Suffolk Cold Case Unit Charges Woman in 1993 Baby Jane Doe Murder

Denise Reischman Merker, 55, of Riverhead pleaded not guilty March 2 in Suffolk County Court to second-degree murder in the 1993 death of her newborn daughter, whose body highway workers discovered stuffed inside a trash bag off Route 25 in Calverton. Merker faces 25-to-life if convicted.

The arrest, made Feb. 2, came after Merker allegedly told a Suffolk County Police Department detective, "I did it. I did everything," according to a felony complaint. She allegedly added: "I put the paper towel in the baby's mouth because she was crying." Merker was booked into custody the following day and has remained at the Suffolk County Correctional Facility since. She appeared in Riverhead court with attorney Danielle Coysh.

The infant, originally designated Baby Jane Doe, went unclaimed for nearly two years before then-Riverhead police chief Joseph Grattan and the late Msgr. John Fagan, longtime director of Little Flower Children and Family Services of New York, arranged a burial service. On March 30, 1995, the child was laid to rest in Coram and given the name Emily.

What cracked the case was a vial of the baby's blood, drawn in 1993 and preserved at the Suffolk County Crime Laboratory for more than three decades. The Suffolk County District Attorney's Cold Case Task Force, formed in September 2024 and composed of members of the Suffolk County Police Department and the district attorney's office, took up the case last April. On April 28, 2025, nearly 32 years after Emily's body was found and just 280 days before an arrest, the task force sent a DNA sample from that vial to Bode Technology, a private Virginia-based laboratory specializing in advanced forensic DNA analysis. By July 16, 2025, a DNA profile created by Bode had been uploaded for comparison with public databases.

A genetic genealogist then helped detectives narrow the child's parents using DNA. Investigators linked the baby to her father, who worked with Merker at Grimaldi's Meat Market in Riverhead and had been sexually intimate with her between 1992 and 1993. He provided a DNA swab voluntarily and told police he was never advised of any pregnancy or the birth of the baby, according to a bail letter from the district attorney's office. Police interviews and a discarded cigarette butt further solidified Merker as the suspect.

Former Suffolk Homicide Det. Lt. John Gierasch, who oversaw the early stages of the investigation in the 1990s, credited the new unit's methods. "I'm reassured when these cold unsolved cases get solved," Gierasch told Newsday. "And I expect more with this new technology."

The case moved from a blood vial in a storage room to an arrest in nine months, a timeline investigators and prosecutors have pointed to as evidence of what the Cold Case Task Force can accomplish with modern forensic genealogy.