Lily Janelle (Frenchville Baby Jane Doe)

Case background and investigation

On December 7, 1985, in the small northern Maine town of Frenchville, a Siberian Husky belonging to Armand and Lorraine Pelletier carried the frozen body of a newborn girl from a nearby gravel pit and left it on the family's lawn. Armand Pelletier later recalled that he at first thought the dog had brought home a rag doll before realizing it was an infant. Temperatures in the area around the time of the birth had dropped to roughly 30 degrees below zero. Investigators found a considerable amount of blood at a spot in the gravel pit, leading them to conclude the baby had been born there, and a human placenta was discovered on the road leading to the pit. An autopsy determined the girl was full term and healthy and that she died of exposure to the cold.

The case became one of Maine's most enduring cold cases. For 37 years the child was known only as Baby Jane Doe, and she was buried in an unmarked grave. Maine State Police periodically revisited the investigation, but the identity of the infant and her parents remained unknown until advances in DNA technology opened a new avenue. In 2022, cold case detectives used genetic genealogy to identify the baby's mother as Lee Ann Daigle of Lowell, Massachusetts, a native of the Caribou, Maine, area who was known as Lee Ann Guerette in 1985. According to police, Daigle was 21 years old when she gave birth in the gravel pit.

A grand jury indicted Daigle on a charge of depraved indifference murder, and Maine State Police arrested her in June 2022. In April 2023 she pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of criminal negligence manslaughter. In June 2023 she was sentenced to 16 years in prison with all but six years suspended, followed by three years of probation. Daigle appealed, arguing among other things that the court had improperly applied modern sentencing guidelines rather than those in effect in 1985; in May 2024 the Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld the six-year sentence. She was housed at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham, with an earliest release date reported as November 2026.

With the criminal case resolved, those connected to the investigation moved to give the child a name and a proper memorial. Detectives who worked the case had long called her Lily, a name associated with innocence, and the Pelletiers — the couple whose dog found her and who said they would have adopted her if given the chance — chose Janelle, meaning "gift from God." The Maine State Troopers Foundation, Mays Funeral Home in Calais, and Smet Monuments of New Brunswick funded and carved a gravestone bearing the name Lily Janelle. On August 5, 2025, original responding troopers, current state police personnel, prosecutors, and cemetery workers gathered at Mount Pleasant Catholic Cemetery in Bangor for a committal service, marking her grave nearly 40 years after her death.