[h=4]The primary suspect[/h] In 2002, an Ohio-based psychiatrist alerted Philadelphia authorities that a patient, Mary (a pseudonym), had claimed for decades that her mother and father bought “America’s Unknown Child” from an underground human trafficking outpost in Kensington.
He was to be used as a sex toy, she claimed.
One day, while struggling to bathe the boy, Mary's mother beat him to death. Mary told her psychiatrist that she accompanied her mother to Northeast Philadelphia and watched her wrap the boy in a cheap blanket and toss him into the cardboard box.
Fleisher believes that Mary and the psychiatrist were telling the truth.
Even if Mary studied the case, even if she had some access to the files, "She said things that mathematically, if you go by all probability," he said, "to me, I think we're 8,000 to 1 that she's lying."
Addresses lined up. Testimony checked out. Descriptions matched.
Nothing the woman said could be confirmed conclusively, but it also couldn't be discounted, Fleisher said.
As a witness, she may be mentally unstable. But, Fleisher countered, if she did witness the horrific crime, "Wouldn't something like this make her mentally ill?"
Complicating matters further, Mary has mostly refused to cooperate on the case.
Once, she sat down with three of the main investigators — Philadelphia detective Tom Augustine, and Vidocq Society investigators Joseph McGillen and William Kelly, two of the men first on the scene that day in 1957.
All three came away convinced.