Identified! PA - Philadelphia, 'Boy in the Box', WhtMale 4-6, 4UMPA, Feb'57

[Laura_Bean]

"The boy in the box", was the name given to a small child found in Philadelphia on February 25th, 1957. This child's body was found naked and battered. In a strange twist, his hair had been cut after death. He is also commonly called "America's unknown child".

This child was found inside of a box that had once held a bassinet from J.C. Penny. Back in 1957, the police were determined to find out who this child was and where he had come from. They even went so far as to make fliers and put them with every gas bill sent out in all of Philadelphia and the Delaware valley. They placed fliers up in store windows, everywhere they could think of, trying to get someone to either confess or call in a lead to police. Despite the efforts no one ever came forward to claim the boy or put in a good lead. This case has remained unsolved and is still being looked into.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_in_the_Box_(Philadelphia)

You can go here for more information, and they even have the flier on this site so you can see what police were handing out and putting around. This flier even had pictures of the body of this child.

On this site, it talks about two possible theories and each one could not be proven.

The first involves a foster home located close to where this boy's body was found. A psychic had told a man a description of a home he should be searching for in this case. She described the foster home with a lot of detail and it closely resembled this foster home. The two found this home and inside was a bassinet that closely resembled the one sold at J.C. Penny. Blankets hanging on the line at the home were very similar to the ones wrapped around the boy's body. The man who ran the home had a stepdaughter. Some believe that he had been having sexual relations with this man and that the girl became pregnant. They believe the man was abusive towards the child and accidentally killed him. When confronted, they both denied it, however the stepdaughter and her father married soon after the incident. After talking with the two, the police were satisfied that these two had nothing to do with the incident and this option was closed.

The other idea comes from a woman who would not give her name. She came forward in 2002. She claimed that her mother purchased this boy in 1954 from his parents. She claimed her mother subjected the child to extreme physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Than, she says, her mother killed him in a fit of anger after he threw up in the bathtub. She said she was made to help dispose of the child's body, and that a good samartan stopped his car asking the two if they needed any help. They ignored him and he drove off.

This could be the most credible claim seeing as a man had told police a similar story about stopping to help a couple, a woman and a girl, around the time the child was found, and that they seemed to be "Hiding something" that was in the car from him.

However, this girl who stepped forward has a severe history of mental illness, and when the mother was questioned, she claimed her daughter had problems and that there was never a boy living in the home.

No one really knows what happened to the boy in the box. I think it's high time someone found out.

 

[believe09]

We have a thread on this lovely boy-you would be surprised to read some of the contact that posters have had with some of the principals:
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?t=57128

 

[Laura_Bean]

1. Bumping up

2. Glad someone put this child up

3. I find it hard to believe that some would allow the child to live for 4 to 6 yrs if they were terrified of having people find out about the child... Why kill the child when it was 4 to 6 yrs of age? There were illegal abortions back than... You could pay to have someone do it, and if you were too scared to have an abortion but didn't want a child, there were orphanages... Not hard to drop a newborn off there... Not hard to drop a small child off there... It makes me think this child was wanted.

So.... Why kill the child? With the extent of the damage on the baby, it makes it hard to believe that this was a "One time only" incident. Also, if the child WAS being abused all the time, why would they take the child to a doctor? Why spend the money if you don't care about the child?

What about this... Here is an idea. There are diseases that can cause huge damage. What I mean is there are children whose bones are brittle and they break easily, children who have problems that make them bruise easily, etc. Could the child have had those? And back than, would it be found on an autopsy? Could they tell if the child had those problems?

Just wondering some things here.

 

[Laura_Bean]

Has any1 checked this child out from the Doe network?


Steven Craig Damman
Missing since October 31, 1955 from East Meadow, Nassau County, New York.
Classification: Missing



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Vital Statistics

Date Of Birth: December 1952
Age at Time of Disappearance: 2 years old
Height and Weight at Time of Disappearance: 3'2"; 32 lbs.
Distinguishing Characteristics: White male. Blonde hair; blue eyes.
Marks, Scars: Small scar under chin. Healed fracture on left arm. Molelike birthmark on back of right calf.
Medical Conditions: Steven had been under treatment for a kidney growth at the time he went missing.
Other: Footprints available


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Circumstances of Disappearance
Steven Damman's mother left her home in East Meadow, New York on October 31, 1955 to go to a supermarket a block and a half away.
She had her son Steven, age 34 months and her daughter Pamela, age 7 months with Pamela strapped into a baby carriage with her. She left her daughter in the carriage out in front of the store with her son standing beside it while she did her shopping. When she came back ten minutes later, both the carriage and her children were gone.
Her daughter and the carriage were later recovered unharmed by a family friend a block and a half away.
Despite a massive search involving more than a thousand persons, Steven was never seen again.



