It’s an almost universal reality that when a news report deals with a crime or criminal court case, that account either explicitly reports, if it’s been confirmed, or at least hints about, what efforts there might have been — or probably were — to conceal the crime and/or protect its secrecy for evermore.

A major mystery or puzzle in Gallitzin’s nearly 45-year-old Stella Williamson case, in addition to the current mystery about where some of the remains of the five infants found in her attic might be today, is that there apparently were no efforts to forever guarantee that the existence of the babies would never be known.

Anyone who ponders that fact might be struck by feelings of amazement that when each of the babies succumbed for whatever reason — and it was confirmed that three of the five were murdered — that, when each dead child was placed in the steamer trunk in which all five were found in September 1980, apparently no efforts had been initiated, over a period spanning decades, to dispose of the remains.

For most people, such a scenario would be regarded as unheard of, although the discovery of seven dead babies in cardboard boxes in a Utah garage in April 2014 produced similar reactions there to how people in Gallitzin reacted 34 years earlier, when the skeletal remains of Stella Williamson’s children were found in her attic after her death and funeral.

It was a two-page handwritten letter of shame written by Stella in 1960 that led authorities to the children’s remains.

In that letter she neither confessed to being a murderer nor identified the person or persons responsible for the three confirmed killings. However, it can be presumed that she was at least an accomplice in concealing the children’s deaths and, thus, criminally responsible.

Indeed, people need to be realistic about the possibility of many other Stella Williamson-type stories in which disposal of remains was conducted successfully. For example, whisperings in the past alleged disposal of children’s remains in coal furnaces in the homes of where the children were born and lived, not having been born in a hospital.

Still, the address 310 Forest St., Gallitzin, where Stella lived, was not a remote address.

There were numerous nearby homes; people knew one another, and people were well aware of each other’s comings and goings.

It’s incredible that none of the babies’ existence ever had “leaked out” to neighbors.

Until the news broke earlier this month about the effort to exhume a pine box containing Williamson children’s remains, probably most people living in or around Gallitzin never had heard of Stella and her story.

No doubt within the new generations of people learning about Stella are people who still cannot fathom why someone with such a horrible secret would not try to cement that secret in eternity — without anyone’s knowledge but her own.

Stella was not living alone when her children were born, when they died and when

their remains were placed in the steamer trunk. The question of why none of the people who had to know what was going on did not feel compelled to help dispose of the remains will remain a mystery forever.

Based on the ongoing efforts to locate the pine box, Stella is destined to remain a topic of conversation and speculation for many years to come.

— Altoona Mirror