"Extremely Strange Case"

Francis Riley told his schoolmates and somebody told Judge Kathryn Sellers. Judge Sellers sent twp U. S. marshals to investigate. The marshals went to the Riley home on Rhode Island Avenue, descended to the basement. They opened the door of a windowless closet and there found something that whimpered and blinked and ate food scraps from a pan. It was the Riley's 12-year-old child. Edith, scarred and filthy. Her case, broached to horrified Washington. D. C. two months ago, was settled insofar as the law could settle it last week.

Before the District of Columbia Supreme Court Edith's father, Henry Newman Riley, a paperhanger, and his wife Elsie, the little girl's stepmother, were put on trial for "feloniously torturing, cruelly beating, abusing and otherwise maltreating" the child. Francis Riley, 15. testified that for four years his sister had been a prisoner in the black and bedless basement closet. She was beaten with sticks and shoes. After one beating, Francis told how he found some of Edith's teeth on the basement floor. So secret had the Riley's kept their closet child that their boarders never guessed her presence.

Rescued from the dark and taken to Gallinger Hospital, Edith was found to weigh 38 Ib. Her legs were too spindly to support her shrunken body. She stared at nurses with lifeless eyes. In six weeks, however, she learned to play with dolls and children, gained 20 Ib. In court the child heard but did not pay much attention to her parents' defense: that Edith "was given to certain vicious practices," that she had to be kept away from neighborhood children, that her stepmother was not "mentally responsible."

As indignant as his judicial position would permit, Judge F. Dickinson Letts declared before rendering his judgment: "This is an extremely strange case, unusual in all its aspects. . . . The evidence is so conclusive and so revolting to any sense of justice entertained by ordinary persons with respect to the care of children that I must mete out the full measure of punishment prescribed in the law."

Paperhanger & Mrs. Riley were sentenced to two years' imprisonment, fined $250 each. Then they were taken to a basement, locked up whimpering together in the court house's temporary cell.

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