He was found by the only sort of people interested in deep, snowy, wooded gullies on a freezing day in February.... Children with sleds.
“One of my brothers looked over and said, ‘Hey, look at that! There’s a body down there,’” said Thomas Adams, who was 6 years old on that day, Feb. 1, 1970. “Someone said, ‘No, that’s a mummy!’ We were just kids.”
The Adams boys ran for their parents at the family’s weekend home in Saugerties, N.Y., a town in rural Ulster County. “My father walked up to the guy and said, ‘That’s a dead body. I’ve got to go call the sheriff,’” Mr. Adams, now 53, recalled last week.
There in the snow, a dead man lay on his back, his arms raised before him as if he were reading a newspaper. He wore a suit and a tie and was cleanshaven, approaching middle age, with galoshes over his shoes, $156 in his pocket and four bullet holes in the back of his head.
There was no identification, but the cold had preserved the body, and the prospects for learning the man’s name seemed promising.
“He was found in great condition,” Investigator James Browne of the New York State Police said last week. “We have his fingerprints. We have his DNA. We have his photographs.”
People were questioned and theories investigated. Leads were offered by a prison informer. A possible connection to the Mafia was raised. And yet, 46 years on, all that has not been enough.
“We just don’t know who he is,” Investigator Browne said.
In March, the police turned to an age-old tool: A sketch artist, working off a photo of the corpse, penciled a portrait of what the man might have looked like when he was alive. The police released the sketch to the public last month.
Over the decades, the case file on the murder has been passed down from one investigator to another. The most recent handoff, to Investigator Andrew D. Kinderman from Investigator Browne, took place in 2014. The men met over bags of evidence last week, a startling display of possible — yet thus far fruitless — clues found on the man’s person.
His money consisted of five bills: three fifties, a five and a single. In addition to his green suit and dark necktie, he wore an overcoat. Beneath his white dress shirt were more layers: a long-sleeved, olive shirt, a T-shirt and pale blue pajamas.
There were signs of modest means. His shoes were imitation leather. A hole in his underwear had been mended with a needle and thread.
The wardrobe was a hodgepodge of international trade. The tag on one shirt was marked “Hering,” from Brazil; another, “Rimrock” from Taiwan. The galoshes were from Canada, his underwear from Korea and his tie from Playboy Neckwear.
“For Men Who Think Young,” the label on the tie read.
He had a plastic comb, a toothpick and, pinned inside a coat pocket, a small key. His most valuable possessions were a gold ring with a red stone and markings indicating that it had been made in Portugal, and, on his left wrist, an Omega Seamaster watch.
Omega, based in Switzerland, made the watch that Neil Armstrong had worn on the moonabout six months earlier, and the one President Kennedy wore at his inauguration eight years before that. Investigators contacted Omega, and the company was able to track the man’s watch from its manufacture to the store it was shipped to in 1960 — Portugal again.
The bullets that killed the man had lodged in his head. They were small, from a .25-caliber pistol, and resembled those produced by the ammunition maker Companhia Brasileira de Cartuchos, based in Brazil.
There were letters and numbers jotted under the collar of his dress shirt: the markings of a dry cleaner. Investigators showed them to cleaners in New York City, with no results.
They wondered about the pajamas.
“One theory could be he was home sleeping, he was confronted by some individual at his home and made to throw a suit on, and ‘come with us’ type of deal,” Investigator Browne said.
But if that was the case, had the man been allowed to shave first? And tie a necktie and pull on galoshes and pick up a toothpick and comb and cash? These are not the acts of a man in a hurry with a gun pointed at him.
Investigators have another theory about the pajamas: The man had dressed in layers because he was cold — very cold, if he was new to New York from a warmer country. Like, say, Portugal or Brazil.
The year 1971 brought what seemed to be a tantalizing lead. An inmate at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, N.Y., came forward and said he had information about the death.
The inmate, Edward Sullivan, 42, was serving a sentence for manslaughter after being convicted in Queens. He told investigators that he had overheard other inmates in a prison yard describe how three men with the Mafia had killed a narcotics courier of Italian or Cuban descent, placed him in a trunk and dumped him down an embankment, according to notes in the case file.
Mr. Sullivan said the three men were Alphonse (Allie Boy) Persico, whose brother, Carmine, was a boss in the Colombo crime family, and two associates, Jerry Langella and Hugh Macintosh, who went by the nickname Apples. The Persico family owned a farm in Saugerties not far from where the body was found.
Investigators noted in 1971 that Mr. Sullivan had testified in three murder trials in the past, suggesting that perhaps he was prone to sharing jailhouse tips in hopes of currying favor.
Over the years, all three men in Mr. Sullivan’s statement were arrested on unrelated charges, and all three were questioned about the body. All denied any knowledge of the man. At least one of them may have been incarcerated at the time of the killing. All have since died, as has the inmate who spoke their names.
The Persicos have sold off most of the property on the farm, a family lawyer, Mathew J. Mari, said.
“No one in the family ever heard of it,” Mr. Mari said last week about the killing. The 89-year-old caretaker of the property, Joe Trunk, greeted a reporter last week and said he had been working there in 1970, and had likewise never heard about the body.
The years passed. In 2015, investigators had the dead man’s body exhumed at Blue Mountain Cemetery, where the town had buried it in an unmarked grave — coincidentally, just outside the Persico family farm. They collected DNA from the man’s bones to compare with a worldwide registry in hopes of finding a relative.
Still nothing.
Mr. Adams, who found the body with his brothers as a boy, now lives in California, but happened to be visiting his family’s property in Saugerties last week when the police released the new sketch. He said he had not dwelled on the memory very much over the years, but remained puzzled by what he saw that day.
“He had a dark suit on, you can remember that,” Mr. Adams said. “You think about a guy in a dark suit as a professional, not someone who could get murdered.”
culled -NY Times.
*These detectives never seem to give up until they solve a case.
Starting from the 2008 Democratic National Party convention when we first got to see Barack Obama's daughters Malia Ann Obama, and Sasha Obama, it was clear that they had an element of grace and style within them. With their dad set to bow out of office at the year end, we go back in time to see how America's number one daughters have evolved into the beauties they are now.
