On an ordinary Tuesday in May 2022, Jenna Rose Gowatski’s phone rang at the flower shop in Newberry, Michigan. The number was unknown, and she almost let it go to voicemail. Something made her pick up. The voice on the other end identified itself as a detective with the Michigan State Police.
Then came the question: Had she heard of the Baby Garnet case? She had. Everyone in that part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula had. But what the detective told her next would collapse the distance between local legend and family history.
Her DNA, he said, had matched to a victim in a cold case. According to the records, she was a direct familial relative of the infant found at Garnet Lake Campground in 1997. For twenty-five years, that case had carried no name but the one the community had given it. On June 26, 1997, workers arrived at Garnet Lake Campground in Mackinac County to prepare the site for reopening after two years of closure.
Part of the routine involved servicing the outhouse facilities, a standard process requiring a suction machine to empty the waste tank beneath the pit toilet. When the machine clogged, the worker stopped to investigate. What he found ended the routine nature of that work day permanently. The decomposing remains of a newborn infant girl were lodged inside the waste pit.
She was full-term, thirty-six to forty-two weeks gestational age. The umbilical cord was missing. The cause of death was not immediately determinable. The Mackinac County Sheriff’s Office and Michigan State Police were called.
She had no name, no birth certificate. No one came forward to identify her, claim her, or explain what had happened. The community called her Baby Garnet. They buried her in Maplewood Cemetery in Hudson Township with flowers and a small angel marker.
Forty people attended. The case went cold within twelve months. Investigators believed the mother was likely a local, someone who knew the campground had been closed and chose it deliberately for its isolation. Their working theory was that she had been hiding a pregnancy since approximately September 1996.
As 1997 ended, there was no suspect, no identity for the victim, and no path forward. Baby Garnet’s skeletal remains went into evidence storage. The community around Garnet Lake did not forget her. Flowers appeared year after year at the angel marker, left by people who never knew her name but felt the weight of her story.
For children growing up in that part of Michigan in the late 1990s and 2000s, Baby Garnet was simply part of the landscape of local memory. A terrible thing that had happened nearby. A mystery that belonged to everyone and had been solved by no one. Jenna Rose Gowatski was one of those children.
She grew up in Newberry, the same small town where the investigation had centered. She knew the story the way everyone in the area knew it. What she did not know, and would not know until she was twenty-three, was that the woman who had driven twenty miles to leave a newborn in a campground outhouse in June 1997 was her own maternal grandmother, a woman she had never met, a woman whose name she had not learned until she was a teenager, a woman who had been living quietly in Wyoming for years. In the summer of 2017, twenty years after Baby Garnet’s remains were found, the Mackinac County Sheriff’s Office made a decision that would determine everything that followed.
A Michigan State Police detective sergeant, reviewing the case with fresh eyes in an era when forensic genetic genealogy had begun producing results, initiated a new investigative approach. Working with a private laboratory and the FBI, the detective began the process of extracting usable DNA from what remained of Baby Garnet’s skeletal evidence. The remains were degraded and had been in storage for two decades. The process was neither fast nor straightforward.
In 2020, the remains were sent to a laboratory for specialized testing. Two years later, in 2022, a full twenty-five years after the original discovery, a viable DNA profile was successfully developed from Baby Garnet’s partial femur. That profile did not identify a suspect directly. What it revealed was a specific familial lineage, a genetic fingerprint that pointed not to a name, but to a family.
Investigators turned to genetic genealogy databases and uploaded the profile. Within those databases, a match surfaced. Not a direct match to Baby Garnet’s mother, but a relative. Someone whose DNA shared enough markers with the infant’s profile to indicate a clear family connection.
That person had taken a consumer DNA test, not for any investigative purpose, not with any awareness that her results were about to intersect with a twenty-five-year-old cold case. She had taken it simply because a friend got a kit for Christmas, and it seemed like an interesting thing to do. That person was Jenna Rose Gowatski. After the detective’s call, Jenna finished her shift and drove home.
She and her mother sat together at the kitchen table and tried to construct a theory. Some distant cousin. Some relative they barely knew. The idea that it could be someone at the center of that family did not occur to either of them in those first hours.
It felt impossible. The detective told Jenna she would receive a follow-up call from a forensic genealogist at Identifinders International in Chicago. That call came the same evening. The genealogist asked for access to Jenna’s DNA account to help build out the familial connections.
Jenna, cautious and unsettled, thought it was a scam and hung up. Her grandfather had recently been targeted by a phone scammer posing as a detective. Her mother’s first instinct was to be careful. Then her cousin arrived.
