A Wisconsin man accused of executing his newborn daughter and abandoning her in the snow is finally headed to trial, nearly five years after the crime shocked a small community south of Madison. Logan Kruckenberg Anderson, now 21, was 16 when prosecutors say he shot his newborn, Harper, twice in the head and left her body in a wooded area near Albany, then tried to spin a lie about handing the baby to a stranger for adoption. He has pleaded not guilty and is being tried as an adult on charges of first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse.
Court records show Kruckenberg Anderson appeared for a final pretrial hearing last week in Green County. Jury selection is set to begin later this month, the culmination of a case that has crawled through delays and appeals since the teen’s arrest in January 2021. The Green County District Attorney first charged him days after search teams recovered Harper’s body during a midwinter cold snap, a recovery that investigators described as painstaking and grim.
According to a criminal complaint summarized by local reports, Harper’s teenage mother delivered the baby at home on January 5, 2021, in a bathtub. At first, the baby’s father told authorities that the couple could not keep the child and that he had paid a man named “Tyler” sixty dollars to take the infant to an adoption agency after arranging the handoff on Snapchat. The story quickly unraveled under questioning.
When deputies pressed him, the complaint says, Kruckenberg Anderson admitted he took Harper into the woods, placed her unclothed body under snow, and began to walk away. He allegedly told investigators he could still hear his daughter crying. Crime scene specialists later determined the baby had been shot, and the teen allegedly acknowledged firing two rounds into her head. The case file notes that a juvenile turned in a handgun to the sheriff’s office, saying Kruckenberg Anderson had given it to him days earlier, and ballistics matched two bullets recovered near the infant’s body.
The brutality of the allegations tore through Green County, a largely rural area where homicides are rare. Reporters who have followed the case since 2021 say the investigation triggered a broader conversation about safe surrender laws and the resources available to pregnant teens, with state officials later highlighting campaigns that explain how parents can legally and safely relinquish newborns. Harper’s death remains one of the region’s most high-profile cases in years.
In January 2021, the Wisconsin Department of Justice announced the first-degree homicide and hiding a corpse counts, confirming the decision to try the then-16-year-old as an adult. That charging document has framed the case ever since, even as defense attorneys fought over what statements a jury should hear and whether the Snapchat adoption tale creates reasonable doubt. For now, the state’s theory is simple: the teen decided the newborn could not stay, he took her out into the cold, and he pulled the trigger.
No charges were filed against Harper’s mother. Prosecutors have not publicly explained that decision in detail, a common approach when a potential witness is a juvenile and when the evidence points to a single actor. As the trial opens, jurors will hear from deputies, forensic analysts, and the juvenile who surrendered the firearm, and they may have to listen to recordings that reconstruct the hours after the bathtub birth. It is the kind of proceeding that forces a community to relive its worst day, and it will test whether a jury believes the cold accuracy of the forensics over a shifting story told by a frightened teenager.
If convicted, Kruckenberg Anderson faces life in prison, the maximum penalty under Wisconsin law for first-degree intentional homicide. For Green County, the verdict will not change what happened in those woods, but it may finally deliver an answer to the question that has lingered since 2021: who killed baby Harper, and why.
