On an April day in 1992, a local farmer in Picayune, Mississippi, was rummaging through trash in a dumpster behind Mr. Gatti’s Pizza, pulling out garbage bags of food waste to take home to feed his animals.

The following day, the farmer was feeding the animals when he made a horrific discovery: A newborn baby, a girl, wrapped in a towel with trash items inside a garbage bag.

Police were notified and Picayune detectives photographed and collected evidence. An autopsy indicated the infant was likely born the morning of April 15, 1992, was about three weeks premature and had only lived a few minutes before being smothered.

And for more than 30 years, that’s all anyone knew. The identity of the mother, or who killed the child, remained a mystery.

But in 2021, Picayune police reopened the case, along with several others they pulled from deep in the files.

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First they had to find out where the infant was buried; the information had been lost.

Retired officers provided tips indicating the baby had been buried in the Salem community near Picayune. Investigators also learned Lee’s Chapel Baptist Church had donated the burial plot and congregation members had given money for a headstone for the unknown child.

In May 2021, a headstone was found at church cemetery, inscribed with the name “Heaven’s Angel” and the dates “April 15, 1992-April 15, 1992″.

The Hancock County coroner would later confirm the child buried there was the same one found in the dumpster nearly 30 years earlier.

Roughly three months later, an agent with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations obtained a grant and offered to assist Picayune investigators with the cost of forensic genetic genealogy testing of the evidence that had had been collected in 1992. The evidence was well-preserved and documented in the years since.

Through DNA testing, suspects were identified in Louisiana and the and Louisiana State Police were brought into the investigation. Investigators, aided by the new testing, determined the child had been killed in Louisiana and dropped in the dumpster in Picayune later the same day.

Arrested this week were 50-year-old Inga Johansen Carriere of Avondale, Louisiana, and 50-year-old Andrew K. Carriere II of River Ridge, Louisiana.

They have both been charged with first degree murder. They were the child’s parents, officials said.

The two also will face a charge of desecration of a human being for allegedly putting the baby in the dumpster.

They are being held without bond in the Jefferson Parish (La.) Correctional Center.

Picayune police chief Joe Quave said solving the case three decades after the crime occurred is gratifying for all involved.

“This is a testament to law enforcement officers not giving up,” Quave said. “Even those back in 1992, not knowing what kind of technology might be available in the future, doing everything they could at the time and then to preserve all the evidence — it’s just a credit to everyone involved, start to finish.”