The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo Read Free Book Online Page B

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