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Taking the baby to a thicket less than half a mile from his Plainview home, he laid him down on the ground in a chill, drizzling rain, abandoned him. Within a few days, though he could no longer bargain with the Weinbergers, LaMarca sent them another ransom note, telephoned them at least once—but Morris Weinberger and his wife somehow never made direct contact with him.
After LaMarca told his story, police and federal agents moved out to seek corroboration. Lined up an arm's length apart, 60 searchers began their slow walk through the thicket. After an hour FBI Agent J. Robert Boger, on his hands and knees in the underbrush, caught the glint of a safety pin. He groped again through a mass of brush and vines, found fragments of clothing, then found what Nassau County's medical examiner later identified as "the remains of an infant child."
* The Lindberg law required a seven-day waiting period before the FBI could step into a kidnaping case. Five weeks after the Weinberger kidnaping, President Eisenhower signed the law that permits the FBI to move in after only 24 hours.