Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,123

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