Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer Page 4

  The following morning, in the company of Detective James Dwyer, Mr. Gaffney—whose employer had given him a paid leave of absence until the kidnapping was solved—took the train up to Palmer. During the entire ride, he sat in an agonized silence, praying for a miracle. The thought of his son, his “candy boy,” dying so grotesquely was more than he could stand. He stared out the window at the bleak late-winter landscape and did his best to steel himself for the dreadful confrontation that awaited him in a small-town Massachusetts mortuary.

  That confrontation never took place. Even before Mr. Gaffney arrived at Palmer, the police had discovered that the murdered child was not his missing son.

  He was, in fact, a local child, the son of twenty-five-year-old Ida Kelly, who worked as a housekeeper for a farmer named Albert Doe. Shortly after Christmas, Doe had lost his temper at the four-year-old boy and beaten him brutally while his mother looked on. The child died two days later. Doe hid the body in the cellar of his farmhouse for a few days, then stuffed it into a wine cask, drove it to the dump, and tossed it on a garbage heap, which he attempted—unsuccessfully—to set on fire. By the time Mr. Gaffney and Detective Dwyer showed up, Doe had already been arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

  The Gaffneys felt badly, of course, for the victim’s mother, but their overwhelming emotion was sheer gratitude and relief. “Thank God it wasn’t my son!” Mr. Gaffney exclaimed to reporters as he started back to New York. Though their prayers had been answered at another parent’s expense, Billy’s mother and father could only interpret the Palmer episode as a hopeful sign—an affirmation of their faith that their own child would yet be found alive.

  By this point, however, the Brooklyn police were rapidly approaching the end of their rope. It was a measure of their increasing desperation that, by early March, they had begun welcoming the assistance of various cranks. One of these was a crackpot inventor, who showed up at the Gaffney home one day with a contraption he described as a “mechanical bloodhound.” In effect, the apparatus was nothing more than an elaborately tricked-out divining rod with a rubber tube at one end, into which a strand of Billy’s hair was inserted. With the device vibrating in his hands, the inventor led a dozen policemen to a nearby varnish factory, which they spent the next several hours searching—in vain.

  Even more bizarre was a séance conducted by a building contractor and part-time hypnotist named Harry Culballah one evening in late March. As Billy’s parents, along with two New York City detectives—William Casey and Fred Shaw—looked on, Culballah put a cousin of Mrs. Gaffney’s, a man named Bill Hersting, into a deep trance. Culballah asked Hersting what he saw.

  “I see Billy in the spirit world,” Hersting replied in a heavy, drugged voice.

  “Look further!” Culballah commanded.

  “I see a man,” Kersting continued. “He is leading Billy by the hand.”

  “Where are they going?”

  The spectators stood transfixed as Hersting proceeded to give a highly detailed, and increasingly animated, recitation of Billy’s fate:

  “The man is taking Billy to 286 Sixteenth Street. This is a red brick building, three stories, with a bakery on the ground floor. They go into the bakery and the man asks for a cup of coffee. He buys Billy some buns and has difficulty getting him to eat them, but Billy finally eats them.

  “The man and Billy now walk down Sixteenth Street, across Fifth Avenue. When they reach Fourth Avenue, the man seems to fade out of the picture. Billy continues to Third Avenue, then up Fifteenth Street. He stands at the curb. A woman appears and takes him by the hand, then leads him across the street and leaves him. Billy goes north on Third Avenue, walks to Twelfth Street, turns west and passes some factory buildings then a gas tank.

  “He reaches water. My God! He’s going into the canal! He’s disappeared!”

  At this point, Hersting leaped from his chair, his hands outstretched as if to grab the drowning boy. Then, with a terrified scream, he slumped back into his seat and awoke seconds later, deeply shaken.

  The detectives were so impressed by this performance that they immediately ordered a new search of the Gowanus Canal. A police diver spent much of the following day searching the muddy bottom of the water-way

  But like every other source that claimed to know the whereabouts of Billy Gaffney, the spirit that had spoken through the mouth of William Hersting had been wrong.

