The prosecution of Logan Kruckenberg Anderson unfolded over five years and still includes a pending defense motion.
MONROE, Wis. — More than five years after a newborn girl disappeared from a home in Albany, a Green County judge sentenced her father, Logan Kruckenberg Anderson, to life in prison, capping a case that began with a hidden birth and a story about adoption that investigators soon began to unravel.
The importance of the ruling lies in the long arc of the case. Harper was born Jan. 5, 2021, to two teenagers who had concealed the pregnancy. Investigators were first told the baby had been handed to someone connected to an adoption plan. Prosecutors later said the true story was that Kruckenberg Anderson took the newborn into nearby woods, covered her in snow and shot her. A jury convicted him in November 2025, and Judge Jane Bucher sentenced him on March 16, 2026, to life with a chance at extended supervision after 45 years. Even now, a post-sentencing motion remains on file.
The first chapter unfolded inside a family home. Authorities said Harper’s mother, then 14, gave birth in a bathtub without her parents knowing she had been pregnant. For several days the baby was missing from view. When the girl’s father had not seen the child, he called 911, setting off the investigation in the early hours of Jan. 9, 2021. Officers arrived at the Albany residence and began interviewing the teenagers and family members. According to a later appellate opinion, they learned that the couple were the child’s parents and that the infant had been born four days earlier. In those first hours, Kruckenberg Anderson told officers he had given the baby to a friend named Tyler to take to an adoption agency, but he could not provide usable contact information for that friend.
Investigators kept digging as the story changed. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals later described more questioning that day and the next, including interviews at the Albany Police Department, the Brodhead Police Department, the woods near Albany and then back at the Albany station. In those sessions, officers pressed for details on what had happened after the birth. Prosecutors said the adoption account gave way to a confession that the infant had instead been carried away in a backpack. The appellate record says Kruckenberg Anderson described putting the baby under snow in a wooded area. Later public reporting on the criminal case said he admitted he intended to leave Harper in the cold to die of exposure. When he heard her crying, prosecutors said, he returned and shot her twice in the head.
Once officers found the child, the case turned from a missing-baby investigation into a homicide prosecution backed by physical evidence. Authorities said Harper was found in the wooded area shortly after police were directed there. An autopsy later concluded she had been alive when she was shot, a finding that became one of the state’s strongest points at trial. Prosecutors also used the timing of the hidden birth, the lack of any real adoption arrangement and the defendant’s own shifting accounts to argue that the killing was deliberate. Defense lawyers fought over what statements the jury should hear and challenged parts of the interrogation record because Kruckenberg Anderson had been 16 at the time. But the state still moved the case toward a jury trial in Green County.
That jury returned its verdict on Nov. 5, 2025. Kruckenberg Anderson, then 21, was found guilty of first-degree intentional homicide and hiding the corpse of a child. Local courtroom reporting at the time said jurors deliberated for a little over two hours. The verdict placed the case in its final sentencing phase, though not before the record had already generated an appellate decision about what portions of the teen’s statements were voluntary and admissible. By March 16, 2026, the court had turned from the question of guilt to the question of punishment. Judge Bucher imposed life in prison on the homicide count and a concurrent four-year term plus three years of extended supervision on the corpse-hiding count.
The sentencing hearing also produced the state’s sharpest summary of motive. Prosecutor Adrienne Blais told the court the case was about one person trying to erase a problem from his life, casting Harper as the victim of that decision. State officials echoed the gravity of the crime after sentencing. Attorney General Josh Kaul called it a horrifying and extraordinarily tragic case. District Attorney Craig R. Nolen said the punishment held the defendant accountable for a horrific act of violence. The Department of Justice said the Green County Sheriff’s Office investigated with help from the state Division of Criminal Investigation and the Albany Police Department, underscoring how a rural missing-child report grew into a multiagency homicide case.
Even after the sentence, the timeline is not fully closed. Court records summarized in later reporting show the defense filed a motion to dismiss after sentencing, and prosecutors were given 120 days to answer. The docket did not show a hearing date in the latest public accounts. Kruckenberg Anderson was credited with 1,891 days for time served on the concurrent count, remanded to county custody and ordered to have no contact with the child’s mother. So the story that began with a concealed birth, moved through a winter search in the woods and ended with a life sentence still has one more procedural date ahead, even if the broad shape of the case has already been fixed by the jury and the court.
As of April 8, 2026, the conviction stands, the life sentence has been imposed, and the next visible milestone is the prosecution’s response to the pending defense motion in Green County court.
Author note: Last updated April 8, 2026.