LEE COUNTY, Texas — The Lee County Sheriff’s Office is one step closer to identifying the remains of a young child found in a trash bag near Giddings, Texas. It’s a mystery that dates back nearly 50 years, but officials are hopeful that modern technology can help solve it.
Sept. 7, 1975, was a sunny day in Central Texas. A family was having a picnic at a roadside park off Highway 77, south of Giddings near the Fayette County line, when the father spotted a trash bag under a tree.
“And inside the bag was a small baby decomposed. It was wrapped in Buster Brown clothes,” former Lee County Sheriff Rodney Meyer said.
An old newspaper clipping shows him working the scene, back when he was a deputy.
Fast forward to 2023 and a “changing of the guard” happened when a new sheriff took over, which sparked up an important conversation.
“I wasn’t alive when this happened,” current Lee County Sheriff Garrett Durrenberger said. “When I took office, I had a meeting with former Sheriff Meyer. We talked about old cases, and this cold case came up. We went over as much stuff as I could remember from the case you know, 50 years ago.”
Durrenberger now believes the remains are those of a 4-year-old child. The skull had brown hair and three puncture wounds.
The remains were initially sent to the Department of Public Safety and then to the Oklahoma Medical Examiners Office.
“And it’s it’s been there for years and years and years in a box somewhere,” Meyer said.
That is until the end of last year, when Meyer and Durrenberger retrieved the remains and sent them to the University of North Texas for DNA analysis.
Meanwhile in Giddings, investigators recreated the crime scene using Meyer’s hand-drawn map from 1975. They also used a Bluebonnet Electric map to find a nearby power pole and a tree that still exists today.
Now with a DNA sample, the hope is that genealogy can help track down a family member.
“They did the best they could with the tools they had and we do the same thing today. We just have different tools,” Durrenberger said.
“It is sad because here we have a small child and we don’t know who the family is,” Meyer said.
“Was the child abducted or kidnapped? Was it a known family member who was traveling through or people who lived there? We have no idea,” Durrenberger said.
It’s not clear how long it will take to get results back from the lab or if genealogy will help uncover the child’s identity. But law officers in Lee County are hoping this is one mystery that will be solved.