From the archive: Stepfather guilty in beating death of girl left in trunk
This article was published in the Inquirer on May 19, 1989.
The stepfather of a girl whose battered body was found more than seven years ago inside a steamer trunk near the Platt Memorial Bridge pleaded guilty yesterday in Common Pleas Court to killing her.
Charles Fox, 34, of the 5600 block of Pemberton Street, was sentenced to 15 to 40 years in prison by Judge John J. Poserina Jr. for third-degree murder, abuse of corpse and aggravated assaults on his other stepchildren.
He was held at Holmesburg Prison pending his transfer to a state prison.
His wife, Maria Davis Fox, 35, who is charged with involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault, waived her right to a jury trial yesterday and was scheduled to be tried Monday before Poserina.
The couple had been fugitives and were arrested by the FBI in May 1988 while living in an apartment in Newport News, Va.
Charles Fox pleaded guilty to killing Aaliyah Davis, 5, in 1981 and beating his other stepchildren, Amira Davis, now 16, and Malcolm Davis, now 17, in the years that followed.
Yesterday, during the hearing before Poserina, Assistant District Attorney Arlene Fisk reviewed the testimony that would have been presented had the case been tried.
Amira Davis has testified before that she and her sister, her mother, and one of Fox's children, Saiiba, were in an apartment in the 4600 or 4700 block of Baltimore Avenue on a Friday evening in June or July of 1981 when the 5- year-old was beaten.
She described how Charles Fox repeatedly hit Aaliyah in the left side of the head with a broomstick because the girl had had a bowel movement in her clothes. Afterward, Fox threw the girl against a wall and started kicking her in the chest.
Amira Davis also has said that her stepfather placed the victim's body on a mattress, where it remained for two days, until flies gathered around it. The body and a trunk were missing Monday morning.
"The steamer trunk was gone and the body of her sister was gone," Fisk said. "She would testify that she never again would see the body of her sister. "
Fisk said a friend and neighbor of Fox's would have testified that he helped Fox dump the trunk near the bridge. State Department of Transportation workers discovered the trunk in the underbrush about six months later.
In addition, she said, testimony from Amira and Malcolm would describe beatings and other abuse that they received in the years after the killing.
After Charles Fox's sentencing, his attorney, Richard Johnson, said Fox ''never expressed remorse as far as the child that died. He's only talked in terms of parental responsibility for corporal punishment. "
Johnson added: "I believe that, down in his heart, he thought that he was really disciplining. I guess we're all guilty of that sometime. We discipline our children and go too far.
"You get to the point you've gone too far and you have a tragic incident, serious injury or death occurs. "
Johnson said Fox was an intelligent man who had graduated from high school and college. "I'm at a loss to really understand what his motivation was," he said.