TWO DAYS AFTER the body of Harry Meyerson was dragged from the lake, another body was found—this one in Bethesda Fountain; or rather, various dismembered parts of a body were found which, later assembled, formed that of a young Caucasian male identified as Peter Sommers of Sunnyside, Queens.
The severed head was the first grisly discovery by a girl of eight chasing her Frisbee. When she looked into the shallow water, she saw what she first thought to be a magnified doll’s head. But through scrolls of fluid hair, two very real dead eyes stared up at her, and because the flesh of the mouth had been torn away, every tooth was exposed in a dazzling smile.
The following day, two dead dogs were found, and at the end of the week, the corpse of a fourteen-year-old child, with evidence that it had been dragged almost a quarter of a mile along the shore of the lake to a mountainous area close to a stream. There, surrounded by hundreds of clear, sharp footprints, the body had been so fantastically mutilated that the police, reporters, examining physicians, and a visiting U.S. Army general and his lieutenant were literally aghast. What remained actually was little more than a gnawed skeleton with shreds of flesh clinging to it. Even the eyes were gone, and the cartilage of the nose. The head was picked clean: a skull crowned with a scrawny tangled wig of human hair.
On Saturday the police barricades went up with more than two thousand men assigned. Special flood lamps were erected lining Fifth Avenue, and Central Park North, South, and West. The park, in effect, became an island afloat in a sea of light.