Ohio Wife and Mom Lived 'Exemplary' Life for Decades. Her Secret Exposed Her as a 'Monster'

Mar. 15, 2025

Gail Eastwood Ritchey.Photo:Geauga County Sheriff’s Office

Geauga County Sheriff’s Office

The same genetic genealogy that helped catch the notoriousGolden State Killersuspect in 2018 has been used to solve handfuls of mysterious criminal cases around the United States that were once thought to be unsolvable, including the harrowing story of Gail Eastwood-Ritchey.

Here’s what took place.

Gail Eastwood Ritchey.Geauga County Sheriff’s Office

‘Geauga’s Child’

Community members raised funds for a funeral and a gravestone for the child, identified only as “Geauga’s Child," named after Ohio’s Geauga County.

“Geauga’s Child lies here now in safety – just too late,” the headstone reads, according to CBS. “Too late to save his life. Too late to make things right. But not too late to teach us all to love and cherish life.”

An ‘Exemplary Life’

After Ritchey abandoned her newborn in 1993, the Ohio woman lived what her attorney Steven Bradley claimed was “an exemplary life” over the next 30 years. Ritchey later married the child’s father and they went on to share three more children together, PEOPLE previously reported.

Gail Eastwood Ritchey.Facebook

She Had Done It Before

Judge Ondrey also told Ritchey that he was taking into account her confession that the 1993 incident wasn’t the first time she had given birth and left her newborn for dead.

Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up forPEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletterfor breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.

PEOPLEreportedthat after investigators approached her about the 1993 murder 26 years after her newborn was found dead in the woods, Ritchey told them she did the same thing with another newborn child she gave birth to about two years prior, in 1990 or 1991.

“I think you knew what to do because you had done it before,” Ondrey told Ritchey, according to CBS. “Calling you a monster who deserves life imprisonment is not an exaggeration.”

source: people.com