Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Baby For Sale

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

When the burned body of an infant is found in the Arizona desert, investigators search for the child's identity and come up empty-handed. Four years later, officers in another county respond to a tip about a couple who sold their baby daughter in an extortion scheme and ultimately killed her. It doesn't take long for investigators to connect the dots and finally discover the name of their Baby Jane Doe. Check out our great sponsors! SkyLight Frames: Get 10% off, up to $30 off your frame when you go SkylightFrame.com/cold  Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 29 million drivers who trust Progressive!

I see a charred body of a little infant that may be a year and a half, two years old. It's not rational. It doesn't make sense. Why would you come across a burned baby? I mean, we see some strange things out here sometimes, but you just don't see burned babies laying around. He put the baby on the phone, and I just hear her screaming and crying and crying, you know, calling, Mama, Mama, Mama. In October of 1990, a rancher and his five-year-old son made a gruesome discovery while driving cattle through the Arizona wilderness. Laying at the bottom of a ravine was any father's worst nightmare. The charred remains of what appeared to be a baby girl.

Any murder is a tragedy. But when a child dies violently, investigators in the community are even more motivated to solve the case. But as police begin to investigate, they found quite literally nothing. No missing person report, no evidence, and no suspects. Authorities were forced to name the one-year-old child Baby Jane Doe,

and the case went cold. That little girl would remain nameless for another six years until a single tip led investigators straight to her killer's front door. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast. I'm Brooke, and here's Bill Curtis with the classic case, Baby for Sale. Day break in the desert. Father and son head out to work 26,000 acres of sand and tumbleweeds, Alan Kessler is a rancher responsible for 600 head of cattle. In 1990, his son J.B. is five years old. About an hour into their day, Alan Kessler's horse pulls up before a shallow ravine.

The rancher looks down and notices a dark object lying among the rocks. I just assumed it was a doll. It had been burned, it was black, and it was kind of shiny, and it was sitting up there. But my son said, there's a baby, Daddy.

She was laying on a little ledge of rock with her head kind of facing us. There were still some kind of shreds of clothes on her. A call is made to local authorities. Yavapai County Sheriff's investigators Ernie Cox and Frank Valentine respond to the ranch. I see a charred body of a little infant that may be a year and a half, two years old. It has its hand up in the air, and it's like looking up into heaven.

You think that maybe the baby was alive, trying to cry, trying to ask for some help or something. Cox and Valentine notice the crime scene is located near a freeway turnoff, a popular stopping spot for passing motorists. It was popular to dump trash for some of the locals, illegal dumps. So we started looking for tire tracks, footprints, anything that would give us a clue as to who had come and gone.

Valentine locates a set of tire tracks and the impression of a cowboy boot, still fresh in the Arizona clay. The vehicle pulled in and stopped. You can see where it stopped. Somebody stepped out of the passenger side of the vehicle wearing a large cowboy boot. Valentine believes the owner of the footprint to be his killer. The task now, match the boot to a face. Investigators will begin by examining the corpse of a child.

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off up to $30 off your purchase of Skylight Frame, just go to skylightframe.com slash cold. That's S-K-Y-L-I-G-H-T-F-R-A-M-E.com slash cold. Get 10% off up to $30 off at skylightframe.com slash cold. Get 10% off, up to $30 off at skylightframe.com forward slash cold. Dr. Philip Keene is the medical examiner for Yavapai County. In 1990, he conducts roughly 70 autopsies, very few involving the murder of an infant. Keene glances over the charred remains laying before him, looking for any identifying features. We were able to establish that this was a female,

that it was Anglo, and we estimated this child was anywhere from 10 months up to maybe a year and a half or two years of age. Investigators tell Keene they are especially interested in putting a name to their victim. The coroner, however, offers little in the way of hope. Visual is not reliable. Fingerprints are reliable, but they are not kept on file for people under the age of eight in the state of Arizona.

