Leakin Park is a place where a person can go from a crowded urban road to a secluded wooded path in minutes. But what makes the wilderness expanse a sanctuary for city dwellers makes it attractive for killers as well.
It has been dubbed "the city's largest unregistered graveyard" -- an urban forest in Dead Run Valley where children discover skeletons and city workers find bullet-riddled corpses draped over guardrails.
Established six decades ago on land once owned by a Prussian railroad industrialist, Leakin Park is simply the place to dump a body in Baltimore.
"If you want to get rid of a body, where are you going to take it?" asks Donald Worden, a retired city homicide detective with three decades of experience. "Dump it in Leakin Park and hope no one finds it."
Since the first recorded body dump in the park in 1968, the remains of 56 bodies have been spotted floating in streams, hidden behind trees or left in roadways.
And the pace doesn't seem to be slowing: four bodies in 1995, eight in 1996 and four so far this year. By contrast, only two murder victims have turned up in New York's Central Park in the past three years.
Preservationists are working hard to build the Gwynns Falls Trail through the park, which will eventually let people walk shrouded by trees from Dickeyville near the Baltimore County line to Pigtown in Southwest Baltimore. But even they realize that Leakin Park -- with its dark, lonely roads twisting through dense forest -- is equated with murder.
"It's Baltimore legend," said Jonathan Foley, president of Friends of Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park. "It's something we live with, and it's something that holds us back in a lot of ways. The public perception of the park as a crime scene is a problem."
In other cities, too
Other cities have their notorious dumping grounds as well. There are the Pine Barrens and the Meadowlands in New Jersey, favorites of the mob. Philadelphia has Tacony Creek Park. Chicago has Humboldt Park. New York has the East River.
Of course, cities with their own body-dumping grounds are reluctant to acknowledge them. "We don't have a spot like that here," said Philadelphia police spokeswoman Stephanie McNeil, echoing her colleagues in other cities.
Leakin Park was built with money from the estate of J. Wilson Leakin, a well-known lawyer who died in 1922 and bequeathed four downtown properties to the city with the stipulation that they be sold five years after his death and the proceeds used to build a park.
