Mystery deepens after police ID body of boy found under bridge in 1972

By Thomas Robertson

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    FAIRFAX COUNTY, Virginia (WTOP) — A 4-year-old boy who was found dead in Lorton, Virginia, more than 50 years ago, and whose name has remained a mystery, has finally been identified after a flood of tips, a series of DNA tests and decades of twists and turns.

Fairfax County police Chief Kevin Davis announced the breakthrough Monday, saying the child’s identification has led police to two people who are believed to have been involved in his killing, and another missing boy whose body has never been discovered.

The case of the boy, identified as 4-year-old Carl Matthew Bryant, confounded police and the public for decades. According to Assistant Chief Brooke Wright, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more tips on Bryant’s case than any other in the state of Virginia.

Bryant’s body was found under the Old Colchester Road Bridge in Lorton on June 13, 1972, by a boy who was biking home from school. Bryant was killed by blunt force trauma and remained unidentified, as there were no matching missing person reports.

In 2003, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children put out a computer-generated sketch of the boy that led to numerous tips, but no answer.

Police then turned to the smallest clippings of hair, which one of the original case detectives saved during the child’s autopsy. The hair was barely visible — no more than specks resembling razor stubble — but the FBI was able to extract some DNA from the hair in 2004.

“Why he collected hair back in 1972? He certainly wasn’t forecasting, I believe, that science would be available down the road, but maybe it was just the hair color. Who knows why he did it, but thank God he did do it,” Davis said.

Still though, initially no match was found, and the case stalled.

“There was no match, so I want to say 2016, they tried to get more DNA, so we thought to try to exhume Carl’s body from Coleman Cemetery in Alexandria, but unfortunately his tombstone had been washed away from the derecho that happened in 2012,” cold case detective Melissa Wallace said.

Then, recently, a breakthrough. A forensics company called Astrea was able to use genetic genealogy to trace the boy’s DNA to his mother, a woman named Vera Bryant, who had died in 1980.

She lived in Philadelphia, and relatives told police that on June 13, 1972 — the day Carl Bryant was found dead — she had driven from Philadelphia to Middlesex County, Virginia, with her boyfriend James Hedgepeth and her son Carl Bryant. But there was another passenger police hadn’t known about, 6-month-old James Bryant, Vera’s second son.

When James Hedgepeth and Vera arrived in Middlesex to meet with Hedgepeth’s family, the couple had no children with them, according to Assistant Chief Wright. On Thanksgiving that same year, Vera’s children were not with her, and she told her family her boys were with Hedgepeth in Virginia.

It was a disturbing twist in the case. After speaking with Vera’s relatives, police discovered it wasn’t just Carl who was gone, but baby James Bryant, whose body still hasn’t been found.

Vera Bryant and James Hedgepeth are both now dead, leaving police with unanswered questions as to what happened on that trip from Philadelphia to Virginia, and how 6-month-old James Bryant could disappear without a trace.

Authorities did extract DNA from Vera’s remains and confirm her as the mother of Carl Bryant, bringing a decades-old mystery to a close while unearthing entirely new ones.

According to Wright, police believe both boys were killed on that road trip down the East Coast, and that 6-month-old James Bryant’s body was also discarded along the way. Upon discovering Carl Bryant’s body, police had searched the area in Lorton for days, but did not find any other remains, nor did they know there was a second child they should have been looking for.

“We ask the public’s help in filling in the missing information,” Wright said. “Perhaps somebody witnessed something along that route that day, or maybe Vera or James confided in someone before they had died. Maybe another jurisdiction had recovered a 6-month-old baby’s remains, and didn’t have any way to tie it to this case.”

Chief Davis said police want to know much more about James Hedgepeth, but what they do know is that he was previously convicted of murder in 1962 and had served time in prison. He met Vera after that prison stint, according to police, and was not the father of either of her boys.

“In the event that he shared any information with family or friends since 1972, even though he’s now deceased, we’d like to know about that,” Davis said. “Our plea is for people to come forward, even if they think they know him but they’re not sure what information about him would be helpful, call us anyway.”

With baby James’ body missing and Carl’s tombstone swept away by a storm, police have also talked about a way to memorialize the case with a bench in Coleman Cemetery.

“This case was always important to me,” detective Wallace said. “To see the extent of that boy’s injuries and what he had suffered through, I’m happy to be here today announcing that at least we’ve identified him. He can have his name, we can get him his name back on his gravestone, and the family can have some semblance of closure.”

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