Note: The case of a headless woman and child found in a farmer’s field near Rochester turned into a months-long struggle to find their names &045; and their killer. This is the first in a three-part series about that case.

By Joshua Freed, Associated Press Writer

ROCHESTER (AP) &045; A farmer’s combine shearing off corn stalks laid bare the black trash bags.

The farmer lugged the bags to the edge of his field, where a township worker cleaning ditches found them about 10 days later. Figuring they were trash, or deer hides left over from hunting season, the worker dragged the bags down into a ditch where they would be out of sight until a Bobcat loader could handle their weight.

That’s when a child’s hand poked out.

Crying, thinking of his own daughter, the worker called 911.

&045;&045;&045;

The pager beeping at Herm Dybevic’s side summoned him to the ditch, just out of sight of the last housing development on Rochester’s north side. It was the day after Thanksgiving, 1999.

Officers were already on the scene taking pictures as cadaver dogs searched for more bodies. Dybevic could see the child’s arm poking through a hole in the side of one of the bags. An officer tugged at the second bag to test its weight, and finding it weighed perhaps 100 pounds or more, left it where it was.

Deputies tromped through the ditches and cornstubble looking for clues &045; a dropped purse, a wallet, another body. They found nothing. With the sun setting, officers took the bags to a Mayo Clinic facility used in death investigations.

There, Dybevic &045; an investigator with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and a veteran of more than 100 homicide cases &045; pulled on latex gloves, a plastic gown and shoe covers. After someone took more pictures of how the bags were tied shut, Dybevic cut them open.

What they saw was enough to startle a roomful of seasoned cops.

Inside one was the body of a woman &045; naked, bound by twine into the shape of a ball, headless. Inside the other bag was the body of a small boy, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, also decapitated.

The bodies offered few clues. Judging by their condition, investigators figured they had been killed a few weeks before they were found. The woman wore a gold ring on her left middle finger, and had been physically fit, perhaps in her 20s or 30s. She was naked. Fresh lavender nail polish covered her left fingernails, but there was none on her right, suggesting she may have been killed while doing her nails after a shower.

The boy looked to be 3 to 6 years old. Both had brown skin. From the necks down, there was no sign of trauma. Whatever killed them happened above their shoulders.

&045;&045;&045;

Bill Reiland figured his phone would ring. In fact, he depended on it.

Reiland, the Olmsted County sheriff’s detective put in charge of the case, thought for sure someone &045; a day-care worker, a Sunday School teacher, an aunt &045; would notice that a child was missing.

Reiland didn’t have much to go on. Investigators found no fingerprints on the bags or bodies. The fingerprints of the victims themselves didn’t match any in police databases. Without the heads, there was no way to compare dental records. Without a call, simply identifying the woman and boy would be difficult, much less finding their killer.

To get that call, detectives needed to get the word out. The night the bodies were found, they summoned reporters into a conference room and laid out the woman’s ring and a photo of the boy’s shorts and shirt on a table; a few hours later the pictures were on TV.

The boy’s shorts were a corduroy-like material, with one red and one green button. His hunter-green shirt was a brand sold by the thousands at Target, size 2T, the size a preschooler might wear. The woman’s ring looked to be hand-crafted 14-karat gold, with straight edges and no jewel; not fancy, not shabby. Individually, they weren’t very good clues. Detectives hoped that together they might be recognizable to someone who knew the two.

On Saturday, Reiland took the gold ring to three local jewelry stores to see if any of them had made it. They hadn’t.

On Monday, detectives notified the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

At a news conference the next day, Sheriff Steve Borchardt looked frustrated as he appealed to the public for help. &uot;If you can’t identify the victims, you can’t solve the case,&uot; he said.

About a dozen detectives worked the case, many putting in 14-hour days. They punched descriptions of the victims into national databases to see if they matched missing women and children elsewhere. Every week, detectives got new leads from those databases, sometimes dozens at a time. About 60 came in from Chicago alone.

And Reiland’s tipline, staffed around the clock, began to ring. Callers told of women in rocky relationships whom they feared may have ended up dead. Detectives looked into each one, knocking on doors all over the city. In other cities &045; Detroit, Chicago &045; officers did the same thing.

Every call or database hit that came in went on a &uot;lead sheet,&uot; and detectives assigned a category &045; &uot;A&uot; for the best leads, or &uot;B&uot; or &uot;C&uot; for those less credible. Calls from psychics &045; there were several &045; were &uot;C&uot; leads.

As part of a public campaign to identify the bodies, detectives notified schools that they were interested in boys between the ages of 3 and 6 who might have gone missing early in the school year. Detectives said the victim was probably black. But no teachers called in with tips that panned out, and school records clerks didn’t find any boys who had disappeared from school that matched that description. Many of Rochester’s 16,000 students come and go during the school year, especially the children of migrant laborers who move through the area each fall. Unless the child’s new school calls to ask for his or her records, it can be tough to determine where they’ve gone.

Nearly five months after the bodies were found, America’s Most Wanted aired a 35-second appeal for help. The broadcast described &uot;Rochester Jane Doe&uot; as &uot;probably African-American,&uot; and &uot;Rochester John Doe&uot; as possibly her 4-year-old son. The show generated more tips, but no real clues.

But every hopeful-looking lead crumbled.

Officers learned of another body found in a black bag, this time near Madison, Wis. But investigators of the two cases compared notes and quickly cleared the Wisconsin killer in the Rochester case.

Reiland was putting in 14-hour days on the case, and lay awake at night thinking about it. Seven months after the bodies were found, detectives were no closer to knowing the names of the dead woman and child, or their killer.

Reiland was offered a promotion to lead a narcotics task force. He hated to leave an investigation with so many open questions. But he had put in for the task force promotion before the bodies were found, and it was looking more and more like they might never be identified. He took the new job.

&045;&045;&045;

On May 26, about 200 people attended a funeral that had been delayed so investigators could make sure they no longer needed the bodies. Several law officers acted as pallbearers. Others sat in the back of Christ United Methodist Church, watching and videotaping those who attended for anyone who seemed like a suspect who couldn’t resist the temptation to show up for the funeral.

The Rev. Scott Daniels told the crowd that even though the crime was unsolved, &uot;there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed,&uot; if not on Earth, then before God.

The two were buried under markers that read &uot;Mother at rest 2000&uot; and &uot;Son at rest 2000&uot; at Oakwood Cemetery &045; the same cemetery where Mayo Clinic founders William and Charles Mayo are buried.

At the same time, pressure was building on Borchardt to turn the case over to the FBI. Some blacks, mainly in the Twin Cities, weren’t happy with the progress of the white sheriff in a mostly white town on a case of two victims who appeared to be minorities. The activists &045; and Borchardt &045; didn’t know it, but detectives were close to a break.

MONDAY: The race of the victims becomes a flashpoint. Meanwhile, the junior detective taking over the case goes back to school in search of the child victim.