CHAPTER 4. A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM
On Saturday, February 23, 1957, a cold rain spattered a lonely country road on the northern edge of Philadelphia, falling on a field of brush and vines slowly claiming an old cardboard box behind the tree line. Inside the box lay a small blue-eyed boy of perfect tapered form, naked and laid out with his arms by his side like a forgotten boy-king of Egypt. His sarcophagus was a J. C. Penney box of corrugated cardboard, three feet long and eighteen inches wide, marked FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE. Great and prolonged care had been taken.
The boy had been washed and groomed and wrapped in a coarse Navajo blanket as if ritually prepared for the next life. His hair was roughly chopped, his fingernails trimmed with a loving touch. His life had been extinguished in an ancient ritual designed to harvest his innocence and beauty by inflicting on him the greatest of cruelties. These were the abominable mixing of love and tenderness with betrayal, torture, and terror, culminating in the horror of his murder, which alone provided the climax for the killer or killers.
The ritual was often confused with Satanism but bowed to neither God nor the devil. In the soft landscape of eastern Pennsylvania in the middle of the Eisenhower 1950s, no one had a clue what the signs meant. The boy was scarred with deep cuts and bruises from head to toe.
He was only three feet, four inches tall. But he was too long for the box, and had been curled into the little cardboard coffin to fit. His head peeked out the open end, sightless eyes fixed on the sky. Moles tunneled under the wild grass that sprouted around the boy. Mice and insects rustled nearby in the underbrush, sensing the seeping blood.
He lay only fifteen feet from the road, but remained unseen. The narrow one-lane road was mostly quiet. The field was a last wild green patch surrounded by city, by hospitals and police stations and thousands of suburban homes. But the surrounding fields had changed little since colonial horses thundered and hounds bayed their call over the Fox Chase Inn. Now and again an automobile tunneled on the road south through the mist to Verree Road, past the woods and fields to the Verree house, still standing, once invaded by the British. Then the road fell quiet again.
It was a remote grave, carefully chosen.
It was warm for February but the rain cut with a raw chill. The land was hushed in an attitude of waiting. There had not been much snow for years but the big storms were coming. The oceans were spinning the thirty-year cycle. Climactic changes that would turn the 1960s into the snowiest decade in a century were already in the air.
The boy was decomposing very slowly in the cold. The animals had not gotten to him yet. Clouds fled; sun dried the eyes and little face. Night came and went. Orion the hunter glittered in the south, Jupiter was bright. The field fell dark and quiet, the boy’s lips white as the moon sailing with the winter stars. The sun rose without warmth. There was no movement left in him except gravity drawing his blood downward in his body.
That Saturday, city people whirred north to a city park with a creek Audubon had admired more than a hundred years earlier. A priest turned in to the quiet Good Shepherd Home for “wayward girls,” deep in the field across the street. In the afternoon John Stachowiak was bicycling by to play basketball at a Catholic church gymnasium, when suddenly he left his bike by the tree line and walked into the field.
He was nervous but excited. Stachowiak was eighteen years old, the son of Polish immigrants who spoke little English, and he was a trapper. He kept nineteen muskrat traps in the woods and field; he lived nearby, they were easy to check. But he hadn’t even set them and the season was almost over. He had been afraid for weeks to set the traps since his older brother discovered a body hanging on the limb of a tree in the nearby woods. The pale dangling man haunted his nightmares. So did the memory of his mother and father when the Philadelphia patrolman came to the house to take a report from his brother about the suicide. Refugees from the Soviet police state, they trembled as if it were Stalin’s dreaded NKVD, who’d snatched many of their friends in the night, never to be seen again.
The dense undergrowth stretching back from the tree line by the road was perfect cover for small game. But the teenager was startled and upset. Two of his muskrat traps were set! Who would have fooled with his traps? Combined with the suicide, the lonely field gave him an eerie feeling. He was about to leave when he saw a long rectangular box in a tangle of vines. The field was a dumping ground, and he was curious to see what was in it. He grabbed it on one end and pulled it upright, but it was heavy and he put it down. Walking around it, he looked into the open end for a long moment. He decided not to play basketball that day. Stachowiak rushed home determined not to tell his brother, his parents, or anyone what he had seen near the woods of the hanging man. He didn’t want the police to return and terrify his family.
Two days later, on the afternoon of Monday the 25th, Frank Guthrum, a junior at LaSalle University, was taking the country road home from classes when he pulled over and parked by the tree line. Guthrum was an older student, in his midtwenties, who’d had trouble adjusting to student life. Two weeks earlier, on February 11, he’d braked for a rabbit that ran in front of his car and into the field. On a whim, he followed the rabbit into the underbrush. He lost sight of the rabbit but found two steel traps and decided to set them. Now it was 3:15, still light enough to see what had been caught in the steel jaws.
He was disappointed to find the traps empty. But about fifteen feet from the road, at the intersection of two footpaths, was a curiosity, a long cardboard box snared by the underbrush. Guthrum leaned down and saw the small head, white as porcelain, the limp figure wrapped in a blanket.
A doll. A big doll. He looked again at the bruises on the small head, the chopped blond hair.
Not a doll.
Guthrum hurried home. That evening he told his brother, who was a priest, what he had seen, but he decided not to call the police. He didn’t want to get involved, and the police were already watching him. They’d recently accused him of being a Peeping Tom, pretending to chase rabbits in the woods in order to spy on the “wayward girls” in the Good Shepherd Home across the street. The last thing he wanted was close questioning about the box.
The next morning, Tuesday the 26th, Guthrum was driving to school when he heard on the car radio that police were searching for possible kidnap victim Mary Jane Barker, four years old, missing from Bellmawr, New Jersey. Bellmawr was just across the river from Philadelphia. When he got to school he sought advice from two faculty advisers, then spoke with his brother again. The priest said, “You know what you have to do.” At 10:10 A.M., he called the police.
The Philadelphia Police Department was headquartered in the French Empire stone edifice of City Hall, with the stone relief of Moses the Lawgiver glowering over the judicial entrance. But despite the antiquated rooms the force was among the most modern in the country. Patrolmen drove red 1955 Chevrolet paneled wagons, among the first heavy-duty cruisers designed especially for police.
Sergeant Charles Gargani took Guthrum’s call in the homicide bureau, then ordered a radio message broadcast to all the red cars: “… investigate a cardboard box in the woods of Susquehanna Road, across from the girls’ home. Could be a body inside, or could be a doll…”
Patrolman Sam Weinstein was skeptical and annoyed as he trudged into the muddy field through the cold rain. A stout man with a square head and broad nose, Weinstein was a streetwise rookie cop, thirty years old with a wife and two kids. He’d already made his name in the department as a tough guy, quick to use his fists. Weinstein had seen combat in the Pacific in World War II. His father had been murdered when he was in the womb. His mother died when he was a toddler. He’d been raised in South Philadelphia by an uncle and aunt who were Lutheran but kept his dead mother’s wish to raise him Jewish. Weinstein had a surly attitude nobody liked unless he was on their side.