Police: Teen Mom's Lover Killed 'Baby Mary' After Affair
Girl's Body Found In Fayette County Creek Years Ago
POSTED: 9:38 am EST January 22, 2009
UPDATED: 11:08 am EST January 22, 2009
UNIONTOWN, Pa. -- The Baby Mary investigation -- an infant girl found dead
in a Fayette County creek -- was a cold case for more than eight years and
consumed a state trooper who refused to give up on it. Now, state police
have made their second homicide arrest in a two-month span in connection
with the June 2000 discovery of that baby girl's body in North Union
Township. WTAE Channel 4's Amber Nicotra reported that Warren Ernest
Bircher, 33, was charged with homicide Wednesday. Police had already
charged the man's sister-in-law, Sarah Sue Hawk, 25, who they said was the
girl's mother. Bircher and Hawk, of Uniontown, who was 16 at the time,
were having an affair when Hawk revealed that she was pregnant by another
man, according to police. After Hawk gave birth, Bircher gathered some
plastic bags, a flannel shirt and a backpack, and put the child inside the
bag and took the backpack to Cove Run Creek, police said. The loss of the
infant no one claimed they knew forced the coroner to name her Baby Mary.
In November, Pennsylvania State Police said results of an analysis by the
New Jersey State Police Mitochondrial DNA Laboratory

http://www.state.nj.us/njsp/divorg/invest/dna-lab.html and a
maternity style analysis by the Marshall University Forensic Science
Center http://forensics.marshall.edu/ in Huntington, W.Va., showed that
Hawk was the mother. Armed with that new information, police were able to
arrest Hawk. A witness reported hearing Hawk that Bircher admitted to her
that he put the baby in the creek. Police also heard from a witness who
told them that, during a party, Bircher talked about how he would get rid
of the baby. "Bircher said he was going to put the child in a bag and
drown it just like he does his animals because she doesn't have the nerve
to do it and he cannot afford another child," a witness said, according to
a police affidavit. Bircher has pleaded not guilty and is being held in
the county prison. He and Hawk each have court appearances scheduled next
week. Trooper James Pierce, who stayed on the case from the beginning,
said he doesn't believe arrests would have been made had forensic experts
not been able to find a link between the mother and baby.

http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/print/18538639/detail.html