Steven Cropper, a 7-year-old Black male, was found dead on Friday, August 17, 1973, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side after a woman walking her dog came upon him in a tenement building at 325 East Houston Street and alerted police. The late-summer heat sat heavy over the neighborhood, and the discovery landed like a thunderclap in a community already raw with fear.
Officers arrived quickly and saw that the scene had been staged: his shirt pulled high, his pants tugged down slightly, his sneakers removed and placed nearby. The cuts on his body weren’t the puncture wounds that had haunted earlier cases across Manhattan; these were razor slashes, and an autopsy later attributed the fatal injury to a laceration of the main artery near his left elbow. Investigators, trying to do what the moment demanded, walked the streets for hours with a photo until they found his parents, Catherine and William Cropper, and brought them to Bellevue Hospital’s morgue to identify him.
In the days that followed, detectives chased anything that might turn into a lead. Neighbors told reporters they had seen a man resembling a composite sketch lingering in the area and talking with children not far from the family’s Pitt Street home. Police questioned scores of people, including known sex offenders, and even fanned out to methadone clinics because they suspected the killer might be an addict—hundreds of calls poured in with sightings, rumors, and tips, each one a thread that might snap or might hold.
On August 21, an employee at the NENA Comprehensive Health Service Center called in a man who looked like the sketch while he was in the office for a job interview, and a Seventh Precinct squad car arrived to take him in for questioning. Word spread faster than any official statement could keep up: a crowd gathered at the station at Clinton and Delancey, pressing against barricades, climbing for a better view, shouting demands—some even brandishing a makeshift noose as if the street itself could deliver justice. Witnesses who had seen the loiterer ultimately said the man in custody was not the person they remembered, but releasing him nearly detonated the block; police used a decoy and then disguised him in an oversized uniform to slip him through the mob and away.
Months turned into another year, and then, in late May 1974, police were alerted to Ernesto “Erno” Soto after he was caught accosting a nine-year-old child and arrested; because of his disorganized mental state he was taken to Bellevue’s prison psychiatric ward for evaluation. Detectives brought witnesses to the hospital, and according to reporting cited in later accounts, some identified him as the person they had seen. Soto then confessed to killing Steven, and for a moment it seemed like the city’s long dread had finally found a name—one tied to psychiatric institutions, past violence, and a life that had repeatedly slipped through the system’s grasp.
But the case did not close cleanly. The surviving victim from an earlier attack could not identify Soto, and hospital officials said he had been confined at the time of the killing he confessed to, though they also acknowledged he sometimes left without permission—leaving the confession standing in a fog of doubt, with no physical evidence to anchor it. Soto was tried before a judge, where psychiatrists described him as dangerous and driven by religious delusions; the judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity and transferred him to a maximum-security psychiatric institution. Later accounts noted that a 1976 report said Soto had been cleared in the other sex-mutilation murders, yet he remained a suspect in Steven’s killing despite the acquittal, and the broader file has been described as still technically open.
