Blind search through murky waters led to Rose's gruesome discovery

Journalists and passersby did not seem particularly surprised when the bag of remains was drawn up.

By SHELLY PAZ
little rose 248.88 (photo credit: Israel Police)
little rose 248.88
(photo credit: Israel Police)
The verdant scenery and the tranquil atmosphere in the small playgrounds bathed by soft sun usually make the banks of Tel Aviv's Yarkon River a pleasant place to bring children. But on Thursday the Yarkon was the site of a gory discovery - four-year-old Rose Pizem's skeleton, found in a red bag at the bottom of the river. The many policemen, journalists and passersby who crowded both sides of the Yarkon between Namir Road and the Ayalon Highway did not seem particularly surprised when the bag with Rose's remains was drawn up from the murky water. "It's not a relief, it is more mixed feelings," said Tzafrir Sade, head of the divers' team from Galei Yam, a private company that was hired by the police to find the body. "On the one hand, we are satisfied that the search is over, but on the other hand, it is not pleasant to find a bag with the body of a little girl in it." Arkady Stonovsky, the diver who actually discovered the soft red bag on Thursday afternoon, said that when he saw it he knew immediately he had found what divers had been searching for the past 30 days. "We have searched the Yarkon, two meters at a time for the past month. We found nets, bottles and several dolls that almost gave us heart attacks every time," Stonovsky said. The divers explained that most of the searching was done blindly, due to the murky quality of the water. "You just feel your way until you bump into something that feels suspicious," Sade said. Everything is murky about this saga, in which a small child's disappearance went unnoticed for three months. Finally, Rose's great-grandmother, Vivienne, called the police and reported that her son, Ronnie Ron, would not let her see the child he was raising with Rose's mother, Marie-Charlotte Pizem, who used to be married to Ron's son, Benjamin. "Before this story was published I saw Ronnie in the café where I used to work and it seemed like he was experiencing something really bad," said Ada Cohen, a Netanya resident and a neighbor of Ron and Pizem. During the month that passed since the search was launched, Cohen volunteered to help look for Rose. "This is all a horrible story. What kind of a person does such a thing?" she kept on asking the policemen and passersby. Ch.-Supt. Yigal Ben-Shalom, who headed the police investigation team, said Ron had not fooled them for a single moment, not even when several days ago he changed his story and said he did not kill Rose. "I would admit killing [Haim] Arlozorov; they forced this admission out of me," Ron said in court earlier this week. Dr. Tom Gumple of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who researches anti-social personality disorders, said Ron was probably fully aware from the start of the gravity of his crime, since he tried from the start to hide it. "Sociopaths are impulsive, narcissist people whose emotional capacity is especially shallow. However, all these characteristics can also be found in successful businessmen, who use these characteristics to make their fortune," Gumple said. "Nonetheless, unlike the two [recent] cases of the mothers who drowned their children and immediately called the police to report their actions, which indicates that they had experienced psychotic episodes while doing the deed, Ronnie Ron acted like someone who knew all along what he was doing, because all of the things he has done were an attempt to hide this murder," Gumple said.