Seattle woman arrested 23 years after baby found dead in gas station trash can

SEATTLE (TCD) --

Police in Seattle arrested a 50-year-old woman whose baby was found in a trash can 23 years ago.

According to the Seattle Police Department, on November 20, 1997, a staff member at a gas station on the 8700 block of Lake City Way Northeast called the police after discovering the baby, who was deceased, in a trash can in the bathroom.

The Seattle Police Department opened a homicide investigation after the King County Medical Examiner determined the child had been born alive.

The baby was buried as "Baby Boy Doe," the Seattle Times reports.

At the time, police could not identify the woman. They used a placental blood clot found at the scene as DNA evidence. They submitted the information to a state database, but no matches came back.

In 2018, Seattle Police Department detectives began investigating the case again. They got information from a genealogy website that matched the description and DNA of the woman from the gas station's surveillance footage. Police performed an undercover operation and obtained a DNA sample, which matched the sample in the state database.

According to the Seattle Times, California genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter worked on the case (she also helped crack the infamous "Golden State Killer" case). She created a list of possible names and police used those to compare photos from the surveillance footage.

Investigators interviewed the 50-year-old woman, who they did not publicly identify, and on March 11 arrested her and booked her into the King County Jail for Investigation of Homicide, according to Seattle Police.

A spokesman for King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg told the Times that the statute of limitations for manslaughter -- three years -- has expired. Felony murder, however, does not have a statute of limitations.

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