Woman’s Ancestry DNA test leads to her own grandma being charged with murder over cold case

A woman who took a DNA test ended up inadvertently helping to shed new light on an old case, allegedly involving her own grandmother.

Jenna Gerwatowski, now 23, had been having a normal day at work in May 2022 when she answered an unknown call to be greeted by a detective from Michigan state police.

The officer asked her if she had heard of the Baby Garnet case, a tragedy from 25 years earlier in 1997 where an infant was found dead in a pit toilet at the Garnet Lake Campground.

This was located close to where Jenna had grown up, and she had heard of the case before. It had ultimately become a cold case, with no-one having seen someone abandoning the baby there.

So, it was with some shock that Jenna was told the news that her DNA had been a match to the very infant who had been found in those tragic circumstances 25 years earlier. But another question had also troubled Jenna in that moment - how had the police even obtained a sample of her DNA to make this connection?

Around six months before this phone call, she had carried out a FamilyTreeDNA test, with court documents saying that other Baby Garnet relatives had led detectives to her DNA test.

'We were both so confused'

Jenna told her mum what had happened later that day, saying to CNN: "It was just crazy. We were both sitting there like, I don’t even know who (the mother or father) could’ve been.

"We were both so confused and we’re like, it’s got to be somebody that we don’t know, you know, like a distant cousin or something."

At first, Jenna believed that the people calling her were scammers, until she rushed home after a call from her mum to find her cousin who had been contacted by police about the case in the hope that she could explain what was happening.

Jenna's relation to the deceased infant

DNA analysis had revealed that Jenna was Baby Garnet's half niece. On 1 June 2022 Kara agreed to provide her DNA, which would reveal that she was the half-sister of the infant.

“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."

This was Jenna's grandmother Nancy Gerwatowski, who she had never met as her mum had become estranged from her, not having spoken since she was 18.

Nancy has now been charged with one count of open murder, one count of involuntary manslaughter, and one of concealing the death of an individual.

Prosecutors are alleging that she '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'.

Defence attorneys have said that Nancy gave birth unexpectedly while in the bath, with the foetus then becoming 'trapped inside her birth canal', and that she 'attempted to pull the foetus out of her own body', but did not succeed and passed out.

When she was able to give birth, the foetus had died.

She accepts that she then placed the remain in a bag before leaving it at the campsite, with her attorneys saying that she had done so while in a state of shock due to the unexpected birth, which she carried out with no pain relief and had been extremely traumatic.