By James C. Mckinley Jr., The New York Times
Syracuse, New York -- There is nothing glamorous about the manhunt Capt. Richard P. Walsh directs from his cluttered office on the third floor of police headquarters here. The mystery of who abducted and molested a 5-year-old girl 11 days ago does not look as if it will be solved with clever Holmes-like deductions or subtle clues like those in an Agatha Christie novel.
This is a grinding dragnet. Each morning, dozens of detectives travel through this industrial city to confront every known sexual offender in their files - more than 1,000 people - and establish whether they have alibis. They are following up hundreds of telephoned leads, mostly tips about suspicious men in white cars, one at a time.
“We have covered a lot of ground,” Captain Walsh says. “Our case file at this point is over 600 pages.”
For the captain and the other investigators involved in the search, it is something akin to a miracle that the victim is even alive. The blond girl was abducted by a man in a white sedan sometime around 6 p.m. on April 24 as she was riding her Barbie scooter two blocks to a friend’s house. The man lured her into the car with the promise of a gift, the police said.
At 12:30 p.m. the next day, about six and a half miles away, William J. Walters, an employee at the Carrier Corporation, was poking around the back of an abandoned warehouse that he was interested in buying when he heard a muffled noise coming from a pile of old carpets, tarps, spare tires and other garbage.
At first, Mr. Walters ignored the sounds, but when he got home an hour later, he heard the news reports about the frenzied search for the missing girl. He went back about 3:25 p.m. and dug around in the refuse, the police said.
The girl was there, hidden under a heavy tarp. Her eyes and mouth were covered with duct tape. Her hands were bound behind her back, and her feet were held tightly together with plastic zip ties. Mr. Walters removed the tape from her mouth and her cries for her mother spilled out, investigators said.
Wearing a T-shirt and short pants, she was losing heat fast in the unseasonable chilly weather; frostbite had begun to set in on tips of her tiny fingers. She had been there all night, she later told the police. The back of her head was bruised where it had hit the cracked asphalt when her attacker threw her on the ground. Later, at a hospital, investigators found physical evidence that she had been sexually assaulted.
“He literally dumped her like a piece of garbage,” said Detective Sergeant Thomas Connellan, one of the supervising investigators.
The little girl has described her attacker to the police. He is balding and in his 40’s, with tan skin and a mustache. He is 5 feet 10 inches to 6 feet tall. He drove a rusting white sedan full of bottles, cans and other detritus. That narrows it down to tens of thousands of people, some detectives acknowledged.
On Wednesday morning, about 40 detectives and state police investigators mustered in the Criminal Investigation Division office, among battered file cabinets, grimy computers and hard-used furniture. They sipped coffee from plastic foam cups and scanned sheafs of papers describing tips and known sex offenders. Aerial photos of the girl’s neighborhood and the crime scene adorned the wall, reminders of the vastness of their task.
Captain Walsh announced some good news. The Police Department had hired Jeanne Boylan, an Arizona sketch artist who is famous for her drawing of the Unabomber, to interview the girl and come up with a better composite picture of the attacker.
Some investigators were told to track down known sex offenders, eliminating them as suspects. Others were to check lists of employees at the companies near the abandoned warehouse for anyone with a criminal history.
People who used to work at the derelict building or might have had another connection to it were also sought. “It’s our thought that this guy may have had some knowledge of the area,” Sergeant Connellan said.
The police believe the assailant drove the girl to the isolated warehouse on Schuyler Road near Syracuse Hancock International Airport, where he sexually assaulted her. Then he redressed her, bound her and buried her under the tarp, holding it down with old tires. She would very likely have died of hypothermia within hours had Mr. Walters not found her, Captain Walsh said.
Captain Walsh and his crew have been tightlipped about precisely what evidence they found at the scene, but they say it is enough to identify the attacker, either through DNA evidence or fingerprints. There was also unspecified medical evidence collected at the hospital, investigators said.
The local police have been joined by a half-dozen investigators from the state police and about 20 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There are more than 60 investigators searching for the assailant. Most have been putting in 12-to-15-hour days for more than a week.
In the meantime, mothers in North Syracuse are afraid to let their children play on the sidewalks and streets. Some said they had seen a similar car roaming the neighborhood in the days before the attack. Mayor Matthew J. Driscoll said “People were really just floored when this happened in broad daylight.”
Jessica Kermes, a 23-year-old bartender, lives two blocks from the run-down frame house where the victim lives. The girl was on her way to visit Ms. Kermes’s daughter, Naomi Diaz, 6, when she was kidnapped.
But now Ms. Kermes said she is afraid to let her daughter leave the house. She says a man in a similar car approached Naomi just two days before her friend was attacked.
“I don’t even let her run outside yet,” she said. “It’s really scary because it could easily have been her.”
While the police search, the victim’s family have struggled to help her return to the normal rhythms of life. On the outside, she has been relatively cheery since the abduction, going to play with her friends in the neighborhood, friends and family members said. But she weeps whenever her parents are not nearby.
Linda J. Slifka, the girl’s aunt, said that the family has waited in suspense for an arrest, and has pinned its hopes on television: “America’s Most Wanted” plans to broadcast a segment about the case this weekend. “It might as well be a murder - it’s the same intense feeling,” Ms. Slifka said. “We are not going to feel closure until he’s caught.”
The child’s mother, Patricia Demore, who is divorced from the girl’s father and has remarried, declined a request to be interviewed. But she told reporters in a brief statement on Saturday that “this entire experience has been a nightmare.” On Tuesday, she and her daughter lounged in brilliant sunshine in their tiny backyard, near a swing set and three small bicycles. It had been the girl’s first day back in kindergarten.
Mrs. Demore is eight months pregnant with her second child. An ice cream truck came by, carousel blaring and waited for several minutes outside the gate, but the little girl and her mother did not venture from the yard. The girl sat on her mother’s lap. Two detectives in an unmarked car parked across the street and watched.
“I don’t have anything to say,” Mrs. Demore said when approached by a reporter, as the girl got down. “I’ve already been through enough.”