The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page B08

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Sunday, February 11, 2007 50 years later, no leads in boy's death B8 www.philly.com Members of the medical examiner's investigative force paid tribute at the boy's grave in a Philadelphia potter's field in 1 957. DEPARTMENT, PHILADELPHIA, PA. INFORMATION WANTED UNSOLVED from Bl piece of the blanket, reams of investigative reports, and even Patrick Gibson's card. Altogether, the contents can shed light on one of the most investigated cases in city history, except for the one thing that could help break it the victim's name. And while a police detective is assigned to oversee the case and members of the Vi-docq Society a Philadelphia-based group of professional and amateur sleuths are working to develop leads, chances dim each year that the boy's identity will ever be known.

The details of the case, however, remain fixed in time. That Feb. 25, a 26-year-old La Salle College student who was known to spy on the Good Shepherd home for girls on then-rural Susquehanna Road in Fox Chase saw across from the home a large box for a J.C. Penney bassinet with what looked like a doll or possibly a child inside. The student did not report his discovery to police until the next day after hearing a radio report of a missing child in New Jersey and talking to a priest.

The radio call to check the box went to Officer Elmer Palmer, a father of young children. "It wasn't a doll. It was a child," Palmer recalled in a recent interview. As it has with others involved, the case has stuck with Palmer, and over the years he has visited the boy's grave. "It was tough," the long-retired officer said.

"It's something you don't forget. This was the one that bothered everybody." The boy's blond hair had been crudely chopped. His hands were wrinkled from being in water right before he was killed. He was about 4 or 5 years old. Because of the cold weather, it was hard to tell how long he had been dead, possibly three or four days.

Police took the unusual step of issuing a poster of the dead boy's face with pictures of the box and a cap found at the scene. About 10,000 copies were posted on stores around the city. Investigators even dressed the body in children's clothing to make the boy more recognizable. One theory was that he was Steven Damman, who was 34 months old when kidnapped outside a Long Island supermarket in October 1955. (The Damman connection was ruled out at the time and again in 2003 after a DNA analysis.) All authorities really knew in 1957 was that the child had been beaten and malnourished and probably killed by a parent or caregiver.

Tom Augustine, the detective who oversaw the case for a decade and retired in December after questionable drug tests, A Police Department poster from the time sought help from the public in solving the crime. Fifty years later, the victim still has no name. and Bill Fleisher, commissioner of the Vidocq Society, saw the posters as boys and were deeply affected. "It was very heartbreaking for me as a kid," said Augustine, who was 11 at the time. "It could be you.

It could be your brother." "I was literally stunned," said Fleisher, who was 13 when he saw the poster at the Penn Fruit store on City Avenue. Many tips came in. Someone reported seeing the boy with a man in a restaurant in Camden. A man reported seeing a woman and a boy getting something out of a trunk off Susquehanna Road the day before the La Salle student spotted the box. None checked out.

William Kelly, a civilian in the POLICE MICHAEL BRYANT Inquirer Staff Photographer William Kelly, a retired civilian employee of the Philadelphia Police Department, is still on the case. "It's been a labor of love," says Kelly, standing behind the boy's new headstone in Ivy Hill Cemetery. Memorial Service The Vidocq Society, named after an 19th-century French detective who used forensics to solve cold cases, will hold a memorial service for "America's Unknown Child" at 10 a.m. Feb. 26 at Ivy Hill Cemetery, 1201 Easton Rd.

their Lower Merion home. M. said she had helped her mother dispose of the body. Fleisher and Kelly said there was nothing to disprove story, but nothing to prove it, either. Now living in West Chester, Patrick Gibson said he had forgotten what he wrote in his card and how much money he sent for the boy's funeral.

"I never totally forgot" the case, he said, "but I haven't though about it for years." Recently, police said Detective Regina Byarm had been assigned to oversee the case. She was not even born when the case first made headlines. "It's been a labor of love," Kelly said. "My only regret is that I don't have another 50 years to give." On July 24, 1957, with detectives as pallbearers, the boy was buried in a Philadelphia potter's field. A donated headstone said, "Heavenly Father, Bless This Unknown Boy." In 1998, the boy's remains were exhumed, and mitochondrial DNA was extracted from a tooth.

He was reburied in Ivy Hill Cemetery with a new headstone: "America's Unknown Child." For Vidocq Society members, the most intriguing lead came in 2002 from a woman identified only as M. and now living Ohio. In a meeting, M. told Augus- Knox says he does not regret his time making payday loans Police Department's identification unit, checked footprints of infants at area hospitals. He sorted through thousands for the years 1951 through 1953 and to this day wonders whether any of the poorly taken footprints he could not read might have belonged to the boy.

Kelly later examined 11,200 entry photos of Hungarian refugees who had arrived in the United States in 1956. He found 10 photos of children who could have been the boy, but all were tracked down. Kelly, 79, continues to investigate the case as a Vidocq Society member with Joseph McGil-len, also 79, an investigator for the Medical Examiner's Office when the body was found. was that the borrower would get his or her regular paycheck by then and repay the loan and the interest. In many cases, though, borrowers couldn't repay in time.

