Days After His mother’s Death, Sad man Finds Dead Baby Stored In Family Freezer And Was Left In Shock

Days after his mother’s death, a man finds dead babies stored in the family freezer. It’s hard for Adam Smith, 37, to say whether Barbara had been a good mother. Growing up, he and his sister, Susan, always had food on the table and a roof over their heads.

When Adam was about 12, Barbara started drinking heavily and associating with people who did the same. During his teenage years, she wasn’t around. “She was always out hanging out with her boyfriend,” Adam says. “Perhaps not coincidentally, about the same time that Barbara started drinking, a rift formed between her and her extended family.”

Previously, Adam’s aunts, cousins, and grandmother had been a steady presence. Then, all of a sudden, extended family was cut out of his and his sister’s lives. The Smiths lived on Miami Street in Tower Grove South and later moved to The Hill when Adam started high school at St. Louis Career Academy.

Before Adam and Susan were born, Barbara had worked as a mail carrier and in restaurants. However, she later told her children that she had to give up work because of them. For a while, Adam split his time between his dad Terry’s place and his mother’s. When he was old enough, he didn’t hesitate to get a job and move out, but, as he puts it, “I always got sucked back in. That was my mom.”

Even when he was living out of the house, Barbara was still clingy with him, calling and asking him to run errands, get groceries, and pick up medicine. Also, in the middle of the passage, there’s a sudden unrelated statement about subscribing to a channel and clicking the notification bell, followed by “now back to the story analyzing their relationship.”

Now he thinks she stunted his independence, preventing him from fully realizing the life he wanted for himself.

Barbara had lived in the apartment for nearly two decades. The white walls had turned yellow, and detritus from a disordered life lay everywhere. Then there was the box in the freezer. A detail that, at the time, wasn’t particularly out of the ordinary, given that a lot about Barbara’s life didn’t add up, even to her children. Later, a handful of media reports implied that Adam and his sister had spent their entire childhoods asking their mom, “What’s in the box? What’s in the box?”

“I’ve asked her several times,” Adam recalls. “It was either a no-no conversation she blew me off. My mom has always been so secretive about things. Throughout life, it hadn’t been like that.”

However, for as long as Adam could remember, there had been an object in his mom’s freezer the size of a large shoebox. It was the sort of thing a pair of boots would be packaged in. He has firm memories of it from as young as six, and his sister, who is 45, remembers it always being there too. They thought maybe a piece of wedding cake was being saved inside. When Adam asked his mom about it, she would deflect, saying, “No, it’s nothing. No comment. Don’t worry about it,” Adam recalls. She changed the subject. Generally, Adam didn’t think of it at all.

This past January, about a year after Adam moved in with her, Barbara was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer. She’d been telling her doctors she wasn’t smoking, which was categorically false. A CT scan found spots on her lungs. The cancer spread to her liver, her bones, and her lymph nodes. Barbara passed away on July 21st at the age of 68.

About a week after Barbara died, Adam’s girlfriend was on his case to clean out the apartment. Dirty dishes covered the table, and the pantry was stuffed with half-empty boxes. He had his work cut out for him. On that hot July Saturday, it was shortly after midnight when he opened the freezer to grab a water bottle he’d been chilling and saw the box.

The box his mother wasn’t around to tell him not to open. He took a photo of the open freezer and messaged his girlfriend, his sister Susan, and his aunt.

“What if it’s money?” his aunt texted back, jokingly. “Money was one thing,” Adam felt pretty confident it was not. He thought it might be more fun to wait until his sister and girlfriend could be there to open it with him. An impulse, in retrospect, he’s glad he ignored.

He grabbed a knife and cut into the cardboard. He saw a pink fleece blanket. “There was a pink blanket, baby blanket. And when I reached down and touched it, I could feel a foot, and I could see the baby’s head. The skin was cracked. I guess curiosity gets the best of everyone. I pulled it up. It still had skin, hair, and everything. It was mummified. After that, I just freaked out. I put it back into the box and I called the police right away.”

He put the baby back in the box and called the police, the non-emergency number. “This is crazy,” the dispatcher said. “I’m just going to transfer you to 9-1-1.” Adam met the officers outside and led them upstairs. In the kitchen, he recalls, one of the officers looked at Adam and asked, “Are you going to grab it?” “I am not touching the thing again,” he said.

Adam went into his room while the officers and eventually a detective investigated the kitchen, which was now a crime scene. Later that night, down at the police station, a homicide detective interrogated Adam, who insisted the baby was a total surprise to him. He says the detective apologized to Adam for what he’d gone through and let him go. The medical examiner would do an autopsy, which would hopefully provide at least some rudimentary answers.

The next day, the media showed up. Channel 5 was the first Adam let them in; the other local stations followed suit. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Riverfront Times published stories, as did CNN, NBC, the South China Morning Post, and countless others. The headline on The Washington Post’s website read, “His Mother Kept a Cardboard Box in the Freezer for Decades. Inside, He Found a Mummified Baby.”

