Gail Eastwood-Ritchey admitted to abandoning her newborn infant to die in the woods near Cleveland in 1993—and said officials she’d done it before.
The same genetic genealogy that helped apprehend the legendary Golden State Killer suspect in 2018 has been utilized to solve several perplexing criminal cases across the United States that were previously thought to be unsolvable, including the terrible case of Gail Eastwood-Ritchey.
PEOPLE is reflecting on Ritchey’s 2019 arrest and conviction for the murder of her newborn infant in 1993, which was solved utilizing technology that has subsequently opened many cold cases.
Ritchey, a married mother of three in Ohio, was arrested in June 2019 after investigators linked her DNA to the nameless baby who died after being abandoned in the woods outside the Cleveland suburb of Euclid, Ohio. According to PEOPLE, Ritchey promptly admitted to the crime and exhibited no emotion when authorities questioned her, resulting in her 2022 conviction and life in prison.
Cuyahoga County police located Ritchey’s deceased newborn infant in the woods near Euclid, where it had allegedly been ravaged by animals, WGN said. According to CBS News, the infant was put in a trash bag, and prosecutors claimed during Ritchey’s trial that an autopsy revealed the boy was still breathing when Ritchey abandoned him in the woods.
Community members contributed funds for the child’s funeral and gravestone, which was simply referred to as “Geauga’s Child,” after Ohio’s Geauga County.
“Geauga’s Child lies here now in safety – just too late,” the headstone says, according to CBS. “It is too late to save his life. It’s too late to set things right. But it’s not too late to teach everyone to love and appreciate life.”
‘Exemplary Life’
Ritchey abandoned her child in 1993, and her attorney Steven Bradley claimed she lived “an exemplary life” for the next 30 years. Ritchey later married the child’s father and had three additional children together, PEOPLE previously reported.
Bradley told a Geauga County judge during her 2022 sentencing that she thought the child was stillborn and was unaware she was pregnant, having the baby on a toilet while nannying at a family’s house, according to CBS. The lawyer claimed Ritchey’s father was strict and would not approve of her pregnancy. According to CBS, Judge David Ondrey told Ritchey that she “took the easy way out,” and that her newborn child “didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
Judge Ondrey also informed Ritchey that he was considering her admission that the 1993 incident was not the first time she had given birth and abandoned her infant for dead.
PEOPLE stated that when authorities approached Ritchey about the 1993 murder 26 years after her newborn was discovered dead in the woods, she informed them she had done the same thing with another newborn kid she had given birth to approximately two years earlier, in 1990 or 1991.
“I think you knew what to do because you had done it before,” Ondrey told Ritchey, according to CBS. “Calling you a monster who deserves life imprisonment is not an exaggeration.”
