On July 11th, 1963, a man named Roy Rogers was fishing in the Keene Creek Reservoir, east of Ashland, Oregon, when his hook snagged on something that he at first believed was a blanket roll. Upon closer examination, however, the roll was found to contain the decomposed remains of a little boy.
The child had been wrapped in a patchwork quilt, which was then wrapped in a teal blanket, and the entire bundle had then been secured with several loops of brass and copper wire. Alongside the boy’s body inside the quilt, authorities also found two iron assayer’s molds which had been used to weigh down the tiny corpse.
The body was far too decomposed to determine a cause of death, but as there had obviously been attempts made to hide the remains, police assumed that the child had been murdered. It was thought that his death had occurred after October of 1962, but pinpointing a more exact time frame proved impossible.
The boy was white, was thought to be between one and two years old, and appeared to have suffered from some sort of developmental disability, perhaps Down syndrome. He had long, light-brown hair and a bifurcated lower front tooth. He was found wearing a cloth diaper fastened with blue diaper pins, and a pair of gray corduroy pants and a long-sleeved red shirt that had likely been bought at the J.C. Penney department store. His shoes were Jumping Jacks, popular toddler’s “learner” shoes that investigators speculated had possibly been purchased at Noble’s shoe store in Medford, Oregon.
Obtaining fingerprints from the corpse was found to be hopeless, but police were able to get a clear set of footprints, which were compared with footprints taken from babies in nearby hospitals from around the time that the child was likely born. Unfortunately, there was no match, and the footprints were subsequently put on file with the FBI.
The only other leads authorities had to go on were the metal molds and the telephone wire that had been found with the body. Though the items were no longer in general use by the time the child’s remains were discovered, they had once been common enough that tracking them to any particular individual was fruitless, and the case of the Jackson County John Doe soon went cold. The little boy was buried in Medford under a headstone that read, “Name Known Only to God.”
However, in 2021, authorities announced that they had identified the child through genetic genealogy as two-year-old Stevie Alexander Crawford, who had been born in October of 1960 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His DNA was matched to that of one of his siblings, who had uploaded a profile to GEDmatch.
The toddler’s surviving family—his mother and stepfather are deceased, and his biological father is unknown—was devastated by the news, but happy to finally discover what had become of Stevie, and have been cooperating with police in the investigation into who was responsible for the boy’s death.
Crime Immemorial 