Editor’s note: While many of the descriptive details told to the jury have been left out, graphic details still exist. Reader discretion is advised.

By Gary Mays and Adam Krebs

The Monroe Times

MONROE — Rather than a deadly mistake at the hands of a scared teen with a gun, the murder of newborn baby Harper was something the baby’s father threatened to do — despite the attempts by the 14-year-old mother to ensure the newborn was safe, according to testimony this week in the murder trial of Logan Kruckenberg-Anderson in Green County Circuit Court.

“Either someone takes it, or it takes a slug,” the now 21-year-old defendant texted the mother via social media, Assistant District Attorney Laura Kohl told a jury during her opening statement Tuesday, October 28.  “(The mother) wants to keep the baby but she knows she will have to tell her mother, and she’s too scared to do it.”

The young mother has not been charged, and her circle of friends from in and around small-town Albany are among the witnesses in the case that has taken more than four years to go to trial — following several rulings and subsequent appeals centering on the admissibility of various statements the teen gave to investigators.

According to testimony, the baby was born in a bathtub, unbeknownst to but a small group of teens and the teen parents. Hours after the baby was born on January 5, 2021, prosecutors contend that instead of placing baby Harper up for adoption — as the defendant allegedly told the teen mother he planned to do — the defendant put her in a blue backpack, hiked into nearby woods and killed her with two shots from a .22 caliber semi-automatic pistol.

After a few days of investigation, Kruckenberg-Anderson was taken into custody as the suspected killer. Ultimately, he was charged as an adult with first degree intentional homicide and transporting, hiding, or burying the child’s body. If convicted at trial before Circuit Judge Jane Bucher, he faces a maximum possible sentence of life in state prison.

According to additional testimony, earlier that day, the baby was swaddled in a blue blanket with ducks on it; the placenta and other evidence of the birth hours earlier were found in a garbage bag also discarded outside. When she was found, baby Harper was naked and covered in a pile of snow between two fallen logs.

“He (the defendant) sets her naked, warm body on her back in the cold snow…while standing over Harper he shoots her twice in the head,” Kohl told the jury, her own voice cracking with emotion during her opening statement.

In the days prior to the birth, the mother and her friends would try to decide whether to tell adults and if she should surrender the child for adoption. At some point, Kruckenberg-Anderson allegedly told the mother he was going to take the child to a friend named Tyler, whom he barely knew and for whom did not have even basic contact information. That friend, would then take the child to some type of adoption facility in Madison.

Police would never locate anyone named Tyler and were skeptical of the story in the initial interviews played for the jury from body-worn cameras — recording as investigators spent a long night and the next morning trying to find the child.

The mother’s lifelong friend testified in court Thursday, that she would be among the first to tell an adult about the teen’s baby secret — and the story began to spill out from the there.

“The next morning (after the birth was reported) I woke up to a text message from her, thanking me for doing what she couldn’t do,” said the witness.

A missing child alert, and a murder investigation begins

Baby Harper was born on January 5, 2021, but by January 9, the child was officially declared missing. Early that evening, then-Green County Sheriff Jeff Skatrud and Albany Police Chief Robert Ritter put out an active press release looking for the missing newborn. Law enforcement had already talked with the teenage mother and father, with the father telling authorities he turned the infant over to an unidentified third party. 

The next day, the child was found deceased in a nearby woods and the father, Kruckenberg-Anderson, was arrested.

“The death is being investigated as a homicide,” a press release from the Wisconsin Department of Justice said at the time.

Flash forward nearly five years later at Kruckenberg-Anderson’s trial, and a litany of witnesses, crime scene investigators and evidence exhibits were being shown to the jury, selected Monday, October 27.

Among the state’s witness Thursday was Dr. Michael A. Stier, a retired UW Madison faculty member and forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy on Harper’s body.

He testified that the baby was born alive and otherwise healthy and likely could have lived an indefinite amount of time before succumbing to the two ultimately fatal gunshot wounds to the head. 

At one point, the doctor was asked if he counted the baby’s tiny digits.

“They were all normal,” he said. “Ten fingers and ten toes.”

Green County Sheriff Cody Kanable, then a sergeant with the second shift patrol division, was among the group of authorities that found the child. An Albany citizen was walking their dog nearby and saw a single set of footprints entering a footpath into the woods off of Ruebens Cave Drive on the northwest side of the village. The sight was unusual, the witness testified on Wednesday, because the footpaths were “never” used in winter. 

“Nobody uses those footpaths in the winter. I’ve lived there for 11 years and you never see footprints there in the wintertime,” the witness said in front of the judge and jury.

The jury watched body cam footage from Kanable and company searching at night, following the footsteps. After about 50 yards, the prints veer off trail into the underbrush and rougher terrain. About 25 yards later, drips of red in the white snow appeared. After securing the scene and photographing it untouched by investigators, Kanable started digging into the snow.

