Authorities in southeastern North Carolina have arrested a 69-year-old woman and charged her with felony concealing the birth of a child, nearly five decades after a newborn girl was found dead in a trash bag at the Columbus County landfill.
The arrest ends one of the county’s longest-running unsolved investigations and highlights how preserved evidence can take on new meaning as science changes. Investigators have not said how the baby died, and the charge does not allege a cause of death. Sheriff Bill Rogers said detectives reopened the case in recent years, worked with state investigators, and used advances in DNA technology to identify the child’s mother as Cathy McKee of Whiteville.
Deputies began the investigation in 1979 after the baby’s body was discovered at the Columbus County landfill, authorities said. The case moved through multiple rounds of interviews and follow-up work but eventually ran out of leads. Over time, detectives kept the file alive, passing it from one group of investigators to the next, the sheriff’s office said. Rogers said a fresh look at old evidence helped restart the effort. “We brought closure to the baby,” he told a local station, adding that the case mattered to the deputies who worked it decades ago and to detectives who later picked it up.
Investigators said they were able to move forward because deputies in 1979 collected evidence carefully and stored it for the future. The sheriff’s office said an audit of its evidence locker helped bring attention back to materials tied to the case, and detectives reopened the investigation about two years ago. The Columbus County Sheriff’s Office said its Criminal Investigations Division worked with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, including the SBI Coastal District and the SBI Cold Case Unit. A private forensic lab, Othram of Texas, also described working with authorities to build a DNA profile from preserved material and develop leads that pointed investigators toward relatives and, eventually, McKee. Authorities said the new work identified McKee as the infant’s biological mother.
Even with the renewed focus, major questions remain unanswered, and investigators have been careful about what they can prove in court. Authorities have not publicly described whether the baby was stillborn, died from exposure, suffered injuries, or died from another cause. They have not said how long the child had been dead before being left at the landfill. Detectives also have not said whether anyone else may have been involved, or whether anyone at the time knew the baby’s identity. The sheriff’s office has framed the arrest as a break in identity, not as a final accounting of what happened to the newborn, and it said the medical details have not been released.
Rogers said the charge reflects legal limits tied to the time of the crime. He said investigators had to pursue charges based on what state law allowed in 1979, and he said the case likely would have been handled differently under today’s statutes. He also said his office has been in contact with the district attorney’s office about whether any additional charges could apply, while noting that any new step would still have to fit the law as it existed at the time. McKee was arrested Tuesday, Feb. 24, and the sheriff’s office said she was first held on a $20,000 bond. WECT reported that a judge later reduced the bond to $5,000 at her first court appearance, and the station said she posted it and was released. Authorities also said McKee waived her right to counsel at that hearing.
The case has rippled through the small community of Whiteville, where neighbors said they struggled to match the arrest with the woman they knew. One neighbor, Sue Tyson, said the news made her stop in her tracks. “I couldn’t hardly believe it. That’s terrible,” she said. Another neighbor told a reporter she did not believe McKee would have done such a thing. A man answered the door at the McKee home for one local station and shut it without speaking. Rogers praised both the current detectives and the deputies who worked the case in 1979, saying their careful handling of evidence gave investigators a chance to return to the case decades later.
Rogers said the arrest also underscored the strain on smaller agencies that do not have a dedicated cold case detective. He said he hoped the result could help his office secure resources to review other older cases, even as day-to-day calls compete for staffing and budget. He described the newborn’s death as a lasting reminder for investigators who carried the file for years. “She was a child, and she was never forgotten,” Rogers said in a statement about the case.
Authorities said the investigation remains active as the case moves through court, and they have not released additional details about the baby’s death. McKee’s next court date was not immediately announced by the sheriff’s office, and prosecutors have not publicly outlined what evidence they plan to present beyond the DNA work that identified her as the mother.
Author note: Last updated February 28, 2026.