Deranged (10 page)

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In an effort to locate the blue sedan with yellow plates that had —according to the eyewitness testimony of Grace’s playmates—whisked the girl away on the day of her abduction, Dribben had contacted his counterparts in Pennsylvania. But investigators in that state were no more successful in tracking down the alleged getaway car than the New York City police.

A week after the abduction, however—on the morning of Monday, June 11—several of the Budds’ neighbors contacted Dribben and informed him that on the previous evening they had spotted a mud-spattered blue sedan cruising up and down their block. Its driver, they reported, was a young man dressed in a brown suit.

Dribben didn’t know what to make of this story. Like the site of other highly publicized crimes, the Budd home had drawn its share of curiosity seekers, and the driver of the blue sedan might simply have been another of that morbid breed. On the other hand, it was also conceivable that the young man was a conscience-stricken member of Howard’s kidnapping ring, impelled by guilt to revisit the crime scene but afraid to surrender.

Whatever the case, Dribben did not intend to take any chances. A guard was posted in front of the Budds’ apartment building to keep watch on the street. But this measure, too, proved fruitless. The young driver in the suspicious blue sedan never returned—assuming he had ever been there at all.

Wildly conflicting rumors and reports continued to pour in. On Thursday, June 14, for example, the Budds received a letter which boosted their spirits, filling them with the hope that Grace was being well cared for. “Dear Mrs. Budd,” the letter began:

I have Grace. She is safe and sound. She is happy in her new home and not at all homesick. I will see to it that Grace has proper schooling. She has been given an Angora cat and a pet canary. She calls the canary Bill. I am a keen student of human nature. That was why I was attracted to Grace. She seemed like a girl who would appreciate nice surroundings and a real nice home. I drove with Grace past your house in an automobile several days ago. I saw several persons standing in front of the house and did not stop, as it looked as though they were waiting for me. I will see to it in the near future that some arrangements are made so Grace will be able to visit you for a short time.

The letter, which struck some of the detectives as authentic, was signed “J.F.H.”

Later that day, however, the police received a far different, though equally compelling report, this one from a Brooklyn man named Nicholas Grimaldi, an employee of the New York City sanitation department. According to Grimaldi, he had gone down into the cellar of his building at 5:30 A.M. the preceding Monday and had been startled to find a young girl asleep on a burlap-covered board supported by two ash cans.

“What are you doing here?” Grimaldi demanded, nudging the girl awake.

Leaping from her crude, makeshift bed, the girl—whose age, Grimaldi judged, was somewhere between ten and twelve—shook her head and answered, “Nothing.”

Grimaldi ordered the child to wait for him while he fetched his wife, but the girl—crying “Don’t tell my brother!”—dashed up the cellar steps and vanished down the street, just as Mrs. Grimaldi appeared at the doorway. Though Mrs. Grimaldi got only a fleeting glimpse of the skinny, pale-faced waif, she was convinced that the frightened child was none other than Grace Budd, whose description she had read in one of the city’s Italian newspapers.

These reports left the police more confused than ever. If the letter from the mysterious “J.F.H.” was to be believed, Grace Budd was living in luxury. On the other hand, if Mrs. Grimaldi was right, Gracie had become a street urchin, living among ash cans in tenement cellars.

As the police were painfully aware, however, there was another, far more terrible possibility: that Grace Budd was no longer living at all.

Mrs. Budd’s nightmare was a tabloid editor’s dream, since few things sold more papers than the heartrending spectacle of a sorrowing mother praying for the safe return of her kidnapped daughter. A simple, uneducated woman—grateful for any publicity that might aid the police in locating her child—Mrs. Budd dutifully posed for press cameramen, dabbing tears from her eyes or staring mournfully at photographs of her lost little girl.

Her state of mind was subject to wild fluctuations. At first, though no demand for money was forthcoming, she shared Lieutenant Dribben’s belief that Grace had been stolen for ransom by a kidnapping gang, who—in spite of their cunning and professionalism—had seriously miscalculated the Budds’ ability to pay. Perhaps, Mrs. Budd told reporters, the kidnappers were hoping that “a newspaper or some charitably inclined person” would post a reward for Grace’s return.

