‘Baby Doe’ Review: Devastating Doc Does Justice to an Inconceivable Crime of Infanticide

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Director Jessica Earnshaw has an eye for blind spots. Traveling to Northeast Ohio for her tremendous second feature “Baby Doe,” she ventures into the kind of working class, deeply religious enclave that is typically overlooked in America, or at least often reduced to stereotypes in its depiction on screen. But with considerable sensitivity and empathy, she is also able to pick up on how people can become unconscious of the most painful elements of their lives. “Baby Doe” looks to make sense of what would be an otherwise inexplicable case of infanticide and how the mother involved, Gail Ritchey, could claim to have been completely unaware that she was pregnant until delivery and remained unaware of how or why she disposed of the baby after giving birth.

It’s an undeniably tough watch, but Earnshaw has a way of putting her subjects at ease to access the typically unreachable. Her equally harrowing debut “Jacinta” saw her camera roam around the grounds of a prison, and the director has similar free rein here, meeting with Gail and her family well ahead of a court trial where she faces a life sentence for the murder of the baby. 

The case poses a fascinating question around belated justice. The death occurred in 1993, but was only recently unearthed by local law enforcement due to DNA technology that linked her to the corpse. Ritchey and the baby’s father, Mark, claim they are unaware a birth ever happened, and have gone on to have three kids and live a pious life largely built around their work at a local church.

Gail has essentially formed a mental block around the experience, and “Baby Doe” becomes absorbing as the defense works through testimony in private sessions with her struggling to describe what happened. Her lawyers try to tease out various alternative cases to the diminished capacity defense they’d like to pursue, built around an increasingly common yet largely unrecognized phenomenon known as “unperceived pregnancies,” where the mother simply can’t acknowledge their pregnancy due to the conditions under which it was conceived.

Although Ritchey can’t articulate her own experience, Earnshaw is nonetheless able to illustrate what could have led her to such an unthinkable decision. The doc shows how Ritchey’s strong religious faith came with a fear of God, likely contributing to why she can’t speak up. A particularly telling moment comes when Mark remembers thinking that none of the sex they had before marriage was infringing on the purity expected of them; he didn’t want to get married until he could buy a house to start a family in and they were deep into a committed relationship. The logic makes no sense now to him, yet it helps him understand how Gail could have made choices that she couldn’t possibly have fully processed. His unwavering support becomes a beautiful part of the film when he has to look past his own social programming to decide how he feels about what his wife allegedly did.

“Baby Doe” only accumulates power as Earnshaw and editors George O’Donnell and Leah Boatright meticulously strip away any preconceptions that audiences may bring toward the matter. The intense focus on Ritchey’s yearslong case clearly pays off in the candor the family and others have around Earnshaw. But with such specific details captured, the doc also opens up ideas around restorative justice, when the rigidity of how the law is applied feels unlikely to achieve anything worthwhile. A verdict in court makes for a naturally compelling climax, but creating the space for an audience to comfortably come to its own is what makes the film so striking.

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2025-03-17 02:47