Dental records are fine, but they're not very good in children who are still in the process of erupting teeth through the gums. Keene takes an inked impression of the infant's feet for his files and draws blood for a possible DNA comparison sometime in the future. Keen determines that the child was burned post-mortem. Unsure of how his victim was killed, the doctor marks the cause of death as an undetermined homicide and completes his autopsy with more questions than answers. Your mind has to rush to all the possibilities of who is this child, why is this child abandoned in the high desert as it was, and what is the story that is behind this child's demise. Keene labels the victim Baby Jane Doe, sends a copy of his medical report to investigators and waits, like everyone else, for someone to provide some answers.

Inside a small office, investigators Valentine and Cox cull through piles of missing persons reports looking for their baby Jane Doe. You can't have a child that's a year and a half old that's suddenly missing from a family without explanation. It just, you know, it's something that's going to turn up. At least that would be conventional thinking. Medical reports are circulated and a composite sketch of the child is developed,

generating plenty of leads but little real heat. We had leads from all over the place. None of them panned out. But that's kind of the price you pay. That's what you get when you put out a shotgun information, try to get as much as you can. One of those could. You just never know.

You get upset and trying to figure out where do we go? There's somebody out there knows something and we need to make contact with him somehow and get them to tell us any little thing so that we can go on further and find out who this child is and who's the responsible party of their death. Two months after she was first found at a ravine, baby Jane Doe remains unidentified. Her body is buried at a local cemetery, and the investigation into her case goes cold.

Gerardo Vasquez is 38 years old, an amateur boxer and a social worker in Tulare County, California. In the summer of 1994, Vasquez also finds himself in a relationship with a woman who has a burden she needs to share. She mentioned that she knew of a murder that had taken place. And I go, who did the killing, you know? And she said, my brother-in-law. And then she quieted down again, and I could see her tensing up. Determined to learn more,

Vasquez presses his girlfriend for information. I asked her, who did he kill? And that's when she said, his baby. And immediately I said, you know, we're going to have to tell somebody. Over the next 18 months, Vasquez talks with his girlfriend, wearing down her resolve and gathering more information. Her brother-in-law's name is James Megan. According to Vasquez's girlfriend,

Megan and his wife Lillian tried to sell the child out for adoption in Las Vegas. By January of 1996, Vasquez feels like he has gotten all the information he can and is ready to go to police. It is an act that will jeopardize his relationship with a woman and the only thing Vasquez can do. I knew that I was starting on a difficult journey and that there was no script for this journey. I didn't know what the outcome was going to be. All I knew is what the next thing was

what I was going to have to do. I was going to have to report it and I was going to have to let the cards fall where they do. But I felt like I didn't have a choice. On January 11th, Sergeant Ken Hefner takes a call. At the other end of the line is an amateur boxer named Gerardo Vesquez with a story about the possible murder of an infant. We get information like that quite often. We get calls almost on a daily basis, people wanting to report homicides, sometimes with very vague information on very old situations.

According to Vasquez, James and Lillian Megan tried to sell their daughter for adoption in 1990. When the scheme turned sour, the Megans took their daughter back and allegedly killed her. Six years after the body of baby Jane Doe was discovered, investigators finally had a name. Actually, they had two names, James and Lillian Megan. They didn't have the baby girl's name, though they thought they were on the right track to find it. Thanks to Gerardo Vasquez's tip, they had a lead. According to Vasquez, the Megans had conned another couple in a really perverse way. They sold them their baby and then tried to shake more money out of them. When the couple refused, the Meagans took their baby girl back.

And then, they killed her. With such serious accusations flying around, investigators knew they had to find out exactly what the Meagans had done with their daughter. And they knew where to start. Armed with this information, Hefner runs a background check on the family. I did some research and saw that there was a child, a female child named Francine, born to them at the right time frame. Hefner continues to follow the paper trail

to the Bureau of Vital Statistics, where he finds no evidence of Francine Meegan's demise. Then Hefner polls the local school district, looking for evidence the girl ever attended grammar school. Francine was not in school. She was born. She should be in school. She isn't in school. We can't authenticate that she had died in some proper or reported way.