Before very long, Mrs. Budd’s hopefulness evaporated. Unlike Elizabeth Gaffney, who never ceased to believe that she would one day be reunited with her stolen child, Mrs. Budd suddenly became certain that her daughter was dead. Lieutenant Dribben continued to express his conviction that, within a short time, Grace would be recovered, healthy and unharmed. But his faith failed to reassure the disconsolate mother.

Two weeks after Grace’s disappearance, however, Delia Budd experienced an abrupt and dramatic mood swing—a powerful premonition that her daughter was, after all, safe and sound. “I seem to feel,” she told reporters, “that Grace is alive. I am almost sure of it. I think that when this excitement dies down, the man who took her from here will return her to me. I don’t think any harm has come to her.”

Ironically, at the very moment that Mrs. Budd was inspired with renewed optimism, Lieutenant Dribben was beginning to feel the first real stirrings of doubt. The Budd kidnapping, he told reporters, was the “most baffling” case he’d ever encountered. Two weeks of the most arduous detective work had turned up nothing. Every lead had been illusory, every clue a will-o’-the-wisp. The police felt farther from a solution than they had at the start of their investigation. They were completely at a loss.

Dribben couldn’t conceal his frustration. What he did conceal, particularly from Grace’s mother, was his growing fear that Delia Budd’s former belief—her despairing sense that her child was no longer alive—might have been correct after all.

9

“Kidnapping is the feature crime of the present time…. It is one of the newest crimes. It is a crime that men with some of the best brains in this country have gone into, because it offers big returns and reasonable safeguards.” WALTER B. WEISENBERGER, President Of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, in a statement to the House Judiciary Committee, March, 1932

Throughout the summer of 1928, New Yorkers broiled, occasionally collapsed, and, in a number of cases, perished in the blast-furnace heat. On one day alone—Monday, July 9—six people died and twenty-five more suffered prostration in the airless swelter of the city. But as the weeks wore on, the trail of Grace Budd’s elusive kidnapper only grew colder.

Even before June ended, the Budd case had largely disappeared from the city’s papers, displaced by more thrilling, momentous or simply more novel events. Aviation was much in the news. Amelia Earhart, accompanied by two male pilots, flew a multiengine Fokker from Boston to South Wales, thus becoming the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane. Her triumph, however, was offset by a tragedy that occurred less than a month later, when a monoplane piloted by Captain Emilio Carranza was hit by a bolt of lightning dunng a nonstop flight from Long Island to Mexico City and crashed in a New Jersey woodland, killing the “ace of Mexican fliers.”

Beginning in mid-June and continuing for the next several weeks, the public was riveted by the high drama taking place in the Arctic Circle, where the dirigible Italia, commanded by the Italian explorer and aviation pioneer Umberto Nobile, crashed on an ice pack in the frigid waters north-northeast of Spitsbergen. An international rescue effort was immediately launched, and eventually, Nobile and seven of his crew members were plucked from the ice. But before the incident was over, nineteen men had lost their lives, including famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, discoverer of the South Pole, who set off in a seaplane to hunt for the downed airship and was never seen again.

In national politics, the big event of the summer was the nomination in Houston, Texas, of New York Governor Al Smith as the Democratic party’s presidential candidate. On Wednesday, June 20, just as convention delegates and party leaders were pouring into the city, a young black man named Robert Powell, who had been wounded in a shoot-out with police, was snatched from his bed in the Jefferson Davis Hospital by a band of five vigilantes, driven six miles into the countryside, and lynched under a wooden bridge.

