Accident, Not Fiend, Killed Boy in ’33

More than seven decades after the case horrified the city and triggered calls for a crackdown on “all known degenerates,” the Sheriff’s Department declared Thursday that it has solved the mysterious death of 7-year-old Dalbert Aposhian.

When the boy’s mutilated body was found floating in San Diego Bay in July 1933, police concluded that he had been killed by a sex fiend.

The coroner’s office made the same finding and said the murder weapon was probably a knife similar to those issued to sailors.

With other local murders unsolved, local newspapers for weeks had blood-curdling headlines about a maniacal killer on the loose.

But the cold case unit of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, after asking the current medical examiner’s office to review detailed autopsy pictures, concluded that the boy accidentally drowned and his body was mutilated by marine life.

“This was an unfortunate case of someone who fell into the water while playing,” said Dr. Jonathan Lucas, deputy medical examiner.

Since 1933, pathologists have learned a great deal more about what bodies look like after being submerged in water and attacked by marine life, Lucas said.

“This is a classic case,” he added.

The boy’s 9-year-old companion had told the police that Dalbert had fallen into the bay, but his version was not widely believed. The boy’s parents are now dead.

“My mother and dad always held to the belief that he had been kidnapped and murdered,” recalled Van Aposhian, the boy’s 73-year-old brother, a retired oil company marketing executive living in Mission Viejo.

Aposhian said his mother would occasionally talk of the loss but his father, a Protestant minister, never could.

“They had their faith, and they always believed they would meet Dalbert again in heaven,” Aposhian said.

A 1935 autopsy by a Los Angeles pathologist concluded that the evidence supported drowning. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department believed the finding, but the San Diego police did not.

Soon after the body was found, the San Diego Women’s Civic Center group sent a letter to the sheriff demanding that “all known degenerates, feeble-minded, congenital perverted and all irresponsible criminals should henceforth be kept in humane but permanent confinement.”

Suspects were interrogated. A mentally disturbed teenager confessed to the killing but later recanted.

“The community was very much up in arms,” said cold case Det. Curt Goldberg. “They wanted action.”

Goldberg said the unit would move on to other unsolved homicides, including the oldest case, the 1932 murder of a 13-year-old girl. The files are still intact.

“We don’t throw anything away with a homicide,” Goldberg said. “When they’re open, they’re open.”