Deranged (22 page)

Whether any of the bones belonged to other victims as well was a question that no one was yet prepared to answer.

Even as Stein was conferring with the press, more discoveries were being made at Wisteria.

Shortly before eleven, Sergeant Hogan was lifting a bone from the ground when he noticed a small bead embedded in the soil. Digging it out with his fingers, he uncovered sixteen more. They were imitation pearls. Their position made it clear that they had once been strung together into a necklace. Grace Budd had been wearing just such a necklace on the morning of her disappearance.

Shortly afterward, police officers searching through the woods behind Wisteria Cottage came upon several pairs of shoes. At first, the discovery seemed to confirm the growing suspicion that Fish had used the isolated house as a murder farm. Only after a neighbor came forward and identified the shoes as discarded trash did investigators learn that, for many years, the property had served as a local dump.

By that time, however, the ramshackle outhouse had been torn down and the fetid pit beneath it excavated by Officer Newman. There, half-buried in the muck, lay two moldering shoes, exactly matching the description of the ones worn by Grace on the day of her murder.

As noon approached, the hunt for more evidence moved into the house itself. Searching the upstairs bedroom where Grace had been strangled and butchered, Dr. Gilbert Dalldorf, chief toxicologist at nearby Grasslands Hospital, discovered a large splotch of brown on the floorboards and a spray of suspicious brown clots on the wall nearby. While Dalldorf scraped a sample of the clotted matter into a test tube, officers ripped up a section of the discolored floor. Later that afternoon, the boards were shipped off to Dalldorf’s lab for analysis.

Meanwhile, two levels below, a second party of police officers was busily tearing up the basement floor. Earlier, Dr. Amos Squire had ordered a single board removed at random, on the theory that—as he explained to reporters—“a man such as Fish would be apt to commit more murders.” And what better place to stash the bodies than underneath the basement floor? Sure enough, when the floorboard was pried up and a flashlight beamed into the darkness, Squire saw a bone.

Armed with crowbars and picks, the officers immediately set about ripping up the rest of the floor. No one could say, of course, how many corpses might be down there. But Squire was convinced that more human remains would be found. It seemed too coincidental that—as he told reporters—he would “casually lift one floorboard and find a bone.”

“We will take no chances,” Dr. Squire declared. “In view of Fish’s confession, there is no telling what else he has done of a criminal nature to which he has not confessed. That he wanted to kill others is evident in the fact that he intended to slay Edward Budd, the child’s brother, and changed his mind only when he saw the little girl.”

The possibility of Fish’s involvement in other crimes was being explored back in Manhattan, too. Right after his questioning by McQuillan and Coyne, Fish had been taken to the Jefferson Market Court and arraigned before Magistrate Adolph Stern, who ordered him held without bail. Since Grace Budd had been kidnapped in Manhattan and murdered in Westchester, the question of where—and for which crime—Fish would be tried remained temporarily unresolved.

As soon as Fish stepped out of the courtroom, he was mobbed by reporters and cameramen. Handcuffed to Detective King, the old man obligingly posed for pictures, while the newsmen bombarded him with questions about other unsolved child-snatchings. “Well boys,” the old man said mildly. “You might as well accuse me of all of them. You can’t do me any more damage.”

It wasn’t much of an answer, and the newspapermen kept at him, calling out the names of the missing. One name in particular kept coming up again and again—that of Billy Gaffney, the four-year-old boy who had vanished from his Brooklyn tenement the year before Grace Budd’s abduction.

After a few minutes, King cut the impromptu press conference short and led Fish back to headquarters. Meanwhile, attorneys from the Manhattan D.A.’s office were conferring with their counterparts from Westchester about the jurisdiction issue. Shortly before noon, Assistant D.A. James Neary met with reporters to announce the decision.

