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

  10

  A hero is a man who does what he can.

  ROMAIN ROLLAND, Jean Christophe

  Among the detectives assigned to the Budd case was a member of the Missing Persons Bureau named William F. King. A tireless and resolute lawman with gunmetal eyes and the leathery mug of a Marine drill sergeant, King conformed so closely, in both appearance and manner, to the popular image of the tough, big city “dick” that he could have been dreamed up by Dashiell Hammett. Only King was no Hollywood crimebuster, no make-believe hero with a hardboiled style and the soul of a crusader. He was the real thing.

  King possessed several qualities which made him particularly well suited for his job. To begin with, he was a man of action, a former locomotive fireman who became a cop in 1907, quit a decade later to fight in the Great War, then rejoined the department in 1926 after working for a number of years in the private sector. At the time of the Budd kidnapping, he had risen to the rank of detective lieutenant in the Bureau of Missing Persons.

  Besides determination and toughness, King was renowned for his tenacity. He was a man of supreme patience, dogged in his refusal to give up on a case until it was solved. This attribute would stand him in especially good stead in the case of the Budd abduction. In the late summer of 1928, King was one of several detectives dispatched to the Midwest to follow the trail of “Dr.” Corthell. As it turned out, the trip would be only the first leg of a journey that would eventually cover many thousands of miles and span several years. King wouldn’t rest until Corthell was in custody, and, in the end, he would get his man.

  But before that day arrived, the search for Grace Budd’s kidnapper would take a sudden and wholly unexpected twist.

  Two years had passed since Assistant D.A. Hastings had made his hopeful pronouncement that Corthell’s arrest and Grace Budd’s recovery were only a few days away. In spite of such official optimism—and the unflagging efforts of Detective King and his colleagues to track down the suspect—the slippery con man remained at large and little Gracie’s whereabouts a mystery.

  Intermittently during those two years, the police would uncover clues that sent the hopes of the Budd family soaring. But inevitably, each of these leads would fail to pan out. In March 1930, for example, the Budds received a strange packet in the mail. By this time, the family had moved to even cheaper quarters, a basement apartment at 404 West 15th Street, several doors away from their former address. (The Depression was now in full swing, and though Albert Budd was better off than millions of his countrymen, having managed to hang onto his job, his salary remained pitifully small.)

  Inside the packet was a copy of The Christian Science Monitor, dated March 21. The paper itself, mailed anonymously from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, contained nothing of apparent significance. But Delia Budd’s attention was instantly caught by the penciled address. It was written in a hand that looked remarkably like her daughter’s.

  Pulling one of Grace’s schoolbooks out of the bureau drawer where she had carefully stored them, Mrs. Budd compared the two samples of handwriting. To her eager eyes they looked the same. She quickly called in a few of her neighbors, who confirmed the similarity. At that point, Mrs. Budd threw on her overcoat and, packet in hand, made her way to the West Twentieth Street precinct.

  The packet was turned over to Detective King, who had by this point become the primary investigator in the Budd case. Indeed, the Budd girl’s kidnapping had become more than the focus of King’s professional life. It had become a personal obsession.

  Carefully examining the envelope and its contents, King discovered a small mailing label affixed to a corner of the newspaper. It bore the name of Herbert J. Sherry, U.S. Navy, Portsmouth. The following day, King, accompanied by Detective Jerry Maher, was on a train headed for New Hampshire.

  Meanwhile, Delia Budd met with reporters to announce the good news. “I am certain that the writing is in the hand of Grace,” she proclaimed, “and so are the neighbors. I am very hopeful that something may come of it. It is the first word of any kind we have had since Grace went away.”

  Even as she was speaking, however, King and Maher were reluctantly coming to a very different conclusion. They had already surmised that, since Sherry was in the U.S. Navy, he was undoubtedly too young to be the kidnapper himself. But perhaps he might be the mysterious accomplice who, according to various eyewitnesses, had driven the getaway car.

