RED WING, Minn. — A Southern Minnesota woman will serve 27 years in prison for leaving her newborn son by the Mississippi River to die decades ago when her life was in disarray.
Jennifer Matter was sentenced Friday after entering a guilty plea in the case back in January of this year. She was charged with second-degree murder for the crime, which took place back in 2003.
In her plea, Matter admitted to giving birth on Methodist Beach near the banks of the Mississippi in 2003 and leaving the baby with the intention of not coming back to get him. Prosecutors say DNA evidence also links Matter to a baby girl found by the Mississippi four years earlier, but no charges have been filed in that case.
Detectives identified Matter as the child's mother and arrested her in May of 2022, when she was tied to DNA from the two infants through a geneaology search that led to potential relatives in Goodhue County.
Court records from the time the children were abandoned show Matter was a recently divorced mother of two, was drinking heavily and was in and out of jail.
Many members of the Red Wing community were haunted by the deaths of the abandoned infants, including Jeanne Madtson who served as an adopted mother for the two children and another that was found in the same time period. Madtson named the unknown children, donated cemetery plots, raised money to have gravestones made for them and personally visited their graves for years.
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