Christine Marie Warren: Seattle mom who left baby to die in trash can in 1997 arrested after putting DNA online
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON: In 1997, the body of an unidentified newborn was found in a gas station. Dubbed Baby Boy Doe by officials, the case went unsolved for 23 years. That is until last week when after a DNA breakthrough, authorities finally traced the killer -- his mother.
The genealogy team that successfully helped capture Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo recently helped arrest a Seattle woman over the cold case death of her newborn baby in 1997. They matched her DNA through an ancestry website. The genealogy experts who helped catch DeAngelo in 2018 have now identified Christine Marie Warren as the child's mother. According to the latest reports, she was arrested in Seattle on Thursday, March 11, 2021, and charged with second-degree murder.
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Caught up by authorities
Authorities charged the 50-year-old with second-degree murder of her infant child during her appearance in King County District Court in Washington state. According to court documents, authorities say Warren confessed to giving birth in the gas station bathroom, before abandoning the baby's body in a trash can.
What happened on November 18, 1997?
Warren, who was then 27-years-old was captured on CCTV footage going into a Chevron station. A witness would later come forward to say that she saw a woman, who was believed to be Warren, exit a white vehicle and walk into the gas station shortly before midnight on November 18, 1997, with a blanket wrapped around her waist. At the time, she had held the door open for her and she headed straight to the bathroom, where she remained for 15 minutes. The witness then said that she heard a baby crying from the restroom while making a purchase.
Reports reveal that the surveillance footage showed the woman believed to be Warren entering the store at 11:20 p.m. and leaving at 11:34 p.m.
According to reports, upon her arrest, Warren told the police that she had the baby in the bathroom after keeping her pregnancy a secret from friends and family. She said she dropped the newborn in the toilet where he remained for several minutes. Police say she then panicked and put the baby in the trashcan, where his body was found 20 hours later.
According to news accounts from the time, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office determined he had been born alive two days earlier and ruled his death a homicide. He was buried in January 1998.
Re-opening of the cold case
In 2018, Seattle detectives re-opened the case with new hopes. They sent the preserved DNA sample to a private laboratory in Oklahoma City. Seattle police homicide detective Rolf Norton revealed that Genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter, who famously helped crack the Golden State Killer case in 2018 and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people the next year, worked on Seattle’s Baby Boy Doe case.
Authorities said that they were able to match a sample taken from a placental blood clot to a genealogy website. The child's full DNA profile was then entered into GEDmatch, the genealogy website that was also used by law enforcement to catch Golden State Killer. According to reports, Rae-Venter generated a list of possible names and police then compared photographs to video-surveillance footage
In March 2019, a possible match to the infant was detected. The sample was likely from a close relative of the baby's mother. Reports reveal that a year later in March 2020, their suspect voluntarily entered her DNA on Gedmatch, and chose not to make her data private.
She has been charged with second-degree murder and has been released on bail of $10,000.