She even gave him a name: Jonathan.
      But, while the media trumpeted the story, eager to wrap up the 45-year-old mystery, Castor was skeptical from the start, calling her story "akin to Martians coming down and marching somebody off in a spaceship."
      And, so far, Castor said, detectives have been unable to corroborate any part of the woman's story since she came forward last summer. Castor said he's unwilling to accept it as a Montgomery County case.
      "I'm not so sure that the information that was highly publicized is accurate and I don't know how reliable that information actually is," Castor said. "I'm not so sure that the information gathered was from a credible source."
      Now a business executive in Cincinnati, the woman told investigators that as a child she lived with the boy in a Lower Merion home. He died after a female caregiver threw him to the bathroom floor, punishment for vomiting in the bathtub. His nude and battered body was found in a cardboard box in a wooded area along what is now Susquehanna Road near Verree in February 1957.
      Police estimated the boy to be about 4 years old. He had suffered multiple head injuries, but the medical examiner declared the cause of death uncertain. Police treated it as a homicide.
      The child's bruises and unknown identity have haunted city residents and investigators ever since. When the woman's tale was leaked to the media, they clamped on it with hope.
      Her story held some credibility because she revealed the information to her physician in 1989. The doctor initially contacted law enforcement officials, but he and police worked 13 years to convince her to step forward.
      She claimed she was about 12 when the boy was killed by a female caregiver who is now deceased. The witness said the boy was given to a Main Line family two years before his death in what may have been an unofficial adoption.
      Autopsy photos of the boy's body show signs of abuse. The woman claimed he was malnourished and physically and sexually abused. Restricted to the basement where he slept in a cardboard refrigerator box, he rarely left the house, she said.
      Castor assigned a detective from his office and one from the Lower Merion Police Department to investigate. The woman described the general area where she claimed the house was located. Combing through property records and municipal tax records, detectives narrowed the search to a specific address and a particular family.
      They considered filing for a search warrant or asking for a consent search, but the home was so different than it was in 1957 that "it wasn't worth it," Castor said.
      Using municipal records, they tracked down residents who lived in the area at the time and might remember a child from the neighborhood suddenly gone missing. Nobody remembered.
      "It sounded good at the beginning because people from the Main Line might not have ever thought anything of it when you had a body (discovered) 20 miles away or 15 miles away," Castor said. "We tried to get them thinking about it, but nothing panned out."
      After the woman's information was publicized, Castor said people called him with all kinds of "wacky theories," including rumors they heard that the boy was a sex slave. Again, nothing panned out.
      Castor said the inability to corroborate the evidence doesn't mean the witness' information is false. "But what it means is that usually we could get at least some partial corroboration and we don't have any," he said. "So that's where we are, which is nowhere."
      The case is back in the hands of Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham, who could not be reached for comment. Castor said his detectives will continue to help if asked, but they've exhausted their means to verify the woman's story.
      "Right from the beginning, it didn't ever smell right to me," Castor said. "I never warmed up to the whole idea, although I know Philly was dying for it to be my problem."