Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer Read online

  Mr. Beaton, who only a moment before had been awash with relief, suddenly felt his throat tighten with anxiety. “Where is he then?”

  Billy Beaton’s reply, offered without hesitation, would be a source of continuing controversy in the days and weeks ahead. It was the sort of answer that a three-year-old could be expected to give and, for that reason, the authorities were inclined to discount it. Indeed, it would be six years before the world came to realize that the Beaton child had been right all along.

  “The boogey man took him,” Billy Beaton said.

  By the following day, twenty-five detectives and patrolmen, under the command of Sergeant Elmer Joseph, had been assigned to the case. Little Billy Beaton, along with his father and Johnny McNiff—the last people to see the missing boy—were interrogated closely. Each time he was asked what had happened, the Beaton boy repeated his story, but Sergeant Joseph dismissed it as a three-year-old’s prattle. “All children talk about the boogey man when they sense trouble,” he explained.

  A kidnapping made no sense to Sergeant Joseph. The Gaffneys were desperately poor. Edmund, the father, worked as a truck driver for a local stocking company, a job that barely paid him a living wage. Indeed, at the moment of her son’s disappearance, Elizabeth Gaffney had been seated at the kitchen table, patching a pair of her son’s tattered gray knickers. These and another equally shabby navy-blue pair were the only pants her child owned. He had been wearing the blue knickers, along with a gray middy, black stockings and black shoes (but neither hat nor coat) when he vanished into the gloom.

  No one in his right mind, Sergeant Joseph reasoned, would kidnap the child of such penniless people in the hope of obtaining a ransom. It was the sergeant’s opinion that the unsupervised boy had wandered out into the street and fallen into trouble. It was conceivable that he had taken it into his head to explore one of the many nearby factory buildings and had become trapped inside. Or—a much grimmer possibility—that he had made his way to the Gowanus canal, located less than five blocks from his home, and met with an accident. A police scow was dispatched to the canal, and two officers spent the day dredging its muddy bottom with grappling hooks. But they managed to bring up nothing except a sodden assortment of trash.

  Over the days and weeks ahead, the tenement district surrounding Billy Gaffney’s home was the scene of one of the most intensive hunts in New York City history. Before it was over, more than three hundred and fifty policemen, plus untold numbers of civilian volunteers—neighbors, school children, Boy Scouts, and others—had taken part. Every cellar, sewer, loft, factory, church, alleyway, lumber yard, coal bin, and crawlspace in the area was searched and searched again. But no trace of Billy could be found. As one dispirited detective put it, it was as if the earth had swallowed him up.

  Throughout this period, Mrs. Gaffney remained sequestered in her dusky apartment, grieving and growing more haggard by the day. Her three married sisters had hurried to her side to offer what comfort they could, and it was only at their insistence that Mrs. Gaffney ate and slept at all. Though she remained firm in the conviction that Billy was still alive, the thought of her “candy boy” (as she called him) lost somewhere in the wintry streets was an unrelenting torment. “He was always so pale—in the house so much,” she cried to reporters. “I can’t bear to think how he looks now, without food and all.”

  To make matters worse, the Gaffneys—like other victims of highly publicized misfortunes—began receiving crank letters by the bundle. Some of these were nothing more than babble: “My dear friends, I will be fine to boy, my son in waters, rivers, cellars. Look out. My God, want back boy.”

  Others, such as the letter the Gaffneys received on February 16, were infinitely worse, impelled by an unimaginable sadism: “Wait! Do not appear too anxious. Your son is in safe hands. We fought for him, but I got him now. We will get the Beaton boy for Billy to play with, for Billy is lonesome. Do not show this letter to anyone if you know what is good for you. Again I say that Billy is safe and that we are experimenting on him.”

  But no matter how insane or incoherent these messages were, the police pored over all of them, in the desperate—and ultimately futile—hope that one might contain a clue to Billy Gaffney’s whereabouts.

  By this time, Billy Beaton had provided the police with a fuller description of the “boogey man.” According to the three-year-old, the stranger who had taken Billy Gaffney away was a thin old man with gray hairs growing on his upper lip.

