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.