Society

For two days last week, little Mary de Caussin, 6, was ordered by her parents to stay in the family's yard in Detroit's Ecorse suburb. She was being punished for wandering away from home a few days before. Then, in midweek, her mother allowed the child her customary freedom. Mary skipped down the block to play with her friends. At dinnertime Mary's mother was frantic: Mary had disappeared.

By midnight Detroit and the towns for miles around were alive with search parties. Police loudspeakers blared down the streets, calling her name, exhorting families to search their houses for the girl. Boy Scouts and soldiers hunted the swamps and thickets of the countryside.

At the Ecorse police station Mary's father, Edmund de Caussin Jr., 33, a technical writer for the Ford Motor Co., paced the room, calm but increasingly haggard. By morning he had all but given up hope. But De Caussin, was forming an explosive charge of thought.

"I still have hope," he told newsmen that morning. "But assuming that the worst has happened, I would not blame the man as much as the society that produces such men. It's a society that allows sex magazines on the stands for our kids to read, a society that measures Hollywood stars by their bosoms, a society where the telling of dirty stories and using foul language is commonplace. These things produce sex perverts out of people who have the slightest abnormal tendencies. They are encouraged by everything around them. Until the day society changes its fundamental moral principles and reasserts a belief in God, we will have sex perverts."

So saying, Edmund de Caussin went home to pray with his wife and neighbors. It was shortly thereafter, as he knelt saying his rosary, that word came. Six-year-old Mary had been found in a wooded lot a mile from home, raped, dreadfully mutilated and dead.

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