Law&Crime Sidebar - Mom Dumped Newborn Baby with Cracked Skull in Mississippi River: Cops

Episode Date: May 3, 2025

Minnesota authorities say within hours of “Baby Angel” being born, her body was put in a bag and dumped in the Mississippi River. After more than a decade, Winona County prosecutors say they’ve finally identified Baby Angel's biological mother as Jennifer Baechle. Law&Crime’s Jesse Weber spoke with Barbara Rae Venter, the founder of Firebird Forensics Group, about the huge impact genealogical research combined with DNA testing can have on police investigations.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW:If your child, under 21, has been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes or fatty liver disease, visit https://forthepeople.com/food to start a claim now! HOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokeVideo Editing - Michael Deininger, Christina O'Shea & Jay CruzScript Writing & Producing - Savannah Williamson & Juliana BattagliaGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. She deserved better than a watery grave. She deserved more than a life cut short. Authorities in Minnesota say a woman put her newborn baby into a bag and put that bag into the Mississippi River. When boaters found the baby's tiny body, it was immediately clear that something had gone horrible in this child's very short life. We're digging into how a forensic group was able to offer their particular services to help get answers to this community. Welcome to Sidebar. Presented by Law and Crime, I'm Jesse Weber. We have an arrest 14 years after disturbing alleged

crime. According to an autopsy, a newborn known only as Baby Angel didn't live for more than a day or two before she died. Medical examiner apparently noting skull fractures to her. And on September 5th, 2011, we're going all the way back. Boaters in Homer, Minnesota, a few miles south of the city of Winona, found her little body inside of a canvas bag in the Mississippi River with her umbilical cord still attached. Winona County law enforcement named her baby angel because of the items that were found with her body. And among them, two angel figurines.

She weighed just six, seven pounds. News 8 now reports that one of the boaters tried to even do CPR on this little baby, but she was gone. She died. Back in 2011, a medical examiner found these fractures on her skull bleeding on the brain. It appeared the four inch umbilical cord had not been cut off. off by a professional. This is according to CBS News. And the Winona County Sheriff's Office teamed up with local agencies to try to figure out two things, figure out who is, baby angel, what's her

identity, and also the identity of the person who put her in the river. Or maybe who are this little girl's parents? Now, the community, they held a funeral for the newborn. And since 2011, there have been vigils that have been held in hopes of finding somebody who had any information at all. This is not a case that can go forgotten. This is a death that needs to be explained. And they release photos of the items that were found with the baby, including the porcelain angels, a green short-sleeved t-shirt with some sort of faded design on the front,

a bracelet of silver and blue beads with a large glass pendant. And then this tan canvas bag with sailboats, a son and the word manzanillo embroidered on it, possibly in reference to the Mexican resort town. Now, deputies also put baby angels' DNA and identifying information into databases. Now, there weren't immediate matches. However, more than a decade after her death, a huge breakthrough.

For more than 13 years, baby angels' tragic death has weighed heavily on the hearts of the Winona community. She deserved better than a watery grave. She deserved more than life cut short. And while her birth mother remained hidden, this community wrapped its arms around the, little girl. More than 150 people gathered to mourn our baby angel all those years ago. The Winona County Sheriff's Office connected with Firebird Forensics Group to do a deeper dive

into baby angels genealogy. And that led them to 43-year-old Winona resident Jennifer Beckley. According to police, they reached out to Beckley for a voluntary DNA sample, but they say she refused to give one. So they went through the trash outside the home, finding something to test and compare to baby angels' DNA. And guess what? It was a match. We never gave up working to find those answers. Our investigators and partners at the BCA conducted many interviews, collected many DNA samples, and pursued every tip and every lead that we got. We decided to try using genetic genealogy to see if they could help us near our search for a relative of Baby Angel.

Our agency enlisted the help of the Firebird Forensic Group, who eventually told us they had a possible lead, Jennifer Nicole Beckley. We put together a plan and contacted Beckley to request a DNA sample. She declined to provide one. Investigators obtained a court-ordered warrant requiring Beckley to provide the DNA sample.