The bank would then add another $17 interest for a second two-week period, or "rollover." That meant a customer who didn't have much money in the first place now owed $134 for a loan of $100. "Credit heroin" is how Allen-town lawyer Alan Jennings describes payday lending practices in general. Jennings, who heads Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley, said that too often, people who had gotten such loans "kept going back for more." Crusader's loans were made from 80 storefront offices in Allentown, the Philadelphia area, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Scranton. Knox's campaign said the bank made "hundreds of thousands" of payday loans. By the summer of 2000, the federal Office of Thrift Supervision was raising serious concerns about Crusader's payday lending business.

So was a consumer advocacy group, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which in a letter to the Federal Reserve System said the terms of Crusader's payday loans amounted to annual interest rates of up to 431 percent. With angry regulators on its tine, Kelly and McGillen that the boy had been a child her late mother bought when he was a toddler and regularly sexually abused. His name, M. said, was Jonathan, and he was kept in the basement of gaged in "predatory lending and foreclosures." A few days later, a Brady ally in City Council, Carol Campbell, lamented how the race had been reshaped by Knox's wealth "by whatever means acquired." Knox had initially said he would spend up to $15 million on his campaign. In the interview last week, he revised that, saying he would spend "whatever it takes" to win the May 15 Democratic primary and the mayor's office in the fall.

He played down payday lend-ing's importance at his former bank, saying it was a small slice of total operations. His campaign referred some of The Inquirer's questions to two former Crusader directors his wife, Linda R. Knox, and Bruce Levy. Levy estimated that payday lending produced roughly $1 MAX LEVINE Inquirer Staff Photographer Tom Knox said he thought at the time that payday loans issued by his Crusader Bank in 1999 and 2000 were "a service to the community." Contact staff writer Joseph A. Gambardello at 215-854-2513 or jgambardellophillynews.com.

Tom Knox's Career: Some Key Dates 1967-86: Chief executive officer, Preferred Benefits Corp. 1987- 92: CEO, Knox Group Inc. 1988- 90: CEO, Kasser Industries and Gimco Holding. 1992- 93: $1-a-year deputy mayor for management and productivity in cabinet of Mayor Ed Rendell. 1993- 95: State-appointed rehabilitator, Fidelity Mutual Insurance.

1989- 2002: Chairman and CEO, Crusader Holding Corp. 1999-2004: CEO and chairman, Fidelity Insurance Group. 2004-06: CEO, United Health Care of Pennsylvania. 2006: Retired. million in profit during the first full year that the short-lived lending program ran.

Later in the interview, he said the program produced about 20 percent of the bank's overall profits that year. Tom Knox stressed that his former bank had been right to get out of payday lending. "We did the right thing and got out," he said. "It's as simple as that." Contact staff writer Marcia Gelbart at 21 5-854-2338 or mgelbartphillynews.com. He said his concern now, as then, is to help people who have no place to turn for small loans much like the situation in which Knox said he found himself after joining the Navy at 17.

When returning home, he said, he had to borrow $3 and pay back $5 to afford a round-trip bus ticket from Norfolk, to Philadelphia. "I believe people in that situation should not be ignored," Knox said. Knox bought Crusader Bank in 1989. He had already made millions in the insurance business, starting out as a $100-a-week life-insurance salesman in South Philadelphia and eventually founding and leading a firm, Preferred Benefits Corp. He said he got his first $1 million commission on an insurance policy in the late 1970s.

"I've been making a lot of money for a long time," said Knox, who is 66. At Crusader Bank, he said, he got involved with payday loans when one of the bank's lawyers introduced him to Advance America one of the nation's biggest payday lenders. The lawyer, as Knox recalled, said, "We think they have a great idea for you, and this is a business you would probably want to be in." Here's how Crusader's payday loans worked: A customer who borrowed $100 would owe $117 two weeks later. The idea KNOX from Bl this practice. He said the bank wanted out, having tired of criticisms from "social groups, do-gooder types" and federal regulators.

"They wanted us out of the business. We wanted to extricate ourselves," Knox said. "We got out." At the time, he said, he thought the loans served working-class people well. "I thought at the time it was a service to the community," Knox said. He said he did not realize at first that the loans, if unpaid and renewed again and again, could lead lower-income people into spiraling debt.

"When we went into this business, we weren't aware that people were rolling over these loans and it was costing them this money. We were going to make a couple of dollars per loan. As it turned out, there were these rollover loans, and that was what all the regulators and all the people who were criticizing us were talking about." While taking pains to say his bank's loans had not been improper, Knox said that if he became mayor, he would ask banks to offer cheaper short-term loans at no profit. "I'd like to see the city require some of the banks that we do business with provide what we call 'micro loans' to people that need them, and to do it on a break-even basis," Knox said. back, the bank made an agreement with the Office of Thrift Supervision to pull out of this type of lending just 18 months after it had begun.

The next year, Crusader was sold to Narberth-based Royal Bank, netting Knox about $17.2 million. He owned 48 percent of the bank at the time. In recent weeks, Knox's wealth has become an issue in the mayoral campaign. His $2 million self-funded TV advertising blitz vaulted him to second place in the latest poll, and set off calls from some politicians for changing the campaign-contribution caps that Philadelphia adopted in 2003. When one of Knox's rivals, Brady, launched his candidacy on Jan.

25, he spoke mostly about stopping crime and improving the city and also vowed to curb lenders who en.