The cousin worked as a victim’s advocate in the county prosecutor’s office. Investigators had already contacted her to help bridge the gap. When the full picture began to emerge around that kitchen table, the room changed completely. Jenna’s mother had tears in her eyes.
The cousin’s face held pure shock. According to Jenna’s own description of that moment, you could have heard a pin drop. Jenna called the genealogist back immediately and cooperated fully. Analysis of Jenna’s DNA kit confirmed what the initial database match had suggested.
She was Baby Garnet’s half-niece. The infant was a half-sibling of Jenna’s mother, Cara. On June 1, 2022, detectives spoke with Cara directly. She agreed to provide her DNA.
The results confirmed the relationship. Cara Gowatski was Baby Garnet’s half-sister, and Cara had a mother, a woman she had been estranged from since the age of eighteen. A woman Jenna had never met. That woman was Nancy Ann Gerwatowski.
She had once lived in Newberry, Michigan. She had since relocated to Pinedale, Wyoming. Investigators packed their evidence and booked travel. They already knew what they were going to find.
Michigan State Police Sergeant Gary Demers and Mackinac County Undersheriff Ron Amberger traveled to Pinedale, Wyoming. They arrived at Nancy Gerwatowski’s home armed with a warrant for her DNA and questions built from twenty-five years of investigation. Nancy did not turn them away. She invited them inside.
When investigators revealed what they believed, that Nancy was Baby Garnet’s mother, she was informed she had the legal right to refuse to accompany them to the local sheriff’s office. She chose to go voluntarily. She was advised of her Miranda rights and waived them. In the second interview, Nancy Ann Gerwatowski told investigators what had happened in June 1997.
She confirmed she was Baby Garnet’s mother. She described being in the middle of a divorce at the time. She said she and her then husband had been drinking heavily. When she discovered she was pregnant, she said she did not know what to do right away, so she did nothing.
She carried the pregnancy to term without prenatal care, without telling anyone, without making any plan. According to the prosecution, she delivered the newborn alone at her home in Newberry. The baby died of asphyxiation during or immediately after the birth. She then placed the infant’s body in a bag and drove twenty miles to the Garnet Lake campground.
She was charged with open murder, involuntary manslaughter, and concealing the death of an individual. In November 2024, Jenna Rose Gowatski posted a video on TikTok. She titled it as a get ready with me. She began applying makeup and started talking.
She told the story of the DNA kit, the phone call at the flower shop, the kitchen table, the cousin, and the grandmother she had never met. She described what it felt like to grow up in Newberry knowing about the Baby Garnet case as community history, as a local mystery, and then discovering at twenty-three that the answer to that mystery lived inside her own family tree. Her exact words: “We were mind-blown. Mind you, I’ve never met this woman before.
She is literally the person that they’ve been looking for for 25 years. And it’s all because of an Ancestry DNA kit. ”
The video received more than ten million views. Jenna’s TikTok following grew to over sixty-seven thousand followers within days.
Comments came from people across the country who had been following the Baby Garnet case for years, and from people who had never heard of it before that video. Baby Garnet, buried in a small Michigan cemetery in 1997 with forty community members in attendance, was now being discussed by millions. Her story had traveled from a wooded campground in the Upper Peninsula to every corner of the country, carried by a twenty-three-year-old woman who had taken a DNA test to satisfy her curiosity. Nancy Ann Gerwatowski was arrested in July 2022 in Wyoming and extradited to Michigan.
She was arraigned in Mackinac County and denied bond. She later appealed to have her confession suppressed, arguing her Fifth Amendment rights had been violated during questioning. In February 2026, the Michigan Court of Appeals denied that appeal. She faces a trial in which open murder carries a potential life sentence.
Her defense has offered a different account. They argue that Nancy did not plan the birth, that she went into labor unexpectedly while in the bathtub, that the infant became trapped during delivery, that she lost consciousness, and when she came to, the baby was already dead. They argue she was in shock, had no access to a phone or cell service in that part of Michigan in 1997, and that placing the remains at the campground was the action of a woman in crisis. That argument is now headed to a jury.
Baby Garnet was buried at Maplewood Cemetery in Hudson Township in September 1997. She had been alive inside her mother’s body through the entire span of a Michigan winter, through spring, and into early summer. Then she was gone before anyone outside of one person knew she existed. The community gave her a name and a grave, and forty people came to stand beside it.
What they did not have in 1997, and what they have now, is a name for the woman who drove twenty miles with her and left her in the dark. The small angel marker still stands at Maplewood Cemetery, but now it is no longer a question. It is an answer.
A twenty-five-year silence broken not by a detective’s hunch or a witness’s confession, but by a DNA kit, a young woman’s curiosity, and a phone call she almost didn’t answer.