The decades-old message scrawled on the bottom of a dresser drawer was ominous alluding to a murder and detailing the location of the victim's body. But after fruitless digging by police in a back yard in the Monmouth County borough Wednesday, the message may prove more useful to a local author than to authorities.
Shovels, a backhoe and ground-penetrating radar failed to unearth any human remains from the yard of Richard Fernicola, a doctor and author who says he might use the detail in his next book.
Fernicola said Thursday it was an easy decision to consent to the search.
"My immediate decision was that we had to resolve this because I didn't want people saying a month or a year or 10 years from now, 'What happened to the body in your backyard?'" he said.
The impetus came from a drawing on the underside of a dresser drawer owned for the last 30 years by Michael and Mary Ryan of Bradley Beach. According to Mary Ryan, her husband acquired the dresser in 1969 from a woman who was moving into the house Fernicola now occupies. Her sister convinced her recently to contact authorities.
"Someone had written, 'Map of the body of the woman I killed,'" Fernicola said.
Fernicola's house is one of several cottages that belonged to a hotel that burned to the ground in the late 1920s. That raises the possibility that the dresser could have come from a different cottage, or that whoever wrote the map was a vacationer from somewhere else.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2004-12-24-map_x.htm
Shovels, a backhoe and ground-penetrating radar failed to unearth any human remains from the yard of Richard Fernicola, a doctor and author who says he might use the detail in his next book.
Fernicola said Thursday it was an easy decision to consent to the search.
"My immediate decision was that we had to resolve this because I didn't want people saying a month or a year or 10 years from now, 'What happened to the body in your backyard?'" he said.
The impetus came from a drawing on the underside of a dresser drawer owned for the last 30 years by Michael and Mary Ryan of Bradley Beach. According to Mary Ryan, her husband acquired the dresser in 1969 from a woman who was moving into the house Fernicola now occupies. Her sister convinced her recently to contact authorities.
"Someone had written, 'Map of the body of the woman I killed,'" Fernicola said.
Fernicola's house is one of several cottages that belonged to a hotel that burned to the ground in the late 1920s. That raises the possibility that the dresser could have come from a different cottage, or that whoever wrote the map was a vacationer from somewhere else.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2004-12-24-map_x.htm