Once she did, and not long after we got that, the BCA confirmed that Beckley is Baby Angel's mother. Since then, we've continued our investigation, attempting to learn everything we could about how Baby Angel died and why she was placed in the river. We don't have all the answers, but we know who is responsible. And today's charges are his first step in holding her accountable. According to CBS News, an updated autopsy review was done in 2024 and it found that the

quote, normally developed term female infant sustained injuries of the head while alive. Now, CBS reviewed a criminal complaint, which said there was no evidence that medical care was provided during or immediately after delivery. The result in brain hemorrhages from the skull fractures could have been treated medically and decreased the likelihood of death. Now, the complaint says that relatives told police Beckley was living in a van in Winona back in 2011. They didn't have contact with her. They said she collected angels, and the pendant found with baby angels' body appeared to belong to Beckley.

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up for the families who deserve justice. So if you're a child diagnosed type 2 diabetes or fatty liver disease, then visit www.4thepeople.com slash food or scan the QR code on screen to learn more. So Beckley was arrested, charged two counts of second degree manslaughter. The Winona County prosecutor told reporters during a news conference that there were other charges the defendant could have faced, but the statute of limitations ran on that. And by the way, in Minnesota, a second-degree manslaughter has a presumptive sentence of at least 48 months in prison if a defendant is convicted. That's according to the county prosecutor. And investigators say Beckley is married two children.

She had been hired as an adjunct faculty member for the spring semester at Winona State University. But according to outlet WLAX, the school announced another faculty member would immediately be taking her place. And the judge said a $200,000 no-condition bond for Beckley with the option to put down $20,000 as collateral to be out of jail. But with conditions like GPS monitoring, it's unclear what type of. bond she posted but she's no longer listed as a current inmate on the county jail website she's due back in court in july so to talk about this case and the work that it took to finally arrest somebody in connection with baby angels death i want to bring in a special guest i'm joined right now by barbara ray venter the founder and president of firebird forensics group which we mentioned

before barbara thanks so much for taking the time really appreciate it sure you're very welcome so let's talk a little bit just more about your organization and the work that you do before we even get into the specifics of this case. We started this. We're actually a group of independent investigators. So we're not, it's not an employee situation. So we're all just together working on cases. We are not-for-profit. And the cases that we work on are some kind of criminal case, either unidentified human remains or rapes or homicides. They need to fit one of those criteria in order for us to use the various databases that we're using to match DNA with a crime scene DNA. I actually founded this about, I think it was about five years ago. I've actually

been working on cases prior to that. But then I got so many requests for assistance from law enforcement to work on cases that I then recruited some other people to help me. That's great. That's great. That means you're doing fantastic work. And, you know, this case is no exception. So talk to us about how firebird forensics got involved in the Baby Angel case. So this was actually a referral. I used to consult with gene by gene, which is the parent company of family tree DNA. And they had received a request for names of somebody who could help work on this case from the sheriff in Winona County.

And so I was then given a copy of the DNA results. they'd apparently had approached other companies and being turned down because the amount of matching DNA with the baby, partly because it is a baby, and so it's, you get the most DNA matches with people who are old, somebody who's very, very young, and in this case a newborn baby, the amount of matching can be very small, and that was true in this case. So I think the closest matches that we have were in about the fourth cousin range. So that means that the people who shared DNA with the baby were people who shared a great, great, great, great, great, grandparent. So we're talking a really difficult case.

And so I looked at it, and we do take all cases. We don't cherry pick and just take the cases that look like they're going to be easy. So we took this one on knowing that it was going to be very difficult. And so we just started working on it. And what you do is you build a family tree for each of the people that shares DNA with you. So these people that you're looking at, these are people who have done DNA testing at one of the direct-to-consumer companies. So they've tested at Ancestry or 23 in May or Family Tree DNA. And then what they've done is they've actually uploaded their DNA profile, not their DNA, just their DNA profile, to one of two sites,

