Deranged (2 page)
Authors: Harold Schechter
O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy. WILLIAM BLAKE, “The Sick Rose”
DERANGED
Prologue
On March 6, 1932, readers of The New York Times, sipping their breakfast coffee or settling back on the living-room sofa, were jarred from the enjoyment of their Sunday morning ritual by an alarming full-page feature, headlined “KIDNAPPING: A RISING MENACE TO THE NATION.” Though the article was occasioned by the shocking abduction, just five days before, of Charles Lindbergh, Jr.—the infant son of America’s most revered hero—it was not illustrated with a photo of the missing baby or a picture of his famous parents. Rather, the portrait that appeared on the top of the page was that of another, earlier kidnap victim, who had disappeared from her home in 1928, never to be seen again. This was a sweet-featured, ten-year-old girl with bobbed brown hair, a gentle smile, and a name which evoked such vivid images of tenderness and purity that no novelist would have dared to invent it: Grace Budd.
From the day of her disappearance, the mystery of little Gracie’s whereabouts—and the efforts of the New York City Police Department to unravel it—had riveted the public’s attention. What made the case so sensational was not simply the flowerlike innocence of the victim but, perhaps even more, the chilling circumstances of the crime. The child had been lured from her home and family by an elderly, kindly-seeming gentleman who had offered to take her to a birthday party. Neither Gracie nor her grizzled companion—a figure of such cadaverous coloring that he came to be known in the tabloids as the “Gray Man”—returned that night. Or ever again.
The Budd kidnapping struck a powerfully disturbing chord in the hearts of parents throughout the country. In a way the crime was even more unsettling than the abduction of the Lindbergh baby. Because of the aviator’s extraordinary renown, the theft of his child (whose corpse was eventually uncovered in a shallow grave not far from home) became the most infamous crime of the Depression. It was a deed that seemed not simply heinous but—given the worshipful regard in which the “Lone Eagle” was held by his countrymen—almost inconceivably wicked. As terrible as it was, however, the snatching of Lindbergh’s twenty-month-old son was committed out of conventionally base motives. It was a straightforward (if appallingly cruel) kidnapping for ransom.
The abduction of the Budd girl was something else, a crime that couldn’t fail to induce a shiver of dread in the parents of every young child. Only the rich, after all, had to worry that their offspring might be stolen for money. But no child was safe from the evil that had befallen Grace Budd—from the treachery of a smiling stranger, whose friendliness concealed a sinister intent. More than any other child-snatching of the Depression years, the Budd kidnapping brought home a terrible truth: that the world contains creatures who batten on innocence and that the trustfulness of children makes them frighteningly vulnerable to such beings.
In our own time, when child abduction has become epidemic and even our milk cartons are imprinted with the faces of the missing, that truth has been confirmed with dismaying regularity. To be sure, most kidnapped minors are the victims of broken marriages, of bitterly divorced spouses stealing their own children away from a hated ex-husband or wife. But the carrying off of young ones by predatory strangers happens often enough to be a legitimate fear. And, after all, it takes only a single outrage, like the 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz (the six-year-old Manhattan boy who set off for his school bus one Spring morning and was never seen again) or the slaying of little Adam Walsh (whose decapitated body was discovered shortly after he vanished from a Florida shopping mall in 1981) to poison the peace of mind of even the most carefree mother or father. Of all the evils that plague the modern world, none is more nightmarish from a parent’s point of view than the crime we now call “stranger abduction.”
For millions of Americans, the Budd case first gave birth to that nightmare. This is not to say that parents haven’t always kept a close eye on their children or cautioned them to be wary of strangers. But the Budd kidnapping was one of the watershed crimes in American history. Before it happened, America was a more innocent place, a place where parents felt free to allow their young children to roam unattended, even in New York City, without fearing that they would disappear forever. Afterward, few parents would permit their sons or daughters to venture into the world without teaching them first that children who talk to, take candy from, or accept the generous offers of strangers sometimes come to very bad ends.
It would be six years from the day of Grace Budd’s disappearance before the case was finally solved, and when it was, the truth turned out to be infinitely more horrifying than her parents’ worst fears. The “Gray Man” would stand revealed as a creature of unimaginable perversity and evil.
Though his name has faded from public memory, his presence is inescapable. Behind the spectral features of the figure that haunts every parent’s dreams—the fiend who lures children to destruction with the promise of a treat—lies the wizened face of the “Gray Man,” whose name was Albert Fish.
PART 1
The Gray Man
1
Great cities are not like towns, only bigger. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers. JANE JACOBS, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Every period is known not only by its heroes but by its killers as well. When we remember the late sixties, the Woodstock era, we think not only of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles but also of Charles Manson—the drug-crazed demon-hippie, every grown-up’s worst nightmare of the counterculture come true. The youth culture of the 1950s, whose icons were Elvis and Brando and James Dean, also produced Charlie Starkweather, the ultimate “JD,” who imagined himself a romantic teen rebel as he hotrodded across the Nebraska badlands, leaving a trail of shotgunned corpses in his wake. And, whoever our heroes ultimately prove to be, our own age will forever be associated with figures such as David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, Ted Bundy and Joel Steinberg, whose atrocities epitomize the nightmares of our time: urban terrorism, sexual violence, child abuse.
