The Fairfax County Police Department announced a major breakthrough today (Monday) in a cold case from 1972.
Police identified the body of a 4-year-old boy who was found in Massey Creek under the Old Colchester Road Bridge in Lorton as Carl Matthew Bryant, police leaders shared at a press conference held at the Fairfax County Public Safety Headquarters at 1 p.m.
In 1972, a boy was riding his bike home from school when he saw a body under the bridge. The child raced home, and his mother called the police, which launched the investigation.
An autopsy found that the boy had suffered from blunt force trauma around eight hours before the body was discovered. Though a computer-generated sketch developed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2003 didn’t turn up any leads, Astrea Forensics was able to use hair collected during the autopsy to put the case together.
The child was identified as Carl Matthew Bryant, one of two children of Philadelphia resident Vera Bryant.
According to the Fairfax County Police Department, relatives said Vera was traveling across Virginia with her boyfriend, James Hedgespeth, and their children Carl and James Bryant.
Family members told police that when the couple arrived in Middlesex County, Virginia, where Hedgespeth’s family lived, they did not have children with them. When Vera visited relatives for Thanksgiving later that year, she told relatives that the children were staying with Hedgespeth’s family.
Vera died in Pennsylvania in 1980. Her boyfriend — who had been convicted of murder in 1962 and served prison time before meeting her — died later.
Based on the fact that the couple left with the children but did not arrive with them and never reported them missing, Fairfax County police said they believe both children were killed by their mother or her boyfriend on June 13, 1972 on the way between Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Police said while the DNA helped piece together most of the story, they’re still hopeful that the revelations could lead others to come forward to offer more information about Vera and James or the younger child, James Bryant, whose body was never recovered.
“Perhaps somebody witnessed something along that route that day, or maybe Vera or James confided in someone before they had died,” Fairfax County Assistant Chief of Police for Investigations Brooke Wright said. “Maybe another jurisdiction had recovered a 6-month-old baby’s remains and didn’t have any way to tie it to this case, as we didn’t know that there would be any relation to this case … We hope to know what happened to baby James, who was born in January 1972.”
The FCPD says anyone with information can contact its Major Crimes Bureau at 703-246-7800, option 2.
