“They found it unbelievable that she could drive herself home after all this stuff,” John Daigle said.Ī couple of weeks after the apparent birth, the young couple decided to move in together after he was offered an engineering job in southern New Hampshire, and they started their new life together in January, less than a month after the baby’s remains were discovered, John Daigle said. John Daigle said he produced a college transcript showing he was in Orono in early December finishing school, and a roommate from the time sent police an email backing up his alibi. “Everyone up in the County is related to each other.”Īt first, detectives did not believe Lee Ann Daigle could have given birth without help and suspected John Daigle – then her boyfriend of four months, he said. “We thought that she was like a suspect and that this was all a misunderstanding,” Kristyn Daigle said. Kristyn Daigle said her mother cooperated with the police throughout their investigation and gave them a DNA sample, thinking that she would be ruled out because she did not remember anything about the incident. She said her mother had blocked out the memories, possibly as a response to the trauma.
Kristyn Daigle said her mother told her she did not recall anything about the incident until after police told her she was the child’s mother. So to her, it was some freak miscarriage and something that she wanted to leave in the past. “My mom thought it was stillborn,” Kristyn Daigle said. Kristyn Daigle said her mother told her she was driving home from work that December night when she had a strong urge to urinate, pulled to the side of the road and gave birth, never realizing the baby may have been full-term or alive. Kristyn Daigle, one of the grown daughters of John Daigle and his ex-wife, said her mother told her after police contacted the family that she never knew she was pregnant in 1985. “It shocked me, that she had delivered a baby all by herself, at 30-degree-below weather, drove herself home. “I fell to the floor,” John Daigle of Merrimack, New Hampshire, said of the story the Maine State Police told him. On Tuesday, Maine State Police announced that Lee Ann Daigle had been indicted on a murder charge in the death of the baby so many years ago in Aroostook County. The police interview with Daigle this spring was the result of years of work as well as recent advancements in genetic testing that led police to connect Guerrette – now Lee Ann Daigle, 58 – to the cold case homicide of baby Jane Doe of Frenchville, Maine, whose death had gone unsolved for over 36 years. 7, 1985, police allege Guerrette drove to a gravel pit in Frenchville and gave birth to a baby girl, then abandoned her in the subzero temperatures. Less than two weeks after they shared turkey and stuffing, on the night of Dec. “My mother didn’t mention it,” said Daigle, now 60. No one knew or acknowledged knowing anything about a pregnancy, he said. It was the start of a summer romance that lingered into the fall – and by November, Guerrette had met Daigle’s parents, even joined them for Thanksgiving.
Lee Ann Daigle Photo courtesy of Maine State Policeĭaigle was 23 years old and close to earning his engineering degree when he met Lee Ann Guerrette, 21, at a July Fourth celebration in St.