People you meet along the way - Episode Three - The baby murder

In Sydney, a tragic case unfolds involving a 16-year-old girl who gives birth unexpectedly in a toilet. After informing her mother, they decide to dispose of the newborn in a garbage bin. The situation escalates when the mother falsely claims a miscarriage, leading to a police investigation. Both the girl and her mother eventually admit to their actions, facing serious charges for grievous bodily harm and unlawful disposal of a body.

Transcript

1:10

Covering police rounds sometimes brings a reporter in the close encounters with events that show just how sorted, uncaring and downright cruel some of the people of Sydney can be. One case that sticks in my mind is the death of a newborn baby. On October the 10th, 1986 in a commissioned house at Mount Druid, the official police report on the incident begins late in the evening. On that date, a 16-year-old girl gave birth to a child of about 30 weeks gestation while seated on the toilet, the child was delivered headfirst into the toilet bowl. The girl called her mother, who did not know of the pregnancy and told her the baby was a boy, was moving and making gurgling sounds. The mother told the girl to flush the toilet again. She said she again flushed the toilet, but the baby remained there. She again asked her mother what should be done, put it in the garbage bin. The older woman said and helped her daughter placed the child who had stopped moving in a plastic bag and then into the garbage bin. Contractors collected the bin two days later and emptied the compressed truckload at the Marsden Park tip that would become the little boy's final resting place. The child's mother went to Mount Druitt Hospital the following day, told staff she'd had a miscarriage and flushed the contents down the toilet. But staff became suspicious and wrote to Mount Drew detectives who received the letter 10 days later when questioned the girl and her mother admitted their actions, and the police studied the feasibility of recovering the baby's remains for under between nine and 12,000 cubic meters of compressed garbage. They brought in Detective Sergeant Warren Day, a well-known and respected forensic investigator who had solved the mystery of the Bella Charles murder, a case that had baffled police for 14 years. He discussed the problem with waste disposal staff. They also sought the services of Dr. Godley, a fame forensic pathologist who had investigated the controversial Bogle Chandler double deaths in 1963. The two experts told detectives, the odds of finding the child's remains and establishing any viable forensic evidence would be impossible. Detectives charged the girl and her mother with causing grievous bodily harm to a child during birth, concealing her birth, and the common law misdemeanor of unlawfully disposing of a body Case closed.