Mary Elizabeth Flannery first came to the attention of the Police Department of the City of Philadelphia at 9:21 p.m., June 29, 1973, when an unidentified civilian called the Police Emergency number and reported that as she and her husband had been driving through Fairmount Park, going down Bell’s Mill Road toward Chestnut Hill, they had seen a naked woman, just walking around, on the Chestnut Hill side of the bridge over Wissahickon Creek.
The call was taken in the Police Radio Room, which is on the second floor of the Police Building in downtown Philadelphia. The operator who took the call was a civilian, a temporary employee, a twenty-two-year-old, 227-pound, six-foot-three-inch black man named Foster H. Lewis, Jr.
Foster H. Lewis, Sr., was a sergeant in the Eighteenth District. That hadn’t hurt any when Foster H. Lewis, Jr., had appeared three years before in the City Administration Building across from City Hall to apply for a part-time job to help him with his tuition at Temple University, where he was then a premedical sophomore.
Foster H. Lewis, Jr., who was perhaps predictably known as “Tiny,” had been at first more than a little awed by the Radio Room, with its rows of operators sitting before control consoles, and made more than a little
