The Murder Room (6 page)

Seymour Levin was a fat pimply kid with glasses who used to live in the neighborhood, and everyone was still afraid of him. On January 9, 1949, the sixteen-year-old Levin went with twelve-year-old Ellis Simons to see
A Night at the Opera
at the movies, then brought his friend home to play with his chemistry set. Ellis took one look at it and said, “I have better test tubes at home.” Seymour was very fond of his chemistry set. They got in a fight and test-tube glass was everywhere. Seymour got a kitchen knife, made Ellis undress, sodomized him, and then stabbed him more than fifty times through the heart and face and back and all over his body. He tied Ellis’s hands and feet with laundry cord and dragged the body through the house and backyard and dumped it behind the garage.

Seymour could get out of jail at any time.

The police said there was not a drop of blood left in Ellis Simons’s body.

 

Billy’s mother was cool to him, but not uninvolved like his father.

That Saturday, she left him alone in the Penn Fruit Company market. She went down one of the aisles to do the shopping, leaving him standing there. Billy knew horror stories of what happened to kids left alone at markets. The famous one was Steven Damman, whose mother left him with a stick of licorice to watch the baby at a Long Island grocery store; when she came out the stroller and the baby were there, but Steven and his licorice were gone, and never seen again.

Billy wasn’t afraid. He was older than Damman and could take care of himself, and he loved the trip to the market. He’d lose himself savoring the perfumed air of apples, pears, oranges, and potatoes stacked high on the counters; he’d forget where he was. It was “the greatest smell in the world” because it reminded him of his grandfather Sol, Philadelphia’s largest potato and onion wholesaler. Billy’s grandfather was his best friend, an oasis of love and safety.

Sol’s full name was Solomon Tredwell, but everyone called him “Smiling Jim, the Potato King.” Sol was a gregarious character who had taken the nickname “Smiling Jim” from a handsome Philadelphia mounted policeman who patrolled the city’s parks. He figured the policeman’s popularity would shine like a halo over him and his business. “My grandfather loved the police,” Billy said, “and he loved me. A policeman couldn’t leave his warehouse store without a free five-pound bag of potatoes.”

Now the boy’s eye caught a poster on a wall near the front of the store. It intrigued him; from a distance it looked like a portrait of three heads. He walked toward it and, up close, froze in fear.

A ghostly, shrunken face stared at him with lifeless blue eyes.

It was a pale, bloodless face—the face of a dead boy. On either side of the ghastly face were profile photographs of the child; the side of the head, like the face, was blistered in bruises and cuts. But the emotionless blue eyes held him fast.

He looked at the eyelids, frail and broken as the crushed wings of a butterfly. PHILADELPHIA POLICE DEPARTMENT, INFORMATION WANTED, the poster said. The print underneath said the unknown child had been brutally murdered and found two weeks ago in the woods of Fox Chase. Police were looking for the boy’s name, and his killer
.
NOTIFY HOMICIDE UNIT, DETECTIVE HEADQUARTERS, CITY HALL, PHILADELPHIA, AT ANY TIME, DAY OR NIGHT, IN PERSON OR TELEPHONE, MUNICIPAL 6-9700.

For an instant the left eye seemed to glow yellow.

Billy had never seen a dead person. He hadn’t heard the prayer to the Blessed Judge of Truth, the rabbi’s wisdom that men were mortals and can’t understand, can only accept God’s will. His father had not prepared him; no one could have prepared him. Death whispers uniquely to each man, but its overture to Billy was beyond the understanding of midtwentieth-century adults, no less a child. In the limpid eye he had seen a glimpse of the darkest evil known to humankind.

 

The boy lay on a cold metal table in the city morgue. Outside the windowless chamber the night was dark and bitterly cold, but now the boy was bathed in warm bright light. The medical examiner measured him at forty inches long, thirty pounds. He looked so small.

Bill Kelly prepared his inks, rollers, and clean white paper. As the police department’s principal fingerprinter, he was one of death’s numberless attendants. He was trained to stoically touch the cool flesh of the dead, but this boy looked just like the fingerprinter’s four-year-old son. His little feet fit into Kelly’s palm. The fingerprinter bowed his head and quietly asked the Blessed Mother for strength and guidance.

The head of the Philadelphia police identification unit, Kelly was twenty-nine years old, a tall Irishman and devout Roman Catholic with shining blue eyes that reflected compassion rather than mirth. The fingerprinter was a devoutly religious man who believed children were a gift from God. He was a father of two with a third on the way; he and Ruth Ann dreamed of having as many as the Almighty would provide. To feed the extra mouths he was picking up work as a wedding photographer, a joyful interlude between corpses.

