Deranged (4 page)

And then, one day, on a mild afternoon in early 1927, he came back.

It had been an unusually temperate winter, and, by mid-February, people throughout New York State were already detecting the first signs of spring. Pussy willows were budding in Watertown, new grass had begun to sprout in Saratoga Springs, and, even in the northernmost reaches of the state, robins, starlings, and black birds had returned from their winter migrations. In New York City, at a time of the year when children could normally be found playing outside in the snow, the streets were full of lightly clad youngsters, skipping rope, shooting marbles, or clattering down the sidewalks on roller skates.

On Friday, February 11, the mildness of the weather was matched-by the pleasantness of the local news. The metropolitan pages of The New York Times were full of sunny stories: the early coming of spring; the first, exciting demonstration, held at Manhattan’s Rivoli Theater, of motion pictures with sound; the eightieth birthday of Thomas Edison, America’s greatest inventor, who favored reporters with his “billion-dollar smile” and declared that work remained his greatest pleasure.

Even the day’s top crime story was strikingly tame. The most sensational event in the city was the police raid on a trio of supposedly immoral Broadway shows, including a drama called “Sex,” whose popularity had as much to do with its title as with the talents of its author and leading lady, Mae West.

In short, anyone reading the news of that Friday would have assumed that February 11, 1927, was a remarkably uneventful day in the city, a day when nothing very terrible had happened.

But—though it took a little while for the truth to sink in—something very terrible had.

It was the speed at which it happened that made the horror so hard to believe at first—that and the fact that the only witness was a child of three.

The Gaffney family occupied a small, sunless apartment on the second floor of 99 Fifteenth Street, one of several rundown tenements crammed between Third and Fourth Avenues in Brooklyn. Late in the afternoon of Friday, February 11, just around dusk, Billy Gaffney, a slender four-year-old with his mother’s cornflower blue eyes and auburn hair, was playing in the dimly lit hallway outside his apartment. With him was his three-year-old neighbor, the Beaton boy, whose first name was Billy, too.

An older neighbor, twelve-year-old Johnny McNiff, who lived on the top floor of the tenement and who was home minding his baby sister, heard the sounds of the two friends at play and headed downstairs to join them, leaving the infant asleep in her crib. A few minutes later, however, the baby began crying. Johnny hurried back up to his flat to quiet her. When he returned to the second floor, no more than three minutes later, the two Billys were gone.

Just then, Billy Beaton’s father, who was caring for his children while his wife was in the hospital, emerged from his flat and found Johnny in the hallway, looking puzzled. The boy explained what had happened. Mr. Beaton dashed to the Gaffney’s apartment, but the children weren’t there. Afraid that the boys might have wandered into the street, he ran down the two flights of stairs to the front stoop and began calling their names. But no one responded.

Mr. Beaton’s apprehensions deepened by the moment. With Johnny at his side, he began a rapid search of the building, starting on the ground floor. But the two boys were nowhere to be found. As soon as they reached the top floor, however, Mr. Beaton heaved a sigh. There, alone by the ladder that led to the roof, stood his little boy.

Taking his child into his arms, he asked what had happened. “Where were you? Where did you go?”

Billy sounded excited. “We were on the roof,” he said, pointing overhead. “We saw chimneys and buildings and steamships!”

Looking up, Mr. Beaton saw that the scuttle which opened to the rooftop had been shoved aside. He was baffled. The tenants of the building, most of whom had young children, were careful to keep the wooden hatch closed at all times, and no boy as young as Billy Beaton or Billy Gaffney could have possibly moved it aside.

“Where’s Billy Gaffney?” Mr. Beaton asked. “Is he still up there?”

His son shook his head.

Mr. Beaton, who only a moment before had been awash with relief, suddenly felt his throat tighten with anxiety. “Where is he then?”

Billy Beaton’s reply, offered without hesitation, would be a source of continuing controversy in the days and weeks ahead. It was the sort of answer that a three-year-old could be expected to give and, for that reason, the authorities were inclined to discount it. Indeed, it would be six years before the world came to realize that the Beaton child had been right all along.

“The boogey man took him,” Billy Beaton said.

