Nearly three decades ago, in 1993, two newspaper carriers found the body of a newborn baby in the woods of northeast Ohio's Geauga County. People in the community named the baby Guega's Child.
Twenty-five years later, the boy's mother was traced using modern DNA and family genealogy procedures. In 2019, Gail Eastwood-Ritchey, 49, was arrested for the murder of the baby.
Ritchey was identified as the child’s mother after a Geauga County sheriff’s detective submitted DNA to a public genealogical website, created a family tree of 1,400 relatives and finally narrowed the search to Ritchey, who told investigators it was her baby. She was arrested in June 2019.
Ritchey never told anyone she was pregnant, Bradley said, and did not realize when she sat down on a toilet at her employers’ home that she was about to give birth.
Ritchey put the newborn in a garbage bag after delivering the child at a home where she worked as a nanny. She put the bag in the trunk of her car. Days later, she drove a group of girls from the church where she was a youth leader to a weekend retreat, snuck away, and left the bag in a wooded area.
The baby boy was found lifeless in the street with his umbilical cord still intact. He had been attacked by animals and was missing an arm and a leg.
Judge Ondrey told Ritchey before sentencing that her newborn "didn't deserve what happened to him" and that she "took the easy way out" by putting the boy in a garbage bag and tossing it into a wooded area where his body was mutilated by animals and dragged onto a rural road.
"I think you knew what to do because you had done it before," Ondrey said. "Calling you a monster who deserves life imprisonment is not an exaggeration." According to the sheriff’s office, Ritchey also confessed to committing a similar crime with another child in 1991 in Cuyahoga County, two years prior to police finding Geauga’s Child.
Ritchey later married the newborn’s father. They have three adult children.
Gail was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
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Music: Intro
Musician: Jeff Kaale
26 мар 2023
