Contractor who found remains of baby in ceiling hopes child 'at peace' UPDATE #13

[Catty1]

Wed Jul 25, 4:30 PM

By Steve Rennie


TORONTO (CP) - Bob Kinghorn didn't know what he had on his hands as he gingerly extracted a carefully wrapped bundle he discovered concealed within the second-floor ceiling joists of an east-end home.

But when the 37-year-old Toronto contractor opened the package, he was confronted with a sight - and a smell - he'll never forget: the badly decomposed remains of a tiny baby, wrapped in brittle, yellowed newspaper from a bygone era.

"You could see the skin was leathery and brown," Kinghorn said Wednesday as he shared the details of his stunning discovery.

"You could see a thigh bone, shin bone, all the five toes. And then all the fingers on the hand," said the father of three, his voice breaking with emotion.

"It was disbelief. I didn't believe it. I thought it was a cat, dog, or something."

Kinghorn said the newspaper - dated Sept. 15, 1925 - provides the most compelling clue to just how long the body has been entombed beneath the home's attic floorboards.

"People don't keep paper for 20 years and wrap up somebody," he said. "It happened about that time, I'm almost positive."

A land title search revealed the property, on Kintyre Avenue just east of the downtown core, was purchased in 1919. Provincial documents indicate the male homeowner died in February 1939, while his spouse appears to have lived at the house until 1941, when she was admitted to Toronto's Ontario Hospital as a patient.

An affidavit reveals authorities took ownership of the home under the provincial Mental Hospitals Act after the female owner was admitted to the hospital.

It's unknown if the baby belonged to the couple.

The red brick, three-storey house stood empty Wednesday. A large maple tree dwarfs the small front yard, which is enclosed by a black iron fence. A few boards leaned against the wall on the front porch.

Kinghorn said he's been renovating the home for its owners, a couple that has lived in the house for about two months.

Kinghorn said he and a co-worker noticed a strange smell in the second-floor room where they were drilling a hole in a beam to run a wire through the wall.

The small prospector's light strapped to Kinghorn's forehead revealed what he thought was a package tucked into a joist.

Kinghorn removed the bundle, which he described as being about 60 centimetres by 30 centimetres. It was wrapped in a floral-print comforter tied together with butcher string, he said.

"I pushed on it, trying to guess what was in the package before I opened it, and I felt the bones. I said, 'Nah. Nah, no way," he said.

Using a small Exacto knife, Kinghorn sliced through the comforter and unwrapped the newspaper beneath it, revealing the remains of the baby, curled in the fetal position.

Kinghorn said he dropped his tools and prayed for both the child and its parents after making the grisly discovery.

"God bless those parents, because if they did anything wrong to you, they're probably dead and they'll be judged now," he said.

He left the house and walked two doors down the street to his own home, where he told his wife what he'd found. She then called the police.

"I started crying, because I have a four-month-old baby, and it was about the size of my baby," he said.

Police arrived shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday and remained at the house until about midnight.

Toronto police Sgt. Robert Whalen said the home's current owners are not suspects in the case.

An autopsy is scheduled for Thursday to determine the child's gender and cause of death. The body isn't easily identifiable because of its level of decomposition, Whalen said.

Kinghorn said he'll raise the money to bury the child, which he has dubbed Baby Kintyre.

"I have three kids. For a child to be put in a damn hole with no burial, that's wrong. Eighty-three years stuck in a frigging wall. He'll be at peace now."

[Kirbys Mom]

wow that brings new mean to dumpster babies...pl have been hidin the bodies of there children since 1925. a sad world this is, i wonder if they will learn of what happened to the baby....who knows...? :confused:

[jackmilliesmom]

How sad for everyone involved and I hope the baby finds peace now.

As for the Contractor he was a kind gentle man who going about his work made a horrific discovery and I hope he finds peace also after finding the body of the child. He is in prayers.

[wombat2u2004]

Whoaaa....what a find !!!! I'd fall off my ladder if that was me.
But I don't know if they will ever work out the full story behind something like this.
At least the baby will now have a decent burial.
Wom

[moosmom]

Wow! If those walls could talk.

RIP sweet little baby.

[AdoreMyDogs]

How heart breaking. I'm so glad it wasn't me who found that poor baby. I don't think I could ever shake the emotional scaring. :(

[Twisterdog]

Wow. No one will probably ever know the whole story.

Was the baby still-born?

