Baby Jane Doe
- Reminiscences of working in a Crime Lab –
- Cape Town 1979 –
There once was a woman
With peppercorn hair
Lying on the mortuary slab
Her bones were broken
Her skull was crushed
Her skin a jaundiced-brown
Old and careworn she looked;
For she’d led a miserable life
Yet now
On her face
A serene look of acceptance
We had to cut her open;
We had to see
Who’d committed this evil deed
The last I saw before I fainted;
The coroner holding a tiny girl
She was perfect;
Ten little toes and fingers
On delicate hands and feet
A child should be born
In the loving warmth
Of a maternity ward
The air sweet
With baby powder and mothers milk
Not in the ice cold
Coldness of a morgue
Where the air is thick,
So sick
With smells of
Death and formalin
To the killer
This woman’s life was worthless
Dead or alive;
It was all the same
But this baby girl,
She,
Who was born
Dead in a morgue
She,
Never even had a name