Matthew Isaac Doe (Northfield Baby Boy Doe)

Case background and investigation

At about 7 a.m. on April 1, 1982, four schoolchildren waiting for their bus on Mill Hill Road — now known as Gillespie Road — in Northfield, Vermont, noticed a dog dragging a sealed plastic garbage bag along the roadside. Inside the bag, wrapped in a brown bath towel, was the body of a full-term newborn boy with his umbilical cord still attached. An autopsy by Vermont Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Paul Morrow could not determine whether the infant had been born alive, and the cause of death was listed as undetermined. With no way to identify the child or his parents, the case went cold, though state police kept the investigation open and treated the death as a potential homicide.

The community of Northfield claimed the unidentified infant as its own. The Reverend Frank Wisner III paid for a funeral service at St. Mary's Church in late April 1982 and christened the boy Matthew Isaac Doe — Matthew meaning 'gift of God,' and Isaac for the biblical son Abraham was called to sacrifice. Roughly 80 people, including police officers and local residents, attended the service, and the baby was buried under a headstone at Mount Hope Cemetery in Northfield.

The case sat largely dormant for decades until July 2020, when Vermont State Police detectives began working with Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia-based company specializing in forensic genetic genealogy. In 2021, DNA swabs taken from the infant and from the towel in which he had been bundled yielded a female DNA profile. In December 2021, Parabon's genealogy analysis produced the names of the boy's possible biological mother and father — a couple living in Maine who had ties to the Northfield area in 1982. Working with the Maine State Police, Vermont detectives visited the couple and obtained DNA samples, and the Vermont Forensic Laboratory confirmed they were Matthew Isaac's biological parents.

According to state police, the father said he had left Vermont in 1982 and knew nothing of the pregnancy or the infant. The mother admitted to unlawfully disposing of the baby's body. She told investigators she had not known she was pregnant, went into labor unexpectedly while alone, and lost consciousness; when she awoke, she said, she found she had delivered a baby boy with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, and the child was dead. She said she went into the woods intending to bury him but became frightened when she encountered other people, slipped, dropped the bag, and fled. Captain Jeremy Hill of the Vermont State Police said investigators found nothing to suggest she was being untruthful. A second autopsy conducted in 2022 by Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Elizabeth Bundock confirmed the original findings: both the cause and manner of death remained undetermined.

On May 29, 2024, the Vermont State Police announced the resolution of the case. Washington County State's Attorney Michelle Donnelly declined to file charges, saying the evidence did not point to any intentional act that would support a homicide prosecution, and the statute of limitations on a charge of unauthorized disposal of a dead body had long since expired. Authorities did not publicly name the parents. Neither parent was ever charged with or convicted of any crime in connection with the infant's death.