Seattle, Washington – A woman has been apprehended in Washington state for the murder of her newborn baby at an Arizona airport almost 20 years ago, authorities disclosed this week.
The newborn’s body was discovered in the trash in a woman’s restroom at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix on Oct. 10, 2005, wrapped inside a plastic bag with the red Marriott hotel logo. It was determined that the one-day-old newborn had not been born in the airport bathroom but was abandoned there. A medical examiner later ruled the baby’s death a homicide by suffocation, according to police.
The public knowledge of the case led to the newborn being identified as “Baby Skylar.” Despite extensive media coverage, no suspects were named, and the case went cold after all leads were exhausted.
Modern forensic testing on the baby’s body several years ago assisted law enforcement in identifying a potential maternal match, leading them to 51-year-old Annie Anderson, the suspect currently charged in the baby’s death. She was in Phoenix in October 2005 for a real estate boot camp, according to Lt. James Hester of the Phoenix Police Department.
Anderson confessed during an interview with investigators in January 2022 that she was Baby Skylar’s mother. Investigators traveled to Washington state around that time to execute a search warrant for Anderson after forensic tests were conducted several months earlier.
The FBI Phoenix Violent Crime Task Force collaborated with Phoenix Police cold case detectives to arrange these tests in November 2021. Along with reviewing existing evidence in the case, the investigators utilized genetic genealogy to help pinpoint DNA samples that could assist in finding the mother. Once a potential match was found, they were able to cross-reference it with evidence originally discovered at the crime scene to identify Anderson as a suspect.
At a media briefing, Special Agent Dan Horan, who oversees the FBI Phoenix Violent Crime Task Force, described genealogy testing as an “identity resolution technique” that uses a publicly available genealogy database to link family matches to an unknown profile. This ultimately led to the identification of Anderson.
A grand jury in Maricopa County issued an arrest warrant for Anderson on a first-degree murder charge, and she is currently in custody in Washington state, awaiting extradition back to Arizona. She is expected to face multiple felony charges upon her return to Phoenix.