Or did the woman, presumably mentally ill, kill the baby later on?

Did the husband cover up for his mentally ill wife?

Fascinating. I'll bet, too, if we could interview those neighbors living around those people at the time, they would have no clue.

I guess the term "skeleton in the closet" might have had an actual beginning.

Sad.

[Marigold2]

Just goes to show you that if someone doesn't want a baby they will find a way to get rid of it no matter what century they live in. Rest in peace little angle.

[sumbirdy]

How sad. From the way it sounds the baby was probably killed or they would have buried it in their yard. Or there was some scandal going on.
I don't see how someone can do so much evil to innocence.
Or how a mother can carry a child for 9 months and not bond with this precious soul she has created and then kill it and have no regrets or guilt. :mad:
But we don't know that that is the case here and I'm straying from the subject.

R.I.P. precious baby. May you be held in Jesus' arms and be the whole and perfect baby that you once were.

[Catty1]

Here's an update...and the hope that the wee one perhaps did not suffer...

No signs of trauma found on mummified baby
Toronto police want to locate relatives of couple who owned Riverdale house from 1919 to 1941
Headshot of Anthony Reinhart

ANTHONY REINHART

July 27, 2007

The autopsy suite at the Hospital for Sick Children would seem the last place anyone would want to be, but yesterday it drew a small crowd of experts to witness a rarity: The postmortem examination of a mummified baby's corpse found under the attic floor of a Toronto house this week.

About 10 medical and forensic officials were on hand as the procedure revealed the baby was a newborn boy, with no broken bones or signs of trauma or disease, and the organs in "remarkably good shape" despite the passage of about 80 years since he died, said Jim Cairns, Ontario's deputy chief coroner.

"Everybody who officially could be at this autopsy was at this autopsy," Dr. Cairns said. "It's not very often that you get to be able to see an autopsy on a child who has died approximately 80 years ago," and yet is so relatively intact.

"You could see the different sides of the heart, you could see the valves, I mean, it was remarkable how well-preserved it was." Pathologists also found remnants of an umbilical cord.

Dr. Cairns said all of this lends credence to the theory that the baby - found wrapped in a 1925 newspaper and a blanket by a home renovator on Tuesday - died shortly after birth, when its body would have lacked bacteria that aid in decomposition. Dry air in the attic, heat from the chimney and the insulating effects of the paper and blanket might also have led to mummification, he said.

"What we can't tell at this time is whether the baby was born alive or dead," Dr. Cairns said. If microscopic tests can show that his lungs had expanded, officials will know that the little boy drew breath before he died, but tissue damage could prevent a definitive result.

The newspaper, meanwhile, turned out to be the front page of the Sept. 15, 1925, edition of The Mail and Empire, and not The Globe, as was originally thought. (The two papers were merged to form The Globe and Mail in 1936.)

The fragile state of the newsprint required delicate handling, Dr. Cairns said, but doctors were able to read the page.

"We could read one story about a woman who had poisoned her six-year-old son and then poisoned herself with strychnine," he said, "and the coroner was Rutherford, and decided that no inquest was necessary."

The next step for Toronto police will be to try to locate relatives of Wesley and Della Russell, who owned the house where the remains were found, from 1919 to 1941. Property records show that Mr. Russell died in 1939, and that Mrs. Russell had been confined to the Ontario Hospital in Toronto as a psychiatric patient when the public trustee for Ontario sold the house on her behalf.

"If we can track down relatives, and they would be prepared to give us a sample of DNA, then we would try and match this, just to confirm that that's where the baby came from," Dr. Cairns said.

The baby was found in a home on Kintyre Avenue, in the east-end Riverdale neighbourhood, by a neighbour named Bob Kinghorn, who was doing renovations for a young couple who recently bought the two-storey house.

Mr. Kinghorn estimated the baby to be a few months old, based on the size of his own four-month-old child, but Dr. Cairns said the autopsy has disproved that.

[jackmilliesmom]

Wow it is amazing what they can tell from testing these days also I hope they find some relative who can answer the question which is now asked is the child a relative of the Russells or some other person who may have been in the house or staying at the house around then.


I hope it is answered soon and that the child can now get a decent burial and place of rest - Prayers and (((hugs))) little one

[Argranade]

Yep that was on the news here in Toronto,

Poor baby, I dout anyone knows what realy happened.

