A frightened and unmarried mother gave birth to a baby boy with the help of a friend. She had kept her pregnancy hidden from her parents. Her boyfriend had skedaddled to find work in North Carolina, leaving the girl alone with her secret burden.
A new-born boy was discovered sealed up in a plastic bag at an old county landfill. It probably had been discarded in a green box dumpster near a local hospital. Among the refuse nearby were some medical papers and clinicalparaphernalia.
The infant apparently had been suffocated.
That was in the late 1970s. The case was turned over to the Raleigh County Sheriff’s Department. The photo of a deputy at the landfill appeared on page one.
An investigation into the alleged criminal case was carried out by local law enforcement. Suspects were questioned and released. No arrests were ever made.
Not long after that Raleigh County incident I heard about another abandoned infant that had been discarded in a trash can at a Princeton service station.
Working as a police reporter for a Bluefield newspaper, I pulled into the parking lot at a Princeton hospital where it was reported that the new-born girl was alive and recovering in an incubator.
I went through the chain of command and asked if I would be allowed to photograph the child in the incubator for the newspaper. Eventually, I was cleared and got the photo after dressing in some hospital apparel.
The photo ran on page one and stirred the hearts of readers throughout West Virginia and Virginia.
As fortune would have it years later, I learned the identity of the abandoned little girl, who ironically had been adopted by a photographer friend of mine in Princeton.
Sounds unbelievable, but it is true. A beautiful dark-eyed beauty in her wedding gown was posted on the wall of my friend’s studio.
That touching story turned out to have a happy ending. The case of the abandoned boy in Beckley was never solved.
But in my mind, I still haven’t given up. In dreams I discover new evidence and turn it over to police. In dreams, not in reality: I see a young woman who is pregnant and fearful that her parents will find out about her liaisons with a young man. He is a truck driver and she is a nurse.
He lights out for a job in North Carolina and leaves her alone with the living cargo that she carries.
I see a close friend assisting with her delivery in a parking lot, helping to place the newborn in a cumbersome plastic container, tying a knot at the top end. Perhaps the infant cried out but was stifled in the pliant casing.
Then, the women flung the bundle into the nearest dumpster. There was no baby blanket, no clothing, only the naked flesh and nothing else.
DNA tests were not available back then.
But in my dreams, I see a tiny bone, probably a fingerbone, that has preserved incriminating evidence, implicating genetic material lodged in the cartilage.
I wonder if the mother wakes up in the middle of the night seeing the infant’s tiny face, the lost look in its eyes.
She might even hear its cries, its protests of being abandoned in a plastic bag at the bottom of a green box, a dumpster without pity or remorse.
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Top o’ the morning!