Maine cold case of ‘Baby Jane Doe’ cracked 36 years later

The mother of a newborn baby girl who froze to death in Maine in 1985 has been arrested and charged with murder in disturbing cold case.

Lee Ann Daigle, 58, was busted by Maine state police outside of her Lowell, Massachusetts home on Monday, putting an end to a 36-year mystery.

The case began after Daigle’s baby’s body had been discovered by a dog that then dragged the body of “Baby Jane Doe” about 700 feet to the dog owner’s home in the Maine town of Frenchville, state police said.

“She kept pounding at the door’s window to get back in,” the dog’s owner Armand Pelletier told the Bangor Daily News in 2014. “She kept pounding, and after awhile, I went to go look, and I could not believe what I saw. I saw what looked like a little rag doll, but then we saw it was a frozen little baby.”

The dog was a Siberian Husky named Paca, the local outlet reported.

State police detectives discovered the baby was born and then heartlessly abandoned in below-zero temperatures at a gravel pit.

“It was so cold, just very, very cold,” Maine State Police Maj. Charles Love told the Bangor Daily News in 2014 “I was not the first officer on the scene, but I was one of the earliest. I was walking the scene, trying to gather information.

“It was so quiet in that gravel pit, and it appeared that a vehicle had driven in, as the tracks were very clear in the snow. Right near them were plainly a set of dog tracks. I turned and followed those paw prints right back to the house, where it had dropped the baby right by the door.”

The case was finally cracked with the help of advancements in DNA technology and genetic genealogy.

“This case was the culmination of decades worth of investigative work from dozens of now retired and current detectives who never gave up finding answers and justice for Baby Jane Doe,” Maine state police said in a Facebook post announcing the arrest.

Two Maine detectives “have chased every lead and spent countless hours working and following new leads that helped identify Baby Jane Doe’s mother,” state police said.

With Post wires