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."
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