After more than two decades, a Texas mother has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for abandoning her newborn daughter on a rural roadside, bringing closure to a cold case that haunted Johnson County for nearly a quarter-century.
Shelby Ann Stotts, from Covington in Hill County, pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter for the 2001 death of a baby girl who became known to the community as “Angel Baby Doe” before finally receiving her true name: Taryn Angel Moreno. The infant was discovered in November 2001 by a resident picking up cans along Briar Oaks Road between Alvarado and Burleson, wrapped in a jacket with her umbilical cord still attached, according to investigators.
“This child was left nameless, bleeding, exposed to the elements, in short, left to die,” prosecutors stated during the sentencing. “But the good people of Johnson County opened their hearts to her, named her, provided her with a burial plot and headstone, gave her a funeral…and 24 years later, a Johnson County jury has given her justice,” officials said.
A Breakthrough in Forensic Science
The case remained unsolved for decades until advanced DNA technology and genealogy testing finally cracked it open. Forensic evidence sent years earlier to a lab near Houston ultimately enabled the identification of Stotts as the biological mother in 2024. “We were able to do the genealogy, which took a long time. It was a difficult case, but we were able to actually provide the identity to law enforcement,” explained lab officials.
Medical examiners determined that the newborn died of foul play, having bled to death because her umbilical cord wasn’t clamped and she received no medical care after being born alive, according to court records.
What makes the case particularly tragic? Texas’ Safe Haven Law was already in place in 2001, which would have allowed Stotts to drop off her infant at a fire station, hospital, or EMS station without legal consequences — a fact that seemed to weigh heavily on jurors during sentencing.
A Father Learns the Truth
Perhaps most shocking was the revelation that the baby’s biological father had no idea Stotts was pregnant and only learned about the existence of his daughter two years prior to the sentencing. Upon discovering he had fathered a child, he gave her the name Taryn Angel Moreno, finally providing the identity she had been denied for so long, sources confirmed.
Johnson County District Attorney Timothy Good marked the moment with precise calculation: “After 24 years, 2 months, 18 days, 4 hours, and 10 minutes, justice was finally done on behalf of the infant girl whom this community named ‘Angel Baby Doe,'” he stated after the sentencing.
The case stands as a testament to both advances in forensic technology and the persistence of investigators who refused to let the case go cold. Dr. Kristen Mittelman, chief development officer of the DNA testing lab that helped solve the case, remarked, “I couldn’t be more proud to be part of giving this baby her name back and get justice for her.”
For a community that once gathered to bury a nameless child, the sentencing brings a measure of closure — though for many involved in the decades-long investigation, no prison term can fully address the senseless loss of a newborn who never had a chance at life.
