CRIME: Death in the Underbrush

One morning last week Gordon Morrow, 19, was hunting rabbits on a snow covered trail of cut-over land 50 miles north of Tacoma. Following rabbit tracks he cut through an alder thicket, stumbled over something. It was the naked body of a small boy, with head bashed in, lying stiff and frozen in the snow. Hunter Morrow rushed home, told his father. The local sheriff and his deputies came, examined the body lying 200 feet from a highway, studied fresh tire tracks and footprints, decided the child had been murdered elsewhere and been dumped there the night before. In a few hours Federal Agents arrived and the body was definitely identified as that of Charles Mattson, the 10-year-old whom a bearded, gun-waving kidnapper seized in the living room of the Mattson home in Tacoma two days after Christmas (TIME, Jan. 11).

Said the boy’s father, Dr. William W. Mattson, when the news was brought to him: “I feared it. I feared when they pulled that boy out into the night that something like this would happen.”