By the following day, twenty-five detectives and patrolmen, under the command of Sergeant Elmer Joseph, had been assigned to the case. Little Billy Beaton, along with his father and Johnny McNiff—the last people to see the missing boy—were interrogated closely. Each time he was asked what had happened, the Beaton boy repeated his story, but Sergeant Joseph dismissed it as a three-year-old’s prattle. “All children talk about the boogey man when they sense trouble,” he explained.

A kidnapping made no sense to Sergeant Joseph. The Gaffneys were desperately poor. Edmund, the father, worked as a truck driver for a local stocking company, a job that barely paid him a living wage. Indeed, at the moment of her son’s disappearance, Elizabeth Gaffney had been seated at the kitchen table, patching a pair of her son’s tattered gray knickers. These and another equally shabby navy-blue pair were the only pants her child owned. He had been wearing the blue knickers, along with a gray middy, black stockings and black shoes (but neither hat nor coat) when he vanished into the gloom.

No one in his right mind, Sergeant Joseph reasoned, would kidnap the child of such penniless people in the hope of obtaining a ransom. It was the sergeant’s opinion that the unsupervised boy had wandered out into the street and fallen into trouble. It was conceivable that he had taken it into his head to explore one of the many nearby factory buildings and had become trapped inside. Or—a much grimmer possibility—that he had made his way to the Gowanus canal, located less than five blocks from his home, and met with an accident. A police scow was dispatched to the canal, and two officers spent the day dredging its muddy bottom with grappling hooks. But they managed to bring up nothing except a sodden assortment of trash.

Over the days and weeks ahead, the tenement district surrounding Billy Gaffney’s home was the scene of one of the most intensive hunts in New York City history. Before it was over, more than three hundred and fifty policemen, plus untold numbers of civilian volunteers—neighbors, school children, Boy Scouts, and others—had taken part. Every cellar, sewer, loft, factory, church, alleyway, lumber yard, coal bin, and crawlspace in the area was searched and searched again. But no trace of Billy could be found. As one dispirited detective put it, it was as if the earth had swallowed him up.

Throughout this period, Mrs. Gaffney remained sequestered in her dusky apartment, grieving and growing more haggard by the day. Her three married sisters had hurried to her side to offer what comfort they could, and it was only at their insistence that Mrs. Gaffney ate and slept at all. Though she remained firm in the conviction that Billy was still alive, the thought of her “candy boy” (as she called him) lost somewhere in the wintry streets was an unrelenting torment. “He was always so pale—in the house so much,” she cried to reporters. “I can’t bear to think how he looks now, without food and all.”

To make matters worse, the Gaffneys—like other victims of highly publicized misfortunes—began receiving crank letters by the bundle. Some of these were nothing more than babble: “My dear friends, I will be fine to boy, my son in waters, rivers, cellars. Look out. My God, want back boy.”

Others, such as the letter the Gaffneys received on February 16, were infinitely worse, impelled by an unimaginable sadism: “Wait! Do not appear too anxious. Your son is in safe hands. We fought for him, but I got him now. We will get the Beaton boy for Billy to play with, for Billy is lonesome. Do not show this letter to anyone if you know what is good for you. Again I say that Billy is safe and that we are experimenting on him.”

But no matter how insane or incoherent these messages were, the police pored over all of them, in the desperate—and ultimately futile—hope that one might contain a clue to Billy Gaffney’s whereabouts.

By this time, Billy Beaton had provided the police with a fuller description of the “boogey man.” According to the three-year-old, the stranger who had taken Billy Gaffney away was a thin old man with gray hairs growing on his upper lip.

In spite of these specifics, Sergeant Joseph and his superiors remained skeptical. Of all the possible fates that could have befallen Billy Gaffney, kidnapping seemed the least likely. What could be the motive? A ransom was out of the question. The Gaffneys seemed to have no enemies. And it would be crazy for a childless adult to risk imprisonment by snatching someone else’s son when city orphanages were packed with adoptable youngsters. “There is no reason why anyone should want to take this child,” opined Inspector John J. Sullivan of the Missing Persons Bureau. “The kidnapper would have to be deranged.”

