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The Mystery of Baby John Doe
Cheyenne, Wyoming’s 33-year-old mystery of what happened to baby John Doe has a chance of being solved with new advances in DNA.
February 28, 1988, saw some early signs of springtime life for bitterly cold Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Lots of townspeople were out walking that day to release some of that pent-up winter energy. Two of those townspeople would make the local news for their frightful discovery near McKinney Drive and Happy Jack Road (a hell of a place to discover something so macabre).
At first, they didn’t know what to make of the blanket wrapped around something on the ground just off the road in a culvert. A feral dog was gnawing at what they first thought was a child’s toy doll.
When the couple got closer they saw something much more sinister. The beast mauled a human baby boy. The baby boy was little — only about 6.5 pounds. His eyes were azure blue and he had brown hair. After the couple scared the mutt away, they found out he was cold to the touch.
No one was around. It was not obvious who the boy belonged to — who left him so callously in a desolate Wyoming culvert that became the boy’s open-air, animal-stalked grave — in winter no less.
Had the wild hound killed little baby John Doe? Who had left him in that horrible place to begin with?
All these variables would boil down to one question Cheyenne would wrestle with for years: what happened to baby John Doe?
I. The Case in 1988
Immediately the couple who found him contacted the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office. Upon an autopsy, the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide because baby John Doe had air in his lungs when he died. This would not have been possible had he died while still in his mother’s womb from a miscarriage or botched abortion. The M.E. still noted the death as “undetermined.”
The sheriff’s investigators exhausted every possible lead they had in 1988: they canvassed local hospitals, schools, and even the Francis E. Warren Air Force Base to try to find the parents of little baby John Doe.
