A Greene County woman who put her newborn daughter’s body in a Plain City trash can in 2023 was sentenced Thursday to 90 days in jail and five years of community control, closing a case that haunted the Madison County village for more than three years.
Anuradha Manukonda, 27, pleaded guilty in August in Madison County Common Pleas Court to gross abuse of a corpse, a fifth-degree felony. Judge Eamon Costello handed down the sentence on November 6, ordering Manukonda to serve 90 days at the Tri-County Regional Jail alongside five years of community control, according to the Plain City Police Department. The charge carried no presumption of a prison term.
The case began on June 16, 2023, when waste workers found the body of an infant girl in the back of a garbage truck on Bluestem Lane in Plain City. The community named the baby Madison Baby Doe and gave her a funeral attended by more than 100 people, the department said.
Investigators could not determine how the baby died. The Columbus Dispatch has reported that officials were unable to establish a cause of death because of injuries caused by the garbage truck’s compactor, and police have said there was no evidence the death was a homicide. Gross abuse of a corpse was, in the department’s words, “the only crime that could be proven.”
The break in the case came through DNA. According to the department, forensic and DNA collection and analysis — along with what it called tireless investigation — led police to a home on Bluestem Lane and identified Manukonda, who occasionally visited family there, as the baby’s biological mother. A Madison County grand jury indicted her in March 2025, and Plain City police tracked her down that year, the Dispatch reported.
In a sentencing memo provided to the judge, the Dispatch reported, Manukonda’s attorney said she had been visiting family in Plain City when she delivered a stillborn baby, that a medical condition related to her reproductive system had left her unaware she was pregnant, and that she panicked and put the newborn in the garbage.
“With the final chapter written, our community now has a degree of closure,” the Plain City Police Department said in its statement, noting that 1,240 days separated the discovery from the sentencing. “We will always remember that horrific day in the summer of 2023 and we will NEVER forget Madison Baby Doe.”
The sentence drew sharp reaction online, where many commenters on the department’s post called 90 days too lenient. But the department noted the legal limits of the case: with no provable homicide and a fifth-degree felony that carries no presumption of prison, the sentence Manukonda received is the one Ohio law allowed the court to build around community control and jail time.