Just a few years before, of course, a thin, gray-moustached and desperately deranged individual had snatched, sexually assaulted, and killed young Francis McDonnell. But—perhaps because so little weight was given to the three-year-old’s testimony—no one connected Billy Beaton’s “boogey man” to the “gray man” of the earlier crime.

As the investigation entered its second week, the police continued to pursue every lead, no matter how slender or farfetched it seemed. One of the countless crank letters mailed to the Gaffneys contained a crudely drawn map of an islet in the Bronx River where, according to the anonymous writer, the corpse of Billy Gaffney was buried. “I didn’t mean to kill him. God forgive me!” When the police followed the map to the designated spot, however, all they found was a small strip of solid rock jutting out of the water.

Another letter indicated that Billy’s corpse had been stuffed into a carton and left in an empty apartment on Alexander Avenue in Brooklyn. Police investigators hastened to the address, where they found a large cardboard box shoved into a corner of the abandoned flat. Inside was a mound of moldering rags.

In their growing frustration, the police began grasping at straws. At one point, Mrs. Gaffney revealed that, several years earlier, she had testified against two female cousins in a lawsuit involving a fiercely contested will. Because of the bitter enmity that had resulted, both cousins were brought in for questioning. They were released within the hour, however, when it became clear that they knew nothing whatsoever about the missing boy.

Even Billy Beaton’s father came under suspicion for a short time. A neighborhood man named Gabriel Cardovez informed the police that, on the night of February 11, he had seen Mr. Beaton hurrying down the street with a bundle in his arms. Kings County D.A. Charles Dodd called Beaton in and questioned him about the incident. As it turned out, Cardovez’s dates were off. Beaton had, in fact, carried a bundle from his apartment one evening. But the package contained freshly laundered underclothing for his recuperating wife, and—as hospital records confirmed—he had made the visit on February 16, five days after Billy’s disappearance.

Hopes were raised and dashed with dismaying regularity. The day after Billy vanished, a truck driver named Edward Wisniski showed up at the Gaffney’s apartment and explained that, on the previous evening, he had come upon a little boy, lost and crying on a nearby street corner, and turned him over to a passing patrolman. The news sent Billy’s parents flying to the local precinct, where they discovered that the boy Wisniski had found belonged to someone else.

A day later, a Weehawken, New Jersey, policeman revealed that, on Saturday afternoon, he had observed a “short, swarthy woman” dragging a weeping little boy past his traffic post. This revelation set off a brief, frantic search for the woman, which came to an abrupt halt when Officer Martin was shown some photographs of the Gaffney boy and realized that the child he had seen bore no resemblance at all to Billy.

Anonymous tips continued to pour in by the dozen. One informant reported that Billy had been stolen by a “bereaved mother” and was living safely in Harlem. Another insisted that he was being kept by an old man in Roosevelt, Long Island.

One morning in early March, the Gaffneys received a special delivery letter which claimed that Billy was imprisoned in an old frame house in South Brooklyn. In three densely packed pages of handwritten script, the writer described in vivid detail how, while walking past the dilapidated house one recent morning, he had glanced up and seen, peering through the grimy panes of a second-story window, a wan child’s face resembling newspaper photos of Billy. Suddenly, a man’s hand appeared, clutched the boy by the shoulder, and jerked him from view. Then the blind had been hastily lowered. Inspector Sullivan immediately sent a dozen men to the address. But the house turned out to be empty.

Subsequent rumors placed Billy in increasingly farflung locales. When an abandoned four-year-old was picked up on the streets of St. Louis, the police of that city believed that he might be the missing Brooklyn boy—until a frantic old lady showed up at the station house later that day, looking for her lost grandson. Some weeks later, Sergeant Joseph received a letter from a druggist’s wife in Deadwood, South Dakota, who claimed that Billy was living on a ranch in Montana. Joseph immediately contacted the Deadwood Chief of Police, who dispatched a man to check out the story.

But like every other sighting of Billy, this one turned out to be a mirage.

The only solid lead that police investigators received came from a trolley car conductor named Anthony Barone who, after a period of what he termed “mental struggle” during which he agonized over the wisdom of getting involved, finally stepped forward to relate what he had witnessed on the evening of Friday, February 11.