Stories of mothers abandoning their newborn infants—often dumped in trash bins or left in remote areas—always make for lurid headlines that never fail to produce a litany of shocked responses and collective disgust. How could she? we ask. How could a mother abandon her newborn, so innocent and vulnerable, to die alone? It is a hard thing to wrap one’s mind around it, especially in a culture that sanctifies motherhood as an unimpeachable virtue of the natural order, which of course makes it all the more horrifying and distressing when a woman doesn’t just fail to fulfill that virtue, but actively violates it. Such women must truly be monsters.

Photographer-turned-documentary filmmaker Jessica Earnshaw’s new documentary Baby Doe challenges those preconceptions via the case of Gail Ritchey, a seemingly ordinary, decent, loving wife and mother who was arrested in June 2019 when genetic testing tied her to the corpse of a newborn baby that had been found in a garbage bag in the woods of rural Ohio in 1993. After her arrest, she not only admitted to leaving the baby in the woods, but confessed to having done the same thing two years earlier with another baby (although no evidence was ever found in that case). She claimed in both cases that the baby was stillborn, which means her worst crime was abandoning a corpse, not killing her own child. Thus, there is no question of what she did; rather, the question the film probes is why. Why did this woman, who went on to lead what any rational person would describe as a good and decent life, commit an act so seemingly callous? And how do we reconcile that act with her professed Christian beliefs? And how do we further reconcile that act with her claim that she didn’t even know she was pregnant? Her husband, Mark Ritchey, who was the father of the child (although at the time they were in college and were not yet married), was also completely unaware of her pregnancy, as were her parents and all of their friends. How could something like that happen?

Baby Doe doesn’t exactly answer those questions, as they are far beyond the scope of a feature documentary; rather, it draws us into Gail Ritchey’s life in the years following her arrest while she prepares for and awaits her trial, which is repeatedly postponed. Earnshaw’s camera rarely leaves the Ritchey family, only to show us archival press conferences, news reports, and, most dramatically, the body cam footage from when Gail was first approached in her driveway about the abandoned baby and video footage of her confession that she is indeed the mother of the infant that had become known as “Geauga’s Child,” named after the rural, working-class county in which Gail lived her entire life. Thus, we can see how Gail was immediately demonized as the monster-answer of a nearly three-decade mystery.

Meetings with lawyers and preparations for the trial are mixed with the surface normality of everyday routines like cooking and going to church; we also see how almost every moment is burdened with the weight of the impending trial, which could very well send Gail to prison for a very long time. We also slowly ascertain how largely isolated Gail has become in her small-town community due to the notoriety of the case, which is physically manifested in the large ankle monitor she has to wear 24 hours a day. There are interviews with a few other people in Gail’s life, including her husband, her adult children, her defense attorneys, and Patty, the wife of the pastor of Gail’s church who became her friend after Gail no longer felt comfortable at the church she had attended much of her life (in this way Baby Doe is a compelling depiction of real Christian charity, as Gail’s new church accepts her without question rather than shunning her, which appears to be what most of the world has done).

At the same time, though, Baby Doe is about what appears to be a horrific crime, one that is largely misunderstood although easily explained by those who think they already have all the answers. It is here that the film gets into its most complicated territory, and Earnshaw takes the surprising approach of staying with Gail and her experience, rather than bringing in various criminal and psychological experts for interviews. Crucial psychological context is provided via her defense team about “pregnancy denial” (also referred to as “cryptic pregnancy”), a psychological phenomenon where women are genuinely unaware that they are carrying a child. Although she is not formally interviewed for the documentary, we hear from Dr. Diana Barnes, a psychiatrist who acted as an expert witness in the defense of Emile Weaver, another college-age woman who abandoned her newborn baby. Dr. Barnes is brought in to serve a similar role in Gail’s defense, but is rejected by the judge and not allowed to testify. Thus, her presence provides the film with important psychological explanation as well as a depiction of how the mechanisms of the justice system can be stacked against certain people. You may or may not be convinced by the end of Baby Doe that Gail is not only not a monster, but rather a victim, but one would be hard-pressed to come away at the end without admitting that such cases are infinitely more complex than we would like to think. Dichotomies like “good mother and bad mother” are reassuring because they are simple. Baby Doe shows that there is nothing simple about it.

Copyright © 2026 James Kendrick

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