Wendell Hubbard was a 10-year-old Black boy who disappeared during an ordinary October afternoon in Manhattan and was found dead on October 23, 1972, on the rooftop of an East Harlem tenement. His mother reported him missing after he didn’t come upstairs when called; hours later his body was discovered on the roof. The killing was described as savage and intimate, with repeated stabbing and sexual mutilation, and investigators and neighbors linked it to a string of similar attacks on boys in Manhattan that the press called the Charlie Chop-Off murders.

Police pursued dozens of leads, circulated composite descriptions from witnesses and a surviving victim, and focused suspicion at one point on Ernesto Erno Soto, a man with a long history of institutionalization who later confessed to the killing of another boy, Steven Cropper. Even so, no one was arrested or convicted specifically for Wendell’s murder, and the evidentiary connection between Soto and earlier cases, including Wendell’s, remained uncertain. Does anyone have information about Wendell’s last known movements or memories of that East Harlem neighborhood in October 1972?