The Case That Haunts The most notorious cold case in STL
Apr 16, 2017 17:32:37 GMT
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Post by albion on Apr 16, 2017 17:32:37 GMT
www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/the-case-that-haunts/Content?oid=2460475
On a mild winter day in February 1983, two men rummaged through the basement of a vacant apartment building at 5635 Clemens Avenue in northwest St. Louis. Their purpose, they would later tell police, was to find a metal pipe they could use to fix their broken-down jalopy.
After searching the main floor, the men crept downstairs into the basement. Blinded by the darkness, one of the men flicked a cigarette lighter. The horror revealed by the flame sent them running for the police.
Facedown amid the boiler-room rubble lay the headless body of an African-American female. Naked from the waist down, she wore only a yellow V-neck sweater fitted loosely around her torso. Fingers flecked with chipped crimson-red nail polish, her hands were bound behind her back with a strand of red-and-white nylon rope. Between her shoulders, where her neck used to be, there was only a hack-sawed hole.
When St. Louis homicide detectives Joe Burgoon and Herb Riley arrived, the building was teeming with police. Awaiting crime-scene technicians, the two veteran detectives speculated on the corpse's identity. Maybe, they guessed, she was a prostitute or drug addict from nearby Cabanne Courts, a housing project with a murderous past. It wasn't until technicians at last rolled the body over that they realized she was not a woman, but a pre-pubescent child. Instantly, the mood in that damp cellar turned from morbid curiosity to disgust. A child-killer.
At the time, the FBI called it the only decapitation in the nation involving someone so young.
As police officers searched a sixteen-block area for the girl's head, Burgoon and Riley returned to headquarters to check missing-persons reports. Surely, they thought, the girl's parents or relatives -- someone -- would call to report her missing. With any luck, they'd establish her identity that night and draw up a list of suspects.
The body went unclaimed on a slab in the city morgue for more than a week before it was given the name Jane Doe. For nine months she lay frozen. Finally, on a glum, rainy day in December 1983, she was buried in a pauper's grave in an historic black graveyard in north St. Louis county. At the funeral were a few homicide detectives, the chief medical examiner, and a half-dozen news reporters. Four muddy gravediggers served as pallbearers.
On a mild winter day in February 1983, two men rummaged through the basement of a vacant apartment building at 5635 Clemens Avenue in northwest St. Louis. Their purpose, they would later tell police, was to find a metal pipe they could use to fix their broken-down jalopy.
After searching the main floor, the men crept downstairs into the basement. Blinded by the darkness, one of the men flicked a cigarette lighter. The horror revealed by the flame sent them running for the police.
Facedown amid the boiler-room rubble lay the headless body of an African-American female. Naked from the waist down, she wore only a yellow V-neck sweater fitted loosely around her torso. Fingers flecked with chipped crimson-red nail polish, her hands were bound behind her back with a strand of red-and-white nylon rope. Between her shoulders, where her neck used to be, there was only a hack-sawed hole.
When St. Louis homicide detectives Joe Burgoon and Herb Riley arrived, the building was teeming with police. Awaiting crime-scene technicians, the two veteran detectives speculated on the corpse's identity. Maybe, they guessed, she was a prostitute or drug addict from nearby Cabanne Courts, a housing project with a murderous past. It wasn't until technicians at last rolled the body over that they realized she was not a woman, but a pre-pubescent child. Instantly, the mood in that damp cellar turned from morbid curiosity to disgust. A child-killer.
At the time, the FBI called it the only decapitation in the nation involving someone so young.
As police officers searched a sixteen-block area for the girl's head, Burgoon and Riley returned to headquarters to check missing-persons reports. Surely, they thought, the girl's parents or relatives -- someone -- would call to report her missing. With any luck, they'd establish her identity that night and draw up a list of suspects.
The body went unclaimed on a slab in the city morgue for more than a week before it was given the name Jane Doe. For nine months she lay frozen. Finally, on a glum, rainy day in December 1983, she was buried in a pauper's grave in an historic black graveyard in north St. Louis county. At the funeral were a few homicide detectives, the chief medical examiner, and a half-dozen news reporters. Four muddy gravediggers served as pallbearers.
