By Neil Shea

"Rooftop" was the highest jump in Quincy's Granite Rail Quarry, an overhanging platform of dark granite, 50 or 60 feet above the surface of a cold, water-filled abyss. A friend of mine who used to leap from Rooftop as a kid said jumping was never easy. It was something you had to force yourself into each time—and it always hurt. Even when you did it right, he said, arms crossed over your chest, feet pointed down, you hurt for a half-hour after.

Pain was part of the experience. And the quarry, with its steep ledges and wild appeal, set on the faraway border of the city, attracted throngs of local kids everyday during the summer for more than 30 years. They brought six-packs of beer and smoked pot, littered the place with graffiti, and piled up socks and shoes in the jittery ritual of stripping before taking a plunge. But Granite Rail was a schizophrenic hole; and in those three decades it shifted back and forth from giant, unregulated playground to glimmering graveyard.

Natural Arena For more than 30 years Granite Rail quarry was a swimming hole and party spot. It was also a dumping ground for bodies. Click to enlarge

In mid-September, 1997, Granite Rail was an arena. Slick rock walls pushed up out of dark water. Tall outcrops leaned in overhead, casting cool shadows. Rock climbers wandered through the buzz of their annual festival onshore, winning contests, eating hotdogs, yelling, laughing. I floated mid-pond lazily in a battered rowboat, a world away, ready to haul out anyone who tumbled in.

I was working as a park ranger for the Metropolitan District Commission, the MDC. The rusty state bureaucracy manages the old quarry as part of a large suburban park system. Leaning over the edge of the rowboat, I watched hundreds of milky, freshwater jellyfish flutter and pump in a cloud just below the surface. The quarter-sized jellies, a line of ghosts, rose slowly through the murk to feed in sunlit patches.

Two months later police divers swam down into a tomb, hunting for a body in the still blackness at quarry-bottom. They found two, hundreds of feet below, resting on ledges. The water was so cold at that depth that ice crystals clouded their diving masks and rattled in their respirators. After days of diving, the policemen pulled up the well-preserved corpse of an Irish exchange student, ending one family's long ordeal. He'd been missing for three years.

A short, stern truck driver from South Boston named Charlie Hammond stood at the edge of the quarry holding his wife and watching police load the body into a black bag. They waited for the other corpse to surface and hoped it would be their oldest daughter, Karen, who disappeared two years earlier. They suspected she had been kidnapped and murdered, and the little flecks of evidence they'd found in their terrible search for her led to Granite Rail.

It was a perfect place to dump bodies.

The quarry has been a Quincy landmark since the early 19th century, when men searching for sturdy stone to build the Bunker Hill Monument discovered great outcrops of rock on the city's edge. Early quarrymen carved thousands of tons of hard, fine-grained granite from the earth and gave the Quincy a nickname: the Granite City. But demand eventually ran out, and the pit was deactivated in 1942. With no one to pump out the huge hole, it filled with 160 million gallons of water. It became an enticing play space, full of wildlife, rusting quarry equipment, and bleak, rocky headwalls, tucked away from neighbors. Granite Rail was beautiful a retreat for reckless teens.

Kids slipped down to the rocks through the ribs of an old fence and wandered a trail to the water. Each generation's toughest and dumbest launched themselves like screaming cannonballs from the cliffs. Rock-climbers and hikers also roamed the place on tiny suburban adventures.

Natural succession is usually benign—lakes fill with sediment and become swamps, swamps change to grasslands, grasslands fade into forests. But Granite Rail, carved up by men and then abandoned, blurred into unregulated ruin, like old warehouses, junkyards, mines and graveyards.

Wildness is seductive in big places like this, right near cities that have banished natural risks. The thrill of gravity and fear pull you to the edge, if you can stand it. You kick in a few pebbles or spit or yell, waiting for an echo, the plunk of impact, some sensual measure of scale. Everyone who makes it to the lip of a deep hole wonders what it would be like to fall. Or jump.

But Granite Rail was dangerous. Logs hovered below the surface at odd depths, like submarines. Old machines squatted on shallow ledges, out of sight. In some places, rotten rock disintegrated underfoot. One jumper disappeared in a neighboring quarry after he smashed into the water like a rag doll and sank. Several kids fell in and drowned. A rockslide crushed two more. Other bodies got rolled in, along with stolen cars and heaps of junk.

The menace of the place irritated lawmakers and frustrated law enforcers; a recurring rash on Quincy's skin. City officials lobbed telephone poles into the quarry to discourage jumpers. The poles sank. The MDC bought the quarry in 1985 and turned it into a park, but rarely monitored it. No one knew how to define the place. So after a while, no one tried.


