Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On the afternoon of June 25, 2015, a woman was walking on the beach at Deer Island, a strip of land in Boston Harbor, when she came across a knotted trash bag on the shore.
Inside was the body of a little girl, wrapped in two blankets. She was wearing white leggings with black polka dots.
Nobody knew who she was. Nobody had called to say a child was missing. There was no matching report in Massachusetts, or anywhere else.
Investigators started calling her Baby Doe.
The face
The girl could not be identified by sight, and there were no records to compare her with. So the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children did something it had done for other unknown children. A forensic artist built a computer image of how she may have looked in life.
It took about four hours. It was released on July 2, in time for the Fourth of July weekend, along with photos of the leggings and of a zebra-print blanket.
The picture showed a round-cheeked little girl with brown eyes and long wavy hair. It was so lifelike that many people took it for a real photograph.
Then the internet took over. The image went around Facebook and every other network. One estimate put it at more than 50 million views. Eighty-four billboards went up across Massachusetts. A funeral home offered to bury her if nobody ever came forward.
Detectives chased leads across the country and overseas. They ruled out more than 200 missing children. Pollen and isotope tests suggested she had lived in the Boston area, and there were tests on her hair, her teeth and the water where she was found. Still nobody called with a name.
“Absolutely someone knows,” John Walsh said on CNN.
Someone did.
The apartment in Dorchester
A few miles from the harbor, on Maxwell Street in Dorchester, the neighbors had stopped seeing a 2-year-old girl.
Bella Bond was born on August 6, 2012. Her mother, Rachelle Bond, had a long struggle with drug addiction, and she had lost parental rights to her two older children, who were adopted by her own mother. State child services had been called about Bella twice, in 2012 and 2013, and closed both cases.
For a while, Rachelle seemed to be holding it together. Her Facebook page was full of pictures of Bella. She decorated the little girl’s room with monkeys, her favorite animal. Bella’s godmother remembered how she loved cats and cartoons and the beach, and how she would lift her feet when her toes touched the sand.
In early 2015, Rachelle met Michael McCarthy. He moved in that February. The Facebook posts stopped.
A childhood friend of McCarthy’s, Michael Sprinsky, stayed at the apartment for about two weeks that winter, and he got tired of hearing McCarthy talk. It was all demons, and how he could rid a place of evil spirits. In the spring the apartment was in disarray. Sprinsky later testified that the couple told him Bella was “possessed.” Sometimes he fed the little girl himself.
In June, he asked where she was.
They said she was with Rachelle’s sister. Other people got other answers. Some were told child services had taken her. Rachelle’s friends and family stopped seeing Bella, and they believed what they were told. Rachelle filled in a housing benefits form saying that Bella was alive. She kept collecting benefits in her daughter’s name.
All summer, the face of Baby Doe looked out from billboards around Boston. The people closest to Bella saw it. Her godmother, Megan Trewell, said it did not look like her, except for one thing. “It was her eyes,” she said. She had contacted child services about Bella before, heard nothing, and assumed everything was fine. Something about the picture stuck with her, and she texted them again.
On September 16, 2015, with McCarthy in the hospital, Rachelle Bond broke down in tears in front of Michael Sprinsky.
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