A pending defense motion keeps the Green County prosecution active after a March 16 sentencing hearing.

MONROE, Wis. — A Green County judge sentenced Logan Kruckenberg Anderson to life in prison on March 16 for killing his newborn daughter in 2021, then ordered him held in county custody as the defense pursues a remaining motion that has not yet been scheduled for a hearing.

Why the case still matters now is that the sentence did not fully end the court fight. Kruckenberg Anderson, now 21, was convicted in November 2025 of first-degree intentional homicide and hiding the corpse of a child after prosecutors said he carried the baby into woods near Albany, covered her in snow and shot her when she cried. The sentencing fixed the punishment, but court records show a defense motion to dismiss remains pending, leaving one last procedural step in a case that has stretched from a January 2021 birth to a March 2026 judgment.

The sentencing hearing marked the most final moment yet in a prosecution that had already drawn years of public attention in southern Wisconsin. Judge Jane Bucher imposed life in prison on the homicide count, with eligibility for extended supervision 45 years from the date of his 2021 arrest. On the second count, hiding the corpse of a child, she imposed a concurrent sentence of four years of initial confinement and three years of extended supervision. Prosecutor Adrienne Blais had framed the case in court as an effort to erase a child who had become, in her telling, a disruption to the defendant’s life. By the end of the hearing, Kruckenberg Anderson was remanded to the custody of the Green County Sheriff’s Department and barred from contacting the child’s mother.

The case began after a hidden teenage pregnancy ended with the birth of a girl named Harper in a bathtub on Jan. 5, 2021. Authorities said the baby’s mother was 14 at the time and Kruckenberg Anderson was 16. Investigators later said the couple had kept the pregnancy from their families. When relatives realized the baby was missing, the girl’s father called 911 after not seeing the infant for days. Early interviews produced a false story that the newborn had been handed off for adoption through a friend or through someone reached on Snapchat. Prosecutors said that account fell apart as officers kept pressing for details. Kruckenberg Anderson eventually admitted he took the baby away in a backpack, carried her to a wooded area, placed her in or near a fallen tree, covered her body with snow and walked away.

According to prosecutors, the killing itself turned on what happened next. The state’s account was that the baby was still alive after being left in the cold. When Kruckenberg Anderson heard her crying, prosecutors said, he turned back and shot her twice in the head. An autopsy later supported the state’s position that Harper was alive when she was shot. Those facts became the center of the homicide charge at trial and helped shape the state’s argument that this was not panic alone but an intentional killing. At trial in November 2025, jurors found him guilty of first-degree intentional homicide and of hiding the corpse of a child after a short period of deliberation. The verdict came nearly five years after the baby’s death and after extensive litigation over what the jury would be allowed to hear.

That pretrial litigation gave the case a second track beyond the basic question of guilt. In 2024, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals ruled on a suppression dispute over the statements Kruckenberg Anderson made to law enforcement during multiple interviews when he was 16. The appellate court agreed that some Jan. 10, 2021 statements should stay out because investigators had crossed the line into involuntary questioning at a certain point, but it also reversed part of a lower-court ruling and said earlier statements could be used. The opinion described a long sequence of questioning in Albany, Brodhead and the wooded search area, and it examined whether a teenager who had not slept or eaten was being questioned voluntarily. That ruling helped set the evidentiary boundaries for the later trial without ending the prosecution.

The motion that remains now is the defense’s latest effort to alter the posture of the case after conviction and sentencing. Court records indicate prosecutors have 120 days to respond. The public docket did not show a hearing date when the latest reports were published, and the exact legal grounds of the motion were not spelled out in those public summaries. That leaves several things unresolved in the narrow procedural sense even though the punishment has been announced. The sentence itself is clear, the custody status is clear and the no-contact order is clear. What is not yet clear is whether the defense motion will be denied on the papers, argued at a later hearing or folded into a broader appellate path once the postconviction record is complete.

Outside the immediate courtroom fight, state officials cast the sentence as a major end point. Attorney General Josh Kaul called the case horrifying and extraordinarily tragic, while Green County District Attorney Craig R. Nolen said the punishment reflected what he described as the egregious nature of the acts. The Wisconsin Department of Justice said the Green County Sheriff’s Office led the investigation with help from the state Division of Criminal Investigation and the Albany Police Department. The years-long file, built from interviews, search efforts, forensic findings and contested statements, ultimately produced a conviction, a life sentence and one remaining motion still sitting in the system. In practical terms, the case stands at a point where the facts have been tested before a jury, but one last defense card remains on the table.

The case now stands in a post-sentencing phase: Kruckenberg Anderson is serving a life term, prosecutors are awaiting the deadline to answer the defense motion, and no hearing date had been publicly set as of early April 2026.

Author note: Last updated April 8, 2026.