Derahica made haste to Piermont and summoned the local police chief, E. H. Stebbins. The body was carried to a local undertaker’s and was at once suspected of being that of the missing Italian child. The next night Sergeant Fiaschetti and Salvatore Varotta arrived at Piermont and went to see the body, which had meantime been buried and then exhumed when the coming of the New York officer was announced. The remains were already sorely decomposed and the face past recognition, but Salvatore Varotta looked at the swollen little hands and feet and the blue sailor suit. He knelt by the slab where this childish wreck lay prone and sobbed his recognition and his grief. A coroner’s autopsy showed that the child had been thrown alive into the stream and drowned. Calculating the probable results of the reaction of tides and currents, it was decided that Giuseppe had been cast to his death somewhere above the point at which the recovery of the corpse was made. Long and tedious investigations followed. When had the child been killed and by whom? Was the little boy still alive when the two messengers arrived at the Varotta home for the ransom and the trap was sprung which gathered in five chief conspirators and five supposed accessories? If so, who was the confederate who had committed the final deed of murderous desperation? Who had done the actual kidnapping? Where had the child been concealed while the negotiations were proceeding? Some of these questions have never been answered, but it is now possible, from the confession of one of the men, from the evidence presented at four ensuing murder trials, and from the subsequent drift of police information, to reconstruct the story of the crime in greater part. On the afternoon of May twenty-fourth, when little Joe Varotta went into the candy store with his penny, he was engaged in talk by one of the men from across the street, whom Joe knew well as a friend of his father’s. The child was enticed into a back room, seized, gagged, stuffed into a barrel and then loaded into a delivery wagon. Thus effectively concealed, the little prisoner was driven through the streets to another part of town and there held in a house by some member of the conspiracy. The men engaged in the plot up to this point were all either neighbors or their relatives and friends.