The Foster Mother Mystery

On the town garbage dump in St. Johnsbury, Vt. (pop. 10,500), the body of a week-old baby was found wrapped in brown paper. A hospital shirt led police to the baby's mother. She admitted disposing of the body, but denied killing the baby or seeing it die. She had taken her illegitimate child from the hospital soon after its birth, she said, left it with a married couple from Plymouth, N.H., who had a child of their own.

A few days later, according to the mother, the Plymouth couple called to say that her baby had died of suffocation. The frightened mother claimed the body, kept it in a box in her apartment for a while, then disposed of it.

The Plymouth couple denied all knowledge of the baby or its fate. No witnesses could corroborate the mother's story, and no signs on the small body indicated the cause of death. The chief clue was a tiny pinch of white dust found in the baby's stomach: 45 milligrams of dried milk left over from the baby's last meal.

Last week's New England Journal of Medicine tells how Vermont's State Pathologist Joseph W. Spelman solved the mystery. Cow's milk, he knew, differs from human milk in its relative amounts of calcium and phosphorus ash. Human milk during the first 30 days after a mother gives birth is also different from the milk of mothers between one and nine months after birth, and that of mothers after nine months. Analysis of the specks from the dead baby's stomach showed that their composition almost exactly matched that of mothers with babies nine months old or more, i.e., the milk must have come from someone other than the baby's mother.

On the evidence, the authorities accepted the mother's story, charged her only with illegal transportation of a corpse.

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