Across the border, in Mexico City, President-elect Alvaro Obregon was assassinated during an official luncheon on the afternoon of July 18. Another political assassination—this one dating back to the sixteenth century—also made news when the members of Madrid’s Academy of Spanish History announced plans to exhume the centuries-old corpse of Don Carlos, Prince of the Asturias, in order to check the truth of the controversial legend that he had been poisoned by his father, King Phillip II, in 1568. In London, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes and (paradoxically enough) a devout believer in the occult, appeared at the trial of a London medium to testify on the legitimacy of Spiritualism. And on July 10, in New York City, the stock market suffered its worst decline since 1914—a portent of the economic catastrophe that was soon to overtake the country.

There were amazing feats and remarkable finds. A daredevil named Jean A. Lussier of Springfield, Massachusetts, became the third man to conquer “the mighty Niagara” when, on July 4, he plunged over Horseshoe Falls while strapped inside a giant rubber ball. The very next day, the world was startled by the announcement that an archaeological expedition to the Aleutians had stumbled upon the mummified remains of four Stone Age humans-three adults and an infant—perfectly preserved in the ice.

As always, sports made up a healthy chunk of the summer’s news. Johnny Weissmuller, future Tarzan of the movies and head of the U.S. Olympic swim team, took the gold medal in the men’s 100-meter freestyle at the VIIIth International Games in Amsterdam. At Wimbledon, Rene Lacoste defeated Henri Cochet for the men’s singles championship. And Gene Tunney held onto his championship by flooring New Zealander Tom Heeney in the eleventh round of their heavyweight title bout at Yankee Stadium. Two days later, on July 29, Tunney announced that he was quitting boxing to study philosophy at the Sorbonne.

By the time July, 1928, drew to a close, the Budd story had been off the front pages for so long that the public had, by and large, put it out of mind. And so it must have come as a surprise to many New Yorkers when they opened their papers on the morning of August 2 and discovered headlines announcing that, according to police, the case of the Grace Budd kidnapping had finally been solved.

Like hundreds of other law enforcement officials and prison personnel throughout North America, J. S. Blitch, warden of a prison farm in Raiford, Florida, had received a copy of the flier describing the victim and suspect in the Budd kidnapping. Studying the circular, Blitch was struck by the similarities between Frank Howard and a man the warden knew well, a former inmate of the farm who had been released in 1926 after serving four years for embezzlement.

Albert E. Corthell was the prisoner’s name, though he was also known by several aliases: Charles Parker, A. Edward Drawfell, J. W. West. A glib, gray-haired con artist, slight of build and in his early fifties, Corthell was a Midwestener who had spent much of his adult life in and out of prisons throughout the U.S., serving time for a wide range of felonies from swindling and forgery to car theft. But there was nothing crude about Corthell. A sharp-witted smoothie with an ingratiating manner and a smattering of medical knowledge (during one of his many jail stints, he had worked as an orderly in the prison hospital), he was able to pass himself off as a Harvard-educated physician from St. Petersburg, who had practiced medicine in Manhattan from an office in the Astor Court Building. To give himself an added touch of respectability when pulling off a scam, he often hired preadolescent girls to pose as his daughters.

Certainly, Blitch thought, Corthell’s practice of exploiting young girls could explain his interest in Grace Budd. And there was something else about the ex-convict which made him a plausible suspect in the Budd case. The way Blitch figured it, after having spent so much time at Raiford, Corthell would have had no trouble at all in conjuring up a very convincing picture of his mythical farm on Long Island to beguile the impressionable Budds.

The more he thought about the parallels, the more convinced Blitch became that Howard and Corthell were the same individual. Pulling out his file on Corthell, Warden Blitch forwarded it, along with the most recent mug shot of the gray-haired con man, to the New York City Police Commissioner, Joseph A. Warren.

Shortly after Corthell’s photograph had been received and added to the Rogue’s Gallery at police headquarters, William L. Vetter, the assistant superintendent of the Brooklyn branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, contacted the police with an interesting story. According to Vetter, he had been visited just a few days before the Budd kidnapping by a slightly built, gray-haired man seeking to adopt a six-year-old girl. The fellow was well-dressed and soft-spoken, but something about his manner struck Vetter as suspicious. Vetter had spoken to him briefly and set up a date for a second, more exhaustive interview. But the gray-haired stranger had never returned.