  By early spring, the Gaffney story, which had been covered more extensively by the city’s newspapers than any kidnapping in recent memory, had begun to disappear from their pages. Even the tabloid audience was growing tired of it. The drama simply refused to arrive at a satisfyingly happy—or tragic—conclusion. Small news items about Billy continued to appear from time to time, but they were relegated to the back pages. Soon, the flood of letters that had poured into the Gaffney home since the tragedy began had slowed to a trickle. By mid-April, even the cranks had lost interest.

  On July 7, 1929—more than two years after Billy’s disappearance—a small article appeared in The New York Times. Mrs. Elizabeth Gaffney, her health broken by her unrelenting grief, had been taken to Bellevue Hospital with severe chest pains. Never a heavy woman, Mrs. Gaffney had lost forty-six pounds since that terrible day. Besides heart trouble, she had also developed a severe infection of her tear glands—a consequence of her chronic sleeplessness and uncontrollable bouts of weeping.

  She was released several weeks later, but her life remained dominated by her loss. Often, in her fitful sleep, she would dream of Billy. In the middle of the night, she would awaken her oldest daughter, Irene, to tell her of an especially wonderful dream—of Billy running up the steps, hammering on the door, crying, “Mamma, mamma, let me in!”

  On special holidays she always set a place for Billy. “I know he will come back some day,” she told reporters, who visited her apartment at Christmastime in 1930. “There is nothing a mother can do but hope.”

  For the rest of her life, Elizabeth Gaffney would never reconcile herself to the loss of her son. Even after the truth came to light, years later, she refused to accept it—an understandable act of denial, given how appalling the truth turned out to be.

  3

  … horrid king, besmeared with blood of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears.

  JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

  He had always been a man of passion. Now, his lust had become even stronger, a terrible appetite that seemed to grow more ravenous with each new feeding.

  In the beginning, he had craved only the pain. It wasn’t until later that the blood-hunger had possessed him. He remembered the first time he had sought to satisfy it. He had cut off a piece of the monkey—just the tip—with a pair of scissors. But the little one had set up such an awful howl, even through the gag, that he had taken pity on it and run away, leaving it bleeding and moaning on the bed.

  Afterward, though, he couldn’t get the picture out of his mind—the cropped and bleeding monkey, the agony on the little one’s face. Even now he stiffened at the memory.

  Sometimes, he felt overcome with contrition. At such moments, the urge to atone for his sins by butchering one of Christ’s lambs was impossible to resist. A verse floated into his head: “Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones/And dasheth their heads against the stones.”

  The latest sacrifice had been the sweetest. It, too, had made pitiful noises—from the moment he had led it from the roof until its final seconds, when its dying bleats truly sounded like those of a bleeding little lamb.

  The commandments came more frequently now. He would need another victim soon, another Isaac offered as a sacrifice for his own iniquities, sins, and abominations in the sight of God.

  His work had always made it easy for him to find, and snare, his prey. But he was often without work nowadays and had to depend on other tricks. There were many of them, and by now he knew them all.

  His hungry eyes never stopped scanning the world for the signs that would lead him to his preordained prey.<
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  He had found them everywhere—on the streets, in the churches, in the houses of the poor and the insane.

  A message might arrive at any time, from any place.

  It was only a matter of knowing where to look.

  4

  What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!

  SHAKESPEARE, Richard III

  Edward Budd was a short but powerful eighteen-year-old, built like a bantamweight. Square-jawed and square-shouldered, he had the cockiness of the young Jimmy Cagney. Even standing still, he seemed tensed for motion, charged with the buzzing energy of the New York City streets.

  In this respect, he differed markedly from his parents, who seemed to have been defeated, if not crushed, by the hardness of their life. Albert Budd, a head taller than his son, seemed like a wisp in comparison. A porter for the Equitable Life Assurance Company, he had a hapless air about him and a look of perpetual bewilderment that was partly the result of a flagrantly phony glass eye. By contrast, his wife, Delia, was a mountainously large woman with an underslung jaw that added to her look of stubborn immobility. Seeing the oddly matched pair together, more than one observer was reminded of the old nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife.

