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Mysteries of Tiny Bodies From 1930s Will Linger

LOS ANGELES — Three months after the mummified corpses of two infants were found wrapped in 1930s newspapers in a basement steamer trunk here, the police said DNA evidence showed them to be the children of a Scottish-born nurse who owned the trunk and lived in the building during that time.

Janet Mann Barrie, the babies’ mother, died in Canada at age 97 in 1994.

Autopsies revealed no signs of trauma, and on Tuesday the police said they had closed the case. But lingering questions — like how the infants died and why they remained packed in a trunk for decades — allowed some of the speculation and mystery that have grown around the case since summer to continue....
Read entire article at NYT