The Murder Room

As Walter worked the Illinois murder, two of the oldest Vidocqeans reached Ohio on a Sunday night, pulling a big American sedan into a Cincinnati hotel in time for dinner. Bill Kelly and Joe McGillen had left Philadelphia that morning right after mass, with city homicide detective Tom Augustine sharing the wheel during the nine-hour drive. Time had not been kind to the Vidocq senior investigative team. VSM Sam Weinstein, the third retired Philly cop on the Boy in the Box team, was in Israel working with the Israel Defense Forces. The widower McGillen, fearless on a murder, was deathly afraid to fly, thus the 600-mile drive. Kelly had spent the long drive quietly praying for a break in the half-century-old case, fearful he too was running out of time. After another year of beseeching God for help, he’d attended the St. Joseph’s Seminary annual retreat, the weekend that kept him sane. Steeped in prayer, he asked a sister to help him ask God for a solution to the case, and she replied that she had been asking. Her words haunted him: “Maybe God said no.”

The next morning, the three of them were seated stiffly in a psychiatrist’s office. The psychiatrist was a tall man with wavy white hair. None of the cops had ever been in a shrink’s office. Kelly had teased McGillen in the car: “Maybe you want to confess this flying phobia of yours.” Now, after setting some ground rules, the psychiatrist led them into an inner room, and introduced them to a middle-aged woman, sitting at a table, they would call “Mary.” Mary was a tall, handsome woman with unusually broad shoulders and keenly intelligent eyes. She seemed nervous, yet also distant. She demanded her identity be protected; she was an executive at one of the largest drug companies in the world, and “they mustn’t know.” The old cops nodded their promises. She breathed deeply to compose herself. “Oh, God,” she said, “this is so hard.”

Two years after her psychiatrist first contacted the police, and fifty years after witnessing the horrors that had scarred her for life, Mary was finally willing to talk about the murder of her brother Jonathan, the Boy in the Box.

“No one outside our house could have imagined what went on. . . . My parents did not have normal sexual desires. My father molested me. . . . My mother didn’t just silently let it happen, the usual scenario. She was enthusiastic about it, even joined in. The agreement was that my father let her indulge her taste in little boys. She preferred them to adult men because she thought them purer, somehow. . . . One night a little boy came into our lives. . . .”

It was a hot August night, she remembered. “I was thirteen when my mother took me in the car to get him.”

Kelly bent his head to his maker and the weight of the words, and scribbled notes on a pad.

Between them, Kelly and McGillen had nearly a century of investigative experience, and as Mary rambled on, both men felt in their guts she was telling the truth. Mary was highly credible and had no reason to lie. This was the real story, at last. It was horrifying, Augustine thought. It was a story that even Hitchcock would have been afraid to film.

On the surface, as Mary told it, her childhood in the 1950s on the Main Line of Philadelphia was one of comfort and privilege. She lived in a house in Lower Merion, a lovely, affluent town, an only child of highly educated, well-respected parents. Her father was a teacher at the high school, one of the better public schools on the East Coast. Her mother was a librarian.The students loved her parents;“I bet my parents autographed a thousand yearbooks,” she said.

But in the privacy of their home, life was a horror from which Mary could not awaken. At thirteen, Mary knew in her heart something was wrong, but she was unable to fully face it, couldn’t begin to understand it. That August night when her mother parked in front of a row house in Philadelphia, she rang the bell, gave the woman an envelope apparently filled with money, and was handed a baby who had peed his diapers. Mary, excited, confused, scared, held the baby in the car. She didn’t mind the smell; she felt a sudden sympathy for the helpless child. She could feel that “this baby, this little human being, needed me. Needed somebody.”

She asked her mother, “Can he be my brother?”

“Sure,” her mother said. “Only we can’t keep him upstairs.” Her mother put the baby in the basement in a small room that used to be a coal bin. He had a box to sleep in, some blankets, and heavy dishes like dog dishes. A drain was his toilet. Mary thought, It’s just like we got a new puppy. Her mother called him Jonathan. She went down to visit Jonathan and play with him. She took food and water down to him. He always had coal dust in his hair. She got him to laugh once. Jonathan never said a word. She realized he was retarded.