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[believe09]

1. Bumping up

2. Glad someone put this child up

3. I find it hard to believe that some would allow the child to live for 4 to 6 yrs if they were terrified of having people find out about the child... Why kill the child when it was 4 to 6 yrs of age? There were illegal abortions back than... You could pay to have someone do it, and if you were too scared to have an abortion but didn't want a child, there were orphanages... Not hard to drop a newborn off there... Not hard to drop a small child off there... It makes me think this child was wanted.

So.... Why kill the child? With the extent of the damage on the baby, it makes it hard to believe that this was a "One time only" incident. Also, if the child WAS being abused all the time, why would they take the child to a doctor? Why spend the money if you don't care about the child?

What about this... Here is an idea. There are diseases that can cause huge damage. What I mean is there are children whose bones are brittle and they break easily, children who have problems that make them bruise easily, etc. Could the child have had those? And back than, would it be found on an autopsy? Could they tell if the child had those problems?

Just wondering some things here.

Hi!! I have been wishing that some genetic testing could be done on The Boy simply because I think it might narrow down some of these questions-one of my theories is that he was a hemophiliac due to the cut down scars. Some of the hospitals in Philly were known at the time for being cutting edge with hemophiliac patients, IIRC.

I wonder if the evolution of YDNA testing will allow for samples to be taken from bone to determine his possible surname? I am also hoping for isotope analysis of his teeth to narrow down where he might have lived prior to dying.

 

[Sporky]

Has any1 checked this child out from the Doe network?


Steven Craig Damman
Missing since October 31, 1955 from East Meadow, Nassau County, New York.
Classification: Missing



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vital Statistics

Date Of Birth: December 1952
Age at Time of Disappearance: 2 years old
Height and Weight at Time of Disappearance: 3'2"; 32 lbs.
Distinguishing Characteristics: White male. Blonde hair; blue eyes.
Marks, Scars: Small scar under chin. Healed fracture on left arm. Molelike birthmark on back of right calf.
Medical Conditions: Steven had been under treatment for a kidney growth at the time he went missing.
Other: Footprints available


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Circumstances of Disappearance
Steven Damman's mother left her home in East Meadow, New York on October 31, 1955 to go to a supermarket a block and a half away.
She had her son Steven, age 34 months and her daughter Pamela, age 7 months with Pamela strapped into a baby carriage with her. She left her daughter in the carriage out in front of the store with her son standing beside it while she did her shopping. When she came back ten minutes later, both the carriage and her children were gone.
Her daughter and the carriage were later recovered unharmed by a family friend a block and a half away.
Despite a massive search involving more than a thousand persons, Steven was never seen again.



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It says on his doe network profile http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/d/damman_steven.html
That they compaired his DNA to the boy in the box and he was ruled out as a match.

 

[Laura_Bean]

That could explain something. if the child WAS a hemophiliac and the child was being treated in Philadelphia, it could mean that the child was not LIVING in Philadelphia but was from a surrounding area. If this is true, and the child was not from Philadelphia, it could explain why no one called in to claim they knew the child or that they had seen the child. Now, here is an interesting theory.

Let's say a woman and her husband have this child. We will assume that they had money, because treatments at a good hospital with cutting edge treatments available wouldn't be cheap, nor would it be cheap to take the child to Philadelphia if they lived furthur away. The woman would be taking the train probably, a good mode of transportantion back than, to and from the city for treatments for the child. Odds are, that would be the woman's only child because she would have to be able to take her child to Philadelphia for treatments on a regular basis. Also I would suggest definitly the mother is a "homemaker". Someone who had the time and didn't have to work in order to get her child to these treatments.

Okay regressing here sorry. So she is taking her son to and from these treatments, she has money, her husband works and she is probably taking the train or the bus to and from the treatments. Now... Perhaps the hospital is offering a new form of treatment something probably experimental and something goes wrong. The hospital would never want to get in trouble for making a mistake like that, or get in trouble for trying this treatment on a child. Perhaps the mother even begged them to try this new "experimental treatment" because she wanted her son to get better. And than something goes terribly wrong and the child dies.

Just a theory.