Charlie Hammond called it "Devil pit".
On a February evening in 2001, screaming ambulances rolled by outside his South Boston apartment, pushing noise through the walls. Charlie was 49, lived with his wife, also named Karen, and drove a big rig delivering fish. He didn't make much money, and he'd lost a lot of work time looking for his daughter in the six years since she vanished. He and his wife were also raising Karen's two adolescent daughters.

He stayed pretty calm talking about Karen; it was the boxed-up calm of sadness and fatigue. He shuffled through the folders where he'd filed every morsel from his searches, his meetings with police, the dead-end details of old hope. If he couldn't remember something, he yelled back to his wife, and she answered quietly.

Karen was blonde, petite and dreamed of being a hairdresser. She disappeared from a Store 24 parking lot in South Boston a few days after New Year's, 1995. Her boyfriend, father of one of her girls, let her out at the store and left to run an errand. He said he'd come back for her. No one knows what came next. When her boyfriend returned, Karen was gone.

Policemen and reporters covering the case thought Karen was working as a prostitute and disappeared in some grisly cloud, the way prostitutes occasionally do. Charlie said Karen was no angel, but he called himself a loving father. He wouldn't even consider the prostitute bit. "My impression is that she went with someone she knew," Charlie said, in a heavy Boston accent, his voice spiraling downward. "There's an awful lot of hearsay. We had indications maybe her boyfriend had a part in it. Another we heard was her body was cut up and disposed of."

Charlie looked in sewers, abandoned cars, warehouses, and all the other hard places he could think of. Clues came in whispers. Most leads turned into thickets of confusion. But some of them glistened just enough to give struggling parents hope of at least finding a body. While checking posters he had taped up describing Karen, Charlie found a note scrawled on the tattered paper: "Body at q…." Rain had smudged the rest of the words.

From this stained clue, the flow of logic was simple—Granite Rail had long been a body dump. Police had found a woman's body there underwater, bound and weighted down with cinder blocks, the same year Karen disappeared. The woman, named Sonia Leal, had been a prostitute and some of her customers had killed her after arguing about money. The poster note, the quarry's notoriety, and other small tips from the police brought the Hammonds to Granite Rail. On the shore, that autumn day in 1997, Charlie had watched police recover the Irish kid's body and he had waited for answers to rise out of the dark water. But they never did.

It took years of terrible lessons before the authorities found a way to seal Granite Rail. But finally in the late 1990s, after a few more deaths and expensive search operations pounded lawmakers and bureaucrats, they pushed to sanitize the place. Lurching out of years of inertia, they declared Granite Rail too dangerous for society. They also hurried because the latest tragedies coincided with Boston's multibillion-dollar Central Artery/Tunnel Project, called the Big Dig, as it shifted into high gear.

An exercise in engineering superlatives, the Big Dig is the biggest, most complicated, messiest, most irritating highway project in the nation. But it has promise. It will remove several thousand dirty commuter cars from public view by sinking the expressway that runs into Boston. At the height of construction, more than a hundred cranes ate into the earth every day. The smell of dirt and diesel fuel and rubber infused the work site. The Big Dig's shuddering gravity was hard to escape.

When officials decided to fill the quarry, they killed two public works problems at once. The quarry would be filled and Big Dig engineers found a destination for the millions of cubic feet of clay, glacial till and muck that came out of its tunnels daily. The state government—already over-budget in Dig expenses—would save millions of dollars from the arrangement. The city of Quincy would also reap several million more for handling the dirt.

On a bright January morning in 2001, two men from the Big Dig drove out from Boston to show off the Granite Rail filling project. It had been going for a month and Dig officials had temporarily taken over the quarry from the state. The men pulled up in a dirty pick-up by a five-foot granite block that bore a memorial to the murdered prostitute: Sonia Leal, 1977-1994. I hopped in.

Chris Barnett, Manager of Materials Disposal for the Big Dig, a tall, friendly engineer in a hard hat and tie, was ready with numbers. Eight hundred twenty-five thousand tons, or about 400,000 cubic yards of Big Dig fill, would soon seal the quarry, he said. Men hustled around the clock to fill the pit. Shift one hauled the dirt from the Big Dig site, 20 minutes away on the expressway, and stockpiled it overnight at an old landfill three minutes from the quarry. Shift two spent its days pushing dirt into the hole.

Mud Slide The quarry in December 2000 at the start of the filling project. Click to enlarge

The pile would eventually stack up as tall as the Mayan Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan: 250 feet tall and about two acres at its base. Also like the Pyramid, this pile would entomb a stash of human artifacts.

We reached the action, my first visit to the quarry in years. Filthy trucks, each hauling about 20 tons of fill, grumbled up to a shallow trough by the edge of the quarry and tipped their loads in. A front-end loader nudged the dirt further, and then a giant yellow excavator reached into the trough and scooped the moist dirt into the void, one tiny black bucket-full at a time.

