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Beneath an ash tree in a snow-covered park, a tiny soiled bundle stood out against the gleaming white. A passing dog stopped in its tracks, sniffing at the dirt-covered fabric. Its owner stepped closer then halted, horrified, and called 999.
The first police officers at the scene carefully inspected the unusual object but had identified it within minutes: it was a little baby, frozen and decomposing in the first snow of winter.
This terrible discovery sparked one of the most complex, painstaking and sensitive investigations in recent times for detectives on the major incident team of Greater Manchester police.
Almost a year on, investigators are still trying to trace the parents of the newborn girl with the soft black hair. But this week, for the first time, they revealed one “significant” clue they hope will help solve the mystery of the abandoned Baby Ava.
Det Insp Louise Kelly was at her desk when the initial report came in. She had investigated shootings, stabbings, gang attacks. But this was different.
At first, officers had nothing to identify the tiny infant. She was days old at most when she died, police believe, though she may have been stillborn. Her body was so decomposed it was impossible to say initially whether she was a girl or boy.
Alongside a team of about 20 detectives, experts in dental and bone analysis, botany, anthropology and archaeology have learned gradually more about Ava’s tragically short life.
They believe she was born at full term, 38 to 39 weeks’ gestation. She is likely to have been a concealed pregnancy, as there was no trace of her mother on NHS records. But even a year on, police cannot be sure of her ethnicity due to her condition when she was found.
“Our main goal here is to try to find out how Ava came to be in that hole and we’re doing absolutely everything we can to find that out,” Kelly said this week. “We’re following up every line of inquiry, conductiing thousands of hours of house to house … because we really want to find out what’s happened in this really upsetting case.”
Detectives suspect Ava’s body was hidden somewhere else before she was buried in a shallow grave about 12cm deep on the edge of Ashton’s Field, a country park in Salford, Greater Manchester, where she was found by the dog walker on 20 November 2024.
The grooves in the soil suggested someone used a trowel or spade to hurriedly dig the hole. One detective likened the marks to “as if someone had got a hanging basket, put it in the ground and then pulled it up”.
Remarkably, if it was not for the snowfall Ava might still have been undiscovered today. Investigators believe she was unearthed by animals who, in the subzero conditions, had resorted to burrowing in the earth for food.
The most significant piece of the puzzle was revealed this week. The little girl had been wrapped in a distinctive piece of women’s underwear, pink and beige in colour, large in size and decorated with cartoon donkeys.
Police believe Ava’s mother wore the item when pregnant but it appeared to carry no trace of her DNA. The underwear did, however, carry an unknown man’s DNA – but the trail went cold when there was no match on the police national computer.
The unusual design – and the fact they were not manufactured in the UK, but imported from overseas – gives investigators hope that someone may recognise where they were sold and lead them to the mother.
“It could just take one person to look at it and recognise it and they could give us that breakthrough that we need,” said Kelly.
An average of about 16 babies a year are found abandoned in the UK, according to one recent study. This is likely to be an underestimate, however, as there are no comprehensive statistics on the phenomenon in the UK.
In the days after the discovery, teddy bears, candles, flowers and even a baby’s fur-lined winter jacket were laid at the scene at the entrance to Ashton’s Field in Little Hulton.
The outpouring of shock and grief from the local community was reminiscent of the case of Baby Callum, whose body was found near a theme park in Warrington in March 1998. The search for his parents confounded the police for 25 years until 2023 when a remarkable breakthrough came after a routine cold case review.
In Ava’s case, detectives are combing through a list of hundreds of people from all over the country with a partial match to her DNA. They then cross-reference the names with vehicle registrations as well as hundreds of hours of CCTV of cars in the vicinity of Ashton’s Field at the relevant time.
Kelly knows she may never unravel the mystery. The answer also may be just around the corner. She urged members of the public to contact officers with any information that could help: “We will keep going until we get the answers that we need.”
