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Elsa had been alive less than an hour and her umbilical cord was still attached when she was wrapped in a towel, put in a Boots shopping bag and left on the Greenway, a cycle path built on a Victorian sewage pipe that runs through east London. She was abandoned on 18 January 2024 by a rose shrub on the coldest night of the year.
She was not the first baby to be abandoned in that area of the Greenway near Plaistow. On 17 September 2017, a baby boy was discovered wrapped in a towel under a bush about a mile and a half from where Elsa was later found. The hospital called him Harry. Then, on 31 January 2019, someone found a newborn girl, also wrapped in a towel and put in a shopping bag. She was beside a park bench 500 yards from where Elsa would be left. It was cold that night too, and the woman who found her said frost had formed on her head. She was taken to hospital, where the staff named her Roman.
All three babies are black, and DNA tests showed that Elsa, Roman and Harry have the same parents. Last June at the East London Family Court, Judge Carol Atkinson let the DNA findings be reported for the first time. While Roman and Harry have been adopted, Elsa cannot be until the police investigation to find her parents is concluded. Judge Atkinson has been pushing officers hard to track them down.
In March I contacted Detective Inspector Jamie Humm from the Metropolitan Police, who leads the investigation.
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