A Long Island mystery at 70: Who took 2-year-old Steven Damman on Halloween?

Results of this investigation were negative.

That phrase appears throughout the Nassau County Police Department records concerning the disappearance of Steven Damman, an East Meadow boy who was 2 years old on Oct. 31, 1955, when his mother told police he vanished from a  shopping strip near their home. Her report launched a dayslong search by thousands of officers and volunteers followed by years of work by Nassau police detectives, each new lead’s failure duly typed up and filed.

Steven was never found and, 70 years after his Halloween afternoon disappearance, no arrests have been made.

"This is still an active, ongoing investigation," Det. Joseph Oginski, a Nassau police spokesperson, wrote Thursday in an email to Newsday. The vice president of the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children told Newsday it also considers the case open.

The documents — hundreds of pages written by police, for police, summarizing tips from the public and interviews with persons of interest and potential witnesses — provide a record of the department's strategy on a major mid-century case. They contain details not previously widely reported, including that police confronted Marilyn Damman with doubts about her story of her son's disappearance. Newsday obtained them from Nassau police in 2009 through a records request and revisited them for the anniversary. 

The investigation begins

The documents trace an investigation that focused for a time on a witness account of a group of Black kidnappers that resulted in years of police questioning of Black people spotted with white children in the tristate area and beyond. No such kidnappers were ever found. The dragnet also snared, if only briefly, hundreds of families including those who had stillborn children, whose boys died in the years before Steven's disappearance or who adopted boys afterward, on the theory that he might have been taken as a replacement.

The documents are a window into postwar Long Island life. Their flat-toned, declarative language can also be read as a history of personal frustration: for the young boy’s parents, alerted repeatedly to the discovery of children who resembled their son but turned out not to be him; for the people who were treated as potential suspects by police and their own neighbors or acquaintances; and for investigators, who for years ran down leads as slim as the claim of a Minneapolis priest who said his "magnetic searcher" showed Steven nearby and alive.

Damman’s Nov. 3, 1955, statement to police says that on the day Steven disappeared, at about 1:15 or 1:30 p.m. she left him napping at their Mitchell Avenue home and took his infant sister, Pamela, in a carriage to a Woolworths department store near Front Street and Merrick Avenue in East Meadow. At about 2:15 p.m. they returned home. At 2:45 p.m. she took both children to the Food Fair supermarket near that intersection. There, she "told Steven that I would be back in a few minutes and left him standing there holding the carriage," with Pamela in it.

Steven goes missing

Damman said that when she returned about 10 minutes later, the carriage was gone and so were her children. A neighbor soon found it nearby holding Pamela but not Steven. He weighed 32 pounds, stood just over 3 feet tall and wore a red sweater with white and blue ships on the front.

Shortly after 3 p.m., the neighbor called Marilyn's husband, Jerry Damman, an airman at Mitchel Air Force Base. At 3:40 p.m., Marilyn Damman called police.

In interviews, several neighbors told police they saw Marilyn Damman and Pamela, but not Steven, that day. One neighbor told police she saw Steven outside the supermarket at 1 or 1:30 p.m., "standing near the carriage rocking it and the baby was inside this carriage crying." In one of the last reported sightings of Steven by someone other than his mother, another neighbor said she saw Damman and both children near the supermarket at about 2 p.m., roughly an hour before Damman said she took both of her children there.  

Nothing in the documents suggests that police thought it was odd to leave a toddler and an infant alone in front of a store, though Damman may have been sensitive to the possibility of criticism. In a 1956 Saturday Evening Post story by columnist Jimmy Breslin, she said that there were "three or four other carriages, with babies in them, outside the store" on the day Steven vanished. "It was something which I had done a thousand times, and other women still do," she said. Damman did not elaborate, but a photograph accompanying the story shows several strollers parked outside the store, all large enough that they might have been difficult to navigate inside. It is unclear if the carriages are occupied.  

"This was very much a child-centered environment — the streets were built specifically with curves to slow traffic so children could play outside," said Scott Eckers, a Long Island historian and teacher who has written about East Meadow. "There was this perception that this was a very safe place."   

An all-out search

In the hours after they were notified, police conducted "the most intensive street by street" search in Nassau County history in the area where he was last seen, according to a Nov. 2, 1955, Newsday story. The story said the search was eventually called off and police were turning their investigation to "all women who have lost babies recently and all women known to have been unable to have children." 

Police checked tips about families with boys that might be Steven through at least 1964, with police ruling out some families through birth records or interviews with neighbors. They questioned some parents, like a Maryland woman with no apparent ties to Long Island. Officers who interviewed the woman determined that while she had adopted a boy in 1955 after suffering a miscarriage, "her fifth such misfortune," he was not Steven.

Police opened another avenue of investigation, based on an interview with Philena Potter, the witness who told detectives that she had watched on Oct. 31 at about 3 p.m. as a Black man "picked up this little boy who had been standing near the carriage and walked off." Potter said the man was one of six Black people in a group that included another man and four women.In a Dec. 26, 1956, police interview, Potter's daughter added a detail that was not in Potter's original statement: "They picked up a little boy and he started screaming," she said her mother had told her on the day Steven disappeared.

None of the other documents that Newsday reviewed suggest that anyone else witnessed this scene. According to the Saturday Evening Post article, written in Damman's voice as told to Breslin, police and Damman herself "discounted" the account of the woman who claimed to have seen six Black kidnappers. Damman said she believed, based on "mother’s intuition, perhaps," that "a woman who lost a child of her own took my son to replace him."

On Nov. 30, 1955, police issued a news release about the six "criminals," asking anyone who saw them with a "small blonde boy with blue eyes" to contact the authorities. Going public was a gamble: Many people who thought they had useful information to share offered tips that were vague or not borne out by investigation.

