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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.
    Ahead he saw patrolman Elmer Palmer, a fellow rookie, and called out a friendly greeting. But Palmer was standing quietly by the lopsided cardboard box, his face broken.
    Weinstein looked in the box and was staggered. He’d seen enough suffering and death for three lifetimes, but he’d never seen a murdered child. Few cops had in Philadelphia in the 1950s. Murder happened to adults, at the hand of someone they knew—jealous spouse, ex-partner. The rare body in a field was a gin-smelling hobo, an old drifter.
    Two homicide detectives joined the group around the body, in their dark overcoats and fedoras, accompanied by Dr. Joseph Spelman, the city’s chief medical examiner. More detectives and street cops arrived, and a captain sent the uniforms into the field in their shiny wet raincoats, kicking the underbrush for evidence. Seventeen feet from the body, they found a men’s blue Ivy League cap, size 7⅛.
    The ambulance pulled up, and Weinstein volunteered to take the boy out of the box. He lifted the small corpse gingerly.
    “Bruises, all up and down,” Dr. Spelman said.