By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Sunday, March 15, 1992
The Record (New Jersey) | All Editions | NEWS | A03
The Baby Hope mystery will have to endure, for now at least.
New York City detectives, who attached the moniker “Baby Hope” to a dead girl whose body was found last year in a cooler near the Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan, continue to search for the girl’s identity and the circumstance of her death.
Bergen County prosecutor’s sex crime investigators identified a 13-year-old Paterson girl who last week reported that she had been sexually assaulted as the person in photographs widely held to be of the dead girl.
Welling Wedemeyer, 54, of 123 Kennedy Drive, Lodi, was charged Friday with aggravated sexual assault on the girl, Bergen County Prosecutor John J. Fahy said. He was being held Saturday in the Bergen County Jail in lieu of $100,000 bail.
Though she is older than Baby Hope is believed to have been, authorities are sure they have the right girl, attributing the difference in age to the fact that the photographs show only the victim’s head and shoulders.
The mystery of the photographs began June 14 when an unidentified man walking west on Route 46, near the Midland Avenue overpass in Garfield, found a brown paper bag containing five glossy snapshots that show a girl being sexually assaulted and being forced to perform a sex act with man whose head is not visible. He turned the bag over to police.
Construction workers found the body of a girl in a cooler near the West Side Highway more than a month later. The girl, thought to be 3 to 5 years old, was malnourished and had been beaten, sexually abused, bound, and suffocated.
A Bergen County prosecutor’s sex crimes investigator made the connection between the two cases in October when he noticed similarities in the features of the girl in the snapshots and New York City police composites of Baby Hope, leading to cooperation between the two departments.
There were other clues that seemingly tied the dead girl to the girl in the snapshots: Route 46 is one route leading to the George Washington Bridge, which has an exit to the Henry Hudson Parkway.
An anthropologist working at the FBI crime laboratory in Washington, D.C., created a single photograph from the five snapshots, then compared the photograph with the skull of the girl in the cooler.
Saying he was 90 percent positive the highest degree of certainty in cases like this, Fahy said Saturday the anthropologist three months ago concluded the dead girl and the girl in the photographs were the same.
The mystery of the girl in the snapshots began to unravel last week, however, Fahy said. A 13-year-old girl, accompanied by her mother, went to Lodi police Monday. Directed to the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, which investigates all sexual abuse cases in the county, the girl alleged that Wedemeyer sexually assaulted her, Fahy said.
Wedemeyer was arrested Tuesday and charged.
An investigator, who noticed the similarities in the features of the girl and the girl in the snapshots, asked her more questions and she told them that photographs had been taken of her. Authorities executed a search warrant at Wedemeyer’s home and found several photographs.
“The background of the house was the same as the background in the pictures found on [Route] 46 the drapes, the couch, windows, and things like that,” Fahy said. “I mean, there is no doubt that this girl is the girl in those photographs.”
Wedemeyer was charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault and Superior Court Judge William C. Meehan added $75,000 to the $25,000 bail from his arrest on the initial charge Tuesday.
ID: 17371520 | Copyright © 1992, The Record (New Jersey)
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