  No sooner had they arrived in Portsmouth than the two detectives discovered that Sherry—who was doing time in the brig for desertion—couldn’t possibly have been involved in the abduction. Sherry’s service record showed that he had been in trouble before and that, at the time of the girl’s disappearance, he had been confined to the naval prison at Parris Island, South Carolina. King and Maher remained in Portsmouth for a few days, hoping to locate the person—presumably Grace herself—who had addressed the envelope to the Budds.

  As it turned out, the two men could have saved themselves the effort. Shortly after they returned emptyhanded to New York, a report from a police graphologist revealed that the handwriting on the mysterious packet was not, in fact, Grace Budd’s—though who the writer was, and why the newspaper had been sent to the Budd family in the first place, no one could say.

  Several months after the Sherry incident, in early June, 1930, Detective King was traveling again—this time on a train headed south, in pursuit of a man who called himself Charles Howard.

  A fifty-year-old Floridian, Howard had married a vacationing New York City woman in May. Immediately after the wedding, the happy couple returned to the city, where they moved into an apartment belonging to the bride’s aunt at 2410 Second Avenue. Exactly eight days later, Charles Howard disappeared, absconding with $2,800 of his wife’s cash, plus $ 1,000 more of her aunt’s.

  The hoodwinked bride rushed to the police and lodged a complaint against Howard. She also suggested that the two-faced reprobate might well be the other Howard the police had been searching for, the one who had kidnapped little Grace Budd.

  The claim seemed plausible, assuming that Charles Howard was simply another alias of the notorious Albert Corthell. Corthell, after all, had plied his criminal trade in Florida for many years. And the deception that had been practiced on the hapless New York woman was just the sort of swindle that a con man like Corthell would be liable to pull.

  This time, King seemed to get lucky. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Florida, he managed to locate his quarry. On June 10, Charles Howard was arrested in Belvedere, Florida. A slight, stooped, prematurely grizzled man, he matched the description of Grace Budd’s abductor. Howard was brought back to New York City, where he was arraigned on a charge of grand larceny.

  One fact immediately became evident—Charles Howard was not Albert Corthell. Indeed, Charles Howard was the man’s true name, not an alias at all. Still, King clung to the hope that his prisoner might be implicated in the Budd mystery.

  A lineup was arranged. Delia Budd and Willie Korman (now a young man of twenty) were brought down to police headquarters to view the suspect. Korman couldn’t identify the man with any certainty, but Delia Budd seemed to harbor few doubts. “He looks like the man,” she insisted.

  In the end, however, Howard was able to provide an airtight alibi. He was living in a completely different part of the country at the time of Grace’s disappearance. He remained locked up on the grand larceny charge but was cleared as a suspect in the kidnapping.

  As it happened, this wouldn’t be the only time that Delia Budd would identify the wrong man as her daughter’s abductor. (In fact, she had already pointed the finger at several other individuals, including a detective from the Missing Persons Bureau, who had been recruited to fill out a lineup on an earlier occasion.) Nor would this be the only time that an incensed wife would accuse her husband of being the man who had stolen Grace Budd. Just a few months later, the same situation would figure in the most sensational—and surprising—development in the Budd case up to that point.


  That development came about as a direct result of the Charles Howard episode. A woman named Jessie Pope had been reading newspaper accounts of Howard’s arrest as a suspect in the Budd case and his subsequent exoneration. The seed of an idea was planted in her mind, germinated there for several months, and finally came to fruition at the tail end of the summer.

  On September 3, 1930, Mrs. Pope appeared at the West Twentieth Street station to inform the police that her estranged husband—a sixty-seven-year-old janitor named Charles Edward Pope—was the man who had snatched Grace Budd.

  Mrs. Pope had an amazing story to relate. At the time of the kidnapping, she explained, she was separated from her husband and living with her sister, Mrs. Margaret McDougal, at 314 High Street in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. On June 3, 1928—the day of Grace Budd’s disappearance—a Western Union boy arrived with a message from her husband, asking her to meet him at the corner of High and Smith Streets, just a few blocks away.

