[It was the middle of Jenna Gerwatowski’s workday at the local flower shop in Newberry, Michigan, when she got a call from an unknown number. The now 23-year-old doesn’t usually answer unknown calls, but she decided to pick this one up in May 2022. To her surprise, it was a detective from the Michigan state police.
The detective told her, “Have you heard of the Baby Garnet case?” Jenna had heard of it – in 1997, a deceased infant was found in a campground pit toilet at the Garnet Lake Campground – right where Jenna grew up. Investigators couldn’t find any leads on the identity of the baby or anyone who witnessed a person abandoning an infant. The case went cold, and the “Baby Garnet” case became a known murder mystery in Jenna’s small town for decades.
Jenna was shocked. The detective sounded sure, Jenna said, but she wondered how he had even obtained her DNA. About six months earlier, her friend had gotten a FamilyTreeDNA test for Christmas and Jenna decided to order her own. DNA from other Baby Garnet relatives led detectives to Jenna’s FamilyTreeDNA kit, according to court documents.
A detective told Jenna that a woman from Identififiers International, a genetic genealogy investigation firm, would call her about her DNA to help with identifying closer relatives, according to Jenna. According to court documents, detectives reopened the cold case in 2017 and then worked with a forensics company to extract DNA from Baby Garnet’s partial femur, before sending the results to Identifinders International.
Jenna explained the situation to her mother when she got home from work. Her mother, Kara Gerwatowski, started to wonder whether the detective call was a scam. Jenna’s grandfather had just been scammed by someone claiming to be a detective, so Kara told Jenna to be cautious about giving out personal information or passwords. Misty Gillis, then a senior forensic genealogist and cold case liaison from Identifinders International, called Jenna that night, according to Jenna and court documents.
Jenna claims Gillis requested her FamilyTreeDNA password to be able to upload her DNA into a separate database. Jenna was concerned it was a scammer and refused to cooperate, according to court documents. One week later, Jenna was working at the flower shop when she got a distressed call from her mother. Her mother’s phone call was about the Baby Garnet situation and being a potential relative. Police had contacted her cousin, who works as a victim’s advocate in the county prosecutor’s office, to explain the Baby Garnet situation to Jenna.
It turned out it wasn’t a scam. An analysis of Jenna’s DNA kit showed she was the half-niece to Baby Garnet, according to court records. On June 1, 2022, detectives spoke with her mother, Kara, who agreed to provide her DNA. Kara was the half-sister of Baby Garnet, according to court records. “I feel like that is when, like, all of the puzzle pieces kind of started falling together for her,” Jenna said. “And she told detectives that, if it’s going to be anybody, it would be her mother.”
Kara, now 42, had not spoken with 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 Nancy, who was living in Wyoming when police questioned her, would be the one behind their town mystery. “I had grown up knowing about the case my whole life and then come to find out it was my grandma that did it?” Jenna said.
The Michigan attorney general’s office alleges Nancy “delivered the newborn alone at her Newberry home, during which Baby Garnet died due to asphyxiation, and that this death could have been prevented by medical intervention (Nancy) Gerwatowski did not seek.” However, in a court filing, Nancy’s defense argues she unexpectedly gave birth while in the bathtub and the fetus “became trapped inside her birth canal.” She “attempted to pull the fetus out of her own body,” the filing says, but couldn’t deliver the fetus and lost consciousness “at some point in the 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 line, so she couldn’t call 911. While she concedes in her legal filings she placed the stillborn fetus in a bag and left the remains at the campground, her defense attorneys argue she had been in shock after having had no pain medication during the traumatic birth.
Nancy is charged with one count each of open murder, involuntary manslaughter, and concealing the death of an individual. Open murder carries a potential life sentence. Her defense is hoping to get the case against Gerwatowski dropped in its entirety, arguing the “state cannot prove the fetus was born alive.”
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