The Murder Room

through nine U.S. presidents, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and the first terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, they had never stopped.

Kelly, retired from the police department, still never passed a hospital without checking the footprints on file of newborns from the early 1950s; he’d studied 11,000 prints, but maybe the next one would identify the boy. Weinstein sorted through the case records, boxes stuffed with files, photographs, hundreds of tips and notes, looking for anything they may have overlooked. Remington Bristow, the medical examiner’s investigator, had devoted thirty-seven years to the case, traveling everywhere with a death mask of the boy in his briefcase. When he touched the boy’s death mask he grieved as if he had been touched by a spirit, and he urged others to touch it, too; some investigators believed he had gone around the bend on the case. When Bristow moved from Philadelphia to Arizona, where he died in 1993, his granddaughter drove him across the country, stopping so that her grandfather, sickly and half-blind, could check new leads all the way. “Rem was ‘The Man,’ ” said Kelly, who had worked alongside him for years on the case. Rem’s work went on.

The boy, who would have been nearly fifty years old now, still lay in Potter’s Field, under the small monument the homicide bureau long ago purchased—the only monument in the field of body parts and the insane, criminals, and the forgotten. For four decades the detectives had visited with flowers in the spring, a yellow sand pail in summer, a newly oiled baseball glove for Christmas, as if he were growing up to be a fine young boy. Bristow had said that with his slender build the boy had the makings of a basketball player instead of football. The cold-case cops kept the boy alive with the heat of longing and memory. He was the boy who would never grow up, who would never die.

They prayed over the legend the homicide bureau once wrote:

“Heavenly Father, Bless This Unknown Child.”

If devotion to solving a child’s murder is a measure, the boy so little cared for in life had been more loved by two generations of police detectives than any child in Philadelphia history—loved when there was no hope.

Now there was hope. The Vidocq Society was on the case.

On Thursday, March 19, 1998, Weinstein and Kelly entered the old Public Ledger Building, across a side street from its twin, the Curtis Publishing Company building, where The Saturday Evening Post was once published, and took the elevator to the tenth floor, to the walnut-paneled Downtown Club. The former men’s club was the new meeting place of the Vidocq Society; the white-linen-covered round tables overlooking Independence Hall were now the setting, on the third Thursday of each month, of the Murder Room.

Vidocq Society commissioner Fleisher greeted the retired cops warmly. Weinstein and Kelly, Fleisher’s former police department colleagues, were now VSMs. Following an invocation by Kelly, the devout Catholic, and then lunch, Fleisher announced that the society was now investigating “one of the most amazing cases in Philadelphia history.” Fleisher had put the full power of the Vidocq Society into finding the identity and the killer of the Boy in the Box.

The Murder Room was filled beyond capacity with more than eighty detectives and their guests. Some detectives were forced to sit on stools at the bar. The menu was chicken, steamed vegetables, and a corpse with a small and unforgettable face. After lunch, the beaten, bruised image of the boy floated on the screen at the front of the room, his sunken eyeballs painted in shadows. Kelly fought back tears, as if he was seeing the picture for the first time. Fillinger, the city coroner who’d worked on the dead boy forty-one years ago, was ready to reexamine the case.

Fleisher had made another shidduch, this one with homicide detective Tom Augustine of the Philadelphia Police Department, which had agreed to reopen the case and work with the Vidocq Society investigators on the case. Augustine brought forty-one years of case files to the society’s brownstone headquarters on Locust Street. It was the sum total, from day one, of all “we’ve worked on day, night, and day year after year. Boxes and boxes, thousands of pages.” In a private second-floor room, Weinstein, Kelly, and McGillen were in the process of going back through all the old records. The three VSMs had formed a Boy in the Box investigative team, headed by Weinstein.

Now, at the meeting, a radiant energy emanated from the table of the old cops, white-haired, stooped, and balding, men whom only a heart attack or cancer could stop from pursuing the next lead. The old Catholic and Jewish detectives saw the murder of innocence not as an end but the beginning of a soul’s journey toward redemption. They were men who had a green thumb in the garden of death.