On closer inspection, Kelly saw the boy was painfully thin. University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Wilton Krogman, one of the world’s foremost experts on human anatomy, known by the FBI as “the bone detective,” examined him with his young assistant Bill Bass (who would later found the Tennessee “Body Farm” to study decomposing human remains for law enforcement). Krogman calculated the boy had nearly the height of a four-year-old but the weight of a two-year-old. That meant starvation, malnutrition. X-rays of the legs showed scars on the long bones from halted growth. The boy had suffered in ill health for at least a year.

Kelly’s heart clenched as he inked the tiny hands and feet, then pressed the prints onto the clean paper. He believed in God but if He indeed tipped the wing of every sparrow in flight, what was the purpose of this?

Kelly saw other things with a cop’s eyes. The terrible cuts and bruises on the head and all over the body. The skin of one hand and foot withered from water immersion, the “washerwoman’s effect.” The narrow head looked like it had been squeezed, like an overripe melon. These were things Kelly, a civilian on the force, preferred not to contemplate. But he knew in his heart he was in the presence of evil—proof the devil existed as surely as did God.

From his humble prayers the comfort came to him that the boy could be hurt no more in his life. He was in heaven. All Kelly could do was help redeem his soul with a name. A name would cut a powerful trail to the murderer, a killer who would be judged in this life as well as the next. Neither task was his. But never had Kelly’s work seemed so important.

A few miles away that evening, Remington Bristow, the dark-haired, craggy-faced son of an Oregon undertaker, sat at home smoking a Lucky Strike over the broadsheet pages of the
Bulletin
. The headline leaped out at him: BODY OF BOY FOUND IN BOX IN FOX CHASE
.
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. But the Philadelphia boy’s kidneys were a markedly different size, and Damman had a big freckle on his right calf. It wasn’t Steven Damman.

A Marine said it was a lost brother, one of his eighteen siblings; all eighteen proved to be alive and well. Angry ex-wives and ex-husbands swore it was their child, murdered by the dastardly “ex.” Mothers-in-law denounced vile sons-in-law. Hundreds of letters poured in from the seamy underground of the American family; each was checked. (“I know my sister must have had an illegitimate baby, and she’s the kind that would kill it.”)

Nothing.

Detectives got excited studying a photograph of refugees from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, fleeing the Soviet conquest. A boy in the photograph was the mirror image of the dead boy. Hadn’t Krogman deducted likely European ancestry from the narrow face and high forehead? After an exhaustive manhunt, Philadelphia police found the Hungarian refugee child happily playing in a North Carolina backyard.

Detectives thought it had to be the Dudleys. The itinerant carnival couple admitted to starving to death six of their ten children as they followed the Big Top, casually dumping two bodies in Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans, others along a West Virginia highway and in a Lakeland, Florida, mine. Detectives almost felt sorry for them while interviewing the disorganized man and his hapless wife, and had to remind themselves they were human beasts. Yes, they’d passed through Pennsylvania in February 1957. No, the boy in the morgue wasn’t theirs.

Nothing.

 

The comforting smell of potatoes had disappeared.

Billy was held fast by the unblinking gaze of the dead boy. It was horrid, the ghastly yellowish face like a bruised gourd with hollowed-out eyes. His heart was pounding, his hands clammy with sweat.

The eyes were a well into which he was falling, falling into blackness with no one to catch him.

His mother returned and put a hand on him, broke the spell. She quietly drove him home in the Buick through the gray February afternoon. He did not tell her what he had seen and felt. But something had changed in him. His tongue grew sharper around his parents, and bitterly sarcastic. He found friends, but while other high school cliques formed around sports or drama, his gang “didn’t care about anything but drinking and having sex . . . I was white-collar Jewish hanging out with tough, blue-collar Italians.” He began drinking and smoking. He stayed small but his fights now were more violent, with bigger kids.

He was one of the smallest kids around, the fastest runner, wiry and nasty and chin-out tough, a wiseass with an answer for everything.

Billy was no longer entertained by kicking over anthills. He got a BB gun, and when he was fifteen, he aimed the gun at the backside of another boy and pulled the trigger. The shot grazed the boy’s butt. The kid squealed like a stuck pig. It was hilarious! Billy roared with laughter.