“It looked like someone had stood there for some time to pack the snow,” Kanable testified. He said it appeared the snow had “kind of melted around the child’s body” and that once he cleared the snow, he could see “an infant child and part of the head and upper torso of the child.”

Seeing the images again and recalling that night, the normally calm Kanable began to appear uneasy and shaken. 

Some audience members left the courtroom after being warned the images were about to be shown.

The defendant kept his head down to avoid looking at the graphic pictures being shown to the jury. Once the evidence was taken off the screen, he opened his eyes and looked up again, while also appearing to wipe tears from both cheeks. 

As testifying continued Wednesday, the jury saw images of the dead child in the snow, as well as where shells of .22 caliber bullets that had been shot were found. After an autopsy at UW Hospital in Madison determined two gunshot wounds were the cause of death, investigators returned to the scene and dug up snow and dirt from a more than 6-foot-wide diameter to look for bullets. That dirt was secured and transported by buckets to the Albany Fire Station, where tables were set up for investigators to sift through the frozen soil. Within about an hour, they found two bullets.

A few days later, on Jan. 11, 2021, one of the defendant’s friends, who usually “just hung out together watching TikToks” or going fishing, brought police something of a surprise: the suspected weapon. Jamy Dennis, then one of three Albany Police Department officers, secured the weapon from the shaken teen, who found the Colt Cal .22LR pistol in his sock drawer “cleaning his room”. 

The teen told the court on Oct. 29 that he knew the defendant had previously possessed the gun, and that he and Kruckenberg-Anderson went out to shoot it a few weeks earlier. The jury watched clips of the gun being fired at a tree just before Christmas in 2020. Later, the teen witness testified to the court that when he found the firearm, he told Kruckenberg-Anderson to “either come get it, or I am taking it down to the cop station,” explaining to the court, “I was done with him and I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.”

Snapchat messages raise eyebrows

The Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Department Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) was among the responding agencies in the following days. Among their tasks were to get records of Snapchat activity from the young father, mother and a few others through warrants. 

Snapchat is a popular social media platform that allows users to send text messages, videos, photos and audio files to approved friends, as well post openly to the world. Many users feel comfortable using the app because messages can disappear to the receivers within seconds to 24 hours unless explicitly saved — though Snapchat does have a system that archives most items without the user knowing.

On Jan. 13, 2021, DCI Special Agent Jeffrey Lenzer of the cyber crimes unit received the archived Snapchat messages via a zip file, and then reviewed “a lot” of messages.

In late November, just six weeks before the baby was born, some of the things the defendant said to the mother were even more concerning in hindsight.

“73% of murders are bc [because] of a guy knocking a girl up and not wanting to deal with a kid,” he wrote. Ten days later, he wrote “Baby, I want to know before your mom does so that way ik [I know] if I gotta kill a f—ing baby or not.”

Nine days later, on Dec. 14, 2020, he asks the mother, “Either way we aren’t keeping it. You understanding that right. Either someone takes it, or it takes a slug.”

On January 5, 2021, what authorities allege as the day of the murder, exterior security camera video evidence from a downtown bar showed an individual with a backpack and a hoodie walk past at 1:33 p.m., presumably across the bridge above the Sugar River. According to testimony by detectives assigned to the case, roughly 31 minutes later the individual crosses back. 

According to Snapchat records, the defendant told the mother at 1:10 p.m. he was leaving but would return. For the next 54 minutes, Kruckenberg-Anderson’s account was silent. When he finally responded to messages left for him at 2:06 p.m., he told the young mother, “btw [by the way] you gunna be happier when you know what happened.”

Two days after Harper was born, but before authorities had tabbed the defendant as the top suspect, the mother started a conversation with Kruckenberg-Anderson “You gunna think I’m weird, but it smells like her.”

He replied, “She didn’t have a smell.”

The mother responded with, “Yes she did, she had a new baby smell. You couldn’t smell it?”

He said, “I smelled iron.”

The young mother was in middle school and under the impression her newborn daughter had been taken by the father to somebody else, who was then going to take the child to an adoption agency. The mother told the father she was hoping that that Harper was safe. “That’s all I wanna know.” The defendant responded that she was, lying to the mother. But how, the mother wondered? “Because she told me when she dropped her off. She said it was a nice place,” he said back to her.

What’s next

Testimony was set to continue into Friday and perhaps early next week.

The defense team, vigorously defending their client, also were cross-examining state witnesses Wednesday and Thursday, and challenging testimony around the intricacies of DNA testing, hearsay; and other evidence presented by several detectives and state crime lab witnesses. 

The defense will have its chance to tell its story as the trial continues, and they alluded to reasonable doubt about the prosecution’s version of events — given the actions and statements of “demonstrably dishonest teenagers,” throughout the ordeal, Defense Attorney Olivia Long told the court during her opening statement Tuesday.