ROWAN COUNTY, N.C. — It was more than 50 years ago when a newborn girl was found dead and left in the trash on the roadside, but a Channel 9 report earlier this year brought forth a new connection and witness.

The Rowan County Sheriff’s Office has evidence that suggests the girl was hit in the head with a hammer and left hidden at a dump site.

She was found on March 20, 1971, but there were no arrests, no leads, and no name for a child whose life was stolen moments after it started.

The only record of the incident was one article at the bottom of The Salisbury Post three days after the baby was found, and a small case file tucked away in storage.

This year, Lt. Ryan Barkley with the RCSO found that case file and gave the baby girl a name: Eva.

Then he got to work.

“I spent two days knocking on doors in the neighborhood back when I first started looking into this, and nobody knew what I was talking about,” Barkley told Channel 9′s Hannah Goetz.

Barkley said it’s unusual for the community to be unaware of this kind of case.

“There’s a lot of difficulties with a 53-year-old case. Why is this one particularly difficult?” Goetz asked.

“There’s an extreme lack of record,” Barkley said. “There’s no news articles, there’s no reports, there’s no follow-ups. It’s just maybe 556 sheets of paper and that’s it. That was strange to me.”

Getting the word out

Goetz reported in February when Barkley was testing DNA, working the case, and calling on anyone with information to come forward.

That’s exactly what happened.

“Gary called me in February,” Barkley said. “He said, ‘Mr. Barkley, my name is Gary Williams, and I think you need to talk to me.’ I was taken aback for a moment because I didn’t think anybody would be around.”

Gary’s full name is John Gary Williams, and he’s been a sworn law enforcement officer for 53 years. He has since retired, but he saw Goetz’s report in February and knew it was a case he worked.

“I called him right away because, like I said, I didn’t know that much, but I did know what I know,” Williams told Goetz.

In ‘71, Williams was a 20-something rookie deputy with Rowan County, eager to help analyze evidence from the crime scene.

“Nobody wanted to go through the evidence, because it was so bloody,” Williams said. “They said, ‘Anybody want to go through this?’ and I said, ‘I will,’ because I wanted to learn.”

“I was down on my knees going through it anyway, in uniform, and you just go little by little, whatever, and lay it to the side.”

Over half a century later, one of the first deputies to touch the evidence and the last looked at the case together.

“I knew that he knew what he was talking about when he told me the color of the sheet that the baby was wrapped in, because nobody knew that but me,” Barkley said.

Williams had more information that wasn’t in the file. He knew that those sheets were from a VA hospital.

“That got me thinking about trying to get a list of employees at the VA to see if I could cross-reference that with anybody that lived around Granite Quarry or the White Rock area, so that’s what I’m working on now,” Barkley said.

Williams remarked on the scant evidence in the case.

“Can you imagine working a case like this and that’s all you got?” Williams said.

“I don’t have a reason to believe it’s in anything else because this is the original folder it was in, and you’re the only one that’s alive that remembers it,” Barkley said.

Decades later, Williams is again helping with the case that he says he’ll never forget.

“I was working for that baby,” Williams told Goetz.

“I hope he solves it. I would really like to know -- can’t wait too many more years, lieutenant, because I’m 78 years old now.”

‘We care’

The dirt road where Baby Eva was found is still here.

“The guy that found her was basically just [saying] this used to be like a dump site,” Barkley said.

“They wanted to hide her,” Goetz asked.

“Yeah,” Barkley said. “I just felt like nobody cared.”

But the 10-year veteran detective does care, and we could feel that in his reaction.

“I could be wrong and I hope I am wrong, I hope that whoever was around back then did care,” Barkley said. “But I care, we care, our agency cares about stuff like this.”

It’s a poignant and passionate push for answers from a father himself, for someone else’s little girl who’d been long forgotten.

“I’m going to put a last name to Eva and put her to rest properly with dignity, instead of being dumped in the side road or trash,” Barkley said.

What’s next in the investigation

Two hair samples were sent for testing, and a lab in California has since determined those samples are from two females who weren’t maternally related.

The samples are now being run through a DNA database to hopefully find a living relative.

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