either to family tree DNA or to another one, it's a site called Jedmatch. And Jedmatch is a site where people who are doing family history research can upload their DNA profile. It does not do any testing itself. It's just a place where you couldn't look for relatives. So that's what we do. We just build out the trees for these people. And then what we're looking for is common ancestor. So we're looking for that great, great, great, great, grandparent that the person shares with our baby. And so from there, what we do, once we've identified a common ancestor, we then have to turn around and what we're now doing is looking for a descendant of that common ancestor because that person's going to be one of the parents of the baby. We had no

idea which parent we were looking for at this point. I mean, presumably both parents are in there somewhere, but we only really had one group of matches who were sharing common ancestor. We really weren't seeing both sides. Yes, theoretically, you could identify both parents, but we were already having trouble identifying whichever one we were working on. So the chances of actually finding the second parent were not very good. So as it turned out, of course, we identified somebody who's potentially the mother. We decided that because I think when we identified the family that the parent came from, there were only daughters who were no sons. So then we assumed, okay, we're looking at the potential mother. And then you do, of course,

to test on that person and confirm that, in fact, that person is the mother. I think investigative genetic genealogy, and we talked about Jedmatch, Golden State Killer, this has been in the news a lot in the past few years. I think it's a fascinating science. But from a legal point of view, obviously, whenever this goes to trial, the first question, of course, is how reliable, how accurate is this? So for people who have questions about how accurate is this data, what would you say to them? Okay, we've got two parts to this. One is, so what we are producing is a quote, investigative lead.

So I'm telling Winona County, this is who we think the mother is. Winona County does not take out word for it. They then go out and they get a DNA sample from the person that we've indicated we think is the mother. So in this case, I believe they asked for a consensual sample. They were not able to get a consensual sample. So they then did a trash pull and then took DNA from the trash pole and were then able to match that with the person who's now being accused of being the mother. When you do that comparison, so that comparison then is they're taking the DNA from the trash pool, they're comparing that with the crime scene DNA.

The odds are usually something like a gazillion to one that it can be anybody else. So in terms of identifying the correct person, yes, it's pretty definitive. of. Then the question is, of course, how do you then show that there's a connection between the baby and what happened to the baby? And I think that's where law enforcement comes in. I believe they did some things. They were looking for fingerprints. They were looking for DNA on some of the objects that were recovered with the baby. And I believe that they were able to get either DNA or fingerprints that did, in fact, put the mother at the scene. Yeah, and that's a very important point, right? You can identify who the parents are.

doesn't necessarily mean that they're the suspect. Doesn't necessarily mean that that's the end-all-be-all. There has to be additional evidence to actually tie, for example, Ms. Beckley to what happened to Baby Angel, and that's a separate analysis. But when you see this in the news, when you see about the work that you did in effectively solving a cold case, and now we have the arrest of Ms. Beckley, and yes, she's innocent until proven guilty, but there is an arrest in this cold case. What is the feeling for you and your company to be a part of something like this?

So it really, I think, depends on the kind of case. If we're dealing with a serial rapist or a serial murderer like Golden State Killer, yeah, you're absolutely elated. Did you manage to do this? In cases like the baby dough case, it's kind of mixed feelings because you sort of feel like, you know, what went wrong for this woman that if, in fact, she's the one who killed the baby, then what happened that led her to that? It seems like it's a failure of society in a way. Where are her friends and family? Where are the support groups? I mean, there are sanctuary laws.

If for some reason she was not going to be able to raise the child, there were other options. Did she just not know about them? You know, what happened? So I think there is sort of mixed feelings. I think you're very sad that this happened. And you feel, you know, very sad for the woman that was in this position. And so it's really a mixed bag in these kind of cases. And you might have mentioned this before, but I just want to clarify it.

With respect to Baby Angel, did you find information about her father? We did not. I believe law enforcement was trying to figure out who the father was. I don't know what happened with that. As I said, when we were working on the case, we had no idea of which parent we were actually zeroing in on. It was not until we got right down to it. We found the family that the person has to be in. And there were only daughters that we realized we were looking at the mother.

mother. By the way, I don't mean to be graphic, but when you're dealing with the death of a baby, and you talked about the difficulties of extracting DNA and using DNA to sort out a family tree from a baby versus an adult, the state of the baby, the way that this baby was found, does that affect the difficulty in the analysis at all? In this case, the baby was found fairly quickly, I believe, within a couple of days. of being put in the river. There are a number of different sources of DNA when we're doing these kinds of cases.

