Serial Killers: Confessions of a Cannibal (3 page)

Frank Howard did not return Grace Budd to her home by nine o’clock that night, neither by ten nor eleven o’clock. Delia and Albert spent a long, sleepless night waiting on their daughter’s return. All the while they tried to convince themselves, and each other, that there was some logical explanation why Frank Howard had not brought Grace home. Perhaps the party had run later than expected and Mr. Howard’s sister had convinced him to let Grace spend the night. Yes, that was likely what had happened.

But by the time the first chill rays of dawn filtered through the windows of their apartment, the Budds decided that it was time to take action. They dispatched Edward to the local precinct to report Grace missing. A short while later, Lieutenant Samuel Dribben arrived at the Budd’s apartment with three detectives. The men listened intently as the distraught parents explained how they’d met Howard, how he’d offered their son a job and how they’d allowed their daughter to go with him to a children’s birthday party.

“And where was this party to take place?” Dribben asked. Delia Budd gave the address, immediately eliciting a curious expression from the detective. “That address doesn’t exist,” he said. “Columbus terminates at 109
th
Street.”

Any hope of an innocent explanation for Grace Budd’s disappearance had now been banished. And there was more distressing news for the Budd family when the police ran checks in the town of Farmingdale, Long Island and found no record of a farm owned by a man named Frank Howard. In the meantime, detectives and plainclothes officers had been dispatched to search the immediate area, and Edward Budd had been taken down to police headquarters to search through mugshots in the hope of finding the true identity of Grace’s abductor. The police were by now convinced that Frank Howard was not his real name.

There was one other lead. The Western Union message Howard had sent to Edward Budd. Howard had, of course, pocketed the slip of paper (and it was now obvious why), but the original would still be at the office that it had been sent from. A couple of detectives were immediately tasked with tracking it down.

On Tuesday, June 5, the story broke in the tabloid press, triggering the inevitable flood of crank calls, cruel taunts, and useless information. There were two leads, however, that initially seemed promising. A neighborhood woman pointed the finger at an elderly man named Joseph Slowey, said to have an “unhealthy interest” in young children. Slowey denied any involvement in the Budd abduction and was quickly cleared. Then four of Grace’s playmates told police that they had seen her and Frank Howard get into a blue sedan, with a young man at the wheel. This suggested a well coordinated kidnapping and sent police on a frantic search for the vehicle, which ultimately proved fruitless.

On Thursday, June 7, one thousand flyers were distributed to police departments throughout the US and Canada. These included a photograph of Grace Budd and a description of both Grace and Frank Howard. The following week saw another batch of flyers, 7000 of them, distributed across New York City. Grace Budd’s picture was suddenly everywhere – in subway stations and ferry terminals, in banks, post offices, barbershops and grocery stores, in diners and luncheonettes. And this, inevitably, triggered a deluge of new tips. Sightings of Grace and her elderly abductor came in from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Niagara Falls and Long Island, not to mention various locales in the five boroughs. Each of these tips was scrupulously checked, either by officers from the West 20
th
Street precinct who had taken the initial missing persons report, or by detectives from the Bureau of Missing Persons, which had now joined the hunt.

In mid-July, the search for Howard’s elusive telegram finally paid off when detectives traced it to the Western Union office at 103
rd
Street and 3
rd
Avenue in Manhattan. The police now had a sample of the kidnapper’s handwriting, but there was still no trace of the man himself.

Another valuable clue emerged when police traced the hawker who had sold Howard the small white pail in which he’d delivered the pot cheese to the Budds. He was a pushcart vendor named Rueben Rossoff, but while he could easily identify the pail by the price tag on its underside, he had little recall of the transaction itself. Still, the location of Rosoff’s stall was close to the Western Union office and that suggested that Howard either lived in the area – East Harlem – or frequented it. A dragnet was therefore organized, employing hundreds of officers. Rooming houses and hostels were searched, while residents and business owners were questioned. It came to nothing.