A lumpy pile had consolidated beneath the dumping trough. On the far northern wall, rafts of debris clung like smashed houses to ledges in the granite. When I worked as a ranger, I had rarely visited the quarry during winter. It looked empty and cold. I'd had no idea what was beneath me that day I watched jellyfish, just before bodies began surfacing. Now the veiled mystery of deep water was gone, lost to the unflinching bulk of big engineering, heavy equipment, fences and 24-hour supervision. The hole stared.

"When we drained the quarry, there was a huge amount of debris at the bottom," Barnett said. It was a perilous, fifty-foot deep mess, choked with logs, those phone poles, bikes, oilcans, and cars—at least a dozen cars remained stuck in the spiny pile. The state police couldn't remove them. "The oldest car was probably vintage 1930s, complete with wooden running boards," Barnett remembered.

The machines groaned and beeped in the cold, throttling up and down as if they were racing. I asked Barnett how much earth it would take to fill Granite Rail. He knew it wouldn't take much longer. By day's end, about 380,000 tons would have gone into the pit—a huge load considering that the filling had begun just a month earlier. "We actually have a pool," he told me. "I'm betting 740,000 tons" he said.

Trucks bellowed by in a rush of diesel and dust. The excavator swung back and forth, dipping into the trough and dumping right onto the area where, in late 1997, divers found a small, naked body crouched in fetal position on a ledge, nearly 200 feet down. To Barnett and many others, there was something pleasant about filling the quarry. It was a good public deed, full of something boyish that comes with digging and filling holes. It was easy and satisfying work. Especially compared to slow crawl of the Big Dig.


It's hard to say the same about deep water diving—there's nothing simple or alluring about swimming into darkness to grope for bodies. In 1997 divers reached the Irish student. But they lost the other body, the one Charlie was waiting for.

Police divers Terry Cunningham and Bob Yeagle dove into Granite Rail 50 times between 1997 and 1998. They were officers from the Wellesley, Mass., police department, dive buddies and members of a special public safety dive team. They'd gotten most of their deep diving experience worming through underwater caves together in Florida and exploring shipwrecks, like the Andrea Doria. State police investigators, following a tip from one of Sonia Leal's killer, had asked the friends to search Granite Rail for a body on a cold, late-November day.

They found nothing during their first dive, around 10 a.m. Layers of sediment suspended in the frigid water made it hard to see. Looming debris—those cars and phone poles—along with loose granite slabs snagged hoses and lines. Even their most powerful lamps reached only six feet through the gloom.

"It's probably one of the worst places I've dove," said Cunningham, now chief of Wellesley's force. "The problem was, if you got tangled in something, you'd feel like you were swimming, but then you'd say, 'wait a minute, I don't think I'm moving'." It was disorienting as a space walk. But astronauts don't do their work drunk: the breathing gas mixture of helium, nitrogen and oxygen, plus the pressure, slowed the divers' reaction time and numbed their minds. "At that depth, there's a narcotic effect. So at 180 feet, that's like having six martinis," Cunningham said.

Granite Rail bludgeoned the divers with cold, darkness, and pressure, forcing the men into cycles of diving, decompression and departure. They could search briefly during each dive, swimming up after 20 minutes to hover at several different levels for 45 more, waiting for nitrogen levels in their bodies to drop. Surfacing without this ritual could cause the "bends", a painful and potentially deadly build up of nitrogen in the bloodstream.

Snow was falling when the men dropped into the water again that first day, late in the afternoon. Cunningham and Yeagle were 18 minutes into their dive when they found the body in 180 feet of water. It loomed suddenly into view—two feet away on a small lip of rock, face down, hands pressed under the chest. Cunningham thought it might be tied to something. The body was well preserved by the near-freezing water and depth, but neither man could tell whether it was male or female. Yeagle began to unwind a marking spool so they could find the corpse later, when they returned with a special body bag.

We're almost done, Cunningham thought as he started for the surface. But on the way up, he got into trouble. A piece of his regulating gear malfunctioned and his dry suit began to over-inflate, becoming a deadly balloon dragging him to the surface. He and Yeagle lost each other in the blackness. Yeagle shot to the surface, skipping decompression, and yelled to support crews that Cunningham was missing. Get an ambulance, he shouted, blood oozing from burst vessels in his nose. Then he swam back to decompression depth, to wait, praying his friend was still alive.

Far below, Cunningham had managed to stop the over-inflation, slow his ascent and slip back to decompression depth. He knew Yeagle and those above would be worried. So he tethered a float bag to his belt with cord and sent it up, hoping it would let surface crews know he was OK. The bag popped up in the waning light, giving his exact position, but someone above misunderstood and started hauling Cunningham up like a hooked fish. He grabbed his dive knife, cut the line, and continued decompression until he was nearly out of air. Then he surfaced, blowing his sinuses. He was 15 minutes overdue. Both men crawled up into boats stunned, frightened, relieved. Sometime during the ordeal the marker leading down to the body came undone. Divers never found their way back.