Fish would be moved to the Tombs and held there until a murder indictment was returned against him—probably on the following Tuesday, December 18, when the Westchester Grand Jury was expected to reconvene. At that point, Fish would be surrendered to Westchester authorities. Neary expected that Fish would probably go on trial sometime around the first of the year, though the date might be delayed by the mental examinations which the old man would clearly have to undergo.

Several reporters wanted to know if Fish had ever been seen by psychiatrists before. Neary confirmed that the old man had spent several brief periods under observation following previous arrests. On each of those occasions, Neary explained, Fish had been judged sane—perverted but sane.

By then, Fish was back in his cell in the detention pen, awaiting transfer to the Tombs. Shortly before noon, a Nassau County police inspector named Harold King (no relation to Fish’s nemesis) arrived to question the prisoner about a pair of sensational, unsolved murder cases on Long Island.

The first was the kidnapping and killing of a sixteen-year-old high school girl named Mary O’Connell, whose bludgeoned body had been discovered in a lonely stretch of woods near her Far Rockaway home in February, 1932. The second was the murder of a man named Benjamin B. Collings, who had been slain onboard his yacht on Long Island Sound in 1931. King interviewed Fish for nearly an hour, but all he got from the old man was a string of increasingly sullen denials.

After Inspector King’s departure, Captain Stein and a few of his men spent some time hammering away at Fish about the disappearance of Billy Gaffney. Fish, sitting hunched on a wooden stool, simply shook his head and protested his innocence. But the investigators were unconvinced. They had, in fact, begun to suspect that Fish was responsible not only for the Gaffney crime but also for another, older atrocity as well—a case which still rankled in the memory of the New York City police, since it had been committed against one of their own. This was the 1926 murder of eight-year-old Francis McDonnell, the Staten Island patrolman’s son who had been savagely attacked and strangled in the woods near his home.

By 4:15 P.M., the woods around Wisteria Cottage were growing dark. Most of Grace Budd’s skeleton had been located by then, and the searchers had turned their attention to the recovery of the tools Fish had used to dismember the little girl’s corpse.

A man named Robert Walton, one of the dozens of locals who had spent the day tramping around the property, found the first of Fish’s “implements of hell”—the curve-handled compass saw, its tapered blade corroded with rust. Shortly afterward, another Greenburgh man, a trucker named Jerry Reale, showed up at Wisteria with an interesting story. About two years earlier, while strolling through the woods behind the abandoned house, he had come upon an old cleaver with a rotted wooden handle. Deciding that the tool was beyond salvaging, he had pitched it into the underbrush. Reale pointed to the place where he had tossed it. Sure enough, as soon as the police began searching the area, they came upon the rusty remains of the cleaver.

That left only one more tool to find. But in spite of the number and diligence of the searchers, no one could turn up the butcher knife. Finally, Captain McQuillan, who had arrived from Manhattan earlier in the afternoon, decided to try burning off the underbrush. A fire was lit and immediately began burning out of control. By the time the Greenburgh Fire Department arrived and extinguished the blaze, it was too dark to continue the search.

McQuillan took charge of the evidence. After posting some of his men around the property for the night, he returned to Greenburgh police headquarters with the two rusted tools and the picnic basket full of bones.

Sergeant Hogan was sent around the corner to Butler’s grocery for a larger container. A short while later, he came back carrying a shipping carton imprinted with the name of a popular brand of canned beans. McQuillan carefully transferred the little girl’s remains into the grocery carton and locked the evidence in his closet.

The picnic basket was shaken clean of bone chips, pebbles, and dirt and returned to Mrs. Thornton, with the thanks of the Greenburgh police.

Suppertime was approaching, but back in Manhattan, Detective King hadn’t relaxed his exertions. Specifically, he was searching for a piece of evidence that would help identify the skeletal remains found at Wisteria as Grace Budd’s. At around 6:30 P.M., he found it.

Digging through the records of the dental clinic at New York Hospital, where Grace had been treated the year before her disappearance, he came upon the little girl’s records. The chart indicated the position of several teeth which had been filled during her visit to the dispensary. At a glance, King could see that the fillings matched the ones in the skull that Captain Stein had brought back from Wisteria.