Throughout the long, hot summer of 1928, the tale of the missing Grace Budd continued to demand column inches in the New York papers. The story was, of course, a boon for the tabloids and they played it to the hilt. The Daily News for example, ended each bulletin with this line: “Follow the search for little Grace Budd and her kidnapper in tomorrow’s Daily News!” It was cheap and tacky, but it sold newspapers.

Meanwhile, caught in the midst of this maelstrom were Grace’s unfortunate parents. Albert appeared bowed under the weight of his unbearable loss, while Delia wavered between optimism, that her daughter would be recovered alive and well, and despair, that Grace was already dead. One person who came to share the latter opinion was Lieutenant Samuel Dribben. Yet even he could not have begun to imagine the horror of what had really happened to Grace Budd.

In August 1928, a prison warden from Railford, Florida contacted officers involved in the Budd investigation. Like law enforcement officials across the country, J.S. Blitch had received a flyer about the Budd kidnapping. After mulling it over, he had become convinced that Frank Howard was a former inmate of his, a conman by the name of Albert E. Corthell. Corthell had been released two years earlier and, according to Blitch, he closely matched the description of Frank Howard. That, however, was not the only reason that Blitch suspected Corthell. The conman had a habit of hiring prepubescent girls to pose as his daughters and Blight believed that he might have kidnapped Grace for the same purpose.

A picture of Corthell was duly dispatched to the NYPD and they wasted no time in showing it to the Budd family. The results were conflicting. Both Albert and Edward thought the man looked like Howard but couldn’t be sure that it was him. Delia Budd, however, was adamant. The man in the picture was definitely the monster who had showed up at her house and spirited her daughter away. She was prepared to stake her life on it.

But Delia Budd’s identification (as we shall see later) was highly questionable. Driven half crazy by grief and concern, Mrs. Budd was prepared to point the finger at just about any elderly, mustachioed stranger. In this case, however, she had corroboration from an independent source.

At around the time that Warden Blitch forwarded Albert Corthell’s mugshot to the Missing Persons Bureau, a man named William L. Vetter contacted the police with an interesting piece of information. Vetter was the assistant superintendant at the Brooklyn chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The incident he wanted to report was of a man matching Frank Howard’s description, who had called in at the S.P.C.C. offices in early June, wanting to adopt a ten-year-old girl. A date had been scheduled for a follow up interview but the man had never returned. Vetter had been mulling the strange incident ever since, but had only recently made the possible connection between it and the Budd case.

On the face of it, this seemed like a very promising lead and the police decided to immediately put Vetter’s tipoff to the test. Having just received Corthell’s mugshot, they put it into a photo array, with pictures of several other elderly cons. Vetter picked out Corthell without a moments hesitation.

It was exactly the break that the police needed. And it was good news for the Budd family too. For all his criminal ways, Albert Corthell was known as a gentle and somewhat refined man. He had no history of violence and was certainly no killer. If Grace was in his hands, she was almost certainly still alive.

On August 3, a grand jury was convened and returned an indictment against Albert E. Corthell for kidnapping. A warrant was then issued for his arrest. It appeared that the hunt for Grace Budd had taken a massive leap forward. Assistance District Attorney Harold W. Hastings boldly predicted that the case would be resolved “within days.”

That forecast, however, was wildly wide of the mark. Two years went by and despite the best efforts of detectives the wily conman Corthell remained at large. During that time several other suspects had dethroned him briefly at the top of the wanted list before being cleared. A man named Herbert J. Sherry was briefly investigated. Then there was Charles Howard, a 50-year-old from Florida who was on the run after defrauding his new bride of $2,800. The woman contacted the police to report the crime, adding that she thought Charles might actually be Frank Howard, kidnapper of the Budd girl.

Charles Howard was duly tracked down and arrested. Placed into a line up, he was unsurprisingly picked out by Delia Budd (on another occasion, Mrs. Budd identified a NYPD detective, drafted in to fill up the line-up, as her daughter’s kidnapper). Charles Howard, however, was able to provide a watertight alibi, and was off the hook for kidnapping, although he still had a charge of theft to answer.

