12 years later: Possible DNA match made for mother of ‘Baby Angel,’ found dead in river near Winona

Boaters on the Mississippi River a few miles south of Winona, Minn., found a girl’s body on Sept. 5, 2011, floating on the surface in a canvas bag, wrapped in two airtight plastic bags.

The 2-day-old infant, with a roughly cut umbilical cord and a fractured skull, was found wrapped in a green T-shirt that bore a faded image of a slice of toast. Embroidered on the shirt were sailboats and the name of the Mexican city of Manzanillo. Also in the package were a bracelet with an eyelike pendant, two music box angels and an angel bell.

Thus the girl came to be known as Baby Angel, and community members came together about six months later to have her buried in Woodlawn Cemetery with a headstone that includes her incomplete story and these final words, “God bless all the baby angels out there in the world.”

Now investigators believe they are closing in on solving the mystery of who was child’s mother.

A search warrant affidavit was filed in Winona County District Court this week asking a judge for permission to collect a DNA sample from a 41-year-old woman who could be Baby Angel’s mother.

After hesitating twice previously, the woman relented Wednesday and allowed a deputy to take a swab of DNA from inside her cheek, said Sheriff Ron Ganrude. The sample was delivered to the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) for testing.

Ganrude, who was the chief sheriff’s deputy when the call came in about a baby in the river and was among the first to the scene, said he expects the results within two weeks.

Reluctant to get his hopes up after all these years, the sheriff said, “In my mind right now, I guess we’ve been hopeful ever since Day 1 that someone would come forward and tell us what happened with the baby. Some consider this a cold case, but we’ve gotten a lot of tips and followed up on every one of them.”

The affidavit, made public one day after the woman surrendered her DNA, spells out in detail why investigators zeroed in on her:

The Sheriff’s Office provided DNA from the infant to the nonprofit Firebird Forensics Group, best known for its analysis leading to the 2018 arrest in California of the so-called Golden State Killer, a man now locked up for life for committing 13 murders and dozens of rapes in the 1970s and 1980s.

In March 2023, Firebird Forensics came back with evidence pointing to the woman, who lives in Winona with a man and two girls in grade school.

A Sheriff’s Office investigator asked the woman for a DNA sample. She replied that she wanted to research Firebird Forensics before consenting. The investigator asked again a week later, and she said he had yet to do the research and would call back. However, she did not.

Since then, the Sheriff’s Office “received a letter from a law firm that [the woman] had legal representation and requested any future contact be made through the law firm,” the affidavit read.

A sheriff’s investigator turned to another source of the woman’s DNA: the trash outside her home.

A BCA lab reported that testing from the evidence in the trash set out for collection and a blood sample from Baby Angel indicated the infant “could be the possible child” of the woman, the affidavit continued.

However, the report cautioned, “discarded samples are not considered known samples for direct comparisons; therefore, additional testing can be performed following the submission of a known sample from [the woman].”

The need for a direct sample is what led to the search warrant being filed and her turning over her DNA this week to the BCA.

“It’s one of those cases that really touches you,” Ganrude said Friday. “It’s in your memory, and it’s still there today.”