At this point, because we know that the child was actually born and never made it to school years later, when it became school age, we have serious concerns that the story's going to pan out to be true. Detective Tom Thousand works the case with Hefner. He unearths adoption papers for a Francine Megan filed six years earlier. The family seeking custody of the girl, an Orange County couple named Dennis and Valerie Jensen. On January 22nd, Detective Thousand finds Valerie Jensen living and working in Southern California.

The detective greets Jensen at her job, asking pointed questions about the Meagans and their child Francine. An infant Valerie Jensen knows as Danielle. I'll tell you, that's the weirdest feeling when you have homicide detectives coming to your work wanting to see you. First thing that they asked me was, when was the last time that I saw Danielle? As detectives listen, Valerie Jensen takes them back seven years, to the day she got a phone call from her good friends James and Lily and Megan, a couple with an unusual proposal. It's Jimbo, or James. And he was saying, you know, Lillian's going to have a baby.

And he had asked us if it was a girl, if we would take her, if we would take her and raise her as our own. As unconventional as James Hoffer was, Valerie took delight in the possibility of adding a baby girl to her family of five. We couldn't have any more kids at the time, and we were a family of boys. I wanted a daughter. I did. And this was just the too-good-to-be-true type situation.

Seven months later, Valerie Jensen got a second call. This time it was Lily and Megan on the other end of the line. I answered the phone, and she says, Come pick up your daughter. Okay. You're kidding. No. Come pick up your daughter. She's waiting for you. Valerie tells police she and her husband traveled to Las Vegas, where they found James and Lillian

Megan, living in a motel room far removed from the bright lights of the city. It wasn't like the nicest place. It was sad. The baby was laying on a bed by herself, and I picked her up, and she was just... That was it. It was over. I knew that she was going to go home with us. According to Valerie, the Janssens struck a deal with James and Lillian Megan.

In exchange for custody of baby Francine, they agreed to help the Megans get back on their feet financially. Valerie wrote a check for $1,000 and made arrangements to purchase a car and home for the Megans. The Janssens then headed back to California with a new addition to their family, a newborn baby girl renamed Danielle Nicole Jensen. She was the little princess around the house. Just loved to be around her brothers and got so excited when she'd see her dad. She was just something else. She was definitely a blessing. For three months, the custody arrangement worked fine.

Then what seemed to be a blessing transformed itself into a nightmare. This episode of Cold Case Files is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you can be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance. It's easy and you could save money by doing it right from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $700 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your

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It began with calls from Lillian Meagan, asking questions about the child. It started getting kind of tense in constant communication with Lillian and, you know, placing demands and all of a sudden now you're going to try and start telling me how to raise this child. And that wasn't what I was going to do. According to Valerie, the calls from Lillian Megan were then supplanted by calls from her husband James. At first, Megan was polite, then insistent. His wife wanted her baby back. The only thing that could keep her quiet, money. So basically what they were saying is we need money and Lillian's changing her mind, but if you send us some money, I can talk Lillian out of changing her mind.

The Jensens refused to pay any more money to the Meagans. Four weeks later, in the middle of the night, they got a knock at their front door. There stands Lillian, and Lillian comes in, and she says, I came to pick up my baby. I want my baby. And I said, no. No.

And all I remember of that night were Jimbo's words. If you don't give her back to Lillian, you'll know what it's like to lose one of your own. Openly afraid of her former friends, Valerie Jensen handed over Danielle. It was the last time she would ever see the girl, but not the last time she would hear her. As Valerie explains to Detective Thausen,

she heard Danielle's voice at least one more time on the phone in September of 1990. Jimbo would call, and he'd put the baby on the phone, and I'd just hear her screaming and crying and crying, you know, calling, Mama, Mama, Mama. And he just was irate. He goes, she won't shut up. All she does is cry.

Investigators digest Valerie Jensen's story and believe it, leading them to an inescapable conclusion. Unable to wring any more money out of the adoption scheme and stuck with a daughter he did not want, James Megan took the short way out and killed his own child. The problem is, without a body, how do cold case detectives prove it? Their next move, pay a visit to James Megan and bring a picture of James' daughter. He virtually just recoiled from the picture. Anybody reading that body language would say, you know, something's wrong here.