  In spite of these specifics, Sergeant Joseph and his superiors remained skeptical. Of all the possible fates that could have befallen Billy Gaffney, kidnapping seemed the least likely. What could be the motive? A ransom was out of the question. The Gaffneys seemed to have no enemies. And it would be crazy for a childless adult to risk imprisonment by snatching someone else’s son when city orphanages were packed with adoptable youngsters. “There is no reason why anyone should want to take this child,” opined Inspector John J. Sullivan of the Missing Persons Bureau. “The kidnapper would have to be deranged.”

  Just a few years before, of course, a thin, gray-moustached and desperately deranged individual had snatched, sexually assaulted, and killed young Francis McDonnell. But—perhaps because so little weight was given to the three-year-old’s testimony—no one connected Billy Beaton’s “boogey man” to the “gray man” of the earlier crime.

  As the investigation entered its second week, the police continued to pursue every lead, no matter how slender or farfetched it seemed. One of the countless crank letters mailed to the Gaffneys contained a crudely drawn map of an islet in the Bronx River where, according to the anonymous writer, the corpse of Billy Gaffney was buried. “I didn’t mean to kill him. God forgive me!” When the police followed the map to the designated spot, however, all they found was a small strip of solid rock jutting out of the water.

  Another letter indicated that Billy’s corpse had been stuffed into a carton and left in an empty apartment on Alexander Avenue in Brooklyn. Police investigators hastened to the address, where they found a large cardboard box shoved into a corner of the abandoned flat. Inside was a mound of moldering rags.

  In their growing frustration, the police began grasping at straws. At one point, Mrs. Gaffney revealed that, several years earlier, she had testified against two female cousins in a lawsuit involving a fiercely contested will. Because of the bitter enmity that had resulted, both cousins were brought in for questioning. They were released within the hour, however, when it became clear that they knew nothing whatsoever about the missing boy.

  Even Billy Beaton’s father came under suspicion for a short time. A neighborhood man named Gabriel Cardovez informed the police that, on the night of February 11, he had seen Mr. Beaton hurrying down the street with a bundle in his arms. Kings County D.A. Charles Dodd called Beaton in and questioned him about the incident. As it turned out, Cardovez’s dates were off. Beaton had, in fact, carried a bundle from his apartment one evening. But the package contained freshly laundered underclothing for his recuperating wife, and—as hospital records confirmed—he had made the visit on February 16, five days after Billy’s disappearance.

  Hopes were raised and dashed with dismaying regularity. The day after Billy vanished, a truck driver named Edward Wisniski showed up at the Gaffney’s apartment and explained that, on the previous evening, he had come upon a little boy, lost and crying on a nearby street corner, and turned him over to a passing patrolman. The news sent Billy’s parents flying to the local precinct, where they discovered that the boy Wisniski had found belonged to someone else.

  A day later, a Weehawken, New Jersey, policeman revealed that, on Saturday afternoon, he had observed a “short, swarthy woman” dragging a weeping little boy past his traffic post. This revelation set off a brief, frantic search for the woman, which came to an abrupt halt when Officer Martin was shown some photographs of the Gaffney boy and realized that the child he had seen bore no resemblance at all to Billy.

  Anonymous ti
ps continued to pour in by the dozen. One informant reported that Billy had been stolen by a “bereaved mother” and was living safely in Harlem. Another insisted that he was being kept by an old man in Roosevelt, Long Island.

  One morning in early March, the Gaffneys received a special delivery letter which claimed that Billy was imprisoned in an old frame house in South Brooklyn. In three densely packed pages of handwritten script, the writer described in vivid detail how, while walking past the dilapidated house one recent morning, he had glanced up and seen, peering through the grimy panes of a second-story window, a wan child’s face resembling newspaper photos of Billy. Suddenly, a man’s hand appeared, clutched the boy by the shoulder, and jerked him from view. Then the blind had been hastily lowered. Inspector Sullivan immediately sent a dozen men to the address. But the house turned out to be empty.

