CNN
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It was in the middle of Jenna Gerwatowski's workday at the local flower shop in Newberry, Michigan, when she received a call from an unknown number.
The now 23-year-old doesn't typically answer unknown calls, but says she decided to take this call in May 2022.
To their surprise, it was a Michigan State Police trooper.
“He said, 'Have you heard about the Baby Garnet case?'” Jenna told CNN.
Jenna had heard about it. In 1997, a deceased toddler was found in the pit toilet of a campsite at Garnet Lake Campground – the very same place where Jenna grew up. According to a news release from the Michigan Attorney General's Office, investigators were unable to find any leads on the baby's identity or anyone who witnessed a person abandoning an infant. The case was dropped and the “Baby Garnet” case became a well-known crime story in Jenna's small town for decades.
“Their DNA matched,” Jenna said the detective on the phone told her. She was related to the dead infant from 1997.
Jenna was shocked. The detective sounded safe, Jenna said, but she wondered how he got her DNA in the first place.
About six months earlier, her friend had gotten a FamilyTreeDNA test for Christmas and Jenna decided to order her own. DNA from other relatives of baby Garnet led investigators to Jenna's FamilyTreeDNA kit, according to court documents.
According to Jenna, the detective said that a woman from Identifinders International, a genetic genealogy research company, would call her about her DNA to help identify closer relatives.
According to court documents, investigators reopened the open case in 2017 and then worked with a forensics company to extract DNA from Baby Garnet's partial femur before submitting the results to Identifinders International.
Jenna explained the situation to her mother when she got home from work.
“It was just crazy,” Jenna said. “We were both sitting there, I don't even know who (the mother or the father) it could have been. We were both so confused and thought it must be someone we don’t know, like a distant cousin or something.”
Jenna said her mother, Kara Gerwatowski, began to wonder if the detective call was a scam.
Jenna's grandfather had just been scammed by someone posing as a detective, so Kara told Jenna to be careful about giving out any personal information or passwords.
Misty Gillis, then senior forensic genealogist and cold case liaison at Identifinders International, called Jenna that night, according to Jenna and court documents filed later in the case.
Jenna claims Gillis requested her FamilyTreeDNA password so she could upload her DNA to a separate database. According to court documents, Jenna feared it was a scammer and refused to cooperate.
“I hung up the phone without thinking about it. And we went about our day. I thought how strange. What a strange thing to do, scamming people,” Jenna said. “I wholeheartedly didn’t believe it was real.”
A week later, Jenna was working at the flower shop when she received a frantic call from her mother.
“She was like, 'You really need to come home.' … It's an emergency. “Please just come as quickly as possible,” Jenna said.
Jenna rushed home because she thought someone had died. Her cousin was sitting with her mother at their round wooden kitchen table. Police had contacted her cousin, who works as a victim advocate in the district attorney's office, to explain the situation with baby Garnet to Jenna. Turns out it wasn't a scam.
“My mother had tears in her eyes,” she said. Jenna’s cousin was “just shocked.” … You could hear a pin drop in there.”
Even though Jenna knew she had nothing to do with the Baby Garnet case, she feared that because she refused to talk to Gillis, the police would think she was trying to hide something. She called them immediately.
An analysis of Jenna's DNA kit revealed she was baby Garnet's half-niece, according to court documents.
On June 1, 2022, investigators spoke with her mother, Kara, who agreed to provide her DNA. According to court documents, Kara was baby Garnet's half-sister.
“I feel like all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place for her at that point,” Jenna said. “And she told investigators that if it was going to be anyone, it was her mother.”
Kara, now 42, hadn't spoken to her mother, Nancy Gerwatowski, since she was 18 because they had a bad relationship, and Jenna had never met her grandmother. Regardless, both were shocked that Nancy, who was living in Wyoming when police questioned her, would be the one behind their town mystery.
“I was familiar with the case my whole life and then realized it was my grandma who did it?” Jenna said.
The Michigan Attorney General's Office alleges that Nancy “gave birth to the newborn alone in her Newberry home, causing baby Garnet to die of asphyxia, and that this death could have been prevented by medical intervention (Nancy) not seeking from Gerwatowski.”
However, Nancy's defense argued in a court filing that she gave birth unexpectedly in the bathtub and the fetus was “trapped in her birth canal.” She “attempted to remove the fetus from her own body,” the filing states, but was unable to deliver the fetus and lost consciousness “at some point during delivery.” When she was finally able to deliver the fetus, it was dead, the filing says.
Her defense argues that Nancy, like the average person in the county in 1997, did not have access to a telephone or cell service and therefore could not call 911. Although she admits in her court papers that she put the stillborn fetus in a bag and left the remains at the campsite, her defense attorneys argue that she was in shock because she did not take painkillers during the traumatic birth.
Nancy is charged with one count each of open murder, involuntary manslaughter and concealing the death of a person. Open murder carries a life sentence. Her defense hopes Gerwatowski's case will be dismissed entirely on Thursday, arguing that “the state cannot prove that the fetus was born alive,” according to court papers filed by Nancy Gerwatowski's defense attorney.
“It was a very difficult time…very traumatic and very nerve-wracking,” Jenna said. “I've never met this woman before, so it was hard for me to even understand this concept, but even harder for my mother because that was her mother.”
