How Bella Bond Was Identified 10 Years After Washing Up on the Boston Shore in a Plastic Bag

On June 25, 2015, a woman walking her dog on Deer Island near Boston’s airport came across a garbage bag on the shoreline. When she opened the bag, a toddler’s decaying foot was exposed. 

The bag was found above the tide line, suggesting the body had been dropped via land. But recent storms plus a full moon that made for higher tides meant that the bag could have washed ashore. So police investigated both possibilities, examining security video footage of roads leading to the island and sending divers into the waters to search for evidence.

“We had to figure out if it was a land dump or if it had washed up,” Bob Murphy, a retired detective lieutenant for the homicide unit of the Massachusetts State Police and the case’s lead investigator, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. 

On the first day of the investigation, police use of forensic evidence determined that the girl’s body had come from Boston Harbor. Forensic evidence would prove crucial for other investigative elements of Boston’s “Baby Doe” case that captivated Massachusetts and beyond for the rest of that summer. 

Police were desperately trying to identify the girl and sought help from the public with the release of pictures of her polka dotted leggings and the zebra-striped fleece blanket she was wrapped in. 

The effort got international news exposure when authorities, helped by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, created a computer-generated sketch of what they believed the girl’s face looked like prior to her death. It generated massive attention and was shared more than 60 million times on social media and in other outlets.

Murphy says the sketch "essentially brought the child back to life.”

“It was everywhere,” he adds. “It was on TV, it was on billboards. Everybody in Boston saw that baby’s face.”

The impact resulted in a massive number of new leads for police that turned into an information glut that was difficult for investigators to sift through.

“We had calls coming from Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Canada. We got told the bag was thrown off of a cruise ship. And you can’t dismiss any of it, because you just don’t know," Murphy says. "The search was just massive—and way beyond our capabilities.”

Narrowing down which tips to focus on became more manageable after police received results of forensic tests conducted by a Utah laboratory on the toddler’s hair and teeth.

According to Murphy, the mixture of pollen in her hair tested at a forensic lab in Utah suggested she had to have lived near one of two arboretums—one in Philadelphia, and the other in Boston. Soot in her hair likewise indicated that she was from an urban environment.

The hydrogen in her teeth indicated that she was native to New England.

“She had roots in Boston. And that was great news for the investigation,” Murphy says. 

But the results also suggested the sinister probability that the girl's family, or someone close to them, had dumped her body in the water.

“You realize that whoever was caring for her could potentially be involved,” Murphy says. “Either that, or they’re dead too.”

In September, more than two months after the baby’s remains were discovered, Murphy says he responded to a tip about a missing child from Maxwell Street in the Boston suburb of Dorchester.

A man had told police he stayed the night at the home of Rochelle Bond and her boyfriend, Michael McCarthy, and noticed while there that her 2-year-old daughter was not present, Murphy says. The man says he was initially told that the girl was staying at her grandparents’ home but that Rochelle later said her daughter was dead.

After receiving the information, Murphy says he was hopeful that the lead could break the case of the missing girl, but he was hardened from “hundreds of tips that didn’t pan out.” He headed to the address with another officer.

“We were walking up the stairs, and I turned to Danny and I said, ‘How far away is the arboretum from here?’” Murphy recalls.

Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum was very close, and police were now very close to cracking the case.

The tip gave police probable cause, which allowed them to seal off the apartment and do a “protective sweep” of the home while awaiting their search warrant—ensuring that the premises were vacated and that no one inside was dead, dying or otherwise in need of assistance. 

During that protective sweep of the apartment unit where 2-year-old Bella Bond was supposed to be living, Murphy and his team discovered the tunic top that was sold as a two-piece set with the polka-dotted leggings the dead toddler was wearing. And there was a rug on the apartment floor with the same zebra pattern as the fleece blanket in the bag containing the girl’s body.

After getting a search warrant, police collected DNA samples of the missing child from a toothbrush and a hairbrush found in the apartment and positively matched it with the remains. The child who had washed up in the bag was unquestionably Bella Bond.

Rochelle Bond and Michael McCarthy were arrested. Bond cooperated with investigators, taking a plea deal and confessing to homicide complicity, saying that McCarthy had punched the toddler in the abdomen, killing her. He then stored her body in the freezer for several days before taking her remains by car to the Boston Harbor, where he dumped her in a duffel bag that also contained weights he had taken from his father’s plumbing shop. 

McCarthy pleaded not guilty but was convicted at trial of second-degree murder, which carried an automatic life sentence. Since then, he has continued to maintain his innocence. 

As part of her deal with prosecutors, Rochelle pleaded guilty as an accessory to murder. She was released after two years, at the time of McCarthy’s conviction. 

Bond and McCarthy were heroin addicts, which the prosecutor emphasized as a tragic element in his closing statement at trial.

Murphy is haunted by how helpless and young Bella was and how her case generated tips about other missing toddlers from around the world.

“This is an ongoing problem,” Murphy says. “There are too many children out there in danger. And we just don’t do enough for them. That’s the hardest part for me.”