[Catty1]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/kintyre/

In Depth
Mummified remains
Who is the baby at 29 Kintyre?
Last Updated Sept. 17, 2007
John Nicol, CBC News

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/kintyre/gfx/kintyre2.jpg
The mummified remains of an infant were found at 29 Kintyre. (John Nicol/CBC)

A couple of months ago, on the evening of July 24, 2007, home renovator Bob Kinghorn was looking for electrical wires in an old house in East Toronto when he spotted a package that had been placed between the attic floorboards and the second-floor ceiling.

Kinghorn reached up through the laths and tossed the package, wrapped in a floral comforter, down to the floor. He jumped down from his ladder, cut through the butcher's string, and found another wrapping inside, made from the Mail and Empire newspaper from 1925.

At first he thought he had found a cat or dog. "It smelled dead," said Kinghorn, 37. "If you've smelt death, you know what it smells like." Then, "when I ripped open the package, really ripped it open, it was like all crunched up in a fetal position. I counted the little fingers and toes, just like a dried up baby. It was pretty horrific. I went into denial right away.

"No! No! No! I got mad, threw off my headgear, kicked something and bounced out of the house. My first thought was murder. I thought: How could you do that? You sons of bitches!"


http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/kintyre/gfx/renovator.jpg
Kinghorn's discovery set off a round of speculation among police and the public on how the unidentified baby on Kintyre Ave. ended up under the attic floorboards. (John Nicol/CBC)


Kinghorn's discovery set off a round of speculation among police and the public on how the unidentified baby on Kintyre Ave. Baby Kintyre ended up under the attic floorboards. Was it the offspring of an unwed mother? Was it hidden to save a marriage? Was it killed by someone too poor to raise or bury it?

The infant was a boy and the Ontario coroner's office determined that the mummified baby was about 80-years-old, which fit with the newspaper it was wrapped in and which was dated Sept. 15, 1925.

The first examination concluded that the infant had reached full term and that there was no evidence of injuries or stab marks.

Dr. Jim Cairns, Ontario's Deputy Chief Coroner, said the forensic evidence is inconclusive, but it suggests the baby was "born alive and died shortly afterwards." He didn't see the need for a police investigation, especially since anyone connected to the baby would be long since dead.

But that still left the essential question unanswered: who was Baby Kintyre?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/kintyre/gfx/della-rita-wesley.jpg
Della Russell, Rita (Rutter) Rich and Wesley Russell. (Courtesy of Russell-Way family)


Early research by reporters, through libraries, land registries and the Ontario archives suggested that it may have been the offspring of Della Emily (nee Rutter) and Wesley Llewellyn Russell, who owned the home from 1919 until 1941.

Wesley was a postal clerk and his wife ended up in a psychiatric hospital sometime before 1939, the year Wesley died. They had no known children, but shared the home every so often with Charles Wesley Rutter, Della's brother, according to the city directory.

Most news outlets dropped the hunt for relatives at that point — it was far-fetched to believe someone might still be alive who knew about the home and the identity of Baby Kintyre. But the CBC soldiered on and enlisted a group of in-house and external librarians in the hunt.
The search broadens

Members of the Russell clan were relatively easy to find in and around Prince Edward County, near Belleville, Ont. But none of them had any knowledge of the couple's lives. Della had three siblings who survived to adulthood but only one had a child, and that family had moved to the U.S.

The chances of anyone in that family knowing what happened on a tree-lined neighborhood in faraway Toronto seemed slim.

Then, a member of the Russell clan in Ottawa contacted the CBC and said her cousin's wife had a cousin on the Rutter side who had lived on Kintyre. This woman, who was still living in the U.S., was Rita Rich.

When we tracked her down, we were prepared for the possibility that she might not contribute much to the story and that, at 92, she likely would have either forgotten the details, or that she might a hard time understanding what we wanted.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/kintyre/gfx/rita.jpg
Rita Rich. (John Nicol/CBC)


What we didn't expect was the vivid detail with which Rich recalled the house and the characters who lived there.

When told a baby was found in the attic floorboards and that it was likely placed there in 1925, she was shocked.

"A baby!" she said from her senior's apartment in western New York. "Oh for goodness sakes!"
Life at 29 Kintyre

When we told her the date, we figured the infant was probably placed in the floorboards around her 10th birthday. What's more, it was hidden under the floorboards of her very room, a room brightly painted yellow and royal blue and filled with dolls and miniature doll furniture.