  Subsequent rumors placed Billy in increasingly farflung locales. When an abandoned four-year-old was picked up on the streets of St. Louis, the police of that city believed that he might be the missing Brooklyn boy—until a frantic old lady showed up at the station house later that day, looking for her lost grandson. Some weeks later, Sergeant Joseph received a letter from a druggist’s wife in Deadwood, South Dakota, who claimed that Billy was living on a ranch in Montana. Joseph immediately contacted the Deadwood Chief of Police, who dispatched a man to check out the story.

  But like every other sighting of Billy, this one turned out to be a mirage.

  The only solid lead that police investigators received came from a trolley car conductor named Anthony Barone who, after a period of what he termed “mental struggle” during which he agonized over the wisdom of getting involved, finally stepped forward to relate what he had witnessed on the evening of Friday, February 11.

  It was shortly after 7 P.M.—not long after Billy’s disappearance—when an elderly man with a heavy gray moustache boarded Barone’s car at Prospect and Hamilton avenues in Brooklyn, just two blocks away from the Gaffney’s tenement. Accompanying this man was a little boy, dressed in a gray blouse and blue knickers. Though the sun had set at 5:30 and the evening was raw, the boy wore neither hat nor coat. Barone had taken special note of that detail. And there was something else about the boy that caught the conductor’s attention. He cried continuously, from the time he was led onboard until the moment he disembarked, in spite of the efforts of the wizened old man to hush him.

  According to Barone, the pair rode to the end of Hamilton Avenue. “Before they got off the car,” he explained to Inspector Sullivan, “the man asked me if they could get a ferry from there to Staten Island.” Barone explained that the best way to reach Staten Island was to take the Hamilton Avenue Ferry to the Battery and then the municipal ferry to St. George.

  Without another word, the old man—who seemed very jumpy, according to Barone—alighted from the trolley car, the little boy in tow. Instead of following Barone’s instructions, however, he turned in the opposite direction. The last that Barone saw of the old man, he was hurrying along Sackett Street, away from the ferry, “half dragging, half carrying” the weeping little boy. For a few moments, Barone watched the strange duo, the hunched old man and the frightened child, as they made their way down the dimly lit street, their figures moving in and out of the shadows. Then they disappeared into the night.

  Police investigators—who by this time had come to believe that Billy had, in fact, been the victim of a child-snatcher—attached considerable importance to Barone’s story, particularly after they interviewed Joseph Meehan, the motorman on the trolley, who confirmed the conductor’s account. Since there had been only one or two other passengers on the car at the time, Meehan recalled the man and boy clearly. Indeed, he had been struck by something Barone hadn’t mentioned. Throughout the ride, the old man had kept his heavy overcoat wrapped around the undepressed boy, as if to keep him warm—or conceal him.

  So important did Inspector Sullivan consider the testimony of the two transit workers that they were given a temporary leave of absence from their jobs and placed on the police payroll so that they could assist in the hunt. Meehan would prove to be a crucial eyewitness when it came time to identify Billy’s abductor.

  But that identification was still many years away.

  The New York City tabloids had wasted no time in exploiting the melodramatic potential of the Gaffney case. The Daily News in particular did its best to transform the Gaffneys’ personal tragedy into a shamelessly lurid soap opera, concluding each day’s article on the case with a breathless “don’t-miss-the-next-exciting-episode” tag:

  Somewhere in New York or nearby is little Billy Gaffney—or his body. An army of detectives, 350 strong, is hunting that somewhere. Watch for the results of that search in tomorrow’s NEWS.

  Hoping against hope, police continue their search for missing Billy Gaffney. Follow the trail in tomorrow’s NEWS.

  Will the seventh day bring joy or sorrow to the parents of little Billy? Read all the developments of the hunt in tomorrow’s NEWS.

  This kind of sensationalism not only sold papers but also had the effect of arousing the passions of many New Yorkers to a near-hysterical pitch. Within a single week in early March, on three separate occasions, mobs of enraged men and women attacked suspicious-looking strangers who were spotted in the company of neighborhood children.

