A cold case file might be warming up in Cheyenne.
The Laramie County Sheriff’s Office is hoping to use new technology to identify an infant whose lifeless body was found in February of 1988.
Law enforcement is partnering with the DNA laboratory Othram to identify the baby boy, whose body was discovered by a couple walking near Happy Jack Road and McKinney Drive in Cheyenne on February 28, 1988.
The infant, described as caucasian with brown hair and blue eyes, weighing 6.5 pounds, was wrapped in a blanket.
An autopsy revealed that the child had air in his lungs at the time of his death, indicating that the had been born alive – so the death was ruled a homicide.
Despite pursuing all available leads at the time, including canvassing local hospitals and schools as well as the Air Force base, law enforcement was unable to locate the baby’s parents, and the case went cold.
But new technology could unveil the mystery – with help from the public.
The Sheriff’s Office is partnering with Othram, the world’s first private DNA laboratory built specifically to apply the power of modern parallel sequencing to forensic evidence.
According to their website, scientists at Othram are experts at recovery, enrichment, and analysis of human DNA, using only trace quantities of degraded or contaminated materials.
But that kind of technology doesn’t come cheap – so a DNASolves fund has been created to cover the costs of testing and research for the case.
The fund is hoping to raise $5,000 to pay for the cutting edge laboratory techniques and computational algorithms to extract the most value from DNA evidence.
If anyone has information that could aid this investigation, they are encouraged to contact Detective Sergeant Curtis Burch at the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office at 307-633-4763. Here is the live link to the DNASolves.com page –https://dnasolves.com/articles/laramie_county_baby_john_doe/
