The story seared him with regret. His second daughter, Rita, was a lovely healthy girl, but his first daughter had died twelve years ago from sudden infant death syndrome. Annie Laurie had been three months old. Annie was buried in California, and he had never stopped missing her. Fortunately, he thought, the case would quickly be solved. A heartbroken parent or guardian would come forward as soon as the evening newspapers, TV, and radio reported the corpse had been found. He was scheduled for the midnight-to-eight shift at the medical examiner’s office, where he worked as an investigator.
The boy would be identified by the time he got to work.
But Bristow was surprised when he arrived at the morgue at midnight. Nobody had come forward to claim the boy. He was assigned to cases of the deceased whose surnames began with letters at the end of the alphabet, including U. The boy was his, classified “Unknown.”
It was ancient history, but Chief Inspector John Kelly knew Philadelphia had a bad reputation on big child death cases. The police had bungled the case of the first child kidnapping in America, the most famous crime of its day, the impact of which was still felt. Four-year-old, flaxen-haired Charley Ross vanished from in front of his mansion in July 1874, when two men lured him into a buggy with candy. Christian Ross raced to the police station, but the sergeant told the father not to worry, the two men were enjoying a “drunken frolic.” The kidnappers demanded $20,000 for Charley’s safe return in twenty-three illiterate letters grimly warning of the boy’s annihilation: “. . . you wil hav two pay us befor you git him from us, and pay us a big cent to . . .” On police advice, the father didn’t respond to the letters, and “Little Charley” was never seen again. The story was a sensation in the county’s three penny newspapers, and thereafter American parents warned their children, “Never take candy from a stranger.”
Suffering a “bereavement sharper than death,” the Ross family spent the next sixty years and a fortune in vain trying to find the boy.
Now, as the newspapers topped one another with daily headlines trumpeting police defeats—BEATEN CHILD IN BOX STILL UNKNOWN, MISTAKEN FOR DOLL, CLUE TO SLAIN BOY PROVES FALSE—Chief Inspector Kelly was determined to identify the boy and punish his killer, at whatever cost. He launched the largest police investigation of a child’s death in the city’s three centuries.
An urgent Teletype bulletin was sent to police departments in all forty-eight states. The FBI was brought in. The American Medical Association mailed descriptions of the boy’s surgical scars, on the groin area, to all its members asking if they recalled performing the surgery. None did.
The homicide bureau dressed the boy in a suit that once fit a detective’s son and propped him up lifelike for police and media photographs. Detectives traced the bassinet box to the J. C. Penney store in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, and interviewed eleven of the twelve purchasers of that model. They learned the men’s blue Ivy League cap found near the boy had been created by a seamstress in South Philadelphia, and tracked down all the men who’d purchased the cap. The Indian-pattern blanket was traced to one of three textile mills, then the thread was lost. Fingerprinter Kelly was dispatched to as many hospitals as he could drive to looking for a match of newborn footprints on file. Nothing came of it.
After days of little progress, the chief inspector ordered the largest police force ever assembled in the city, including new academy recruits, to comb twelve square miles around the crime scene. Three hundred men brought tons of possible evidence back to the department, including a dead cat wrapped in an old shirt. Three hundred neighborhood doors were knocked on, more than six hundred neighbors interviewed. All 773 white families who had moved into the city that month were questioned, not a scrap of useful information gleaned.
Nothing.
Long Island New York cops drove down to the morgue to see if it was Steven Damman, whose mother, Marilyn, told the story of his 1955 abduction in The Saturday Evening Post. It was too late for Marilyn; her husband divorced her, quit his Air Force career, and fled to Iowa and took up farming. He never forgave his wife for leaving the child alone for ten minutes. Damman was about the same age and weight, also had blond hair and a little scar on his chin.