  All three incidents occurred in Brooklyn, close to the tenement district where the Gaffneys lived. In the first, a sixty-three-year-old salesman named Giles Steele was strolling down East 92nd Street when a four-year-old boy stepped into his path. “Move aside, son,” Steele said, reaching down and taking the boy by the shoulder. At that moment, the child’s mother, Mrs. Sadie Bernstein, came to the door of her house and, seeing a strange man with his hand on her son, began to scream for help. A crowd of neighbors immediately descended on Steele and began pummeling him. After being rescued by a passing patrolman, the hapless Steele was taken to the local stationhouse, where police quickly determined that he had no knowledge at all of the Gaffney crime. Even Mrs. Bernstein, once she calmed down, admitted that she might have overreacted. Nevertheless, Steele was arraigned on a kidnapping charge and held on $10,000 bail.

  The other two men attacked by outraged mobs in Brooklyn that week were considerably more unsavory than Steele. Both of them—Louis Sandman, a forty-two-year-old waiter, and Samuel Bimberg, a dapper young man from Secaucus, New Jersey—were admitted pederasts with prior convictions for impairing the morals of minors. And both men were in the act of leading young victims into darkened tenement hallways when they were spotted and set upon by enraged neighborhood residents, who were prevented from beating the culprits to death only by the timely appearance of the police. Nevertheless, though detectives would have liked nothing better than to establish even a slender connection between one of these men and Billy Gaffney, Sandman and Bimberg—like Giles Steele—were quickly eliminated as suspects.

  To the legion of New Yorkers who had been following every twist and turn in the search for little Billy Gaffney and sharing in the hope that the missing boy might still be found alive, the front-page headline in the Wednesday, March 9, edition of The New York Times was a shocker: “FEAR SLAIN CHILD FOUND IN CASK IS GAFFNEY BOY.”

  On the previous afternoon, in Palmer, Massachusetts, a high school sophomore named Chester Kolbusz had been scavenging at the town dump. Lying on top of a refuse pile was an old wine cask that appeared to be partially burned. Peering inside the cask, Kolbusz saw a lumpy, burlap-wrapped object. He reached a hand into the cask and pulled aside the fabric. What he saw sent him dashing in terror to the nearest police station. The object was the corpse of a child, its face horribly mutilated.

  The police were on the scene within minutes. Nearly a month had now passed since Billy’s disappearance and, by this point, a description of the kidnapped Brooklyn boy had been wired to policemen throughout the Northeast. By early Tuesday evening, Massachusetts state detectives had contacted their counterparts in New York with the deta
ils of the discovery. Inspector Sullivan broke the news to the Gaffneys as gently as possible, and arrangements were made at once for Billy’s father to travel up to Palmer the following day.

  By this point, of course, Billy’s parents had suffered through a spate of false alarms—supposedly reliable (but invariably erroneous) reports that their son’s body had been dumped in the East River or buried somewhere on Staten Island. Several weeks after Billy was stolen, a steam-shovel operator, digging up the grounds of a mental institution in Brooklyn for a new sewer line, turned up the body of a small boy wrapped in the remnants of a patchwork quilt. The police believed at first that the dead child was Billy Gaffney—until an autopsy revealed that the corpse had been in the ground for at least seven months. (The body turned out to be that of a neighborhood child, dead of natural causes, whose impoverished parents, unable to afford a funeral, had buried him by night on the hospital grounds.)

  For the Gaffneys, however, the grisly discovery in the Palmer town dump was far more distressing than any previous scare. For one thing, a hasty postmortem by the medical examiner seemed to indicate that the murdered boy had been dead for just over three weeks—exactly as long as Billy had been missing. For another—as The New York Times reported—the corpse in the wine cask was that of a little boy “answering in almost every detail” to Billy’s description.

  Like Billy, the victim was a thin, pale child with brown hair and large blue eyes. Even more ominously, the killer had apparently taken pains to obliterate certain telltale features from the corpse, in places where Billy himself had identifying marks. The lower half of the murdered boy’s face, for example, had been badly disfigured, his jaw crushed by a series of savage blows. Billy had a scar on his lower lip, the token of a bad spill he had taken as a baby. And the skin of the dead boy’s stomach had been slashed with a sharp object. Billy had a distinctively shaped birthmark on his stomach, precisely where the corpse’s abdomen had been carved up.