BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) – “Here sleeps an unknown mother and her infant son,” reads the tombstone, “mysteriously murdered April 18, 1923, and sympathetically buried by residents of Kern County.”
And a century later that unknown mother slumbers still, undisturbed by 103 relentless San Joaquin Valley summers or the periodic drone of lawn mowers working their way across the potter’s field at Bakersfield’s historic Union Cemetery.
Later investigation into that Jane Doe’s unsolved killing has invalidated some of the cops’ original assumptions. But this much is rock solid: a young Latina, 25 to 30, was beaten to death, then tethered to the bank of an irrigation canal.
Her body was discovered two days after a toddler was thrown into that same canal to drown and discovered by a worker. Despite weeks of outreach and publicity, no one claimed the child or identified the woman.
Perhaps that will change.
Bakersfield Police Detective Chad Ott, inspired by a local true-crime podcast, wants to exhume the co-interred bodies of the woman and the child, and have their DNA analyzed in hopes modern technology can identify a blood relative. Ott’s supervisor, Capt. Nathan McCauley, the investigations division commander, is on board.
“We have a worthwhile goal,” McCauley said. “To be able to identify these victims, then be able to find answers, and maybe find answers to someone’s family history. They may not have known what happened.”
But, as Notorious Bakersfield podcaster Robert Petersen says, they’ll have to raise money to do it. Unless they can find a 130-year-old murder suspect to justify the expense, this investigation is simply a training exercise and a quest for community closure.
“There’s not a possibility of prosecution,” Petersen said. “They can’t use taxpayer money, so the money has to be raised privately. But since there’s two bodies and we don’t know exactly their relationship, it’s gonna be kinda double whatever’s necessary for one body, so upwards of $10,000.”
McCauley, in fact, put the possible price tag at closer to $15,000.
The city’s two newspapers at the time – the afternoon Bakersfield Californian and the Bakersfield Morning Echo – covered the case in breathless detail.
An employee of San Joaquin Light and Power, a forerunner of PG&E, spotted some black patent leather shoes floating in the canal behind the facility’s steam plant. He thought a child’s doll had fallen in and floated downstream, but when he grabbed a pole and fished around, he was horrified to find an 18-month old boy, characterized in the papers as a beautiful, robust, well-cared-for child — well-dressed, with olive skin, black, curly hair, manicured nails and a handmade cap.
The body was still warm; then Kern County Coroner N.C. Houze said the boy had been dead less than an hour when he was found. Investigators said the approach to the canal bank was too steep for a boy of his age to have climbed alone.
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Two days later, the body of a woman was found in the same canal, tied with bailing wire to the trunk of a sapling willow and weighted down with buckets. Her house dress suggested “refinement,” the Morning Echo reported, and she had been severely beaten – though her wounds suggested a lengthy and desperate attempt to defend herself.
Perhaps the biggest mystery: A man’s suit was also found near the canal. Investigators assumed they would soon find a third body in the water, but no such discovery was ever made.
Coroner Houze revealed that the dead woman was pregnant. But he also determined that she had never given birth and therefore was likely not the mother of the drowned boy. Perhaps DNA analysis can settle the matter of their relationship.
Around the city, theories abounded. Perhaps it was a love triangle, a deserted husband, a discarded lover. Police received a phone call from a woman, never identified, who alleged something of that nature, but nothing came of that line of investigation.
The District Attorney ordered that the bodies be kept on hold in the hope someone might step forward and identify them. Eventually, though, they were laid to rest in separate coffins, but in the same plot. A Morning Echo-sponsored donation campaign paid for their burial – totaling $191, the equivalent today of just under $4,000.
The community, in fact, truly mourned their passing. One newspaper letter writer penned this tribute: “Sleep on in thy beauty, thou sweet angel child, by sorrow unblighted, by sin undefiled.”
Podcaster Robert Petersen will host a fundraiser to benefit the 1923 cold case’s DNA campaign. It’s set for Nov. 8 in the basement venue of the Woolworth’s building.
The event is titled Notorious Bakersfield Presents: An Evening with Gil Carrillo – Inside the Night Stalker Investigation. Carrillo is the retired L.A. Sheriff’s detective who chased that notorious serial killer in the mid-1980s.
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