The Murder Room

since 1957. His only family was two generations of cops.

The old stone, HEAVENLY FATHER, BLESS THIS UNKNOWN BOY, had been set in the foreground of the new one at Ivy Hill.

Fleisher wept.

The commissioner moved to a makeshift podium and tried to compose himself. More than a hundred people stood around the grave, including District Attorney Abraham and an executive from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children from Washington, D.C. The media people stood at a distance across the road. In the crowd was a fifty-one-year-old woman nobody knew. She held a bouquet of blue carnations from the children who rode the schoolbus she drove. “I was ten when it happened, and I never forgot him,” said Rita O’Vary. “The poor little guy. Somebody has to know who he is.”

The old cops sat in folding chairs before the coffin. The clouds broke. Sun bathed the grove of rhododendrons and oak, and the cops said it was a good omen.

Fleisher reminded himself of the reasons to be hopeful. The reburial was only part of their effort, only the beginning. Hundreds of new leads had poured in since America’s Most Wanted aired the special show on the Boy in the Box. Host John Walsh had revealed Bender’s speculative bust of what the boy’s father might look like.

Eight days earlier, the Vidocq Society’s lawyers obtained a court order to allow exhumation of the boy from his grave in Potter’s Field near Mechanicsville and Dunks Ferry roads in northeast Philadelphia, and to move him ten miles to the historic Ivy Hill Cemetery. A backhoe had lumbered up to the grave in Potter’s Field, and, after the stone was removed, opened the grave deep enough for the diggers with shovels, who scraped down to the lid of the coffin, then worked wide straps under the coffin. The backhoe lifted the boy’s coffin out of the earth for the first time in forty-one years. The diggers cleared dirt from the coffin, and carried it into the back of a waiting ambulance. The FBI’s evidence recovery team had done its work.

A woman from the neighborhood, in her fifties, had walked sadly away. She had come to watch, to let the boy know “we didn’t forget.” She was ten when the boy was found, and prayed for him her whole life. Like a lot of neighbors, she left flowers and toys. She thought of the boy as her little brother.

The ambulance drove to the morgue. The coffin was set on a worktable in the medical examiner’s office. As Kelly watched the lid being pried off, he thought, Rem Bristow should be here. Kelly crossed himself when he saw, remarkably, the boy after forty years had not been reduced to dust. Such preservation was seen by ancient Christians as a sign of the Almighty. The boy was a small pile of bones within the rags of the suit a detective’s son had long ago donated. A technician worked through the pile of dust and bones and found a tooth. It would be tested for DNA. With the boy’s DNA soon in hand, if a suspect or family member emerged, they could learn, at last, the boy’s name—and the name of his killer.

The new black stone said, AMERICA’S UNKNOWN CHILD.

Fleisher said the boy was “a symbol of our nation’s abused children, missing children, and murdered children. We are validating this little boy’s life. Our mission is to go forward from this day and put a name on that tombstone.” A priest, a pastor, and a rabbi commended the boy’s soul to God. Weinstein, seventy-two years old, stood and described finding the boy’s body on February 25, 1957.

“I saw all his pain and his suffering and his anguish,” he said. “It was as though he was speaking to me: ‘What happened? Why?’ And that was an answer I couldn’t give.” In a faltering voice, Weinstein said the Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer—“in the world which will be renewed . . . He will give life to the dead . . . and raise them to eternal life.”

As the hydraulic groaned and the little coffin disappeared into the ground, Weinstein snapped to attention and gave the boy a military salute. Then he hugged a police sergeant, and then gripped Fleisher as if he would fall.

Kelly’s prayer was simple: Dear God, what more can I do? Tell me and I will do it.

As the sun illuminated the little grove of fresh earth, Weinstein sat in a folding chair with his head in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably.

“C’mon, Sam,” Fleisher whispered as they held on to each other. “We’ll solve it.”

Fleisher had told the stonecutter to leave room on the serpentine black surface for a name.

• CHAPTER 47 •

“CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’VE FOUND YOUR KILLER”

As if the murder of Terri Brooks had happened only yesterday, Detective Sergeant Cloud started the case at the beginning, visiting her father and stepmother at their home in Warminster. George and Betty Brooks easily accepted the idea that the case was now newly open; for them it had never closed. The couple had been interviewed by the Falls Township police fourteen years earlier, but were pleased Sergeant Cloud wanted to talk to them.

Sergeant Cloud explained that he was new to the case and starting over. He had hundreds of pieces of old evidence, a thick case file, Walter’s profile, and not much else.

George and Betty said they remained determined to find their daughter’s killer.

“Hopefully, that son-of-a-gun is still out there walking around and something happens that will bring him out of his hole,” Betty had recently told the Trentonian newspaper, when the reporter called to see what she thought of the Vidocq Society’s involvement. The newspaper headline had read ROY’S RIDDLE: CAN GROUP CRACK CASE ?

Betty reiterated her conviction that Terri had been killed by her boyfriend. “I thought it was the boyfriend all along.”

Her husband, George, quickly disagreed. “They were engaged,” he said, shaking his head. He just couldn’t see it. But Betty said she’d had a funny feeling when the boyfriend showed up at their house to give them the terrible news that Terri had been murdered. He expressed his grief, but something was not right. They’d seen him only one more time in the ensuing fourteen years, and that incident still bothered her, too. Two weeks after Terri was buried, they ran into him on the street. “He made a point of letting us know he had a date,” Betty said.

Sergeant Cloud held up his hand to clarify the point. He’d committed the case file to memory, all two hundred interviews, and the Brookses weren’t making sense. The police had eliminated Terri’s boyfriend as a suspect almost immediately fourteen years ago. Unable to pin it on him or any of Terri’s coworkers, they quickly saw the crime as a robbery gone wrong.

“The boyfriend had an airtight alibi,” Cloud said. “He was in California at the time.”

Betty’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “Not that boyfriend! There was another guy.” Terri had already broken up with the guy who went to California. There was a new one.”

“What was his name?” Cloud asked.

She shook her head. She couldn’t remember. She’d barely gotten to know him during the eight months he was engaged to her daughter. “He was not the type that would come over to the house,” she said. But a few minutes later, a surname came to her. “O’Keefe, I think.” She couldn’t recall a first name.

Thanking the couple for their time, Sergeant Cloud drove back to the Falls Township Police Department and asked around about O’Keefe. He got blank stares. He ran the name through the computer and came up empty. Frustrated, he called his friend Ed Gaughan, the private eye, at the Philadelphia brownstone headquarters of the Vidocq Society, and asked him about “O’Keefe.”

Gaughan had never heard the name, but he and Fleisher both searched for “O’Keefe” in their computers, using proprietary databases designed for lawyers, private eyes, and bail bondsmen to find anyone with an arrest record. Both men struck out on “O’Keefe.”

Gaughan called Sergeant Cloud back. “Are you sure of the spelling?”

No, Cloud wasn’t sure.

“Was he at the funeral?” Gaughan asked. “Check the guest book.”

Sergeant Cloud had the large, leather-bound book right on his desk. He ran his fingers down the ruled pages where the mourners had signed in at Terri Brooks’s funeral. There was no O’Keefe. But there was a different name: Keefe.