Stearns County Sheriff solves cold case from 1980 on unidentified baby found in ditch

The Stearns County Sheriff’s Office released a statement Thursday afternoon announcing it closed a cold case.

A decades-long investigation into a dead baby’s remains found on April 3, 1980, in a ditch on 250th Street off of County Road 136 in St. Augusta led to discovering the parents of the formerly unidentified baby.

The sheriff’s office, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office, Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office and Parabon NanoLabs collaborated in the investigation.

Stearns County’s investigation reached a key discovery in 2021 when it, in collaboration with the BCA and Parabon NanoLabs, matched the baby's remains with a deceased woman, who they determined to be the mother, in DNA comparison tests.

“The comparison results indicated the genetic results obtained from Baby Jane Doe are 1,700 times more likely to occur in a biological child of the adult female compared to someone unrelated to the adult female,” the release states.

In 2024, Parabon NanoLabs collected DNA from a living adult man, which also underwent a DNA comparison. The sheriff’s office also interviewed the male.

The results combing the two potential parents' DNA came back with the genetic comparison being 670 million times more likely to occur in a child of the adult man and deceased woman's biological child versus someone unrelated to the two, according to the release.

"The (test) reported there is very strong evidence to support the biological relationship between the adult female, adult male and Baby Jane Doe as being a biological parents-daughter relationship," the release states.

The sheriff’s department said in its release that it decided to close the case without a cause or motive of death due to being unable to interview the deceased mother.

At this time, the Stearns County Sheriff's Office did not release the name of the baby nor its recently identified parents.