On September 3, 1930, a woman named Jessie Pope marched into the stationhouse at West 20
th
Street and announced that her estranged husband, Charles Edward Pope, was the man who had kidnapped Grace Budd. According to Mrs. Pope’s story she had received a telegram from her husband on the day of the Budd kidnapping, asking her to meet him on the corner of High and Smith Streets, a few blocks from her residence. When she arrived at the rendezvous point, she found her husband waiting with a pretty, brown-haired girl of about ten. He asked her to look after the girl for a few days but she refused. Pope had then left in a huff, taking the girl with him.

Asked why she hadn’t reported this sooner, Mrs. Pope said that she had become seriously ill almost immediately after the incident. She had remained bedridden for several months. By the time she recovered the hubbub over the Budd kidnapping had died down, and the strange incident had faded from her memory. It was only after reading about the arrest of Charles Howard that it had all come back to her.

Mrs. Pope came across as a forthright woman and after the fiasco surrounding the arrest of Charles Howard the police were glad to have another solid lead so quickly. The following day, detectives called at the East 87
th
Street apartment Pope shared with his widowed sister and placed him under arrest. The 67-year-old janitor appeared bewildered as he was hustled into a hastily arranged line-up. Yet again, Delia Budd made a positive identification, while her husband and son were less certain.

By the following morning, the newspapers had wind of the arrest. “Budd Kidnap Suspect Captured After Two Years!” trumpeted the Daily News, sparking a near riot as an angry mob gathered outside the police station. Inside, Charles Pope endured hours of interrogation but stuck steadfastly to his denials. “My wife has had it in for me,” he told detectives, “ever since I was made executor of my father’s $30,000 estate.” He went on to add that Mrs. Pope had even had him committed to an asylum in an attempt to get her hands on the money. This, he speculated, was just her latest gambit.

Pope’s story was verified by his elderly sister, and the more police looked into Pope’s past, the more likely it appeared that he was telling the truth. But then matters took an unexpected turn. While searching Pope’s premises the police found a number of compromising items, including a stack of postcards featuring women in “alluring poses” and, more tellingly, a swatch a dark brown hair, tied up with a length of ribbon.

News of the discoveries sent the New York papers into a frenzy. “New Clues Tighten Budd Kidnap Net,” the Daily News reported. “Ribbons, Curls, Found In Trunk At Budd Suspect’s Home,” the World announced. It was looking very dark indeed for Charles Edward Pope.

The matter came before a grand jury on September 11, 1930. By then, doubts had resurfaced about Pope’s guilt (at least amongst the investigators working the case, the tabloid press had all but convicted Pope already). Yet despite these doubts, the unreliability of prosecution witnesses, and evidence that the lock of hair found at Pope’s home was not from Grace Budd, the grand jury found enough cause for an indictment. Pope’s trial was set for December.

Before that could happen, the police finally tracked down and arrested Albert Corthell, their original suspect. Extradited from Illinois, Corthell was placed into a police lineup and identified by both Delia and Alfred Budd. Suddenly, the police found themselves in the unusual position of having two identified suspects for the same crime.

That number would soon be reduced to one. At Charles Pope’s trial on December 22, the judge listened to testimony from only two witnesses, Delia Budd and Jessie Pope. Mrs. Budd surprised the court by stating that her earlier identification of Pope had been mistaken. Mrs. Pope squirmed and wheedled under cross-examination and eventually admitted that she bore a grudge against her husband. The judge then reprimanded her and instructed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty. After more than three months in police custody, Charles Pope was a free man.

That reinstated Albert Corthell as the main suspect. But after months of trying to find enough evidence to make a charge stick, the D.A. was forced to admit that he had nothing to connect Corthell to the abduction of Grace Budd. On February 6, 1931, charges against Corthell were withdrawn. The police were back to square one.