Early in the morning of December 5th, 1982, a trucker stopped at a weigh station along I-10 in Jackson County, Mississippi, to call 911. He thought he’d seen a body in a river, he told the dispatcher. It looked like a person wearing a blue-checkered shirt floating near an ice chest. He’d spotted it as he was passing over a bridge. When police responded to the scene, however, they found no such body. Instead, officers discovered the body of a baby girl in a different river nearby. She was just 18 months old, and wearing a red and white dress. They called her Baby Jane Doe. The mystery of that trucker’s phone call and the baby’s identity would persist for nearly 40 years.
Solvable, a new podcast from Audiochuck, follows the case of Baby Jane Doe leading up to her eventual identification as Alisha Heinrich in December 2020 using familial DNA. The 10-part series, premiering July 19th, is co-hosted by a genetic genealogist, Amanda Reno, with 26-year law-enforcement veteran Greg Bodker. The hosts apply their knowledge from their fields to their talks with investigators, family members, emergency responders, and other residents of Jackson County who were affected by the discovery of the baby’s body.
The series takes listeners through the investigation, all the way up until the moment authorities confirm Alisha’s identification and reveal it to family members. It also shares info about Alisha’s mother, 23-year-old Gwendolyn Mae Clemons, who has been missing since Thanksgiving Day in 1982, shortly before Alisha was found dead.