 

[Laura_Bean]

Bruising all over the body :::


Many Americans eat insufficient amounts of foods containing vitamin C; bruising is caused by vitamin C deficiency that is scurvy. While very few people actually have scurvy, even minor deficiencies of vitamin C can increase bruising. People who experience easy bruising may want to try eating more fruits and vegetables—common dietary sources of vitamin C. Doctors can assess the diet by using a diet diary, sometimes accompanied by computerized diet analysis. A diet diary is a written record of what and how much a person is eating, usually divided into sections by meal and/or day. As used by many doctors, diet diaries lasting one week are most common. If such an analysis reveals a lack of dietary vitamin C and flavonoids (related compounds), the diet requires more fruits and vegetables to correct the problem.

 

[ilovemew]

Why would the person cut the boys hair after death? What were they trying to hide? Also I think I noticed in this link: http://americasunknownchild.net/default.htm there is the 2 pictures of the boy dressed in clothes. One of his right side, one of his left side. It looks like only one side of his head has been shaved. The other side still looks like it has hair. It is an old photograph and black and white so it's hard to tell. I was just thinking that was so weird. Any thoughts?

 

[Laura_Bean]

The local police dept took it upon themselves to dress the dead body in clothes that were normal for a child to wear and sat him up. The idea was, with him wearing clothing, he would be more "recognizable" and someone would be more apt to identify him. One side of his head does look shaved. I've been wondering about that myself. Either a mother went to cut his hair to make him look nice in death, perhaps she was interupted or just did it in a hurry and made mistakes. If your child just died and you felt a need to cut his hair, you'd be crying and upset and it wouldn't look very good.

The other idea is perhaps he was going in for yet another surgery and the doctor thought the child needed relief on the brain. If they were going to do some sort of brain surgery to relieve pressure on the brain, they would shave him, and usually just the side they were going to cut into. He may have died before they got a chance to relieve the pressure, but after they had shaved the area.

 

[Laura_Bean]

No DNA has ever been able to be extracted from the child's body. I just read about it. They have tried but the body was so badly deteriorated they were unable to extract any DNA. There is no 100% way to rule out the Daman boy. So I wonder what made LE rule him out? Any ideas there?

 

[Laura_Bean]

Never mind just found this sorry about the misinformation



April 2001 the investigators announced a major breakthrough in the case: An independent laboratory finally obtained a mitochondrial DNA profile from the unknown boy's teeth. (Most of the following E mail messages and responses were written prior to that announcement.)

The investigators plan to compare the boy's DNA profile against tissue samples they hope to obtain from individuals who either claim to be, or who are suspected of being related to the unknown boy. Such tests should confirm or, alternatively, rule out any alleged relationship.

 

[ilovemew]

The local police dept took it upon themselves to dress the dead body in clothes that were normal for a child to wear and sat him up. The idea was, with him wearing clothing, he would be more "recognizable" and someone would be more apt to identify him. One side of his head does look shaved. I've been wondering about that myself. Either a mother went to cut his hair to make him look nice in death, perhaps she was interupted or just did it in a hurry and made mistakes. If your child just died and you felt a need to cut his hair, you'd be crying and upset and it wouldn't look very good.

The other idea is perhaps he was going in for yet another surgery and the doctor thought the child needed relief on the brain. If they were going to do some sort of brain surgery to relieve pressure on the brain, they would shave him, and usually just the side they were going to cut into. He may have died before they got a chance to relieve the pressure, but after they had shaved the area.

IMO someone who dumps their child in a box on the side of the road doesn't care enough to cut their hair first but CA :sick: (allegedly-do I have to write that here?) put a heart sticker on her little girls mouth before dumping her so who knows... I was also thinking that maybe he hadn't been taken care of and his hair was long and matty and dirty and his nails too. Maybe that is why they felt the need to clean him up first. Maybe they feared if they got caught they could at least say they took good care of him (until they "lost it" and got angry that one time.) IDK there's so many possibilities but I've never heard of someone shaving part of the hair off after death like that. I was just thinking maybe if we figured that out it could lead us to another clue.

