A discarded cigarette butt was the key to charging a 41-year-old Michigan woman Friday with the murders of her newborn twin sons, who were left for dead in a trash bin 17 years ago in southwest suburban Stickney Township.
Antoinette Briley, of Holland, Michigan, appeared in court Saturday, where her bail was set at $150,000 during a hearing at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse. She faces two count of first-degree murder.
The unidentified twins were found June 6, 2003, by a waste management employee emptying trash bins in an alley in the 4800 block of South Latrobe Avenue in unincorporated Stickney Township, officials said.
Their deaths were ruled homicides after autopsies revealed the boys had been born alive and died of asphyxiation, officials said.
At a press conference in Maywood, Cook County sheriff’s office Chief of Public Safety Leo Schmitz lauded investigators’ work, saying “we never gave up.”
Ginny Georgantas, the lead detective on the case, said she asked to reopen the investigation in 2018 after genetic genealogy was used to identify serial murderer Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. as the Golden State Killer in California.
That technique led authorities to identify Briley as the boys’ potential birth mother, officials said.
Detectives went to Holland, Michigan, spotted her smoking a cigarette, and then retrieved the butt for a sample of her DNA — which ended up matching that of the twin boys, according to the sheriff’s office.
Officers learned that Briley was in Cook County Thursday and arrested her during an Oak Lawn traffic stop, officials said.
“I’m happy that there’s closure for the twins,” Georgantas said. “There was no one fighting for them.
“It’s kind of a surreal feeling,” she added.
Schmitz said the Cook County sheriff’s office and other police agencies in Illinois are using genetic genealogy to go back and give old cases another look.
“Yes, we’re going backwards on cases now that we had DNA [evidence for],” Schmitz said. “There will be other cases, absolutely.”
Briley told detectives she knew she was pregnant that day back in 2003, and that she had been at her grandfather’s house when she began to feel stomach pains, prosecutors said during her bail hearing Saturday afternoon.
Briley moved to the bathroom tub and gave birth to the babies, who were crying “but not loud enough that the neighbors could hear,” she allegedly told investigators.
After cleaning herself up, Briley placed the newborns into a duffel bag and got into a car to drive to a hospital, prosecutors said.
But she told detectives she changed her mind on the way, thinking that since no one knew she’d given birth, “no one would ever have to know,” according to prosecutors.
So she took the babies out of the bag, left them in a trash can and drove back to her grandfather’s house, prosecutors said.
Briley allegedly told detectives “she wishes she could take the whole day back” and that she’d kept driving to the hospital instead.
Briley lives with her 12-year-old daughter and works full-time as an assembly worker in Michigan, her assistant public defender said in court Saturday.
Briley is due back in court Tuesday.
