On May 11, 1965, the body of an infant was discovered in a package mailed to Darwin, Australia. Closer returns to this sinister affair.
The small town of Darwin, in northern Australia, probably means nothing to you. However, this tiny town far from everything was, in May 1965, the scene of one of the most appalling cases in the history of the country of Oz. On May 11, 1965, an uneventful postal worker named John Polishuk noticed a strange package at the bottom of his mailbag. The cardboard box, which no one has asked for since it was sent on May 3, exudes a “putrid smell”. John also notices that a strange liquid is escaping from it and decides to open it. “He was horrified and called usInspector Denver Marchant would tell news.com.au years later. It seriously affected John.”
In the box, the young postman discovers the body of a decomposing infant. Completely naked, the umbilical cord still attached to his abdomen, the child seems to have been savagely stuffed into the box. The Darwin police immediately opened an investigation. The infant’s autopsy reveals that he died of strangulation, just minutes after birth. “The child was born, still had his umbilical cord, had taken several breaths and to kill him, someone had wrapped a stocking around his neck three or four times, explains Denver Marchant. (…) The neck was severely compressed… I told myself that it had been done to stifle the cries of the child and to ensure that he was dead.”
“Someone, somewhere is carrying a hell of a burden”
The police first try to trace the trajectory of the package. Sent from Russell Street in Brunswick, a suburb of Melbourne, it is addressed to a certain J. Anderson and bears a non-existent return address: JF Barnes, 2 Woolridge Ave, Mentone, Victoria. Unfortunately, this information does not allow authorities to identify the sender and recipient. The analysis technologies of the time did not make it possible to extract any DNA from the package either. Quickly, all the leads followed by the police end up fading.
Fifty-eight years later, the identity of the “baby in the mailbag” remains unknown and his murderer has never been identified. Nevertheless, those who worked on the case at the time still hold out hope of one day unraveling the mystery. “Someone, somewhere, is carrying a hell of a burden, confided the ex-detective Denver Marchant in 2015. Some people can no longer bear the weight of truth as they come to the end of their lives, some feel the need to say they know something. I urge anyone with information to contact the police.”
The whereabouts of the baby at the heart of this affair are unknown today. Inspector Marchant himself never knew where he was buried. Note that no name was ever given to him. “For us, it’s always been ‘the baby in the mailbag'”, admits Marchant.