 

[Laura_Bean]

Okay so I had a thought late last night laying in bed and thinking about this case before I drifted to sleep. No animals had touched the body. This is significant because it shows a time of the body being put there. The body had to have been found pretty quickly after being dumped. However, the coroner said that the boy had been dead two weeks. So where was the body? I had an idea. My family is part Irish. When my great grandma died she had a wake. That is where the body sits out for a while for people to come and say goodbye to. What if this boy's family was Irish? Back than wakes were generally in a person's home, and the body could lay there for weeks before being taken to be buried. So why no burial? If the family did not have money, the wake would not cost anything, they would just lay his body on a couch or in his bed, and when the wake was over, well if they couldn't afford a burial the box and the blanket would have to suffice. Another thought, the child was naked except for the blanket. Perhaps the child was scheduled to have surgery done on his brain, and was wearing a hospital gown. The hospital may have insisted on taking off the hospital gown, because they knew it would be traced back to them if left on the body. As a mother, I am not sure if I could bring myself to dress my dead child. Perhaps the mother just decided to wrap him in a blanket instead of trying to dress her son's dead body.

 

[Julessleuther]

I wonder if they could do the DNA test like they did for Benjamin Kyle, where they could determine the boys lineage, or isotope testing on his teeth to determine where he lived before death??

Never mind just found this sorry about the misinformation



April 2001 the investigators announced a major breakthrough in the case: An independent laboratory finally obtained a mitochondrial DNA profile from the unknown boy's teeth. (Most of the following E mail messages and responses were written prior to that announcement.)

The investigators plan to compare the boy's DNA profile against tissue samples they hope to obtain from individuals who either claim to be, or who are suspected of being related to the unknown boy. Such tests should confirm or, alternatively, rule out any alleged relationship.

 

[ilovemew]

Okay so I had a thought late last night laying in bed and thinking about this case before I drifted to sleep. No animals had touched the body. This is significant because it shows a time of the body being put there. The body had to have been found pretty quickly after being dumped. However, the coroner said that the boy had been dead two weeks. So where was the body? I had an idea. My family is part Irish. When my great grandma died she had a wake. That is where the body sits out for a while for people to come and say goodbye to. What if this boy's family was Irish? Back than wakes were generally in a person's home, and the body could lay there for weeks before being taken to be buried. So why no burial? If the family did not have money, the wake would not cost anything, they would just lay his body on a couch or in his bed, and when the wake was over, well if they couldn't afford a burial the box and the blanket would have to suffice. Another thought, the child was naked except for the blanket. Perhaps the child was scheduled to have surgery done on his brain, and was wearing a hospital gown. The hospital may have insisted on taking off the hospital gown, because they knew it would be traced back to them if left on the body. As a mother, I am not sure if I could bring myself to dress my dead child. Perhaps the mother just decided to wrap him in a blanket instead of trying to dress her son's dead body.

Oh wow, I thought I was pretty read up on this case but that is the first time I have heard that he was dead for 2 weeks before he was put there. That does change things. Hmmm...

 

[LucyJack]

i just wonder what made them rule out that fostor family? Did they just take people's word for it back then when they said "that's not my son" Another sad thing is if there is any truth to margaret's claim that her mother bought the boy and killed him - there would be no way to prove it. Her DNA wouldn't be a match to his becuase they are biological siblings. It so frustrating - there were so many dead ends in this case.

 

[Shecky]

Okay so I had a thought late last night laying in bed and thinking about this case before I drifted to sleep. No animals had touched the body. This is significant because it shows a time of the body being put there. The body had to have been found pretty quickly after being dumped. However, the coroner said that the boy had been dead two weeks. So where was the body? I had an idea. My family is part Irish. When my great grandma died she had a wake. That is where the body sits out for a while for people to come and say goodbye to. What if this boy's family was Irish? Back than wakes were generally in a person's home, and the body could lay there for weeks before being taken to be buried. So why no burial? If the family did not have money, the wake would not cost anything, they would just lay his body on a couch or in his bed, and when the wake was over, well if they couldn't afford a burial the box and the blanket would have to suffice. Another thought, the child was naked except for the blanket. Perhaps the child was scheduled to have surgery done on his brain, and was wearing a hospital gown. The hospital may have insisted on taking off the hospital gown, because they knew it would be traced back to them if left on the body. As a mother, I am not sure if I could bring myself to dress my dead child. Perhaps the mother just decided to wrap him in a blanket instead of trying to dress her son's dead body.

Bold by me.

Actually, the original poster featured on americasunknownchild.net says that death occurred anywhere from three days to two weeks prior to discovery. So while it is possible he'd been deceased for that long, it isn't a definite fact.

Not that your theory isn't a possible one, just trying to keep the facts straight.

If someone has a source that contradicts the info on the original poster found here: http://americasunknownchild.net/Poster.htm, please feel free to correct me. (just a warning, said poster features pictures of the deceased boys face. If such images bother you.)

