Forensic exams, autopsy results and other tests are pending on remains of two mummified babies found in a Depression-era trunk in a Los Angeles apartment building basement, but more clues emerged about the apparent owner of the trunk. It was not clear if police would be able to release any new details on the case in the coming week.
Each step takes investigators a bit closer to understanding what happened eighty years ago.
The babies' remains were discovered about 5 p.m. Tuesday in a former ballroom basement area of the Glen-Donald apartment building, in the 800 block of South Lake Street, according to Los Angeles police. The Los Angeles County Department of Coroner began its work Thursday to identify the origin of the remains, the parent or parents, and possible genetic links. None of the exams or tests were complete as of Friday morning, a coroner's investigator told City News Service.
One of the biggest challenges will be to determine whether a crime was committed, police sources told the Los Angeles Times.
While coroner's investigators were at work Thursday, Los Angeles police detectives sifted through evidence that continued revealing details of a distant past.
Inside the steamer trunk where the baby remains were discovered, police found a fur wrap, a flapper dress, a beaded purse, and a bundle of blank medical test forms, The Times reported.
Detectives said the medical forms point in the direction of the woman named Jean M. Barrie, who lived in the area and may have worked as a nurse.
She was born in San Francisco in 1916. Detectives said they found postcards in the trunk addressed to a Jean M. Barrie from a brother, Thomas, in San Francisco, The Times reported.
Detectives are considering other leads, including the possibility the trunk may have belonged to a different Jean M. Barrie, a well-known storyteller and performer at the time. She apparently lived in the Midwest and on the East Coast, and she was related of James M. Barrie, the Scottish author of the children's book "Peter Pan."
Clues in the trunk that point in her direction include an old edition of "Peter Pan," and a certificate of membership to the Peter Pan Woodland Club, a resort that predated Big Bear City in the San Bernardino Mountains and burned down in the 1940s.
But it's unclear whether this other Barrie ever lived in Los Angeles.
An ad in a 1918 edition of Lyceum Magazine shows the stern-faced woman in a lace and velvet dress. The ad bills her as a "Reader of Plays and Miscellaneous Programs."
The women who made the grim discovery of the mummified remains, building manager Gloria Gomez and her friend Yiming Xing, told The Times they found books, postcards, a crystal bowl and two doctor's bags inside the trunk.
Inside each bag was the body of a baby, each body in a blanket, and wrapped in a faded, 1930s-era newspaper, The Times reported.
Xing, who discovered the first body, said Wednesday it appeared to be a fetus.
"It looked like a baby, but it didn't have any shape to it," she told The Times. Xing, a USC geneticist, said she believed the baby was miscarried or possibly aborted.
John Medford, a resident at the building, told the paper he thinks the bodies could be linked to illegal abortions.
"It was kept secret for 74 years and my theory is that this rolls back the cover on a cruel, tragic and unjust time in America for women," Medford told The Times. "Ending pregnancies this way would have been commonplace. This was business as usual in all social strata."
