BABY DOE – Review by Valerie Kalfrin
Ohio grandma Gail Eastwood-Ritchey knew why the deputy wanted to talk to her.
On body cam footage early in Baby Doe, she nods matter-of-factly in her garage doorway as he approaches to speak with her. “It’s about a baby,” she says. “A baby that was left.”
What happens from there is both a fascinating and compassionate look at a one woman’s choice made decades earlier that she still struggles to reconcile.
Directed by Jessica Earnshaw (Jacinta), Baby Doe examines the unsolved case of a newborn baby boy left in the woods in Geauga County, Ohio, in 1993. In archive news footage, the community is so heartbroken that it holds a funeral, burying the baby with a headstone for “Geauga’s Child.”
“Even if this child was stillborn,” says the local sheriff, “you just don’t do something like that.”
Years later, in 2019, DNA through an online family tree identified Eastwood-Ritchey as the baby’s mother. By then, she was married to the baby’s father, Mark Ritchey. The couple had three other children.
Eastwood-Ritchey isn’t the first woman to face murder charges after such circumstances, the film points out in a curious tangent. Nor is she the first to claim that she didn’t know she was pregnant at the time—something that astonishes investigators and defense attorneys, but not two forensic psychologists in the film. They explain how fear, upbringing, and other pressures might cause someone to experience such “pregnancy denial,” helped along by, say, not gaining weight or feeling the baby move.
Whether her attorneys can present a defense that argues her diminished capacity is up to a judge’s discretion in Ohio, providing a smidgen of suspense.
While the pacing lags in some parts, Baby Doe builds a rounded portrait of Eastwood-Ritchey, thanks to Earnshaw’s earned trust with her, her family, attorneys, and church friends. When a judge says he has a hard time reconciling who left the baby in the woods with the woman before him, we understand what he means, a credit to Earnshaw’s approach.
Often soft-spoken and humble, Eastwood-Ritchey shares some tearful confessions, such as how she always felt like the “sinner” in her sexual relationship with her future husband. They dated for seven years, and she was twenty-two when pregnant in 1993, something that Mark Ritchey never noticed. He touchingly blames himself for not proposing to her sooner, leaving her to handle her fears alone.
Meanwhile, their daughter visits from Oklahoma with her baby girl to show her support. It’s disconcerting to see Eastwood-Ritchey bathe and dote on the infant, knowing the accusations, which her daughter says she doesn’t even know how to discuss. A church friend talks around the topic, too, revealing to the filmmakers her own abortion in her twenties, something she’s rarely discussed because she wouldn’t want her family to think less of her.
In following Earnshaw-Ritchey’s criminal case matter-of-factly, Baby Doe never feels as if it’s offering excuses. In fact, in a telling moment, though she often prays for guidance and mercy, Earnshaw-Ritchey won’t let her husband speak ill of the justice system. This had to happen, she says, for “everyone involved.”
Baby Doe thoughtful dive into a past that resurfaces, subtly revealing a woman ready for a reckoning.