Her mother said, “Don’t go down there.”

Jonathan’s hair grew long, like a girl’s. His parents never cut it. They never took him outside. When Mary was fifteen, feeling weighted now with a terrible secret, her mother dragged Jonathan upstairs for a bath, “cursing . . . his feet going thump, thump, thump on the steps as she dragged him along.” She put him in a bath that was scorching hot and he started screaming. She took him out of the tub and he was crying and stamping his feet. She put him back in the water and he threw up their baked-beans dinner. “My mother shrieked like I’d never heard before. She yanked him out of the tub and slapped him. I mean hard.” He cried but she kept slapping until he fell and hit his head on the bathroom floor and then she was punching him all over with her fists. “My mother’s head was shaking from side to side, she was swinging so fast.”

Jonathan was still. “I could tell he was dead. His eyes were open but not seeing. There was sadness in his face. If I live to be a hundred, I will never feel as sorry for a human being as I did for Jonathan right then.” His parents chopped his hair short; Mary was ordered to trim his fingernails. “I tried to be gentle,” she said. The next morning her mother lifted Jonathan from the tub, where he’d been kept all night. They wrapped him in a blanket and carried him out a side door in the basement that faced the driveway, hidden by a hedge, and put him in the trunk of the car. Her mother drove past a church and down a country road and stopped by a patch of woods. A car came by as her mother opened the trunk, and she told Mary, “Don’t say a word.” They carried Jonathan into an overgrown field. Her mother found an empty box near the road. “Oh, good,” her mother said. “Tilt it.” Mary tipped it and her mother slid Jonathan into it and made sure he was out of the rain. “Did it matter?” Mary wondered. They stopped at a diner on the way home and Mary had a donut. She threw it up in the car. Her mother was very angry. “Then we went home and tried to act like everything was normal.” Her father died years ago from a heart attack, her mother died after that at a nursing home in Florida. She never told anyone but her psychiatrist.

As they drove back to Philadelphia, Kelly could hardly contain his excitement. He recalled that the Good Samaritan saw a young boy wearing a raincoat standing next to a woman—the tall, wide-shouldered Mary said she was wearing a raincoat, and she easily could have been mistaken from behind for a boy. Kelly and McGillen agreed the route Mary described to the field made sense. Her account of the boy vomiting baked beans was intriguing; the autopsy, not widely reported, noted a brown residue in the boy’s esophagus.

Mary gave the address of the family’s house on the Main Line, and Kelly and McGillen raised their eyebrows. The address matched an earlier tip the society believed to be reliable and had never made public. To pick a matching address in a metropolitan area of more than five million people seemed more than coincidence. Kelly and McGillen confirmed the existence of the house, and of Mary’s late parents, a teacher and librarian. They were stunned by what she witnessed and suffered, and amazed at how she struggled to make her life a success.

As Augustine listened to Mary, he kept thinking, Why does she hate her parents so much, to tell a story like that? He didn’t believe Mary, and even Fleisher was skeptical of the story. Augustine pointedly asked the psychiatrist why he didn’t have any notes confirming Mary’s story. The therapist was offended. “I don’t need notes. My job was to help Mary unlock the memory, series of memories, and free herself from them. . . . And I can tell you . . . her account has been consistent from the start. What you heard is what I’ve been hearing for thirteen years now, long before there was a Web site about this case. I believe Mary is telling the truth.”

Later that summer, on Philadelphia’s top-rated TV news station, Eyewitness News reported that according to confidential sources the Vidocq Society had achieved a breakthrough in the case “that has tormented Philadelphia police for more than four decades.”

Augustine remained unconvinced. “It may be true. It may not be true. Hell, there’s just no corroboration for any of it,” he said. Bruce Castor, the Montgomery County district attorney, said the information was “sketchy and unreliable.” He said Mary’s story is “akin to Martians coming down and marching somebody off in a spaceship.”

But within days Kelly and McGillen located Mary’s old house. The white-haired cops walked up and down the street interviewing neighbors. Several neighbors recalled the couple who once lived there, a very conservative, conventional teacher and librarian, and dismissed the lurid story as ludicrous. None of them ever saw a boy come out of the house.