The Forgotten Neighbor on Florida Avenue

Mystery Man

The 500 block of Florida Avenue, not far from the Howard Theater, is in a neighborhood full of the sounds of power tools, with developers transforming dilapidated brick buildings into sleek condominiums.

Since the discovery of the skeleton, there's been another chatter, as neighbors wonder how someone who had lived among them for so long could disappear so quietly, so abruptly, without raising questions. "It's like a soldier missing and no one inquiring about him," said James Patterson, 69, his Washington Redskins cap pulled low as he stood a couple of blocks away outside the nook of a candy store he owns.

"He's a man who has a home. A middle-class man, maybe even a rich man," said Patterson, who did not know Wilson. "He's not flat on the ground. I don't understand it. Nobody asks nothing about him?"

Eight doors from the three-story house where Wilson lived, Aaron T. Whitaker, who has had a dental practice there for 20 years, said he could not recall ever meeting Wilson. Since the discovery, he said, he has found himself thinking about what it's like to be old and to live alone. "It's unbelievable that a person could pass as though he were never here," Whitaker said.

To a large degree, the reason for the mystery is the man himself. By neighbors' accounts, Wilson was that most singular urban archetype: the recluse. He never married or had children. They noticed him, it seems, out of the corners of their eyes, as he caught the bus or took out the trash or made his way up his black metal stairs.

Alfred Bank Michaux, 78, lived in the neighborhood for more than 50 years and is one who claims direct contact with Wilson. On a number of occasions, he said, he swept Wilson's steps and took out his trash, sometimes going into his home, which he said was cluttered with stacks of newspapers and Avon cartons.

"The only time you'd see him was coming out of his house with that Avon bag, going to catch the bus," said Michaux, who had bought some Avon products for his wife.

Wilson, he said, told Michaux that he was an only child and that his mother had been overly protective. "He said his mother wouldn't let him go out and play," said Michaux, leaning on his cane as he gazed at Wilson's former home. "He never associated with anybody. . . . He was always by himself."

Wilson's presence on the block goes back to at least 1923, when his mother, Caroline J. Dudley Wilson, bought the house, which she shared with an assortment of boarders, including a barber, a chauffeur, a servant and a bellboy, according to the 1930 U.S. Census. In answers to that survey, Caroline Wilson gave her age as 43, her birthplace as North Carolina and her occupation as housekeeper. She also said that she was the mother of 12-year-old Edmund, who was born in the West Indies, and that his father, unnamed in the census, was Jamaican.

It is unclear what became of Caroline Wilson and the father, but her son took over the rowhouse in 1962, according to D.C. property records. His name replaced hers in the city directory in the mid-1960s and next to it, "SLSMN," the abbreviation for salesman.

As far back as the 1950s, Wilson sold Avon products and regularly racked up enough sales to be included in the company's prestigious President's Club, reserved for the top 10 percent of salespeople in the country. Ruth Black, who managed Avon's Northwest Washington office in the late 1970s, said Wilson was so adept that she could not recall his ever needing help. "He knew what he was doing," she said.

As recently as the late 1990s, when he was nearly 80, Wilson regularly visited the office on the edge of Mount Pleasant to drop off orders and pay bills. "He wasn't one who shared information," said Cynthia Lowery, an Avon manager from 1997 to 2000. "He was focused on business."