50-year-old mystery surrounds boy's
death
January 3, 2007
By David Stout,
New York Times News Service
Philadelphia | For a half-century,
he has been the center of a heartbreaking mystery, this boy of 4 or
5 who lies buried beneath a black granite stone in the shade of
rhododendrons.
Visitors to his grave in Ivy Hill
Cemetery pray and leave toys, perhaps bestowing more love on this
child than he ever had in his life, which was marked by sickness and
hunger and ended in a beating.
The boy's body, bruised and naked,
was found in a cardboard box in a patch of woods off a dirt road on
the city's outskirts in February 1957. He was an early symbol of
child abuse at its worst. Yet all these years later, he has no name.
William H. Kelly, a retired
Philadelphia detective, and his friend Joseph McGillen, a retired
investigator for the medical examiner's office, visit the boy's
grave often. "My little friend," Kelly calls him. The men, both 79,
dream of giving the boy an identity before they die.
Still officially an open homicide
investigation, the case is "one of the very few in which we can't
say who it is," said Capt. Benjamin Naish, a Philadelphia police
spokesman.
Elmer Palmer was the first officer
on the scene that drizzly Feb. 26, 1957. "It looked like a doll," he
recalled recently. "Then I saw it wasn't a doll." The boy's hair had
been cut, crudely, either just before or just after death, so his
body was flecked with hairs.
Palmer, now 79, was a young husband
and father then. He recalled shivering in his raincoat, thinking,
"What a shame." At least this will be solved quickly, he thought.
"They had so many leads."
But there were problems. A college
student had spotted the body on Feb. 25, but did not call the police
until the next day, after confiding in a priest. Cold slows
decomposition, so it was impossible to tell how long the boy had
been dead.
An autopsy showed that the child
had been beaten to death and that he had been ill and
undernourished. His baby teeth were intact, and he had apparently
never been to a dentist. His body bore several small scars that
looked like surgical incisions. Yet a survey of local doctors and
hospitals turned up nothing. Photographs of the boy's face were
printed in the newspapers, hung on storefronts and mailed with
utility bills throughout Philadelphia and beyond. Orphanages and
other child-care institutions were checked. Still nothing.
Detectives even dressed the corpse
and photographed it in a sitting position, then distributed the
pictures in the hope that the more "lifelike" appearance would jog
someone's memory.
A man's corduroy cap found near the
body was traced to an area store. The owner recognized it from the
strap the buyer had her sew on. She recalled him as a man in his 20s
who had come into the store alone. There was nothing special about
him. He was never found. The police traced the cardboard box to
another store. It was one of a dozen that had held bassinets sold
from Dec. 3, 1956, to Feb. 16, 1957. Investigators tracked down all
but one buyer - quite a feat, considering the store's cash-only
policy - but found no link to the boy.
More than 11,000 Hungarian
passports were checked. The carnival workers were cleared. The
roofer was found, along with his son, safe and sound.
Finally, the boy was buried in a
potter's field, with detectives as pallbearers. His grave was the
only one with a stone, donated by a local monument maker.
Years went by. The patch of woods
was bulldozed for houses; the dirt road became a busy street.
Investigators who had worked on the case acquired paunches and
pensions. But for all the big-city death and mayhem they had seen,
they could not forget the little boy.
The Vidocq Society, a Philadelphia
group composed largely of law enforcement professionals who
investigate long-unsolved crimes, adopted the case. Kelly and
McGillen are members. (The society is named after a famed
18th-century French detective, Eugene Francois Vidocq.)
Another member was Remington
Bristow, an investigator in the medical examiner's office who had
been deeply affected by the case. His own son had died in early
childhood.
Bristow worked on the case
practically full time, even in his retirement, spending thousands of
dollars of his own to chase leads across the country. He carried a
death mask of the child in his briefcase.
Until his death in 1993, Bristow
theorized that the child was the son of an unmarried daughter of a
couple who ran a foster home in an old mansion.
Kelly and McGillen say the key to
the mystery may lie in the memory of a woman who grew up in
Philadelphia and says that when she was a child her parents brought
a boy home and kept him in the basement. One day, the woman says,
her mother battered the boy to death, then drove with her to the
patch of woods to dispose of the body.
The woman told her story to Kelly
and McGillen several years ago, in the presence of her psychiatrist.
She said she decided to come forward after a television reprise of
the case, one of several in recent years.
"We think she's the real deal,"
McGillen said.
But William Fleisher, a former
Philadelphia police officer and FBI agent who is the president of
the Vidocq Society, is not so sure. "Nothing she says has been
proved, nothing she says has been disproved," said Fleisher, now a
private investigator.
And if the boy remains without a
name and the crime goes unpunished? Sooner or later the killer will
be "in a place where there's no appeal," McGillen said. "And I feel
good about that."
|