By that time, reporters covering the case already recognized that King was the true hero of the story, the indefatigable manhunter who had refused to rest until the Budd criminal had been tracked down and brought to justice. At a news conference to announce the discovery of the dental chart, Commissioner Valentine was asked if King could expect any official recognition for his work on the case.

The commissioner confirmed that King could look forward to a promotion from second- to first-grade detective. The higher rank would mean a pay hike of $800 per year, bringing King’s annual salary up to $4,000.

King had one final task to perform that day. He was one of the officers who accompanied Fish when the old man was transferred to the Tombs.

Arriving at the prison shortly before midnight, Fish was stripped of his necktie, belt, and shoelaces. A round-the-clock guard was posted outside his cell to make sure that he did not inflict any harm on himself. The police, of course, were thinking about suicide. At that point, no one knew anything about the other far more extravagant, if less fatal, forms of self-abuse that were among the old man’s dearest pleasures.

25

“Budd Murder Mystery Solved … Justice Always Wins!” Page One, New York Daily Mirror, Dec. 16, 1934

From the moment it broke on December 14, the Fish story kept New York City spellbound with horror. By Friday afternoon, the news of the arrest was splashed across the front page of every paper in town, and for the following two weeks, the dailies covered each new development in lavish detail.

The Mirror and Daily News in particular served up a nonstop feast of juicy revelations, seasoned with the tabloids’ own special blend of prurience and moral indignation. The Mirror did an especially loving job of dishing out lurid tidbits for its readers’ delectation and never hesitated to spice up the facts when the truth wasn’t zesty enough for its sensationalistic standards. Fish’s statement that he had strangled Grace Budd slowly, for example, was transformed into the even more horrific but completely fictitious admission that “It must have taken me fully an hour to strangle her once I got my hands on her throat.”

The Mirror scribes were particularly inventive in coming up with lurid labels for the decrepit old killer. In the course of a single story, Fish was described as the “Ogre of Murder Lodge,” the “Vampire Man,” the “Orgiastic Fiend,” the “Modern Bluebeard,” the “Aged Thrill-Killer,” and the “Werewolf of Wisteria.” The articles themselves were written in an equally inflammatory style: “Out of the slime of the sadistic butchery of Grace Budd by the benign-looking Albert Howard Fish,” began a typical piece, “there emerged last night the hint of an even greater horror. A horror of multiple killings. Revealing a new type of Jack the Ripper … in the guise of a kindly old gentleman.”

Compared to the visual aids which accompanied the stories, however, the writing was a model of cool objectivity. On Saturday, December 15, for example, the Mirror ran an artist’s graphic rendition of the Budd murder. Headlined “HOW THE THRILL VULTURE POUNCED ON HIS COWERING PREY,” the drawing was a step-by-step reconstruction of the killing, culminating in a close-up of the little girl’s strangulation. In a bow to the public’s sensibilities, Fish was shown fully clothed. The Mirror, after all, was a family newspaper.

On another day, the paper printed a sequence of photographs that traced the route Fish and Grace had taken on their trip to Wisteria. Each photograph was accompanied by a breathless caption that did its best to summon up the titillating horrors of that day. “What were you doing on Sunday, May 28, 1928?” began the caption under the first picture in the series, a shot of the Budd’s old apartment building on West 15th Street. “On that day, Albert Fish was killing little Grace Budd!” The other landmarks in the series were the “el” at 14th Street (“Perhaps you used the station that day, rubbed shoulders with them …”), the Sedgwick Avenue Station (“Perhaps you were on that very train. Were you? The horrible ogre sat beside the little girl, planning his horrible crime”), Worthington Station (“Fish left his bundle on the train. She went after it, carrying her own death weapons!”), and, of course, Wisteria Cottage (“The old man went inside, leaving the little girl out of doors picking flowers. When he called her, she went trustfully to him, and he killed her”).