At around 8 a.m. on Sunday, July 7, 1912, a group of boys entered a vacant lot in the Bronx to play.
Moments later, they ran to the street, screaming, “There’s a dead body in there!” It was a young girl, naked, bloody, her face red and swollen, stuffed into a soapbox . There were 41 stab wounds in her 5-foot, 70-pound body. But she was still breathing.
A painter reached her first, realized she was alive, and asked her name. “Julia Connors,” she whispered. “Who hurt you?” he asked.
“A man. A man” was all she said before she fainted. She never regained consciousness.
The last time Julia’s parents saw her was Saturday afternoon when the 12-year-old left the family’s Bronx apartment on her way to Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church. She came home around 5:15, chatted with her sister, and then left again to meet her parents, who had gone to a baseball game with her brothers. Somewhere along the way, she vanished.
Around 8, her father, Edward Connors, reported her missing at the Tremont police station. He was told not to worry; she would probably come home soon. Connors and his wife organized neighbors into a search party but found nothing.
At midnight, Connors returned to the police station to beg for help. “Go out and look for your child yourself,” the police commander told him. After she was found in the lot the following day, investigators determined that Julia had been dumped there after being brutalized somewhere else.
They discovered that the scene .