Fleisher introduced Ron Avery, the veteran Philadelphia Daily News columnist whose research for his new book, City of Brotherly Mayhem, had inspired the commissioner to revisit the case. Avery briefly reviewed the case he said was “indelibly emblazoned in our memory.” He tantalized the detectives with the fact that the case had provided “loads of clues and loads of evidence . . . dozens, scores, hundreds of good leads.”

Richard Walter was working on a profile of the killer based on the crime scene. Frank Bender, seated next to Walter, closely examined all the old photographs of the boy. Bender was doing an age-progression sculpture, but one even more challenging than John List’s. Bender was sculpting the bust of what he felt the boy’s father looked like, hoping someone would recognize the father and come forward with information on the case. With not an iota of knowledge of the boy’s parents, he was flying purely on intuition. But Bender had performed a miracle with List, and America’s Most Wanted had committed to airing a fall episode on the Boy in the Box featuring the bust. There was a sense of possibility in the air.

Weinstein stood, heavyset and balding, his face worn with the curse of a photographic memory. He was thirty years old again, passing through the tree line to the field off Susquehanna Road; he was kicking his rubber boots through the muck and wet underbrush. “I saw all this garbage,” he said, “and a young white boy whose hair was chopped. It was a sad, heartbreaking thing to see. It was a dump. This was homicide.”

Weinstein said the case had been taken away from him, a patrolman, and assigned to detectives forty years ago. He’d stubbornly conducted his own investigation, and through a confidential informant found a local man who had photos of himself with a young blond boy on his lap and “an Indian blanket spread out.” He purchased the photos. He interviewed the man, who was “very cooperative” but “extremely nervous,” in a restaurant. The man “started to get shaky.” He had just agreed to go to the Homicide Unit for questioning when a superior officer saw Weinstein in the restaurant and ordered him to leave, ending his role in the investigation. Weinstein said he welcomed a second chance he never thought he’d have.

Kelly dreamed of solving the case as the crowning moment of his career, and in many ways his life. McGillen’s wife was proud of his efforts to help bring Marie Noe to justice and now perhaps helping to resolve the Boy in the Box murder. She was dying of cancer, and she prayed she would see him triumph in the cases.

Bender said he had a vision that the boy had been dressed as a girl. His caretakers had grown his hair out long and chopped it to conceal his identity just before killing him. Walter snorted and others laughed.

“Keep your day job, Frank,” Walter reminded him, his favorite dismissal of his creative partner.

Fleisher longed to give the boy a decent burial. “This case is solvable,” he said. Even if the killer or killers were dead, he said, their purpose would be to restore to the boy the dignity of his name, and avenge him with their only remaining weapon, the truth. They could bring the killer “to reckoning if not to justice.”

“Bah!” Walter glared at Fleisher, a look he usually reserved for people who peddle Bibles door-to-door. The thin man had grown weary of the sentimentality in the air. He openly mocked the consensus that had initially started with Bristow that the boy had been accidentally killed by loving caretakers who fled with broken hearts, unable to afford a decent burial. In 1957, police had seen it as a murder, but over time, at Bristow’s urging, they’d publicly said it was an accident.

The child, Walter thought, was sacrificed to the most malevolent murdering personality of all, and to preserve their own innocence the cops had made a fetish of his lost childhood, keeping him an eternal child as he moldered forty-one years in the grave. The killer represented a force so vile the cops couldn’t face the truth. Without truth, how could they find the killer?

They had waited forty-one years for the truth, and in fact now seemed energetically devoted to the long martyrdom of failure; the mystery gave them such purpose, and the truth admitted none of the romance of beach toys and baseball gloves.

“It’s hard to find something,” Walter sniffed later, “when you don’t know what you’re looking for.” The horror behind his cool, dry words seemed not to penetrate the others.

The fact was that after forty-one years of continuous investigation, thousands of police interviews across thirty states, and thousands of pages or pieces of so-called evidence, they still had nothing to go on. Never in