  Besides Edward, Mr. and Mrs. Budd had four other children: Albert Jr., George, baby Beatrice, and—the flower of the family—little Grace, a sweet-tempered ten-year-old, strikingly pretty in spite of her city-child’s sallowness.

  All seven Budds inhabited a cramped apartment at the rear of 406 West 15th Street at the edge of Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The apartment was overheated in the winter and—in the pre-air-conditioned days of 1928—unbearably oppressive in the summer. Young Edward had resolved to spend the summer outside of the city, away from its ceaseless clatter, rotting-garbage smells, and deadening heat. He had been working part-time as a truck drive but had no regular job. What he wanted most was a few months of fresh country air and a chance to work his muscles. He wanted to spend to spend the summer on a farm. The question was how to secure such a position. And the answer, proposed by his mother, was to take out a classified ad.

  And so, on Friday, May, 25, 1928, the teenager rode the subway to the offices of the New York World, where he arranged to have a one-line classified inserted into Sunday’s edition: “Young man, 18, wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street.”

  Two days later, his notice appeared in the “Situations Wanted” section of the newspaper’s morning edition, and Edward, after satisfying himself that his ad had been printed as scheduled, went off to spend the day with his buddies, confident that his classified would do the trick.

  On that same Sunday, in a different part of the city, an elderly man at a rickety kitchen table, studying, as he did every day, the classifieds in the New York Work World. When he got to Edward Budd’d ad he stopped and read it again. And then again.

  To anyone else’s eyes, there would have been nothing notable about the ad, except, perhaps, for its simple reflection of old-fashioned American virtues—industry, youthful ambition, a feel for the outdoors.

  It look a mind already hopelessly lost to sanity to attach a very different meaning to it and to feel, at the sight of those innocent words, an overpowering thrill of malignant desire.

  5

  The soul of the wicked desireth evil: his neighbors fundeth no favor in his eyes.

  PROVERBS 21:10

  At around 3:30 in the afternoon of the following day—Monday, May 28, 1928—someone knocked on the door of the Budds’ apartment.

  Seated on the creaky double bed she shared with her husband, Delia Budd was folding up underwear from a shapeless pile of freshly washed laundry that sprawled at her side. The day was warm and muggy, and Mrs. Budd, whose bulk made the heat even harder to bear, had undone the top few buttons of her tentlike cotton house-dress. Even so she found herself pausing every few moments to swab the sweat from her neck with a balled-up hanky. Through the plaster wall behind her, she could hear the muffled squeals of her youngest daughter, Beatrice, playing in the adjacent bedroom. The rest of the family was away from home, at work or with friends.

  At the sound of the knock, Mrs. Budd raised herself with a little groan from the buckled mattress and made her way slowly to the door. Before she reached, it the rapping again.

  “Just a minute,” she called.

  Rebuttoning the top of her flower-printed housedress, Mrs. Budd pulled the door open. There stood a small, elderly stranger, dressed in a dark suit and black felt hat. A folded newspaper was tucked under one arm. In the dusk of the tenement hallway, he looked impressively well-to-do and dapper. Mrs. Budd was unaccustomed to such nicely dress callers. Instinctively, she reached up and patted at her shapeless hair.

  “Can I Help you?” Mrs. Budd asked.

  The elderly gentlemen reached under his arm, removed the newspaper, and held it out to Mrs. Budd, as though he had dropped by to deliver it.

  “I am looking for a young fellow named Edward Budd. I read his ad in yesterday’s paper.”

  “You come to the right place. I’m his mother.”

  The little man removed his hat and bowed slightly, a gesture that, in Mrs. Budd’s eyes, seemed as courtly as a kiss on the hand. “Good day to you.” he said. “My name is Frank Howard. I’m here with an offer that might be of interest to your son.”

  Stepping back from the doorway, Mrs. Budd held out a welcoming hand. “Come on in Eddie’s over to a friend’s but I’ll have my little girl fetch him for you.”

