Janita Phillips Wiki

                                        Janita Phillips Biography

Who is Janita Phillips ?

The mother of a newborn found dead in a Connecticut dumpster in 1986 was charged with murder on Friday after detectives searched her trash last year and used advances in DNA testing to link her to the baby.

Janita M. Phillips, now 62, turned herself in to police in Florida on Friday, where she had lived for more than 30 years since the girl was found dead. Because all other applicable charges expired with the statute of limitations, she was charged with murder.

Phillips was 26 when she was deemed a person of concern in the baby’s death. The boy’s body was discovered by sanitation workers who emptied a garbage container outside her apartment at 27 Havemeyer Place in Greenwich on May 16.

Janita Phillips Age ?

She is 62 year old.

Husband

Detectives noted that the towels in Phillips’ apartment that she shared with her husband and her two-year-old son matched those that were wrapped around the discarded baby.

However, more substantial evidence was needed to charge the woman with a crime, and the case cooled down when she and her husband, Jerry, moved to Lake Mary, Florida, shortly after being interviewed.

Arrested and Charges

Janita M. Phillips  turned herself in to police in Florida on Friday, where she had lived for more than 30 years since the girl was found dead. Because all other applicable charges expired with the statute of limitations, she was charged with murder.

The baby’s body was discovered on May 16, 1986 by sanitation workers who emptied a garbage container into their truck at 27 Havemeyer Place in Greenwich the woman’s apartment building, on May 16.

Then Greenwich Detective Christy Girardi and a Florida sheriff’s deputy were dispatched to guard the couple’s garbage containers in June of last year.

Using a discarded swab, detectives determined that Phillips was the mother of the long-deceased boy. An empty water bottle established Jerry’s paternity.

Jerry seemed “shocked” when detectives told him about the boy’s existence, and his subsequent murder, according to Greenwich Time.

Phillips told police that Jerry had told him that she did not want any more children after her first birth, and she managed to hide her entire pregnancy from him and her families until she gave birth to light in her apartment.

Investigation

She “never grew” during pregnancy, she told the researchers. Until the night she gave birth, she told investigators, she repeatedly thought to herself: ‘this can’t be happening.’

“ I just remember that I didn’t plan this, ” Phillips told police, more than 35 years after she gave birth to the boy, according to the affidavit.

She hardly handled or looked at the baby in the brief moments after her birth, she said, because that would make the situation “real.”

A medical examiner determined shortly after the boy’s body was found that he had been strangled to death.

‘I didn’t want to ruin [my husband’s] dreams and fall into the den of having a bunch of kids and keeping the bills and not being able to take care of them or achieve their dreams,’ ‘Phillips admitted. the murder, she told detectives.

Greenwich Time reported that Janita Phillips was working at Saks Fifth Avenue on Greenwich Avenue at the time, while her husband was working as a fashion designer, suit maker and custom tailor.

Since 1986, Phillips had maintained a clean criminal record and a “stellar life” with 30 years in the insurance industry, said her defense attorney Lindy Urso.

However, since her arrest, she has been in a ‘psychologically fragile situation’.

“However this cake is cut, it is a very, very tragic situation,” she said. “She has had to live with this pain for 35 years, and now, obviously, she has brought it out again.”

Phillips was initially held on $ 50,000 bail, but was released on the promise that she would contact the Bail Bonds Commissioner’s Office weekly after her impeachment hearing Friday in Stamford State Superior Court.

State Attorney Paul Ferencek supports the decision to release Phillips, saying the state does not see it as a flight risk. He said Friday that she, since her alleged murder, has lived a “blameless life” with no criminal record.

Chief James Heavey said during Friday’s news conference

“Today we began to close the investigation into the death of a baby, many years ago,” Greenwich Police Chief James Heavey said during Friday’s news conference.

“While today’s arrest will not bring that child back, it does give him an acknowledgment that her precious life had meaning and that he will not be forgotten.”

“The investigation into his tragic death has taken many years, but he has always been remembered and we hope this conclusion brings him peace and recognition.”

Janita Phillips Quick and Facts

Janita Phillips, 62, was charged with murder Friday for killing her newborn son in 1986, when she was 26, before moving from Connecticut to Florida.
The baby was found by sanitation workers who had emptied the garbage container outside of her apartment; a medical examiner later said he had been strangled.
Detectives noted that the towels in Phillips’ apartment matched a towel found with the baby’s body, but they didn’t have enough evidence to charge her.
Advances in DNA technology allowed police to obtain samples of the evidence found at the cold scene and compare them to the trash outside the Phillips home.
Police determined that Phillips was the mother of the deceased boy with a swab and that Jerry was her father with a discarded water bottle.
Her husband, Jerry, seemed ‘shocked’ that she was pregnant, that she gave birth in her Greenwich apartment and that she had killed the baby.
“She did not want to ruin her dreams [by] having … children … and not being able to care for them or achieve her dreams,” Phillips told investigators.