One tip came from a Valley Stream hardware store owner who called police after a "colored" woman bought a padlock. Many of the tips about Black adults with white children turned out to be genuine but not nefarious. A Nassau police officer, calling Old Brookville police to check a tip about a Black woman seen with a white child, learned that "many of the residents have governesses for the children in that area, and many of them are taken for walks in the afternoon," according to the documents.

Police appear to have run down nearly every possible lead, regardless of plausibility, Once, they drove to the Bronx to search a neighborhood after a woman reported a possible sighting of Steven, only to have the woman tell them she got "messages out of the air." They searched the neighborhood anyway. They also interviewed at least two psychics who claimed to have had relevant visions.

"No information of any value was obtained from this interview," an investigator wrote after talking to a psychic in New Jersey.

Leads go nowhere

Promising leads failed to develop. A person who sent ransom notes to the Damman family was probably just an opportunist with no knowledge of Steven's whereabouts, police determined, and a Michigan man who in 2009 claimed to be Steven was proved wrong by DNA evidence.

An early disappointment came in a Nov. 18, 1955, call that investigators took from the NYPD about a boy matching Steven’s description who had been found wandering alone in a New York City variety store. Police believed the resemblance was so great that at 12:45 a.m. they drove Jerry Damman to Manhattan’s Foundling Hospital and together "viewed the child who was not Jerry Damman’s son."

Marilyn Damman recounted that incident in the Saturday Evening Post article, starting with a phone call from police to her husband: "I could tell by his answers that something good was happening. I grabbed his arm and cried a little." Alone at home after her husband drove with officers into Manhattan, Damman said she was convinced "he was going to bring back Steven. I thought of how I’d act and what I’d do." As hours passed, "I said, ‘Yes, it is Steven, and Jerry is late because he is signing a lot of papers so he can bring Steven home. Jerry walked into the house alone at 4 o’clock" in the morning.

The Saturday Evening Post article presents a sympathetic portrait of a woman pushed to the limits of what any parent could bear. 

Mother under suspicion

But in late 1955, police interviewed two women who said Marilyn had beaten Steven. One woman said that on a day in the spring before Steven disappeared, she’d heard slaps and the boy crying from the Damman residence. The woman also cited an acquaintance who told her she saw "Marilyn beat Steven about the face, head and chest with her fists." 

Another woman who told police she witnessed the beating said it was so troubling she had complained to an air base chaplain. When police interviewed the chaplain, he said he’d had multiple complaints about Marilyn Damman beating Steven. The chaplain said he had spoken with the Dammans "because some of the neighbors had complained about the way Marilyn had treated Steven." 

Other neighbors described Marilyn as a caring mother. But police reviewed Steven’s medical history, which included a visit to an air base doctor in January 1954, in which the physician was told that Steven had awoke with a bruised face and a bruised, swollen arm after falling from a rocking horse. An X-ray showed his upper left arm was broken. On other dates, the history noted a chin cut that required sutures and a ruptured eardrum. The doctor was told that Steven ruptured his eardrum after sticking a piece of wood into it. 

The medical history was included in the documents without comment from the police. Newsday's review of the records found no assessment of the likelihood of abuse. 

By November 1957, investigators seemed to be operating from a new theory of the case that pointed to Marilyn as a suspect when they re-interviewed the Dammans, who had separated but were both living in Iowa.

Here the language of the police report — concrete and specific across hundreds of pages — turns obscure. "There are indications, as there have been from the inception of the case, that Marilyn has not taken the interest in the efforts to return Steven that Jerry has, and that the loss of Steven has not greatly (affected) her, which, in itself, appears unnatural, and at the same time, in a vague sense, may be due to her type of personality and makeup."

What "indications?" What degree or manner of grief would, in the writer's judgment, appear natural? The report does not specify. 

The report continues: "Detectives told Marilyn that the facts of the case indicate that she is the one that is responsible for the disappearance of Steven, and furthermore that there was every indication that the treatment which she gave Steven was not of the routine discipline type, and that it was felt that she was not telling all regarding the day in question," according to the documents.

Marilyn Damman told police that "she had nothing to do with the disappearance of her son, and felt that she had nobody to answer to but herself."

Newsday was unable to reach Pamela Sue Horne, Steven's sister, to discuss her brother's disappearance. The documents do not address Damman's treatment of Pamela, except a passing observation by a neighbor that Damman "cuddled" her.  

Hard to solve

Joseph Giacalone, a retired member of the NYPD who commanded the department’s Bronx Cold Case Squad and is now an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said investigators working a case like Steven’s in 2025 would use tools that didn't exist when he disappeared, including surveillance camera footage and cellphone and internet records.

Police then and now would be wary of confronting the parents of a missing child or even implying suspicion without strong evidence, he said. "If you’re wrong ... you’ve turned this into a mess. We are trained to believe victims, even though we might have our antennae up."

Were he working the case, he said, he would retrace the path Marilyn Damman and her children took on the day Steven disappeared and pull property records to find any nearby sites with open land or construction. Cadaver dogs have been known to detect decades-old remains, he said, and ground-penetrating radar can aid in the search for buried evidence.

Without DNA or forensic evidence, he said, Steven's case "is going to be nearly impossible to solve."

John Bischoff, vice president of the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said his organization has a photograph of Steven as a toddler and an age-progressed image of him as a 65-year-old man on its website.

The organization's database holds just 162 missing children who would be over 65 years of age if found alive today, a fraction of the roughly 500,000 cases staffers have worked on, using missing posters and methods like genetic genealogy, age progression and forensic reconstruction. 

Steven is 72, if he is still alive. Finding someone decades after they went missing is "quite difficult," Bischoff said. But "until we know what happened to a child, we don't give up hope." 

Newsday's John Valenti contributed to this story.