 

[Shecky]

Did anyone ever get the book on this case that was released last September? I'm going to see if my library has it before I buy it but I would like to read it.

http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Box-Unsol...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231513860&sr=1-1

I actually just finished it tonight! Very well written and brought me up to date on some case developments that I hadn't been aware of.

For example, in October of 2007, DNA results finally proved that Anna Marie Nagle (the daughter/step-daughter of the couple who ran the foster home nearby) was not the mother of the unknown boy.

For those unfamiliar with this angle of the mystery, there is some information about the foster family in the case summary on americasunknownchild.net: http://americasunknownchild.net/summary.htm

There is also some discussion about the foster home here,: http://americasunknownchild.net/FosterFamily.html

If anyone has questions about the book or the information in it, I'd be glad to discuss it.

 

[Laura_Bean]

If this child had autism has anyone considered this man as a culprit?

Bruno Bettelheim
(1903-1990)

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Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 - March 13, 1990) was a writer and child psychologist. When his father died, he had to leave university to take care of the family lumber business. After ten years, he did go back, however, and earned a degree in philosophy, writing a dissertation relating to the history of art. He was interested in psychology for much of his life but never studied it formally.

As a Jew in Austria, he spent time in the concentration camps, but his way was bought out, as was possible before the war started, and he went to the United States. Here he eventually set himself up as a professor of psychology. He was able to claim that he had the relevant training because the Nazis were destroying the records.

He spent the most significant part of his life as director of the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago, a home for emotionally disturbed children. He wrote books on both normal and abnormal child psychology, and was well respected by many during his lifetime. His book, The Uses of Enchantment, recast fairy tales in terms of the strictest Freudian psychology, sometimes to unintentionally hilarious effect.

He suffered from depression throughout his life, and committed suicide in 1990, six years after his wife died of cancer.

After his suicide, evidence of Bettelheim's dark side began to emerge. Although many of his counsellors at the Orthogenic School considered him brilliant and admirable, others began to openly question his work and to call him a cruel tyrant. Although untrained in analysis, Bettelheim was a Freudian fundamentalist. Bettelheim was convinced, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that autism had no organic basis but was caused entirely by cold mothers, who he dubbed "refrigerator mothers," and absent fathers. "All my life," he wrote, "I have been working with children whose lives have been destroyed because their mothers hated them." Other Freudian analysts, as well as scientists who were not psychiatrists, followed Bettelheim in blaming mothers for their child's autism. This view is now regarded as erroneous, and Bettelheim's work is discredited.

Stories of this man beating the children at the school have come to light. He is said to have been cruel, harsh, and would beat children there. He was said to have exploded in screaming anger at students, and to have gone beyond firm treatment to corporal punishment or abuse. That could explain bruises upon bruises on this child.

IN his last book, "Freud's Vienna and Other Essays," the legendary child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim recounts how, as a young analyst in training, he was deeply influenced by a severely disturbed child he used to see in his own analyst's waiting room. The child, he writes, taught him the importance of listening, of putting yourself in the mind of a patient so as to understand the deep reasons for abnormal behavior. It was a lesson that Dr. Bettelheim, the longtime head of Chicago's renowned Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for emotionally disturbed children, used to create an environment known for being nurturing, supportive and full of love.

When Bettelheim took his own life last March at the age of 86, the obituaries stressed the greatness of the man and his pioneering methods. But the praise has now led to a powerful reverse current, with the psychiatrist portrayed not as a dedicated man of wisdom, but as a megalomaniacal tyrant who systematically abused children, undermined their self-confidence, and publicly humiliated and beat them. The angry charges, made by former patients and at least one former counselor at the school, question not only Bettelheim's judgment but his honesty.

One contention of the critics -- hotly contested by therapists who worked with Bettelheim -- is that some of his patients were never as desperately sick as he said they were. Bettelheim, they say, set himself up as a kind of judge and jury at the school, never submitting his diagnoses or assessments of cures to peer review.


The opening salvo seems to have been fired by Alida Jatich, a resident of the school from 1966 to 1973 and now a computer programmer in Chicago. "Bettelheim's public persona, carefully constructed in his many books and articles," was utterly wrong, she wrote in The Chicago Reader, a weekly newspaper. "In person, he was an evil man who set up his school as a private empire and himself as a demigod or cult leader. He bullied, awed, and terrorized the children at his school, their parents, school staff members, his graduate students and anyone else who came into contact with him."

