Two babies found in river were related

Two of three babies found dumped along the Mississippi River near Red Wing in the past eight years probably came from the same mother, authorities said Tuesday.

Investigators said they had known of the link for some time, but decided to release it publicly in hopes of pushing their investigation forward. They said they believed the children, a boy and a girl, had separate fathers.

"I guess what we have with these first two children is cold-blooded murder," Goodhue County Sheriff Dean Albers said. "If it was one child you might see it as the act of a desperate mother, but what I think what we have here is premeditated murder."

The third child, a girl whose body was found in March, is not related to the first two.

Authorities also released the races of the babies for the first time Tuesday. Based on DNA tests performed by a Florida lab and paid for by Goodhue County, the first two babies were probably Caucasian, with the third believed to be of American Indian descent.

The probability that the first two babies came from the same mother was established by DNA testing performed by the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

In 1999, Mississippi River boaters found the first body, a newborn girl, wrapped in a towel in the water near a marina in Red Wing. The second discovery came in 2003, when a group of teenage girls spotted an infant boy's body on a beach at Lake Pepin, an area south of Red Wing where the river widens.

In March, workers at a marina near Treasure Island Resort & Casino, just north of Red Wing, found the body of an infant girl floating in the river.

In all three cases, investigators believed that the infants were born alive. Autopsies were never able to ascertain causes of death.

Albers said dozens of women have been tested and eliminated in the past couple of years as possible mothers of the children. More information was released about the case Tuesday in hopes of finding new leads.

"Three pregnancies, three births, three deaths -- somebody knows something," said BCA Superintendent Tim O'Malley.

Albers said he's asked about the cases regularly, often by strangers.

"These deaths are tragic," he said. "Shortly after these children were born, they were thrown away -- thrown away to die cold and alone."

At a news conference, he was asked what he would say to the children's mothers if they were watching.

"This is the kind of thing that's going to haunt them," he said. "It's not going to go away. This community needs closure. We need to know why this happened."

The identity of the babies has made for an unpleasant mystery in Red Wing, an idyllic river town of about 15,000 residents an hour south of St. Paul. "It's a stretch of 15 miles, and we have three of these incidents. It's just unbelievable," Chief Sheriff's Deputy Scott McNurlin said after the third body was found.

After the discovery of the first two infants, a local couple paid to have them buried next to their own stillborn daughter, under headstones that read "God's Little Angel."

Authorities have pointed out that whoever dumped the babies could just as easily have invoked a Minnesota law that allows mothers in crisis to anonymously leave newborns as much as three days old at any hospital in the state, without fear of prosecution.

Albers said he didn't believe that option had ever been used in Goodhue County.

Anyone with information that may help authorities find the mothers of these babies is asked to call 651-385-3155.

By Patrick Condon, Associated Press Writer

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