On the fifth of December 1982, a trucker by the name of Ted Hammond was driving a route that took him through Moss Point, Mississippi when he noticed what appeared to be the body of a young woman floating in the Dog River (now known as the Escatawpa River). He called police, informing them that the woman was face-down and wearing a blue plaid shirt.
Investigators arrived on the scene in short order, but could not find a woman’s body where the trucker had specified. Broadening their search, however, uncovered something even more horrific: the remains of a little girl in the very same river, concealed by weeds around ten miles from the I-10 bridge.
The victim was white, and between one and two years old, with curly, strawberry-blonde hair and an indeterminate eye color thought to be blue or brown. She was dressed in a pink checkered dress and a diaper, and appeared healthy and well-nourished, weighing around twenty-five pounds.
When the toddler was examined by pathologists, it was determined that she had been dead for approximately thirty-six to forty-eight hours prior to being found. It looked as though someone had attempted to smother the child before throwing her off the side of the bridge, but she was still alive when she hit the river; the presence of water in her lungs suggested that she had drowned.
After a description of the girl—dubbed Delta Dawn or Baby Jane—was released to the public, several witnesses came forward to state that days earlier, they had spotted a barefoot young woman in a blue plaid shirt carrying a toddler along the side of the I-10. The witnesses further claimed that this woman was clearly agitated, and though a handful of them had apparently pulled over and asked if she needed help, she refused all offers.
The sightings of this mysterious woman—perhaps Delta Dawn’s mother—led detectives to speculate that the woman had either attempted to smother her own child before throwing herself into the river to commit suicide, or alternately that a male perpetrator had picked up both the woman and the toddler and had murdered them both. Neither line of inquiry yielded anything close to a break in the case.
But in 2020, Delta Dawn was finally identified via genetic genealogy as eighteen-month-old Alisha Heinrich. The child and her mother, twenty-three-year-old Gwendolyn Mae Clemons, had been missing from Kansas City, Missouri since November 24th, 1982, when they had reportedly left with Gwendolyn’s unnamed boyfriend in order to start a new life in Florida. The boyfriend later returned to Missouri alone, and despite being deceased, he is considered a person of interest in the murder of the child and the disappearance of Gwendolyn Clemons, who remains a missing person. Considering the fact that witness Ted Hammond stated that he had seen a woman’s body in the same river where the child’s remains were found, it’s feared that Gwendolyn may also be dead, but the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department is actively investigating all avenues.
Crime Immemorial 