  The old man nodded again and, walking with a slightly bowlegged gait, followed Mrs. Budd into the living room, where she invited him to have a seat. As carefully as a convalescent, Mr. Howard lowered himself into a chintz-covered armchair.

  Calling Beatrice from the bedroom, Mrs. Budd told the child to run around the corner to the Korman apartment and tell her brother to come home immediately. As the five-year-old passed the stranger in the easy chair, the old man reached out bony hand took her by the wrist.

  “You remind me of my own grandaughter. What do they call you?”

  The little girl, who had just turned five, stared shyly at her feet. “Beatrice,” she said after a moment.

  Reaching into his pocket, the old man came up with a shiny coin. “Here’s a five-cent piece for your trouble,” he said, placing the nickel in her palm.

  Beatrice held up the coin for the mother to see.

  “What do you say to the man?” Mrs. Budd asked reprovingly.

  “Thank you,” said Beatrice, then dashed out the door.

  “You’ll spoil the child,” Mrs. Budd said with a smile. “Would you care for some lemonade? I got some freshmade in the ice box.”

  “That would be nice.”

  The windows of the Budds’ apartment faced a back alley, and even at the height of a bright spring afternoon, the rooms were filled with shadows. After returning with the drink, Mrs. Budd switched on a table lamp next to her guest, and in its yellow glow, she took a better look at him.

  It was hard to tell his age, though he seemed dried-up and shrunken, one of those wizened old men whose hollow faces look like parchment-covered skulls. He had a sharp, beaked nose, watery blue eyes, a thatch of gray hair, and a gray moustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. Gazing up at Mrs. Budd, he smiled benignly, revealing a set of moldy teeth. His top incisors protruded slightly, giving him the look of a kindly old rodent.

  His navy blue suit, Mrs. Budd could now see, was shabbier than it had seemed in the hallway—its jacket cuffs frayed, its pants worn to a shine at the knees. Still, he looked respectable enough, and when he raised his left hand to lift the lemonade glass to his mouth, a large diamond pinky ring glittered in the lamplight.

  The old man had just set his empty glass down on the side table when Beatrice returned with her brother Eddie and his best friend, Willie Korman, another compactly built teenager with an impressive set of shoulders. Mrs. Budd introduced the boys to the elderly visitor, who half-raised himself from his seat
to shake hands, then settled back onto the cushion with a wince.

  As Mrs. Budd made room for the boys on the sofa, the old man proceeded to describe his situation. For many years, he explained in a quiet, almost whispery voice, he had worked as an interior decorator in Washington, D.C. He had done very well for himself. He had a good marriage and six wonderful children. Then, his eyesight began to fail. Taking the money he had made from his business, he had indulged a lifelong dream by pur chasing a “nice little farm” out in Farmingdale, Long Island.

  His wife, however, had hated country living from the start, and within a year she had abandoned him, leaving him with the care of their children. He had been both mother and father to them for a dozen years. Life had been hard for them during that time, but his children, thank God, had all turned out well. “One of my boys is a cadet at West Point,” he said proudly.

  Moreover, he had managed to make the farm a go. With three hundred chickens and a half-dozen milk cows, the place provided him with a good steady income. At present, he was able to employ a full-time Swedish cook and five farmhands.

  One of his most dependable workers had decided to move on, however, and Howard was looking to replace him. Edward’s ad had appeared at a most propitious time. He smiled up at the boy. “You look strong enough to work.”

  “Yes, sir,” Eddie answered, leaning forward eagerly. “And I ain’t afraid of hard work, either.”

  Howard nodded approvingly. “I am prepared to pay fifteen dollars per week for as long as you can stay with me.”

  “That sounds good to me,” Eddie said, turning to his mother, who was sitting beside him with a look of perfect satisfaction on her face.

  A moment of silence passed, during which Eddie and his friend exchanged a glance. “We was wondering, Mr. Howard,” Eddie said, pointing a thumb at his friend. “My chum Willie here is also looking for summer work.”