Tina Fey’s scar a cold case in Upper Darby

Upper Darby police have no further light to shed on Tina Fey's scar.

For a small, hardly noticeable mark, it has led to more than its share of recent headlines.

Not that Fey's hurting for publicity. Tomorrow night at 10 on ABC, she'll be interviewed as one of Barbara Walter's "10 Most Fascinating People of 2008."

The scar buzz began when Jeff Richmond, husband of the 30 Rock star and Sarah Palin imitator, told Vanity Fair magazine the disturbing story of the incident that caused it.

In the mid 70s, when she 5, Fey was playing outside her Upper Darby home, when a stranger came up and somehow cut her.

"It was in, like, the front yard of her house, and somebody who just came up, and she just thought somebody marked her with a pen," Richmond is quoted as saying in Maureen Dowd's story for the January issue.

Whether police were contacted, Richmond didn't say.

And Upper Darby police don't know.

"We don't have anything on that at all," said superintendant Michael Chitwood.

"Unfortunately, our police reports are no longer available after 33 years," he said. "And checking with detectives who either knew somebody that worked here or [had] any type of information, we have zero.

"So whatever was reported there's no way to document."

Richmond speculated for the article that the scar had an influence on Fey, a 1988 grad of Upper Darby High who parlayed her fame from Saturday Night Live - she was its first female head writer - into a film acting, writing and producing career, including the Philadelphia-set Baby Mama.

"That scar was fascinating to me," he said. "... I think it really informs the way she thinks about her life. When you have that kind of thing happen to you, that makes you scared of certain things, that makes you frightened of different things, your comedy comes out in a different kind of way, and it also makes you feel for people."

Fey, though, told Dowd she "proceeded unaware" of the mark as she grew up. "I was a very confident little kid. It's really almost like I'm kind of able to forget about it, until I was on-camera."

The hubbub proves her reluctance to talk about it was well-founded:

The media, she feared, would make too much of it.

"It's impossible to talk about it without somehow seemingly exploiting it and glorifying it," Fey said.