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.
Kelly and McGillen knocked on the door of Mary’s old house. Kelly explained the situation and politely asked the current owner if they could see the basement. No, she said firmly. But Kelly and McGillen figured it was a good start. It was just their first conversation. They would be back.
They wanted to see if there was a coal bin.
• CHAPTER 52 •
THE GHOST
The fax arrived at the nineteenth-century brownstone headquarters of the Vidocq Society, on Locust Street in Philadelphia, at midday. Fleisher walked down the hall and crossed the large red Oriental rug in the waiting room, past the mantelpiece with the Vidocq bust and the cadaver skull, to the fax closet. He barely read it as he brought it back, scowling, to the “war room,” where he was meeting with Bender and Walter. It was the winter of 2002, and the commissioner of the Vidocq Society should have been happier. Before Christmas, the society had heard one of his favorite cases. VSM Richard Walton, a California investigator, had come east to describe his thirteen-year effort that led California to exonerate American Indian Jack Ryan, wrongly framed for a celebrated 1920s double murder in Humboldt County.
“Redemption is the sweetest human event,” Fleisher said. He had just been named one of the seventy-six finest minds in Philadelphia by Philadelphia magazine. He and Nate Gordon had recently published a book, Effective Interviewing and Interrogation Techniques, exploring his favorite subject, the historic search for truth. New tips on the Boy in the Box case were pouring in since VSM George Knowles, a New Jersey volunteer, had created an “America’s Unknown Child” Web site; Knowles had been haunted by the case since he went to his local police station in central New Jersey to register his new bicycle at age eleven, and saw the police “Information Wanted” poster—“my first exposure to death.”
Even the planned Vidocq Society movie was getting media attention now, helping attract more cases, more chances to help the helpless. The movie “will be full of thrills, murder, mayhem, and disgust,” Walter told a Binghamton, New York, newspaper. “A typical day for me.”
But Fleisher’s optimistic view of human nature had been challenged that fall by the terrorist