WAYCROSS, Ga. — It's a desolate area. Wooded and quiet, about a mile up Duncan Bridge Road just outside of Waycross, GA.
“Somebody put this little girl out here to be sure she wasn’t found,” tells GBI Special Agent in Charge Jason Seacrist.
It was a place known for dumping trash or other unwanted items, rarely visited by people. But just four days before Christmas in 1988, a timber worker was walking through the woods when he saw a TV cabinet lying on the ground.
“He started looking at the cabinet and realized there were human remains inside it and called the Ware County Sheriff’s Office,” explains SAC Seacrist, now working the case.
He says deputies responded and found the skeletal remains of a little girl, believed to be between 3 and 5 years old inside a duffle bag, inside a suitcase, in the TV cabinet.
It's believed the little girl had been dead two to three months before she was found. She is believed to be Black and was found in a white knit pullover shirt with a red pony emblem on the upper left chest, white thermal pajama bottoms with maroon trim and a disposable diaper. A search of the area began, but with it being an illegal dump site, it made it more challenging.
“Which makes it hard to identify what is relevant to the remains that were found and what is trash that folks were throwing out here,” he says.
Deputies also checked for any reports of missing children and none had been reported in Ware County. There was a paper from the Albany, Georgia area found near the remains, so deputies checked there too and no reports of missing children either. The search was extended to multiple states, but still no missing child reports that matched the little girl. The case went cold, but then came the advancement of genetic genealogy.
About two years ago, Special Agent in Charge Seacrist says they tried genetic genealogy in this case, but it didn’t lead to any major breakthroughs.
“We have gotten some weak links to follow through on, but we could really use some help in giving us some direction through a tip or anything else to help identify who this little girl is,” he explains.
He hopes that by bringing this case back into the spotlights, someone out there might remember a little girl who seemed to vanish 35 years ago.
“And a parent gave a really unusual explanation that is hard to believe and I think all these years it has eaten at them and now they are thinking – what happened to that girl?,” he says.
As for how the little girl died, that is just one of the many questions in this case. But SAC Seacrist says multiple agents and Ware County Sheriff’s deputies have worked this case over the years – by no means has it been forgotten. Nor will it ever be until they get answers.
“A child holds a special place in any investigator’s heart, they are so innocent and can’t protect themselves. We want to provide justice for that child, we want to identify that child. That child is a person and deserves to be identified and there are family members I know that want to know what happened, that to this day still think about that little girl they haven’t seen in 30 years and we want to provide those answers,” he says.
If you have information about this case, or you think you might know who the little girl could be, you are encouraged to call the Georgia Bureau of Investigation tip line at (800) 597-8477 or you can submit a tip through the online form here: https://gbi.georgia.gov/submit-tips-online