We're standing across the street from 4480 El Oro, which was the house the Meagan family was living in at the time that this investigation came to fruition. On February 13th, detectives Ken Hefner and Tom Thousand flashed their badges and asked Lillian Megan if she and her husband have a moment to talk. Lillian's demeanor was immediate and profound. She just began to slump, drop her shoulders, drop her head, looked like the weight of the world had just crashed down upon her. When you walk into the Megan household, you have a full understanding that James Megan rules with an iron fist.

The first thing that you see hanging on the wall between the living room and the kitchen is a very well-worn, thick leather belt that is so worn in that it hangs perfectly flat on both sides around the nail. Detectives questioned James and Lillian Meagan separately about their daughter Francine, a child the Meagans allegedly sold to an Orange County couple in 1989, a child investigators now believe has been murdered

Lillian tells detectives her daughter has been missing for more than six years and that she was kidnapped out of a parking lot of a local casino leaves the baby in the car while she goes inside to cash a check and when she comes out, the baby's gone. And when they ask her why she didn't report this to the police, she just tries to explain that she was worried about the scrutiny

and never told the police. The story's completely unbelievable that she would have her child taken from her vehicle at a casino and not report to anybody. Lillian's story might be unbelievable, but it is better than no story at all, which is what James Megan offers police when asked about his daughter. He couldn't give you an answer to anything. He'd refer us back to Lillian, which would make no sense if you had a child and it was stolen out of a car and your wife was the one that had it,

when it happened, certainly you'd have a conversation with her at some point where you'd know every detail about it. Investigators feel the need to shake things up. Ken Hefter pulls out a photo of Francine and throws it onto the table in front of her father. He turned sharply to his right. He just was so fearful of looking back and seeing that photo. So he knew then anybody reading that body language would say, you know, something's wrong here. Something is indeed wrong. But without a body or some idea of what might have happened to Francine Megan,

cold case detectives are forced to play a waiting game. We believe that the child is dead. We believe that this has happened, that James has killed this child and done something with the body, and we're going to keep a surveillance on the house to see what's going on with James Megan and see what he does next. What James Megan does next is try to skip town. In the early morning hours of February 14th, 1996, a surveillance team tracks the Megans heading out of Las Vegas. We ended up stopping the Megans as they're about to head out of town, which I'm sure just was another situation to them that just shocked them back into reality. You're not going anywhere.

You're not going to slip out in the early morning hours and drift away, and this thing's going to, you know, just be forgotten. Detectives have enough to hold James Meagan on a charge of murder, but not nearly enough to support a conviction. Cold case detectives decide to reach out to the public. And we're looking for the help of people who knew the Meagans, who may have lived next door to the Meagans, who may have heard what they may have said on this issue,

to come forward and help us. In short order, neighbors and friends of the Meagans line up to offer detectives any information that may help the case. One such person, a friend of James Meagans named Marcel Peet. According to Peet, he and Meaghan had a conversation that turned into a confession to murder. In some kind of car accident, his leg was messed up. He was on medication for the pain. The baby was crying and next thing he knew, he grabbed it and shook it.

Before he realized what happened, it was over. He didn't know what to do. He was over. He didn't know what to do. He was scared. That was huge. I mean, that's kind of evidence that is very damning when your best friend comes forward. And you can tell the man took no great pleasure in telling us what he knew, but it was the truth and he was going to get it out.

Pete's information advances the case against James Megan significantly. Cold case detectives, however, realize they still have a major hole. If Megan killed his daughter, what did he do with the body? And where is it now? It's a typical Sunday morning for Jackie Price. The schoolteacher sits down with her husband, Dennis. Over coffee and breakfast, Price peruses the newspaper. On the second page of the Prescott Courier, a little story caught my eye that said that a man had been arrested and was in jail, but they couldn't find the body of his daughter that was missing.

