PICAYUNE, Miss — For more than 30 years, "Heaven's Angel" was the only name we had for her — a newborn baby found dead in a dumpster in Picayune, MS.
It's the kind of case you never forget.
"As I tell people, in law enforcement, you don’t work these cases. You live them," Freddy Drennan, who was the Picayune Police Chief at the time, said. "And you know, this is one of those cases that I had hoped all along that we would be able to put some closure to.”
Back in April of 1992, a Picayune farmer gathering trash bags from a local pizzeria dumpster to feed scraps to his animals discovered the newborn baby inside one of the trash bags collected.
"I moved the towel, and I says, 'oh my god! that’s a little doll,'" he told Eyewitness News back in 1992. "Then I said that ain't a doll. That’s human flesh. And it turned me sick. I just got out and got my truck drove to my house, and called the authorities.”
Police say the baby was born three weeks premature, then smothered to death and wrapped in a garbage bag. Trash found in that same garbage bag would guide detectives to the west bank of Jefferson parish, but they never came close to catching her killers — until now.
Police arrested Inga and Andrew Carriere for the baby's death.
According to detectives, police used the unidentified baby's DNA to prove that the Carrieres were her parents.
“We were able to build a DNA profile that has hundreds and hundreds of markers, we use genealogical databases that are consented for law enforcement use, such as our own DNA SOLVES, and we are able to piece back where that person belongs on a family tree,” Dr. Kristen Mittelman Chief Business Development Officer at Othram Inc. said.
Fingerprints found on the garbage packed away with the newborn baby led them to Inga and Andrew Carriere as well.
Now, both face first-degree murder charges.
"It sounds crazy but some agencies will destroy old stuff," Special Agent Christa Groom with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation said. "it’s imperative for agencies to retain that information. Not all of them do.”
Groom and Capt. Rhonda Johnson with the Picayune Police Department put together the pieces that solved this decades-old case. They say it was evidence preserved for more than 30 years, and new technology that helped them do it.
“This type of technology is a way to give these children their voice back and be able to get justice for them,” Mittelman said.
And there's a special sense of pride in solving a case that most people though was a lost cause.
"Indescribable. It’s wonderful," Johnson said. "It’s justice for the child, closure for the city and everybody who’s been involved with it and knew about it then."
Closure for people like Drennan, who have been holding on to the memory of "Heaven's Angel" for more than 30 years.
"Knowing that we know who the baby is now ... it brings closure," Drennan said. "I hope to a family and it certainly brings closure to us."
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