Morgue Worker ‘Dead Man’s Baby’ Arrest Story Was Fiction
False: no morgue worker was arrested after giving birth to a dead man's baby. Fact-checkers have traced the story to satire sites since 2010.
If this one has turned up in your feed — a morgue worker in Missouri, arrested after giving birth to a dead man’s baby — it is not a news story. It is fiction, and it is old. Fact-checkers have been knocking it down since 2010: Snopes, Lead Stories, Truth or Fiction, Check Your Fact and Africa Check each time it surfaced somewhere new.
What the story said
The version examined by these fact-checkers put an assistant pathologist in a Missouri medical examiner’s office, added a birth, and added a DNA test said to name the father as a man whose body she had been assigned to autopsy. It called her Jennifer Burrows.
That name belongs to the story, not to an identified person. So do the ages, the totals and the quotes. They were written, not reported.
Where it came from
It did not start with World News Daily Report.
The earliest version ran on Dead Serious News, a satire site, built around a different invented character. The archived page shows the date 11 November 2010, and Snopes gives the same date. Dead Serious News was not hiding anything either: Snopes quotes its About page saying that “with the exception of the names of public figures, all names are fictional.”
Snopes debunked it on 2 December 2010 — three weeks later — and rated it “Labeled Satire.” The story has been circulating, and on the record as fiction, ever since.
The version naming Jennifer Burrows was published by World News Daily Report and was circulating by 26 January 2016, when Lead Stories debunked it and pointed readers to the publisher’s fiction disclaimer. That disclaimer states that the site “assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content.”
So neither site that wrote this story passed it off as reporting. Both told readers it was made up. The people who stripped that label off came later.
The details change with each retelling
Here is the part worth slowing down for. Put the versions side by side and the basic facts will not sit still.
| Detail | How it changes |
|---|---|
| Her name | Felicity Marmaduke in the 2010 version; Jennifer Burrows in the 2016 one. Lead Stories recorded a further variant naming her Kristen Burrows. |
| Her age | 38 in the 2010 version, 26 in the 2016 one. |
| When the man died | March 2015 in the 2016 version; March 2017 in the copy 8Shit ran in 2018, and in the Lansing Daily version Check Your Fact examined. |
These are not small discrepancies. The suspect’s name changes. Her age changes. The year the man died moves by two years between one telling and the next. Documented cases get corrected; they do not get rewritten.
How it kept coming back
Lead Stories came back to it on 20 July 2018, the day after a site called 8Shit ran it again. 8Shit labelled itself too — Lead Stories quotes its disclaimer describing it as “a satire news and humor website” whose content is fiction. Truth or Fiction caught another round in October 2020, when the account appeared on DesignSalad and travelled through a NewsBreak link. Check Your Fact found a further copy in April 2021: Lansing Daily had taken the World News Daily Report text word for word and published it without the satire disclaimer.
Africa Check picked it up again on 31 August 2022, after a screenshot of a 25 August tweet spread on Facebook. It noted the claim had been posted there earlier still, as far back as 20 May, and that one Facebook version had been viewed more than 332,300 times.
About that police quotation
The story puts a statement in the mouth of a Kansas City police chief. Check Your Fact looked for it and found no credible media reports attributing that statement to him, and noted he had left the job by 2018 to become interim sheriff of Jackson County.
It also reported that neither the named woman nor any comparable case appears in the department’s press releases, and that a wider search turned up nothing except debunks. Those were Check Your Fact’s searches. We have not reviewed police or court records ourselves, and we are not claiming to have.
The investigations cited here document repeated publication of the fictional account, including copies that omitted its satire disclaimer. Those republications do not establish that the alleged arrest or birth occurred.
Sixteen years. The sites that wrote it told readers it was fiction. At least one that copied it left that part out. And the story still cannot keep its own names and dates straight. That is not an arrest report. It is one invention, retold.