Actually, probably one of the most reliable is actually ruthless hair, because the hair shaft protects the DNA that's in the hair shaft. Also, things like bone can be really good sources. So actually, the DNA can be in pretty good shape. And in fact, in the case of the Golden State Killer, the DNA that we were using had been frozen for 38 years. I think what we call rate was something like 98%. The call rate, meaning how intact is the DNA?

So that meant that 98% of the genome was actually there. And it was in good shape. How many cases, you know, has Firebird forensics help solve? I know that might be a difficult question, but how many cases? What are some of the bigger cases that you worked on as well? I mean, it sounds like you're doing great work across the board, but, you know, just curious. So it depends on how you count cases. Okay.

So do you count cases in terms of the number of cases? that get closed as a result. So let's use Golden State Killer. So we closed 50 cases when we solved who he was. So do we count that as one, or do we count it as 50? In terms of numbers of resolved situations, they'll put it that way instead of using cases. We've probably solved close to 100.

But if you throw in the fact that a number of those have been either serial killers or serial rapists, it's a lot more than that. It's probably up closer to 200 in terms of cases actually closed. There are certain cases you're working on right now that you can talk about? We're working on a series of cold case rape kits out of Cuyahoga County in Ohio. I think we started out with about 40 of those, and I think we've solved maybe over a half

of those. Wow. One that was kind of interesting. It hasn't been confirmed yet, but it's another unidentified remains case. So it sort of gives you an idea of how interesting some of these cases are, because I think that's sort of partly why it's fun to do these. This is one out of Coconino County in Arizona. And it was a body of a woman that was found not far from Grand Canyon.

And so this one was called Devil Dog Doe. And it's called Devil Dog Doe because apparently that was the name of the street where the body was found. So we get the information on that one and we're looking at the matches. And the matches are kind of an interesting mix. We've got a number of matches from basically old family U.S., so we're talking about Maryland, Connecticut, you know, the, so your typical Mayflower type descendants. And then we have a number of matches to people in the U.K. and in Australia.

So what was interesting about this case was that they had actually done some isotope analysis on this particular case. So they have this woman who's probably, we figured out, born around 1945 or so. And so the analysis that they did was strontium isotope analysis. And I'd actually never worked on a case before where that had been done.

So I had to do a little research on the strontium isotopes. But what the isotope analysis showed was that this woman had apparently been born in Eastern Europe. And she had presumably had actually growing up probably in a metropolitan metropolitan area like either London or Paris. So that was kind of interesting, so we're looking at, okay, so she's born in 1945. We've got one side of the tree is apparently going to be old family US, and then we've got

some folks in Europe. What did that tell us? So our hypothesis was that we were looking at probably an American serviceman who was stationed in Europe during World War II. that he had met somebody from, probably from the UK, since those were the kinds of matches that were getting the UK in Australia, and that this person then is a daughter of that particular couple. So that, in fact, that's who we've discovered.

We don't have it confirmed yet, but that's exactly what we found. As we found, the person that we think is the father was, in fact, a man who was actually a well-decorated soldier in the U.S. Army. And then the mother was a woman from the U.K. So we'll see if we're right or not. But it's interesting, you know, trying to put things together. It's fascinating. It's a different level of investigative work that we didn't have 20 years ago. And that's why so many of these cases are being solved. I think it's incredible work that you're doing. Also, by the way, big fan of Firebird Forensics. I think it's a great name. I personally think so. I used to be a trademark attorney, so I have a thing for names.

I think it's really, really good. But listen, Barbara Ray Venter, I really appreciate you coming on explaining a little bit more about the work that you do, your connection to the baby angel case. And thank you for the work that you and your team are doing. It's really, really important. Well, you're very welcome. Thank you. It's all we have for you right now here on Sidebar. Everybody, thank you so much for joining us. And as always, please subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you should get your podcasts. I'm Jesse Weber. I'll speak to you next time. You can binge all episodes of this long crime series ad free right now on Wondery Plus.

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