January 12, 1984, was a rare midweek holiday for 7-year-old Gary Grant Jr. There was no school because of a teacher’s conference. Gary lived with his mother, May. She and Gary’s father, an Atlantic City, New Jersey Police detective, had been separated for nearly a year. According to May, that morning Gary told his mother that he had an appointment that afternoon:
“I was asking him with who and he said it was a secret. So I thought you know, it’s silly. You know, he’s a little boy, something to do maybe with his little girlfriend around the corner or something. So I kind of left it at that. He wanted to go out and play so he got dressed and he went out to play.”
A cryptic message wtitten on the side door of a patrol car
A cryptic message on the patrol car
Around noon, Gary left home. He told May he would be back by 4:00 PM, before it got dark:
“It got to be 4:30 and he still hadn’t shown up for dinner and he liked his dinner. He never missed. So I started getting worried. And I went down to see two girls that were friends of his and asked them if they had seen Gary.”
When another two hours passed with no sign of Gary, May telephoned her husband. Gary Grant Sr. proceeded to search the neighborhood for his son:
“I searched until well after midnight, probably until around 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning, I walked around. As a matter of fact, I called out from work that night. I was due to go in to work at midnight and I called my sergeant and advised him that I wouldn’t be coming in.”
By the next morning, the Atlantic City Police Department had started an all out search for Gary Jr. Regulations prevented Detective Grant from taking part in the official investigation, but as a father, he was unwilling to stand by and do nothing:
“I started searching every possible place I could think of. I started searching abandoned houses. I started searching underneath the boardwalk. I started searching arcades and questioning people who were working in the arcades… By Friday night, it started getting dark again. And still no sign or no word of Gary. I started then looking in alleyways and trashcans and dumpsters. The streets can be pretty mean for an adult, let alone for a 7-year-old child. And by that time, I was fearing the worst.”
A cryptic message on a sidewalk that reads 'Gary Grant Jr. Lives. I still killed him. son of a pig officer. Payback is a M.F.'
Another message, was the writer the killer?
The next afternoon the body of Gary Grant, Jr. was found in a vacant lot less than two blocks from his home. He had been beaten to death. Nearby, lay a short length of heavy pipe, probably the murder weapon. The police immediately imposed a radio silence until the boy’s family could be notified. At virtually that same moment, Detective Grant, exhausted and on the verge of collapse, came upon the scene:
“I didn’t want to believe that it was him. Being a father, you don’t want to believe it. You don’t want to believe that your kid is lying back there somewhere you know, and he’s never going to get up again.”
The investigation began like all others, with detectives tracing the victim’s final hours and talking to those who knew him best. Carl Mason, nicknamed “Boo”, was a mentally challenged 12-year-old with an IQ of 65. Though Boo was five years older than Gary, he was smaller in height and weight. The two boys were good friends and often played together. According to Rick Murray, an investigative journalist who covered the case, Boo said he was not with Gary on the day of his murder:
“But detectives canvassing the neighborhood kept coming back with stories that he had, in fact, been with Gary. So they didn’t know what to do. There was this conflict. Boo seemed like such a harmless character. He was known as a scaredy cat in the neighborhood. But they just couldn’t reconcile the conflict.”