Michigan 1997 Cold Case Solved — Her Own Granddaughter’s DNA Test Exposed the Killer 

Michigan 1997 Cold Case Solved — Her Own Granddaughter’s DNA Test Exposed the Killer 

Get ready with me while I tell you about how an Ancestry DNA kit is putting my grandma in prison. Most people who take a consumer DNA test are looking for something ordinary, a percentage of ancestry from somewhere unexpected, a distant cousin, the quiet satisfaction of a family tree filling in with names and places.

What almost no one expects, what almost no one could reasonably prepare for, is a phone call from a state police detective telling them their DNA has just reopened a cold case from before they were born. June 26th, 1997. Garnet Lake Campground, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Workers arrived to prepare the site for reopening.

 The campground had been closed for 2 years. Part of that preparation 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, 36 to 42 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 immediately.

 She had no name, no birth certificate. No one came forward to identify her, claim her, or explain what had happened. The community surrounding that campground gave her a name anyway. Baby Garnet. They buried her in Maplewood Cemetery in Hudson Township with flowers and a small angel marker. 40 people attended. The case that bore her name went cold within 12 months, leaving behind skeletal remains, unanswered questions, and a wound that a small Michigan community would carry quietly for the next 25 years.

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a different world from the the half of the state. Separated by the Straits of Mackinac, it is a region of dense forests, clear inland lakes, and isolated communities. Mackinac County covers over a thousand square miles and holds a permanent population of just a few thousand people.

Garnet Lake itself is so small, it does not appear on the state highway map. In the summer of 1997, the campground had been closed for 2 years. Investigators believed the mother was likely a local, someone who knew the campground, knew it had been closed, and chose that location deliberately because of its isolation.

 Their working theory, she had been hiding a pregnancy since approximately September of 1996. Someone in the area would have noticed unexplained weight gain followed by sudden weight loss within roughly the same time frame. Community members were shocked. This was the kind of thing that happened in cities, not in small-town Upper Michigan.

 The idea that someone from within that tight-knit community could have carried a full-term pregnancy to completion, delivered that baby alone, driven 20 miles to leave the infant in an outhouse, and then continued living normally among neighbors who knew their name, that idea felt impossible. No leads materialized.

 By the end of 1997, the Baby Garnet case had produced no suspect, no identity for the victim, and no path forward. The case file sat. Investigators moved on. Baby Garnet remained in an evidence storage facility. Her skeletal remains preserved, her identity unknown. The community around Garnet Lake did not forget her.

 The small angel marker at Maplewood Cemetery became a quiet local fixture. Flowers appeared year after year, left by people who had never known her name, but felt the weight of her story. For the children who grew up in that part of Michigan during the late 1990s and into the 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. One of those children was Jenna Rose Gowatski. She grew up in Newberry, the same small Michigan town where the investigation had centered. She knew the story the way everyone in the area knew it. This case was very popular in the town that I grew up in um because it was so up.

Um it was the baby Garnet case. What she did not know and would not know until she was 23 years old was that the woman who had driven 20 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 in Wyoming quietly and without incident for years.

>> I’ve never met my grandmother. Um I didn’t even know her name until I was like 14 or 15 years old. Um and for reasons that are not my business to tell, when my mother is ready to tell that story, then that’s on her. Um but I’ve never met my grandmother. In the summer of 2017, 20 years after baby Garnet’s remains were found, the Mackinac County Sheriff’s Office made a decision that would determine the outcome of 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 in the FBI, the detective began the process of extracting usable DNA from what remained of baby Garnet’s skeletal evidence.

 The process was neither fast nor straightforward. The remains were skeletal, degraded, and had been in storage for two decades. In 2020, the remains were sent to a laboratory for specialized testing. Two years later, in 2022, a full 25 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 did was reveal a specific familial lineage, a genetic fingerprint that pointed not to a name, but to a family. Investigators turned to genetic genealogy databases. They uploaded the profile. The search began. Within the databases, a match surfaced. Not a direct match to Baby Garnet’s mother, 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 25-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 Gerwatowski. Go back about 2 years ago. I watched my best friend get an Ancestry DNA kit for Christmas, and I thought it was dope. I was like, “I need one of those. I want to see all the cool you’re seeing right now, so I bought one. It’s literally spit into it, you swab your mouth, you send it in, and they give you your ancestry results.