Reporters had a lot of questions. Adam had a lot of questions too, chief among them: Exactly what kind of person was his mother? What else about her didn’t he know?

Barbara Smith kept a lot of secrets, even when she was alive. It was often up to her children to suss out key aspects of their identity on their own. For example, for a long time, Adam and Susan had assumed they got their last name from the same man, Adam’s father, Terry Smith. However, as adults, they found out that Barbara had previously been married to a man named Howard Smith, from whom Susan got her last name. Though Susan’s biological father was really a man named Don.

In the wake of her death, the family compared notes about Barbara. How many times had she been married? How many times did she give birth? Different relatives came up with different numbers. In the weeks since Barbara’s death, siblings who previously had been unknown to each other have met for the first time.

In multiple conversations, Adam stressed he isn’t judgmental of his mom for being with so many partners. That’s not what bothers him. What keeps him up at night is the fact that she left him in the dark about so much and that she died leaving an infant frozen in a box she knew her son would open. “She knew she wasn’t going to be around much longer. Why couldn’t she tell us?” he says. “I can’t help but think she did something bad.”

In the weeks since finding the baby girl, Adam has combed through his memories for clues to her identity. He remembers once when riding in the car with his mother, he asked her why she seemed sad. She responded, “My firstborn, Jennifer, would have been 21 today.” Adam can’t recall exactly how old he was when she told him that, maybe six or seven or eight. “We’re saying, what, 46? 47? That’s how long, I assume, it’s my sister. It’s been in a box in a freezer for this long. I can’t help but think that the baby that I found was Jennifer,” Adam says.

But even that, the most basic of information, is still beyond his grasp nearly two months later. Police and the medical examiner have yet to say how the baby died, and without a DNA test, Adam does not even know for certain if the little girl was Barbara’s child, although he strongly suspects that to be the case. “I have to wait for the autopsy to see if that baby ever took a breath, and I cannot help it to think she might have done something to it. I just can’t help it.”

Adam and Susan have always known the box to be in their mother’s freezer, in houses from Miami Street to The Hill to Bancroft to Magnolia. Meaning it’s probable that the baby inside was born before Susan, who was born in 1974. “I’m 37, and it has been in my freezer for 37 years, and I was always told it was like a wedding cake top. Turns out it was a baby.”

In that case, Barbara would have been barely in her 20s, maybe even younger, when the infant arrived. It’s hard to say what Barbara’s life was like at the time in the early 1970s. She would still have been living with her family in the North St. Louis County city of Florissant, where she grew up.

Younger relatives described the family as strictly Catholic, but family members who were around Barbara then and might remember what was happening at the time have not wanted to speak to reporters. However, Adam says in talking with his relatives, he has come to believe his mother almost certainly concealed her first pregnancy. It is likely her family did not know or somehow did not notice, even as her belly swelled.

Though concealed pregnancies that end in tragedy are shocking, they are relatively common and follow distinct patterns, says Michelle Oberman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. Oberman has researched the grimmest of outcomes; she is often cited as a leading expert on infanticide as well as neonaticide, killing a baby in the first 24 hours of life.

Women who conceal pregnancies for the entire duration often are disconnected from their own bodies and typically are young, often teenagers, pregnant for the first time. Oberman notes they are slow to recognize the signs of pregnancy, possibly as a result of some sort of trauma but often because they are scared at the prospect of being pregnant, and while they are physically and emotionally changing, another hallmark of the cases Oberman has reviewed is that no one around the expectant mothers notices what is happening.

The young women end up confused and torn between yearning for a connection with their baby and the feeling that they would be left in a seemingly impossible situation of caring for a child alone. Because they are young, they fall in the adolescent trap of avoiding the short-term pain of telling an adult they’re pregnant and perhaps getting in trouble for having sex and ignore the far more serious long-term consequences.

All too suddenly, labor begins one day, Oberman says. “No one would plan to have a baby alone, unattended on a toilet, yet the overwhelming majority of these cases end in this tragic manner.” In cases of neonaticide, the unprepared mothers often smother the newborns in a moment of panic. The response is not, “I don’t want this baby,” but instead, “Oh my God, someone is going to find out.

Often, the women follow the nearly unimaginable act with tenderness, cleaning the infants before taking them back to their bedrooms, under their beds, in their closets. They keep the lifeless babies with them.

Oberman points out that if a woman were committing something like premeditated murder, she would endeavor to get the evidence as far away from her as possible. “We’re distracted by the fact that the baby is dead, I get that heartbreak. It’s a tragedy,” Oberman says, “But if we’re tending toward worrying about these cases and how to prevent them, then we have to notice that what the woman is doing is actually treating the baby like a baby.” Neonaticide cases tend to follow a distinct pattern, Oberman says.

Parts of what we know about the broad outlines of Barbara’s younger life follow that pattern. She would have been young and almost certainly afraid. Given her family’s heavy-handed Catholicism, it is easy to imagine her concealing a pregnancy rather than admitting she’d been having sex and worse had become pregnant.

