Deranged (26 page)

Satisfied by Unger’s argument, the Grand Jury promptly moved to indict Fish for abduction. Within the hour, Westchester D.A. Frank Coyne called a press conference in White Plains to announce that evidence to support a first-degree murder charge against Fish would be presented to the Westchester Grand Jury on Thursday. Thirteen witnesses would testify, including the Budd family, Detective King, and members of the Greenburgh police force.

With only three days left before the Grand Jury assembled in Westchester, the police redoubled their efforts to track down the dentist who had treated Grace Budd and could identify the fillings in her skull. Dozens of dentists were called down to police headquarters for questioning, and a circular containing a diagram and description of the work performed on Grace’s teeth was printed up for distribution to clinics and dispensaries throughout the city. By Tuesday afternoon, however, the police had still not managed to locate their man.

The hunt for more evidence at Wisteria Cottage had also proved fruitless. For all their doggedness, the police had failed to turn up the missing butcher knife, even with the aid of a special electromagnetic device supplied by the Westchester Lighting Company. Their search for Grace’s hat and coat, which the old man claimed he had rolled up and stuck under a stone, was also unavailing. And since the discovery of the skeletal fragments in the muddy beds of the two cisterns, no additional bones had come to light.

A few more discolored beads from Grace’s necklace were the only new finds of any significance. Without the testimony of the unknown dentist, the string of fake pearls would, in the view of the Westchester D.A., constitute a key piece of evidence when the Grand Jury met on Thursday.

Another, of course, would be the child’s skeleton itself.

On Tuesday afternoon, the pieces of that skeleton—along with the other bones recovered from the premises of the Wisteria “murder lodge”—were in the laboratory of Dr. Dudley J. Morton, Associate Professor of Anatomy at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University.

Earlier in the day, Captain McQuillan had removed the boxes of bones from his office closet and driven them down to Yonkers Police Headquarters. There, he was joined by Medical Examiner Squire, who transferred the evidence to a large, black leather satchel, making sure to keep the child’s skeleton separate from the thirty-odd bones that had been found in the basement and at the bottom of the two wells. McQuillan and Squire then took the satchel of bones to the medical school at 168th Street and Broadway, arriving around noon.

They were met in the lobby by Sergeant Hammill of the Missing Persons Bureau, who was carrying a leather satchel of his own. Inside were the weatherworn skull and other skeletal fragments which Hammill and his colleagues had unearthed on the night of December 13, when Albert Fish had first led them to the spot behind the mossy stone wall where he had left the little girl’s butchered corpse to molder.

The officers delivered the bags to Doctor Morton, who at once began the task of piecing the bones together and comparing them to the skeleton of a twelve-year-old child in the college museum. Two hours later, the examination was over. Judging by their size and texture, Morton concluded that the bones found behind the stone wall constituted the nearly complete skeleton of a child who had not yet reached puberty.

The bones removed from the cellar and cisterns—identified by the Daily Mirror as “hacked sections of human anatomy”—were, in fact, the remains of an indeterminate number of four-footed animals, including at least one dog, a pig, and a cow.

Though Morton’s findings supported Fish’s claim that Wisteria Cottage was not the “ogre’s lair” portrayed in the tabloids, police remained convinced that Grace Budd was not the only child Fish had slain. Indeed, even as the little girl’s bones lay spread out on the anatomist’s lab table, investigators were checking into the old man’s possible involvement in five more child killings. These were the molestation and murder of four Brooklyn girls ranging in age from five to seven—Barbara Wiles, Sadie Burroughs, Florence McDonnell, and Helen Sterler—plus the 1927 killing of eleven-year-old Yetta Abramowitz of the Bronx, who had been lured to a tenement rooftop by an elderly stranger, where she was raped, strangled, and savaged with a knife.

For the murder of the six-year-old Sterler girl, a man named Lloyd Price—described in the papers as a “Negro vagrant”—had been arrested, tried, and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Price had recanted his confession, insisting that it had been beaten out of him by his interrogators. His final words before the switch was pulled at Sing Sing were “By the Grace of God, I am innocent.”

Now the police had begun to think that Price might have been telling the truth after all.

Investigators in Brooklyn, meanwhile, were making progress in their efforts to link Fish to the Gaffney disappearance. On Wednesday, December 19, they got the break they were hoping for.