 It’s actually really Um and I had a blast doing it. Um little did I know. It was an ordinary Tuesday in May 2022 when Jenna’s phone rang at the flower shop in Newberry. She almost let it go to voicemail. The number was unknown. Something made her pick up. The voice introduced itself as a detective with with Michigan State Police.

The question came almost immediately. Had she heard of the Baby Garnet case? She said yes. He told her that her DNA had matched to a victim in a cold case. That she was, according to the records, a direct familial relative to the infant found at the Garnet Lake Campground in 1997. 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. It felt like the kind of thing that happened to other people.

In other stories. Not in a kitchen in Newberry. 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 Jenna for access to her DNA account to help build out the familial connections.

 Jenna, cautious and unsettled, thought it was a scam. She hung up the phone. So, this lady calls me and I’m on the phone with her and she’s like, I just needed like your permission and I was like, you have my permission, girl. I was like, whatever you need me to do, like I’ll do it. And she was like, okay, I need your password.

And I was like, who can ask me for my password that’s not a scammer, you know? And so, I hung up phone. Jenna’s grandfather had recently been targeted by a phone scammer posing as a detective. Her mother’s first instinct was to be careful. Jenna agreed. She had hung up on the genealogist without providing anything.

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 her cousin sat down at that kitchen table and the full picture began to emerge, 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 1st, 2022, detectives spoke with Cara directly. She agreed to provide her DNA. The results confirmed the relationship. Cara Gerwatowski was baby Garnet’s half-sister, and Cara had a mother, a woman she had been estranged from since the age of 18. A woman Jenna had never met.

 A woman whose name Jenna had not even known until she was a teenager. 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 when they got there. 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 a set of questions built from 25 years of investigation. They identified themselves and asked for her cooperation. Nancy did not turn them away. She invited them inside. The conversation progressed until investigators revealed what they believed, that Nancy was baby Garnet’s mother.

 There was a moment of disclosure, the space between knowing and saying. Nancy 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. She waived them. And then in the second interview, Nancy Ann Gerwatowski told investigators what had happened in June of 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 for what would happen when the baby arrived.

According to the prosecution, she delivered the newborn alone at her home in Newbury. The baby died of asphyxiation during or immediately after the birth. She then placed the infant’s body in a bag and drove 20 miles to the Garnett Lake campground. She was charged with open murder, involuntary manslaughter, and concealing the death of an individual.

In November 2024, Jenna Rose Gowellatowski 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 Newbury knowing about the baby Garnett case, knowing it as community history, as a local mystery, and then discovering at 23 years old that the answer to that mystery lived inside her own family tree.

Her exact words. So, 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 a Ancestry DNA kit. The video received more than 10 million views. Jenna’s TikTok following grew to over 67,000 followers within days.

Comments came from people across the country who had been following the baby Garnett case for years, and from people who had never heard of it before that video. Baby Garnet, who had been buried in a small Michigan cemetery in 1997 with 40 community members in attendance, was now being discussed in comment sections by millions of people.

 Her story had traveled from a wooded campground in the Upper Peninsula to every corner of the country, carried by a 23-year-old woman who had taken a DNA test to satisfy her curiosity. Nancy Ann Gerwatowski was arrested in July of 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 was full-term. She had been alive inside her mother’s body through the entire span of a Michigan winter, through spring, and into early summer. And then she was gone before anyone outside of one person knew she existed.

The community gave her a name and a grave, and 40 people who 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 20 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 25 year silence broken not by a detective’s hunch or a witness’s confession, but by a $59 DNA kit, a young woman’s curiosity, and a phone call she almost didn’t answer.