Alisha Heinrich (Delta Dawn)

Case background and investigation

At daybreak on December 5, 1982, a truck driver crossing the Interstate 10 bridge over the Escatawpa River near Moss Point, Mississippi, reported seeing what appeared to be a body in the water. Jackson County sheriff's deputies recovered the remains of a female toddler, roughly 18 months old, caught in brush downriver from the bridge. According to investigators, the child had been partially smothered before being thrown alive from the eastbound I-10 bridge, and she died of drowning. A medical examiner concluded she had died only hours before she was found. Witnesses later reported seeing a distressed woman carrying a barefoot toddler without a coat walking along Interstate 10 on December 3, and a truck driver reported a possible sighting of an adult female body floating in the river around the time the child was discovered; that body was never recovered.

No missing-person report matched the little girl, and she went unidentified for 38 years. Locals called her 'Baby Jane' and later 'Delta Dawn,' after the river delta where she was found and the popular song. Jackson County deputies raised money for her funeral and served as pallbearers, and she was buried at Jackson County Memorial Park beneath a headstone reading 'Known Only To God.' The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children took on case management and forensic support beginning in the early 2000s, producing facial composites from crime-scene photographs that generated dozens of leads. Her body was exhumed in 2009 for STR DNA testing, and the profile was entered into national databases, but no match was found.

In November 2019, evidence was sent to Othram, a forensic laboratory in Texas, which used forensic-grade genome sequencing to build a genetic profile suitable for genealogical research. Part of the testing was funded by Catherine Serbousek, a New York audiobook editor who donated roughly $2,600 she had saved for a birthday trip after learning about the case. Genealogy leads delivered in June 2020 pointed investigators to a Missouri family, and a DNA sample from Theresa Spencer confirmed the child was her niece. In September 2020 investigators positively identified the girl as Alisha Ann Heinrich, born May 24, 1981, and the identification was announced publicly on December 4, 2020.

The identification opened a second mystery. Alisha's mother, 23-year-old Gwendolyn Mae Clemons, was last seen by family around Thanksgiving 1982 — reported variously as in Joplin or Kansas City, Missouri — when she left with her daughter and a boyfriend, reportedly planning to start a new life in Florida. Days later, Alisha's body was found in Mississippi. Clemons has never been located; Sheriff Mike Ezell said in 2020, 'We do not know if she is dead or alive at this point,' though family members believe she was also killed. The man who accompanied them, whom authorities have described as a suspect in Alisha's death and who reportedly returned to Missouri without mother or child, is now deceased and has not been publicly named. No one has ever been charged, and the Jackson County Sheriff's Department continues to investigate Alisha's murder and her mother's disappearance.