Soon after, investigators called off the search for the winter, citing the hazardous conditions. The district attorney's office decided to partially drain Granite Rail. After a couple dozen dives in 1998, the search was halted again and draining resumed. A last look in 1999, this time by cadaver sniffing dogs lowered onto the quarry's debris pile, failed to find the body.

Charlie was convinced the body Yeagle and Cunningham had seen was Karen's. His belief boiled into a stubborn crusade. Charlie pushed to keep the search moving through the rest of 1997 and into 2000, but it was like wading through molasses. He met with the governor, the DA and flocks of reporters. He said he'd turn the press against state officials. He was even accused of threatening to toss a construction worker into the pit. And he was caught sneaking into the quarry through a hole in the barbed wire fence, the same way kids used to get in.

Granite Rail was almost completelydrained by November 2000. The state, the Big Dig and the city of Quincy, whose contractors who would heave the dirt into the hole, had signed agreements and pushed millions of dollars around. Big equipment crept up to the pit like citrus-colored ants.

Charlie sought an injunction in December to stop the filling. He was ready to put up his retirement money, $30,000, to hire a private contractor for a week's search of the wreckage at the quarry's bottom. State lawyers argued that the place was too dangerous to stay open. They said there was no proof Karen was in the quarry and they warned that a marvelous opportunity would pass by if Big Dig engineers had to look elsewhere for a fill site. The judge denied Charlie's injunction.

"I asked for a stinkin' seven days to recover a body. I had the crane, I had the basket. They ganged up on us in the courtroom." Charlie shoveled the bitter words out of his mouth. "As soon as we hit the courtroom they switched over to 24/7, and it looks to me like they moved the dumpin' right over to where the body was supposed to be. They tied my hands."

Places like Granite Rail all follow a succession-like pattern. They bump along through growth and utility, but are always abandoned and return to chaos. They fester on the edges of civilization until tragedies roll into them. Then civilization brings in bulldozers.

Two months later, in February, I trudged down an earthen ramp into the quarry with Chris Barnett, the engineer. We slopped around briefly near where I watched jellyfish years ago. Then we wandered over to Rooftop. "If you hear anything falling, get in close to the rock." Barnett demonstrated, shouldering into the overhanging wall of grimy, gray granite. Dark mud sucked at his boots and the massive ledge above his head blocked out sunlight. "There's always stuff coming off the walls."

It was cold in Rooftop's shadow, 12 feet below the old waterline. Somewhere directly beneath our feet divers saw what might have been Karen Hammond's body. The stream of dump trucks had slowed to a trickle. Bulldozers had begun crawling down into the quarry, leveling out the enormous heap.

A new muddy pile stretched unevenly across the quarry like a rumpled blanket. Oyster shells from Boston Harbor and old bricks poked up through the muck, new ornaments of succession. Splinters of wood still clung to the rock. Jagged metal littered the place like broken teeth. But the quarry had been tamed. Barnett estimated the fill job was two-thirds done. Trucks would bring 200,000 more tons of material. Granite Rail would be full by spring, he said.

MDC spokesmen said the agency was planning a Granite Rail revival and that plans would soon be presented to the public. With a makeover, the gentle hump connecting Granite Rails and an adjacent quarry would loll out like a big green tongue. There would be room for polished picnic grounds and the big cliffs would stay open for rock climbers. Barnett had heard the plans could include a memorial for Karen Hammond.

Metamorphosis A gallery of the quarry's transformation. Click here

By October 2002, Granite Rail had been fully stuffed for nearly a year. Rock climbers had returned, gathering in the evening after work, and on weekends. They scrambled up once inaccessible areas and pioneered new routes up the granite faces. But the MDC had lost momentum, focus or money, and none of the rumored renaissance projects had begun. No tables, memorials or fences marked the site as stand-ins for supervision. The quarry still squatted dangerously on the city's rim, each of the old jumping spots plunging down to a pile of packed dirt. The quarry was bandaged, but not sterilized.

For those who have lost loved ones in Granite Rail, or for people like Charlie Hammond who see the place as a symbol of death and buried questions, the casual return to disorder is disturbing. Charlie wanted a memorial. He thought he might find solace in one, a kind of closure. A public offering might be better than finding a body or gruesome story.

If his daughter is in the quarry, the filling project has at least lent her some dignity: she was buried like a princess. Relatives and government men conducted intricate ceremonies at the site, and 25,000 lumbering trucks have bowed and filled her grave. The quarry's lore also endures, and as visitors stand atop the pyramid of dirt and look up at the fading graffiti-epitaphs, they will always wonder what's buried in Granite Rail.

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Neil Shea is a regular contributor. He is a staff writer at The Providence Journal and he has written for Harvard Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor and other newspapers.

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