THE yellow building at Number 176 Ackerman Avenue in Clifton, New Jersey, looks not all that different today from the one Lee Kui Yin moved into nearly 30 years ago.

The bronze numbers have rusted a little more and the old occupants have moved on, but by all accounts, the two-storey building has the same sparse, almost barren backyard, and is in need of a new coat of paint.

A recent photograph of the New Jersey house which Colleen and her parents lived in. It was also the tragic site of the murder of her parents and her paternal grandfather.

The building, about the size of a Peranakan townhouse, has four apartments in it, two on the ground and two on the second floor – each cramped, depressing units of no more than 800 sq ft.

The other homes in the neighbourhood are scarcely better. For years, new immigrants just finding their feet in America, have ended up here – a neighbourhood they hope is just a pit stop to a better life.

It was in this neighbourhood, in this yellow building, in the apartment on the right side at the top of the stairs, that Kui Yin found herself with her Polish husband, as they began their life in the US in the late 1980s.

Both were in their 30s and deaf.

They had modest jobs – she was a seamstress and he a press operator in a rubber company – but their apartment was full of toys for their much-loved toddler Colleen. They also had a Camcorder that they would set up in the living room to film the baby or family celebrations.

In their living room, a framed photo of Colleen took pride of place, perched alone on top of the television.

Colleen’s foster mother, who wants to be known only as Robin, said she knew the baby came from a loving family from the moment she met her.

“She was a happy baby and she loved to be held. That’s how I knew she had good parents. I could tell her mother and father loved and cared for her,” she said.

She looked after Colleen for a year after the murders.

She recalled that the baby did not want to sleep in a crib. As is often the case with deaf parents, Kui Yin would cuddle Colleen to sleep rather than place her in a crib so she could feel when the baby was crying.

Baby Colleen also had a soft spot for cookies, and a warm smile that she would bring with her into adulthood.

Yet, if there was one trait that baby Colleen was best known for, it was for simply being a survivor.

She was a happy baby and she loved to be held. That’s how I knew she had good parents. I could tell her mother and father loved and cared for her.

∼ Robin, Colleen’s foster mother, on Colleen as a baby

The day everything changed...

Retired detective Harold Pegg who investigated the murder case of Colleen’s family two decades ago. He is trying to obtain family videos seized by the police as evidence so that he can share them with Colleen.

HAROLD Pegg remembers vividly the day he stepped into the Clifton apartment in the spring of 1990.

He was one of the investigators who had been called to the building after neighbours complained about a foul smell coming from the apartment.

“The smell was incredible,” Pegg, now 69, said. “And it was really hot in there. For some reason, they had the thermostat turned way up.”

At the entrance was a note a neighbour had slipped under the front door, asking if the Turzynskis were okay.

The TV was on and the apartment looked like it had been ransacked. Clothes were scattered across the floor, the closets had been half emptied and there were dried bloodstains all over the place.

In the bedrooms lay three bodies – Kui Yin, her husband Kazimierz, and her father-in-law Mieczyslaw. All had been stabbed to death. Police estimated that the trio had been murdered a week before they were found.

And there was another shocking discovery. A toddler peered silently at the police through a mound of clothes.

Baby Colleen had somehow survived for a week in that apartment.

Amid the mess in the apartment, a lot of which was made by the killer, Pegg and his colleagues were able to piece together the puzzle of how this remarkable baby survived.

There was an open box of Cheerios in the middle of the living room, its contents spilt all over the floor and sofa.

Floating in the toilet bowl was Colleen’s baby bottle, with its cap still on.

A photo taken by the police of the ransacked apartment in which Colleen’s parents and grandfather were stabbed to death in Clifton, New Jersey, in 1990.

“She couldn’t figure out how to open her bottle but we believe she must have found a way to drink from the toilet,” said Pegg.

And although Colleen was too young to remember any of the details of what happened that day, the traumatic events left a mark.

“I remember being there and trying to pull at my mother and I remember that I was scared,” she said through a sign language interpreter.

Then there was her fear, in her childhood, of dark skinned men with bushy hair and moustaches – a description that fit the prime suspect in the murder – deaf Pakistani man Abdul Qudoos.

Qudoos, a friend of the Turzynski family, was found with the family’s Camcorder and a sum of money matching the amount Mieczyslaw had saved to bring home to Poland.

Robin saw first-hand how the baby would react to men who fit the description: “The first time she saw my husband, she was very uneasy. We worked out it was because he had bushy hair and a moustache. So we sent him upstairs to shave off his moustache and trim his hair.”

I remember being there and trying to pull at my mother and I remember that I was scared.

∼ Colleen on her last memory of her mum

He spent a year in jail as investigations were carried out but prosecutors later dropped the charges.

The case remains unsolved to this day and will likely remain so, said Pegg, “unless someone steps forward or feels like he needs to clear his conscience on his death bed”.

Colleen went to live with her Polish paternal grandmother and uncle. She was brought to Poland where the tragedy would hardly be mentioned again until she returned to the US in 2014, now a grown woman looking for answers.

After all those years, the sense of loss remained acute: “I felt connected, and then there was suffering and the feeling of a disconnect. I felt like I was tossed. I knew that my parents gave me love. And now I feel alone.”