The article strikes a chord with Price, who remembers the body of a baby found burned in the Arizona desert six years earlier. Price shares details of the news article with her husband, Dennis, who happens to work at the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office. My wife said, you know, that's your baby. I know that's your baby. And I kind of said, what? And she said, the baby you guys found, you know, this, I'm sure that that is the baby. And I said, you know, I don't think so. You know, what are the odds? I thought, no, you're wrong. This, this is really connected. I felt very, very strongly about that. Jackie pesters her husband until he agrees to put a call in to Las Vegas. DNA later confirms what Jackie Price already knows, that Francine Megan is indeed baby Jane Doe, a one-year-old child dumped in the Arizona desert

and set on fire six years earlier. Nothing in this job shocks me anymore. Surprise, yeah, we were pleasantly surprised that the information got out and we had her body. Cold case detectives believe James Megan to be their killer and decide to confront his wife, Lillian. Informing her, the body of her child has been found and asking what really happened to Francine. On April 2nd, 1996, cold case detectives sit down with Lillian Meagan. Faced with the evidence of Francine's remains, Lillian is willing to talk about how her daughter died.

According to Lillian, her husband James brought an almost lifeless Francine to her arms, claiming that the child had gotten into some pain medication James had been taking for his broken leg. Lillian said she tried to do CPR, and the baby basically dies in her arms. They decide at that point they're going to take the baby out of the house, so she puts the baby in some clothes and puts the baby inside a suitcase, puts the suitcase in their car. Lillian says they travel to Arizona, looking for a spot to dump the body of their one-year-old. Just off I-17, the couple found a turnout and pulled over.

James takes Francine out of the suitcase, puts her on the ground, pours gasoline on her, and sets her on fire. And I remember Lillian commenting that she couldn't watch, so she didn't want to look and ask that they drive away, and they didn't stay to watch to make sure that the body burned up. Cold case detectives don't buy Lillian's story of an accidental overdose, believing it to be a last desperate attempt to save her husband from a charge of murder.

Clearly, if he admitted that he picked up the baby and shook it, he'd be admitting to murdering the child as opposed to just having some medication that the child had gotten into, which she was trying to do at that point. On August 20th, a jury renders its judgment on how Francine Meagan died and who was responsible. Her father, James, is convicted on a single count of first-degree murder and is sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Francine's mother, Lillian, pleads guilty to negligence

and draws a term of 18 years. The Megans' former friend, Valerie Jensen, is left to wonder about the nine months she called an infant her daughter. Nine months that unfortunately turned out to be the better part of a lifetime for Francine Megan. She wasn't given a chance. You know, she deserved to be loved and to grow up and to be with her family, and they took that from her for absolutely no reason. The Jensens will live with their brief memories of Francine forever.

And so, Francine will never be forgotten. But is that justice? Is retribution even justice at all? And if so, can you call a life sentence for James Megan and 18 years for Lillian Megan retribution? The Cold Case podcast team looked into where the Meegans are now, assuming they would both still be in prison. Like anyone, I assume that someone is locked up for the murder of Francine Meegan, but you know what they say about assuming. In 2007, Lillian Meegan was paroled after serving just 10 years of her 18-year sentence.

And despite an initial ruling of life without the possibility of parole, James managed to apply for parole in 2011, just two years after Lillian. And his parole was granted. That's right. James walked free. Then, in August 2013, just two years after being granted parole, James got into a heated argument with his mother. So heated, in fact, that officers were called to the scene,

clearly demonstrating that he was having anger issues. As a result, James' parole was revoked. He returned to prison, but applied for parole again two years later. And in August 2015, James was paroled again. He's currently a free man. I won't get into whether or not James and Lillian Megan should be free, or whether I think they're rehabilitated, but I do wonder whether there's any justice for a little girl whose life was taken before it even really began. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by McKamey Lynn and Scott Brody.

Our executive producer is Ted Butler. We're edited by Steve Dolometer and distributed by Podcast One. Cold Case Files Classic was produced by Curtis Productions and hosted by the one and only Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at AETV.com and by downloading the A&E app. See what's screaming all month long We'll be right back. Pluto TV has hundreds of channels with thousands more movies and TV shows. Available on live and on demand. Download the free Pluto TV app on all your favorite devices.

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