Defenders of Bettelheim have come forward, many of them former counselors at the Orthogenic School, which he directed from 1944 to 1973. Most of them, in letters and conversation, allow that Bettelheim was a blunt, direct, gruff figure who sometimes used corporal punishment as a way of handling severely disturbed children. But charges like those of Ms. Jatich and others, they say, amount to character assassination of a man no longer alive to defend himself. They maintain that Bettelheim was a brilliant therapist and teacher who not only saved many children considered untreatable by other experts but trained and inspired whole generations of therapists.

"I never saw any of the kind of behavior that some of these former students are reporting," said Karen Zelan, a psychotherapist in Berkeley, Calif., who was a counselor at the school from 1956 to 1964. "I don't want to say that they are making it up. I think they're saying that they were afraid of the man, that they were afraid of his occasional unpredictable behavior."

Elio Frattaroli, a Philadelphia psychotherapist trained by Bettelheim, said: "I can tell you that the Orthogenic School was a very loving place. It felt loving. And, yes, I saw Bettelheim hit kids. But I do not think it was inconsistent with the spirit of loving and concern for the best interests of the child that comes across in his works."

What is at stake in all of this conflicting testimony is the standing and credibility of one of the century's most important scholarly and therapeutic legacies. A Vienna-born survivor of German concentration camps who came to the United States in 1939, Bettelheim exercised tremendous influence both through his methods and through such books as "Love is Not Enough," "The Empty Fortress" and "The Uses of Enchantment." The claims that he could be erratic, violent, out of control and abusive threaten to give him the image not only of a tyrant but of a hypocrite as well.

Bettelheim himself said that he was influenced by the model of the concentration camps, believing that the milieu of total control used by the Nazis to destroy people could be turned to good purposes. The attacks on him by products of that total milieu are sure to raise doubts about the validity of his method. In the October issue of Commentary, Ronald Angres, a former patient who is now a graduate student in international relations at George Washington University, says that Bettelheim engaged in "insulting and intimidating theatrics."

"He insulted people just in order to break any self-confidence they might have," Mr. Angres wrote. "I lived in terror of his beatings, in terror of his footsteps in the dorm."

Defying Orders

Ms. Jatich, making what may be the single most shocking charge, says that at the age of 15, she was once dragged naked and dripping wet from the shower by Bettelheim and slapped in front of her dorm mates. Another former patient, Richard Younker, a Chicago photojournalist, said in an interview that he was slapped some 20 times in eight years at the school. "He hit me until he got tired, and then he would tell me that I was a hood and a and was going to end up as a murderer, and then he slapped and punched me some more," he said, adding that his offense was defying his counselor's orders that he stop hiding under his bed.

Some former counselors, like Dr. Zelan and Freda Rebelsky, a psychologist at Boston University, said they never saw Bettelheim use corporal punishment. Others argued that he did but never in the uncontrolled way described by some of his former patients. Jacqueline Sanders, a former student of Bettelheim's who has been the director of the Orthogenic School since 1973, said she herself once believed that "a good smack was a better way of controlling destructive behavior than isolation rooms, medication or physical restraints." She said, "I do not believe that he administered corporal punishment in an arbitrary rage."

Some therapists suggest that the former students are working out the normal, even healthy anger they might feel toward Bettelheim, who intentionally served as a kind of surrogate father -- often stern, certainly feared, but at the same time loving and devoted. For former patients to say that they were never so sick, that it was just the hated Bettelheim who was at fault would, some analysts say, be the kind of psychological adaptation that Bettelheim himself would have hoped for. Incidents that happened 20, 30 or more years ago may have been distorted in the minds of some students, these therapists say, a suggestion that is rejected by the students themselves.

I think these things happened to me the way I describe them," Mr. Younker said. "If you made the most innocent joke to the man, he exploded. He was out of control."

But Dr. Frattaroli said that when Bettelheim slapped children at the school, he was always acutely aware of the purpose he had in mind. Among youngsters who are deeply fearful and often riddled with guilt, Dr. Frattaroli said, a slap can actually impart a kind of reassurance, a sense of control.

"The problem with the way Bettelheim is being portrayed," Dr. Frattaroli said, "is that he did things in a very thoughtful way, including insulting people. He did not do it in a hostile, abusive fit. He did it to make a point that he thought would not be heard if he made it in a different way."

Maybe the most troubling aspect of the issue is the impossibility of reconciling it once and for all. Bettelheim, after all, can no longer speak for himself, so there is no way to resolve the conflicting stories of a man everyone sees as not only powerful and complex, but mysterious as well.