There was even an altar in the corner where she said her nightly prayers to her mother, who had died in 1918, when Rich was three, during the Spanish flu epidemic.

That's why Rich ended up at 29 Kintyre. But she was never short of parenting. She had her father, her aunt and her uncle to take care of her, as well as a boarder named George Turner. Rich felt it implausible that any of them could have been responsible for the baby in the floorboards.

Her father Charles was a barber who never remarried, and he did his best to make sure Rich never forgot her mother. Every year on her birthday, Rutter took his daughter to the storage room where he had a trunk of her mother's belongings.

"He would take one thing out of it and give to me and say, 'This is from your mother to wish you a happy birthday,'" Rich recalled. "The last thing he gave me, when I was 16, was a ring with five pearls."

Her father was such an easygoing character that one day he brought a client home with him, and that man ended up staying for almost 10 years. George Turner, in his 20s, had just arrived from Ottawa.

"He was like a big brother to me," said Rich.
The cast broadens

Asked if it was possible Turner could have got a woman pregnant and didn't know what to do with the baby, Rich countered: "He would have married her for sure. I mean, he was very much a gentleman."

Whenever Rich went off to take the Dundas streetcar, Turner escorted her to the stop and was there in the evening waiting for her to return.

As for her Uncle Wesley, she described him as a "second father. He was very good to me."

Apparently he was handy around the house, turning the basement into a den and taking a week off work every two years to paint the outside. He also took two weeks off in the summer to run an ice cream stand down at the Canadian National Exhibition. Rich and her friends benefited from free ice creams.

"He used to make home brew," said Rich. "He drank quite a bit, but I never saw him drunk. He never missed a day's work. I know that."

Rich ruled out her aunt as a possible mother to the child because it was well known she couldn't have children as a result of a childhood fall from a horse. "Della was always very sad she couldn't have children."

Then, as Rich was telling the story her mind tripped across a distant memory. Another aunt, the more glamorous Alla Mae, had been visiting from New York city.

"She was at the house and moving furniture. I could hear my Aunt Della say: 'Don't do that, or you will lose this baby.' It was a quick blink of an eye that crossed my mind. Where did that come from? How did I remember that? This thing that crossed my mind. It was as if Alla Mae didn't want the baby."
Alla Mae

In 1925, Alla Mae Rutter was 32, and between marriages. Her first husband went off to war four months after they tied the knot, and the union ended when he returned in 1918.

In the meantime, Alla Mae had moved to her husband's native city, New York. When she was not doing embroidery for department stores, she enjoyed the nightlife and hung out with some of the better known bandleaders of the time.

On one of her trips to Toronto, one of the New York bandleaders picked her up in a car at 29 Kintyre. Rich's memory is vague on that point but she remembers it was a pretty big deal.

During her adolescence, Rich's idyllic childhood gave way to a darker chapter in the lives of everyone at 29 Kintyre. Della, Rich's aunt, became mentally ill. Rich recalls that one night Della tried to throw herself from the roof.

Wesley Russell had his wife committed to a mental hospital. It turned out Russell also had a girlfriend who moved into the house after Della left. Della would spend the rest of her life in an institution until she died in 1953. Alla Mae passed away in 1960.
Baby K at rest

Now that the family's secret has surfaced, Rich has not only wracked her brain to figure out the mystery at her former home, she has volunteered to give DNA to try to match the mystery baby's.

She also met the coroner in Toronto on Sept. 17, along with other members of the Russell family, in order to figure out whether the baby is related to them, and whether it should be buried next to one of their loved ones.

As for Kinghorn, the renovator would just like to see the baby at rest and has set up a trust account at TD Canada Trust to help pay for a memorial. He's putting some of the money he earned from a video he took of his discovery towards it.

"We'll do a memorial on the street, buy a tree with edible fruit, a plaque, and the city will buy a bench," said Kinghorn.

He says he is amazed at how much his discovery affected him. "When I called and they told me it was a natural death, no murder, I felt better. Then the Chinese couple from across the street came over and said: 'You released that baby from prison.' That felt good."

[moosmom]

All I can say is WOW!!!

[Catty1]

Amazing what can happen with persistence...wow! is right! :)

[jennielynn1970]

OMG. Amazing. Wonder if they'll figure it all out?

[Catty1]

Sounds like it might be Aunt Alla's baby. Wonder if they will find that out?

[ramanth]

That's nice of the woman to offer her DNA to try and do a match. What a story.