  Mystified but intrigued by the telegram, Mrs. Pope proceeded to the spot, where she found her husband waiting. With him was a sweet-faced, brown-haired girl, dressed up in her Sunday best.

  Pope asked his wife if she would mind taking care of the girl for a few days while he went off on some unspecified business. The girl, he explained, was the daughter of a friend, and it would be “a great favor” to everyone if Mrs. Pope consented to look after the child.

  Mrs. Pope had no idea what sort of funny business her husband was up to, but she refused to have any part of it. “Then I’ll have to take her back home with me,” Pope grumbled. After a brief but bitter exchange of words, Pope stormed away, leading the little girl off in the direction of the Perth Amboy-Tottenville ferry. Before they disappeared from view, the girl turned and gave Mrs. Pope a look that “she would never forget.”

  Almost immediately after this strange incident, Mrs. Pope continued, she had become “seriously ill.” By the time she recovered, months later, the excitement over the Budd case had died down and the memory of that day had faded from her mind. Only recently, after reading about Charles Howard in the newspapers, had it all come back to her. Throughout the summer, her suspicions had mounted, until, just the day before, she had finally taken it upon herself to visit the Budds. Delia Budd had shown her photographs of the missing tenyear-old. As soon as Mrs. Pope laid eyes on them, she recognized who her husband’s mysterious, brown-haired companion had been.

  The detectives were impressed by Mrs. Pope’s story—so much so that on the following day, September 4, 1930, at the East 78th Street apartment he shared with his widowed sister, Charles Edward Pope was arrested for the kidnapping of Grace Budd.

  Once again, Delia Budd was called down to the stationhouse to pick out the suspect from a lineup. And once again, she provided a positive identification. “That’s the man who stole my Gracie,” she declared, pointing directly at Pope. And there was no doubt that the old janitor—a wizen-faced codger with a bushy gray moustache and a shriveled physique—bore a vague resemblance to the man who had called himself Frank Howard.

  The next morning, the tabloids trumpeted the news: “BUDD KIDNAP SUSPECT CAPTURED AFTER TWO YEARS!”

  As an angry crowd—consisting mostly of neighborhood mothers and assorted friends of the Budd family—gathered outside the police station, Pope tearfully protested his innocence. He shook his head in amazement as his wife told police that Pope was “a dangerous man” who had once been confined to a mental institution in Gowanda, New York.

  It was true, Pope admitted, that he had been locked up in Gowanda for a few months. But he had been sent there by his wife, who had conspired to commit him in order to get her hands on some money his father had left him. His only crime, Pope insisted, was a weakness for the game of “Klondike crap.” Questioned at police headquarters by King, Maher, and a third detective, Samuel Ryan, Pope explained that he was the son of a steamboat inspector and the executor of his father’s $30,000 estate, though he himself had only come in for a pittance of that inheritance. He had been trained as an engineer, but he had not practiced that profession for many years. Now, with the Depression underway, the only work he had been able to find was as the superintendent of an apartment building on Madison Avenue. He lived with his sister, an elderly spinster, and supported them both on his meager salary.

  Ada Pope, the suspect’s sister, confirmed every part of his account. Though her brother and his estranged wife had been married for forty-two years, their relationship had always been difficult. Indeed, over the course of those decades, they had been separated more than twenty times. Her brother, Ada Pope tearfully told the detectives, was a hard-working but soft-hearted man who had fallen victim to the malice of a spiteful woman. “I do not know why she hates Charlie and me so much. Charlie has not been able to give her much money these past few years. He does not make very much, and he is looking out for me.”

  Investigating Pope’s story, King discovered that it checked out in every detail. The old man had no police record. And though it was true that he had been institutionalized for eight months between September 1924 and July 1925, the superintendent of the asylum, Dr. E. H. Mudge, affirmed that Pope’s ailment was of “a mild nature.” There was nothing violent or dangerous about the man at all.