In fact, when she was later pregnant with twins following Susan’s birth and put them up for adoption, her family was adamantly opposed, Adam says. But what actually happened to Barbara and that little girl in the freezer is still a mystery.

Oberman says there are significant aberrations in the story that set Barbara’s situation apart from the cases she has reviewed. “What’s weird about this case is how long Barbara hung onto the baby and that she talked about it aloud,” the professor says.

“Those are strange facts. Who absolutely keeps their own child in a box for this long and never talks about it and never…” “I just have so many thoughts, and it’s just insane.” Maybe the little girl was stillborn or died of sudden infant death syndrome.

Maybe there was an accident. But the idea that Barbara could carry a child to term without anyone close to her noticing seems entirely believable to Adam because it happened at least one other time. In 1986, Barbara gave birth to a daughter whom she put up for adoption.

Adam and his sister were school children at the time and yet he says no one in the family, not her children, not her siblings, not her parents with whom she was still in contact, realized what had happened. It wasn’t until the days after her death that Adam and Susan found out. About a week after Barbara’s passing, Adam got a call from his aunt.

She had news. Earlier that year, her daughter, Jessica, Adam’s cousin, paid for 23andMe DNA testing and found that she had two full cousins, both women, one living in Illinois and the other in Florida. Laura and Shannon were their names, born a decade apart.

They shared the same mother but had been adopted by different families. Their mother was a woman from Saint Louis named Barbara Smith. Adam now knew the name of his older half-sister, Shannon,who had been given up for adoption in 1977.

The younger sister, Laura, was the real surprise. He hadn’t known she existed, no one in the family did. She was younger than Adam by five years. He’d been around for the pregnancy but hadn’t noticed. Furthermore, this was before the rift with the family in North County, and despite being in Barbara’s life at the time, none of them had noticed either.

Laura Sorensen grew up in St. Louis and has lived in Springfield, Illinois, for the past eight years. After connecting with Adam’s cousin Jessica on 23andMe, they pieced together that Barbara was Laura’s mother. Jessica told Laura that Barbara had passed away recently. If there had been an opportunity for the long-separated mother and daughter to meet, they had missed it by a matter of weeks.

Laura did a Google search for her mother’s obituary, but what appeared instead was a story about a baby in a freezer. “I had actually seen the story about Barbara before I even found the cousin or Adam or any of them,” Laura says. “I saw an article earlier that week. I was like, ‘No way. I totally read that headline earlier that week.’ Apparently, that’s my birth mom and my half-brother. It was overwhelming.

A birth letter Laura received from the adoption agency had some basic information about Laura’s biological mother and father. The father had been an acquaintance of Barbara’s ex-husband, whom Barbara had dated for a year and a half. Though at the time of Laura’s adoption, they were no longer together.

It said Laura was Barbara’s seventh pregnancy; however, the letter also states that prior to giving birth to Laura, Barbara had one miscarriage, a stillbirth, and four natural births. It’s likely, but not certain, that the baby in the freezer would have been her first pregnancy, followed by the natural birth of Susan in 1974.

Three years later, she gave birth to Shannon, natural birth number two, as well as a twin who was stillborn. Adam was born in 1981. This means there are three known natural births, one short of what the letter says. Also, the stillbirth was Shannon’s twin, the same pregnancy, meaning the letter leaves another pregnancy unaccounted for. The letter from 1986 also states that Barbara lives with a son who attends a school for kids with severe hearing problems. Adam’s hearing is fine and always has been.

The adoption worker who wrote the letter may have made a few careless mistakes, or it’s possible that she, like a lot of people in Barbara Smith’s life, was working with incomplete information. “The more you know, the more questions you have,” Laura says.

Laura may have missed out on meeting Barbara in life, but she did go to the funeral and hung out with the family afterward. She and Adam hit it off, cut from the same cloth. They bonded instantly. Since connecting with Laura, Adam had been trying to scrape together the funds to have both his and his sister’s DNA tested. In September, he bought a scratch-off and won a thousand dollars, some of which he used for 23andMe. The results showed he and Laura are half-siblings. Her dad’s identity is still unknown.

“Finding this, I’m more like confused, angry, and I just want to find closure. I want to know more answers,” Adam says.The end of summer and early fall have been rough on Adam. He’s mourned his mother; pictures of him in front of his mom’s open freezer have gone around the world. “Like yesterday, it went everywhere. My one friend said it was on the news in Australia. I’m like, this is insane.

I did not expect it.” He’s put up with media intrusions. He’s had to grapple with the anger he has toward Barbara that may never fully resolve. Barbara’s legacy was questions, ones that only she knew the answers to. “I wanted some kind of closure, and I feel like I may never get any closer because my mom’s gone,” he says.

At the same time, Barbara’s death has brought Adam something of a relief, a weight lifted off him. He no longer has to witness his mother’s pain and suffering nor be subject to her cruelty. He’s out of the apartment on Magnolia. “I was held back for so many years by my mom’s sickness,” he says. “I could never go and venture out and do my own thing. Now I get to do what I need to do, what I’ve always wanted to do.”