Trigger Warning: This article contains descriptions of infant death, child abuse, infanticide, and graphic references to the handling of a deceased child that some readers may find disturbing.
Kerri Mazzuca’s case shocked the nation and the police; she later received a fitting punishment for the murder of her infant son.
The case dates back nearly three decades, when locals found a newborn boy’s body near the Moses statue in Albany’s Washington Park in 1997. The infant, who had been smothered and burned, became known as “Baby Moses” within the community.
Police bodycam footage posted by EWU Crime Storytime captures the exact moment detectives confronted Mazzuca, who continued to lie before realizing she had nowhere to hide.
According to the footage, the 52-year-old Kerri Mazzuca was taken into custody from a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Guilderland, New York, in September 2024. Kerri acted clueless, as if she had no idea why she was being taken to the police station.
The investigators told her they needed her help in untangling a mystery.
“We’re looking into something that happened quite a few years ago…back in 1997… So, some remains were found in Washington Park… We’ve been kind of working on it here and there, and we’ve been deploying a new investigative technique.”
The detective informed her that they were going to take the help of genealogy to solve the case.
“So what we do is um we kind of go to some third party companies like ancestry.com stuff like that and try and build family trees. So part of that is the DNA testing on the remains that we found are connected to your family. So it was it was younger, right? The the remains best we can tell and we honestly don’t know really what happened. It’s just one of those things that they’re trying to get us to figure out.”
Detectives also visited the suspect’s sister, Wendy, that morning in Roxberry, New York, for the same purpose. Detectives used buccal swabs to collect DNA samples from the two sisters to match them to the infant.
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Kerri continued to play mind games with the detectives. She walked the officers through her immediate family members, including her ex-husband and her two adult children, and insisted no one was missing. When asked how many times she had gotten pregnant, she answered two.
The investigators tried to intimidate her. She soon started to ask questions about the investigation procedure. When officers showed her a photo of the burned body, she reacted with visible shock and physical distress, saying, “I’m going to throw up. Like that’s gross. I’m sorry. I’ve got goosebumps.”
While the officer maintained a calm demeanor, he employed psychological pressure by repeatedly stressing that she needed to be truthful. This led to her eventual confession shortly after, saying, “Idid it… I got pregnant. I had the baby. I gave birth in my bathtub. Baby died. Didn’t know how to get rid of it… I think I had water in the bathtub. I think it drowned…I didn’t drown it.”
However, she kept insisting she didn’t burn the baby and that she went to the park and handed the baby to a “random person.” The detective did not buy her lie. As the officer further pressed her on the inconsistencies, saying there was no water in the baby’s lungs and there were no signs of natural causes or trauma. They concluded the cause of death was suffocation.
Under the pressure, Kerri confessed to smothering her child by placing her hand over his mouth and nose. “I didn’t know what to do. I set the baby on fire,” she said. As the officer asked her whether the baby was screaming, she said, “No. It was dead.” She further explained she took the infant’s burned body in the towel and into a plastic bag to abandon it in Washington Park. “(I) carried it out like it was groceries.”
Although she was allowed to leave the police station that day, one week later, she was arrested for second-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence, and concealment of a corpse.
To avoid a murder trial, Kerri later pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and tampering with physical evidence.
On April 18, 2025, Mazzuca was sentenced to 25 years in prison, followed by five years of post-release supervision. She is currently serving her time at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York.
Disclaimer: Inquisitr individually could not independently confirm the facts of this incident and is reporting based on the information available within the public video record.