  Reluctantly, King and his colleagues were beginning to conclude that their elation over the capture of Grace Budd’s kidnapper had been premature. What they had on their hands, it seemed, was not the long-sought solution to the girl’s disappearance but a sordid squabble, motivated by rankling resentments over money, between a pathetic old man and a bitterly vindictive woman. It was true that Delia Budd had unhesitatingly picked Pope out of the lineup. But Mrs. Budd had already proved herself a notoriously unreliable witness.

  From the moment of Pope’s arrest, the city’s papers, from The New York Times to the Daily News, had been running major stories about the successful climax of the two-year manhunt for the Budd kidnapper. But just two days after Pope was arraigned before Magistrate Anthony Burke—who set his bail at $25,000—reporters learned that King and his fellow investigators now had serious doubts about Pope’s guilt and were on the verge of dropping all charges against him.

  Before that could happen, though, events took a sudden and very dark turn for the unhappy Mr. Pope.

  During his initial two-hour interrogation of the suspect, King had learned that Pope owned an old farmhouse on an acre of land in Shandaken. New York, a small town in the Catskills. A search order was put through to the State Police base at nearby Sidney, New York. Early the next morning—Sunday, September 7—a contingent of troopers, led by Lieutenant Matthew Fox, arrived at Pope’s place and proceeded to ransack the two-story farmhouse from basement to attic. There was nothing even remotely suspicious inside the house. Concluding that they had been sent on a wild goose chase, Lieutenant Fox and his men made ready to leave. Determined, however, to “leave no stone unturned” (as Fox later told reporters), they decided to take a look inside the small garage at the rear of the farmhouse.

  Inside was an old Dodge touring car bearing 1929 license plates. But what caught the lieutenant’s eye were three small trunks lined up against the far wall of the little building. Dragging them out into the sunlight, the troopers swung open the lids. The contents of the first two seemed innocent enough—newspaper clippings and old magazines, used clothing, and “assorted odds and ends.”

  The third, however, was filled with more provocative material—pictures and postcards of women and girls, many of them in alluring poses. There were also various bundles of letters. Undoing the ribbon around one of the packets, Fox scanned a few of the letters and discovered that they had all been written by women and were of a most personal nature—“mushy notes,” as he described them.

  Though the postcards and letters shed new light on the private life of the elderly caretaker, they weren’t especially incriminating in themselves. But that couldn’t be said of the other items in the trunk. Three strands of deep brown hair, tied with white
ribbon, lay concealed beneath the letters. Judging by their color, length and texture, Fox concluded that the strands had been clipped from the head of a young girl.

  Back in New York City, the news of the discovery hit like a bombshell. “RIBBONS, CURLS FOUND IN TRUNK IN BUDD SUSPECT’S OLD HOME,” blared the headline of the next morning’s Daily News. Suddenly, Charles Edward Pope no longer seemed like the put-upon victim of a termagant wife. A new and sinister light had been cast on the old caretaker. Perhaps he was the Budd kidnapper after all.

  The discovery of the hair clippings set off an intensive search of the Shandaken property. Troopers from the Sidney base swarmed over the premises, digging up the entire yard in an effort to uncover more clues. The contents of the three trunks were carefully removed and closely analyzed. Tucked among the old clothes in one of the trunks was a box of revolver ammunition. Even more significantly, troopers found a pair of white child’s stockings with darned heels—similar, according to Mrs. Budd’s testimony, to the ones that her daughter had been wearing on the morning she left home forever.

  By Wednesday, September 10, things were looking grim for Charles Pope. “NEW CLEWS TIGHTEN BUDD KIDNAP NET,” the Daily News reported. According to the article, the police, in searching Pope’s property, had found a file of letters covering the period from 1891 to 1929. Suspiciously, one entire year’s worth of correspondence was missing. That year was 1928. Grace Budd, of course, had been abducted in June, 1928.

  Investigators also learned that Grace had spent a few weeks in the vicinity of Pope’s farm during the summer of 1927, when she had been sent to live with a local family under the sponsorship of the New York Tribune’s Fresh Air Fund.