The grave of Baby Garnet at the Maplewood Cemetery east of Garnet in Mackinac County. The remains of the child discovered at the Garnet Lake Campground were buried here in September 1997. (Journal photo by John Pepin)

In a tiny campground near a tiny U.P. village, a septic worker made a haunting discovery. Now investigators are trying to piece together the tragic puzzle of Baby Garnet.

File story by Journal staff

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was originally published by The Mining Journal on July 13, 1997.

GARNET, Mich. — Garnet Lake is so small that it doesn’t show up on the state highway maps. If you’re familiar with the area, you know there is a small campground tucked away behind the lake on an arc of sandy road. In early June someone who knew this secluded spot — or somehow stumbled upon it — picked an outhouse septic pit and made it a tomb for an infant girl.

“Everybody’s befuddled,” said Bill Hanson, supervisor of the vast but sparsely populated Hudson Township in Mackinac County. “Nobody seems to have any hard evidence about what happened out here.”

Hanson, nursing a damp stub of cigar on a rainy day last week, collected trash from campsites and discussed his role in the discovery of the child who would become known as Baby Garnet.

The 9-site Hudson Township campground at Garnet Lake had been closed for two years until the new township board decided to reopen it this summer. Hanson was checking out the area in late June when he noticed the cement block covering the septic vault behind the men’s outhouse had been moved out of place. He also noticed the outhouse tanks were full and in need of service.

“That baby never probably would have been discovered if we hadn’t decided to pump out those tanks,” Hanson mused.

The infant’s body was found on June 26, 1997, by septic worker James Everhart of Gould City. “It’s a real hard thing for me to even talk about it right now,” Everhart said. “…It’s a tough deal to even fathom that it happened.”

Like just about everyone else in the county, Hanson has trouble believing that something like this could happen in tiny Garnet, which has an unofficial population of about 60 people. On County Road H-40 about 12 miles east of Engadine, Garnet is a cluster of little more than a dozen houses along the road and railroad tracks.

Nearby, a small shingle mill operates. You can see the big sawdust pile from the campground on the south end of the lake.

The lake itself — small and rimmed with grass — hosts a pair of loons and some pike. People fish there, but not seriously. Most people who camp at Garnet Lake just want a rustic spot to put up their tent or park a trailer.

The outhouses are set away from the shoreline, behind a small hill under some big pines, next to an open field of raspberry canes and Indian paintbrushes.

An autopsy in Grand Rapids gave police what scant information they knew about the child. Forensics tests showed the infant had gestated for between 38 and 40 weeks. Full-term gestation is 40 weeks. Police believe the baby girl was white and that she was left in the outhouse as early as June 1, 1997. An umbilical cord was not found. Beyond those few facts, investigators can tell little about what happened to her.

“The autopsy — at least the work done so far — hasn’t been able to tell us if she was born alive or stillborn, what the cause of death was, or anything,” said Mackinac County Prosecutor Clayton Graham.

He’s not even sure what kind of crime could be charged in the case.

“We’ll have to go over the case with the pathologist and detectives and see what else can be determined,” he said.

The incident is being investigated jointly by the Mackinac County Sheriff’s Department and the Michigan State Police.

“We’ve gotten some leads,” said Detective Sgt. Robin Sexton of the St. Ignace state police post. “We’re following up on them. … People have called in and given suggestions. We’re checking them out.”

Unless they get new information, the death will continue to be investigated as a homicide, Sexton said.

Mackinac County Sheriff Lawrence Leveille said police are still awaiting some autopsy results.

He said the number of new leads in the case has been tapering off.

“It’s been really down. We’ve had a few, but nothing overwhelming,” he said. “Nothing’s panned out yet.”

Still, Sexton maintains he’s optimistic the case will be solved. Someone out there knows what happened at the Garnet Lake campground. Sexton’s certain of that.

“The question is who,” he said. “And what it’s going to take to get them to call us.”

He believes there are several clues that may point to the identity of the infant’s mother:

≤ Unexplained weight gain over the past few months and especially unexplained weight loss during the last month.

≤ A pregnancy that began in September 1996.

≤ Changing clothing styles to baggy attire since April.

≤ Depression and sleeplessness during the last month.

≤ Gynecological complaints, including bleeding.

≤ Loss of menstrual cycle in past months.

Leveille has suggested that the remote location of the campground makes it likely that whoever abandoned the baby is a nearby resident.

Prosecutor Graham agrees.

“We all have that feeling,” he said. “That area (Garnet and the nearby small town of Rexton) is fairly remote to begin with — and the campground even more so. I didn’t know where it was before this.”

Not everyone around Engadine, the closest city of any size, agrees with the police.

“It could have been somebody local, or it could have been somebody traveling through that’s in Washington state by now,” Hanson said. “Nobody’s really got any specific opinions — of course you can’t in a case like this.”

From grocery store clerks to retired farmers, most people in and around Engadine have heard the circulating news reports and rumors.

But at the Beary Patch coffee shop on U.S. 2 patrons are finding other topics of conversation. The big parade up in Curtis and the fireworks. The search for the fisherman suspected to have drowned in South Manistique Lake.

“Not too many people in here have been talking about it,” said Emily Whitney, a young Beary Patch waitress. “It’s not something you like to discuss, except to say how terrible it is.

“No one wants to believe it could happen,” she said. “It’s not something you really think of as happening in Garnet. Like that girl on TV at the prom killing her baby. Something like that would happen in a big city, downstate somewhere, not in small-town Upper Michigan.”

And Whitney doesn’t think that the person who abandoned the baby is from the area. “I can’t believe it was, or somebody would have known about it.”

The community knows next to nothing about the baby discovered at Garnet Lake: where she came from, when she was born, when and how she died, if she ever even lived to draw a breath. But when she’s buried, they will mark her grave with a name — at least a shred of identity.

“Someone,” Hanson said, “I don’t know who, named the baby ‘Garnet.'”

According to prosecutor Graham, the name was chosen “for where they found her.”

“And ‘garnet,'” he added, “is a precious stone.”

Said Hanson, the township supervisor: “We’re going to donate a plot in the little cemetery up on the hill there and have the sexton bury her.”

Garnet Cemetery is less than a mile down the road from the campground, on the way to neighboring Rexton. It’s a tidy little graveyard surrounded by chain-link fence. The week after the Fourth of July a crop of American flags sprouted from the ground and a small, bright statue of the Madonna stood watch.

It may be some time before the body of Baby Garnet rests here. There may have to be more forensic tests as police try to solve the mystery of how she died. Yet officials want to have some kind of memorial for her.

“We want to put the baby to rest, give her some sort of ceremony,” said Graham. “And maybe somebody will show up at the ceremony … someone will either feel bad and come to us, or know something about what happened.”