October, 2004
`WE DIDN'T WANT BLUE TO GO INTO A JANE DOE GRAVE'
COUPLE HELPS GIVE PROPER BURIAL TO BABY WHO WASHED UP ON VENTNOR BEACH
DAVID BENSON Staff Writer (609) 272-7206
He found her almost a year ago, washed up in the surf on a beach in Ventnor. At most a few days old, the infant had been strangled, stuffed in a laundry bag and thrown into the ocean. After 10 months in a morgue, the dead infant has changed the lives of those who have come to think of her as their own. They have given her a name, a set of clothes and a family. Now they will bury her. Baby Blue has come home.
Jan. 17 was a beautiful day at the shore. A long cold snap had ended, and temperatures soared into the high 40s. Bill Ferrier, a Ventnor resident, told his wife, Susan, that he was going for a walk along the shore at the end of Suffolk Avenue. It was Saturday, Bill's day for pondering life at the beach he loves so much, and for smoking his weekly cigar.
"As I was walking," Bill said, "I saw something big in the surf line. It was gold, kind of like a mustard-colored sack."
As a child, years before he and Susan moved here, Bill visited the beaches in Ventnor for summer vacations. Like many people, he never quite outgrew the fantasy of finding treasure buried in the sand or rolling along the shore. That sack, pushed up high on the beach, could be filled with money, he remembers thinking.
"I grabbed it by the drawstring and dragged it through the sand up to the Boardwalk so I could have some privacy when I opened it." Bill took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead, as he recalled what happened that day. Susan put her arm around her husband, and leaned into him. Both had tears in their eyes.
Bill, 43, took a long moment and a deep breath.
"There was a Hefty bag inside the laundry sack," he said. "I dumped the Hefty bag out onto the ground, and two seconds later, my life changed forever."
The plastic bag had made Bill even more sure that there might be money inside. He pinched the bag to tear it open.
"As soon as it opened," Bill said, "a bloody pair of purple panties flew out."
Then Bill saw the dead infant.
"I dialed 911 on my cell phone. It didn't take the Ventnor police two minutes to get there."
But as fast as the response was from the city police, Bill still had time to stand and look back toward the ocean.
"In my mind, I keep seeing the line in the sand from the drag marks," he said. "I know I couldn't have known, but I still feel bad about dragging this baby's body across the beach."
The baby and the line in the sand changed their lives. Bill fell into a depression after finding the child.
"It was a profound sadness," he recalls. "It was self-pity, and I asked: Why me? Why was I the one to find the body?"
Susan held her husband closer.
"Other people would have walked away," Susan said. "Some of the investigators said as much."
But not Bill. He couldn't walk away - not that day from the infant he found, nor from the memory of what he saw.
A week after finding the baby in the surf, Bill found himself walking along the beach. The day was clear, cold and crisp.
"I looked up to ask `Why?' " he said, "and all I could see was blue." From edge to edge, it was as if the sky had an answer for Bill. While gazing upward, he mouthed her name for the first time - Baby Blue.
"One thing that bothered me," Bill said, "was that that people called her: `the baby,' or `she' or `it.' I looked up at that sky, and I knew I had to give this baby a name."
All things beautiful are blue, Bill said. "So that's what I named her."
It was then that the healing began. Giving the baby a name drew the infant even closer to the Ferriers. "Blue" was a part of their family now. Although the couple has put off having children of their own, Susan said, that didn't relieve them of feeling responsible for Blue. They knew that since the baby had been killed, Blue's parents probably would not step forward. And investigators didn't have much to go on. Her weight was barely more than 6 pounds, indicating she was a few days old at most. And officials still aren't sure about her ethnicity, although they think she might have been Hispanic or Asian. That meant the child's body would be caught up in the legal system, Susan said, and they couldn't let that happen.
"We wrote a letter to the medical examiner's office, because there was a possibility that no one would claim the body," she said.
Bill looked up.
"We had a problem with that," he said. "We didn't want Blue to go into a Jane Doe grave."
In February, the Ferriers offered to pay for a funeral and burial after the investigation was completed.