bag and went to the campground to dispose of the body before driving to her mother’s house.

“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

The Michigan attorney general’s office alleges that Nancy Gerwatowski, now 58, “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.”

She is charged with open murder, involuntary manslaughter, and concealing the death of an individual. If convicted of open murder, she could receive a life sentence. Nancy Gerwatowski’s defense argues that she did not have access to a phone to call 911 back in 1997 and that she was in shock when she gave birth to a stillborn baby, so she put the baby in a bag and left the remains at the campground. They say the case against her should be dropped because the state is unable to prove that the baby was born alive and that Nancy was denied her right to counsel when she was questioned, which the state disputes. Nancy had admitted during questioning that she had considered an abortion and did not seek prenatal care, which the state is considering a motive for the baby’s alleged killing.

“It was a very hard time … very traumatizing and very nerve-wracking,” said Jenna. “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.”

Judge Brian D. Rahilly is tasked with determining if the charges should be dropped or if the case should move forward, and expects to make that decision before the end of the year. Nancy’s attorneys want the information she admitted to police to be tossed.

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