Like every old city, Philadelphia has a long history of atrocities. Some made national headlines, like Gary Heidnick and his infamous West Philly basement of sex slaves. Or the shooting of a police officer by a radio journalist who would later receive the death penalty and become a cause celebre. Or the 1985 bombing of an entire city block to combat a bunch of radicals who called themselves Move. Only, that last one was the fault of the mayor.
But even here in Northeast Philadelphia—for which Frankford served as an unofficial border between it and the rest of the city—there were plenty of atrocities, too.
Take the “Boy in the Box”—the name given to a kid, no more than six years old, who was found beaten to death and dumped in an old J.C. Penney bassinet box along the side of a quiet street back in 1957. Despite intense publicity, and a photo of the boy included in every city gas bill, his identity remains unknown to this day.
Closer still was the Frankford Slasher, a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes in Frankford during the late 1980s. I hadn’t been kidding with Meghan about that; the Slasher was real. Police apprehended a man who was later convicted of one of the murders, but the real Slasher is believed to be dead or still at large.
This wasn’t the case with “The Girl in the Pit,” another Frankford atrocity. I was surprised that I’d never heard of it. I made it a point to seek out any crime stories that took place where I grew up.
But one amateur true-crime website had posted a quick case summary. The story was real. Patty Glenhart had gone missing, and stayed missing. They found her body years later.
I didn’t linger over gruesome details. I only cared about two things: the name of the bastard who had taken her.
And his address.
The house was a single on Harrison Street, just four blocks away from where I grew up. It dwarfed much of the other homes in the area, and had a wide skirting of lawn on both sides. A deep porch. Three floors, including an attic.
The top floors didn’t interest me—it was the pit. It was little more than a crawl space under the laundry room just behind the kitchen. But according to the website, the pit was where the remains of Patty Glenhart were discovered by a new owner doing renovations. There was a full, unfinished basement in this house, but the pit was something extra, hand-dug by the previous owner. The killer of Patty Glenhart.
His name was Dennis Michael Vincent. After his arrest in October 1983, Vincent admitted to police that he intended it as a bomb shelter in case the Russians had any H-bombs pointed at Frankford. He’d grabbed four-year- old Patty because he thought an attack was coming in March 1972 and he wanted to save her because she was so blond and young and beautiful and would be useful when it came time to repopulate the country. Forensic investigators would find twenty-seven of her bones broken, and her head fractured in six places.
Later, Vincent claimed he’d been mistaken. She wasn’t beautiful. She was evil. She was the daughter of the devil.
So now I stood in front of Vincent’s house, wondering how to break in. The front door was locked. So were the windows. I moved along the side of the house and climbed onto the wooden porch. There was still a summer weather screen on the back door. Vincent hadn’t bothered to change it out, even though it was February. I pressed the fingers of my right hand into the mesh screen and clawed down as hard as I could. The material slipped beneath my fingers. I clawed harder, hanging as much weight as I could on it.
The screen ripped a little. I put three fingers into the hole and tore it away from the frame.
There was an eye latch and hook. I worked it free, then tried the handle of the storm door.
It was locked.
But the door was wooden, with a single pane of built-in glass. I stepped back down to the yard, found a rock, then tapped it against the glass. It held. I couldn’t risk smashing it too hard—I had to be quiet here. Stealthy. I tapped the rock again. The glass splintered a little. A few taps later it finally broke, the shards clinking on the linoleum floor on the other side.
I waited.
No sound, no nothing. It was close to four in the morning.
I pushed away the rest of the glass then reached my arm in to flip the latch. This took me a long time, especially since I couldn’t see what the hell I was doing. Ghosts in movies have it easy. They can walk through walls, float up through a ceiling, sink down into the floor, whatever. Here I was, having trouble with the most rudimentary door lock ever created.
Finally the lock opened, but there was another one. A deadbolt. Hadn’t counted on that. I reached my arm in farther and wrapped my fingers around the nub and pulled hard. It moved a fraction of an inch. I pulled again. It opened with a loud clack.
I was in.
Now I needed to find that laundry room and the pit beneath. I prayed I wasn’t too late. Prayed that Vincent the monster hadn’t taken her and killed her in the same day.
The time was 11:00 p.m. according to a cuckoo clock in Vincent’s kitchen. The whole place was full of dusty antique furniture, which made me think Vincent’s parents had been well-to-do but died young, and left him a ton of things he didn’t know what to do with. Including adulthood.
Did he sleep upstairs? Or did he keep vigil by the trapdoor he’d jerry-rigged on the wooden floor of the laundry room?
I kept moving.
The laundry room wasn’t hard to find. It was right behind the kitchen, and I could see the hand-sawed square in the floor, with the rusty hinges on one side and a deadbolt handle on the other. Yes, more locks. It took me a full minute to work it free and jump down into the dark pit.
My mouth instantly tasted like dirt. I pressed my hands against the floor and pushed up, spitting and snuffing. It was freezing down here. There was about four feet of space below the boards, with a wildly uneven muddy brown floor carved out. The dirt was cold and clammy under my palms, and felt like greasy modeling clay.
There was almost no light down here, but I could make out a few things the more my eyes adjusted. On one side was a small kid-sized mattress. No bed frame, just a single sheet that half-covered a cheap mattress that looked shiny. In a cardboard box next to the mattress were a couple of toys—a worn fabric doll, a wooden duck with red wheels and a string attached to its beak. The kind of toys you expect to find in an orphanage. A badly run, broke-ass orphanage.
And curled up in a corner was Patty Glenhart.
She was sleeping on the dirt next to an exposed pipe. Condensation dripped from the rusted metal. She must have chosen that spot because it was slightly warm. I moved closer then whispered to her, not wanting to frighten her more than she already was.
“Patty.”
She groaned. Curled up tighter into herself.
“I’m going to get you out of here, Patty, I promise. You’ll be back with your mommy and daddy soon.”
From behind a small forearm covered with light, downy hair, a tiny eye forced itself open. A beautiful green eye.
And then she screamed.
I tried shushing her, reassuring her, but it was too late. Her piercing cry traveled up the pipes, through the floorboards, through everything, and convinced Dennis Michael Vincent—who was probably already awake, sitting in his parents’ old king-sized bed on the second floor—that something was wrong. I heard his heavy footsteps clomping down a wooden staircase. He was coming down to check on his captive.
“Patty! Listen to me! You need to be quiet!”
Then he was right above us, almost tripping over the open trapdoor.
“The