In May, 1924, a killing occurred in Chicago—a crime so sensational that it would come to be as closely identified with the twenties as flappers, the Charleston, and bathtub gin. Two brilliant and wealthy young men, Nathan Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, the pampered scions of prominent Chicago families, concocted a plan to carry out “the perfect crime.” Its commission would confirm their image of themselves as Nietzschean supermen.
Cruising the streets of their exclusive South Side neighborhood, they selected a victim at random—a fourteen-year-old acquaintance named Bobby Franks—lured him into their car and, after bludgeoning him with a chisel, disfigured his corpse with hydrochloric acid and stuffed it into a drainpipe at the bottom of a remote railroad embankment.
The killing of little Bobby Franks by Leopold and Loeb (who, for all their arrogance, were easily captured less than two weeks after the murder) achieved instant notoriety as the “crime of the century.” And their trial became the media event of the day. Defending them was the celebrated attorney Clarence Darrow, whose oratorical genius had saved 102 clients from execution.
During the month-long proceedings, the drama unfolding in the Chicago Criminal Courts Building overshadowed every other crime story in the country. For that reason, relatively little notice was taken when, in July, 1924, another child, a young New York City boy named Francis McDonnell, was brutally murdered. For sheer sensationalism, the McDonnell slaying, terrible though it was, simply couldn’t compete with the Leopold and Loeb case, and the public quickly forgot it. Indeed, a full decade would pass before it burst back onto the front pages of the newspapers.
Only then would people realize that the death of little Francis McDonnell had not been a case of a single, depraved murder but an omen of more—and worse—to come.
Staten Island has always been the most sparsely populated of the five New York City boroughs, and in 1924, the section of Port Richmond where the McDonnell family lived struck first-time visitors as a particularly isolated place. Manhattan was only a short ferry-ride away, but the McDonnell’s neighborhood—a scattering of modest, one-story houses surrounded by woods—might have been located way out in the country. On sun-washed summer days, the streets seemed especially barren, their heavy silence broken only by the occasional shouts or laughter of a few neighborhood children at Play.
Not far from the McDonnell home lay a place known locally as Charlton’s Woods, a ten-acre tract belonging to the Charlton Nordling Fireworks Company. The area was a favorite haunt of neighborhood youngsters—a backyard wilderness with a little brook running through its center, where, in the summer months, the children came to swim, fish, and sail their toy boats.
Eight-year-old Francis McDonnell, the son of a Staten Island police officer, had spent the early afternoon of Monday, July 14, playing by himself on the front porch of his home. At around 2:00 P.M., his mother came out to join him, cradling her month-old daughter, Annabelle, in her arms. Shortly afterward, as she sat on the porch nursing her baby, Mrs. McDonnell caught sight of a strange figure making his way down the middle of the street—a stooped, elderly man, shabby in appearance, with gray hair, a gray moustache and a gaunt, graystubbled face.
His hands made a constant, nervous motion, clenching and unclenching, and he seemed to be mumbling to himself. As he passed down the street, the two German shepherds belonging to the McDonnell’s next-door neighbor set up a howl. The gray-haired man turned to the woman on the porch, tipped his hat, then vanished down the road.
Later that afternoon, the stranger reappeared. By that time, Anna McDonnell had retired into her cottage with her infant daughter. Francis, accompanied by his little brother Albert, had gone off to join several playmates on the street—Eddie, Tommy, and Jimmy Donovan, the sons of a neighborhood fireman. The five boys were enjoying a game of catch with Francis’s favorite plaything—a white rubber ball, printed with the silhouettes of circus animals—when they noticed an elderly man with a gray moustache standing a short distance away, beckoning to them. Little Francis walked over to see what the old man wanted, while the others turned their attention back to their game. When they looked for Francis a few moments later, both he and the stranger were gone.
The last person to see Francis McDonnell that day was a neighbor, George Stern. The time was roughly 4:30 P.M. Relaxing on his porch across the road from the McDonnell’s place, Stern spotted the boy entering the grassy path that led to the little brook. Like other children from the area, Francis often played in Charlton’s Woods and, ordinarily, Stern wouldn’t have paid any attention at all. What caught his notice this time was a second figure—a gray-moustached “tramp,” as Stern would later describe him—walking close behind the boy.
Nowadays, of course, the sight of a grubby, grizzled stranger following a young child into an isolated woodland would undoubtedly arouse suspicion, if not alarm, in the minds of most observers. And even in 1924, the residents of the Port Richmond area had been sensitized to crime. Not long before, a neighborhood woman, Mrs. Maud A. Bauer, had been shot and killed by a motion picture operator named Harry Hoffman. Even more dismaying to area residents had been the murder, a year earlier, of a young boy, whose body had been found hanging from a tree less than a mile from the McDonnell home.
Even so, in July, 1924, New Yorkers were less wary of certain perils than they soon would be. Clearly, George Stern couldn’t imagine that, at the height of a sun-baked afternoon, on a lazy summer day, an eight-year-old boy could enter the woods that served as the neighborhood park and never come out alive.