Disabled by a stroke, fifty-seven-year-old Joseph Meehan was retired now, but for many years he had worked as a motorman on the BMT trolley line in Brooklyn. On the evening of February 11, 1927, it was Meehan, along with conductor Anthony Barone, who had been struck by the strange-looking pair huddled in the back of his car—a jittery old man trying to hush an underclothed little boy, who cried continuously for his mother from the moment he was led onto the trolley until the moment he was dragged off into the night.

Only later had Meehan and Barone realized that they had been eyewitnesses to the abduction of little Billy Gaffney.

Like millions of his fellow New Yorkers, Meehan had been transfixed by the unfolding horrors of the Fish story, and on December 18, his eye had been caught by a special feature in that day’s edition of the Mirror. Running along the bottom of page two was a series of close-up photos, five in all, showing the face of the hollow-cheeked “thrill murderer” from various angles. “REMEMBER THIS FACE?” the headline asked.

The text accompanying the pictures urged readers to recall whether they had ever seen Fish “in real life. If so—when—where-—under what circumstances? You may be in a position to aid police in solving a number of mysterious disappearances…. If you can add to what is already known about Fish’s movements, communicate instantly with the City Editor of the Daily Mirror, MUrray Hill 2-1000, or call personally at the Mirror office, No. 235 E. 45th Street.”

Studying the photos, Meehan realized with a shock that he did, in fact, remember that face. It belonged to the wizened old man he had observed that long-ago night on his trolley car. Meehan waited until the next morning, Wednesday the 19th, before taking action. Then he made his way to the nearest telephone and dialed the number of the Daily Mirror.

Later that day, Lieutenant Elmer Joseph, who had been in charge of the Gaffney investigation seven years before (when he was still a sergeant), arrived at Meehan’s apartment. After questioning the former motorman for over an hour, Joseph was convinced that the case had finally been cracked. Arrangements were made to transport the semi-invalid Meehan to the Tombs the following day. In the meantime, several police officers set about tracking down Anthony Barone, whose testimony at the time of the Gaffney disappearance had been, along with Meehan’s, the only solid lead in the case.

Shortly before noon on Thursday, December 20, Lieutenant Joseph, along with Detectives James Dwyer and Jeremiah Murphy of the Fifth Avenue police station in Brooklyn, picked up Meehan at his apartment and drove him to the Tombs, where he was scheduled to view Fish in a lineup. Barone, who had been located and interviewed at his home the previous evening, arrived at the prison shortly afterward.

The two former co-workers were ushered into the lineup room. Under the harsh glare of the klieg lights, nine men—five of them aged and gray, the rest somewhat younger—shuffled onto the platform. Barone and Meehan studied them carefully. Though Barone thought he recognized Fish, he couldn’t positively identify him as the man he had seen with the little boy on his streetcar seven years before. But Meehan had no doubt. He pointed his cane at Fish and exclaimed, “That’s the man!”

“Are you sure?” asked Lieutenant Joseph.

Meehan nodded emphatically. “I’m positive. I would remember him anywhere. He looks the same now as he did then. The only difference is that he was wearing an overcoat when I saw him with the boy.”

Within twenty-four hours, the story would be carried in every newspaper in the city. The “boogey man” who had spirited four-year-old Billy Gaffney away from his Brooklyn tenement seven years earlier, setting off one of the most intensive manhunts in New York City history, had been identified as Albert Fish.

Even as Meehan was making the identification, the Westchester Grand Jury was in the process of indicting Fish for the murder of Grace Budd.

The proceedings lasted less than two hours. During that time, the jurors heard the testimony of thirteen witnesses, including Albert, Delia and Edward Budd, Captains Stein and McQuillan, Detective King, Sergeant Hammill, several Greenburgh police officers, and Medical Examiner Squire. Dr. Morton’s findings were offered as evidence, along with Grace’s dental chart and the small, sad pile of imitation pearls, which Mrs. Budd identified as the remains of her daughter’s favorite necklace. Both Mrs. Budd and her husband broke down at the sight of the yellowed, weatherworn beads.

The jurors needed little time to complete their deliberations. Shortly after two P.M., they returned an indictment accusing Albert H. Fish of murder in the first degree for the slaying, “with malice aforethought,” of Grace Budd.

The shock of Meehan’s bombshell was still reverberating when the Fish investigation took another dramatic turn, the second in as many days.

Early Friday morning, Fish—dressed in the same, shabby, mismatching suit he had worn when he was captured—was arraigned in Homicide Court before Magistrate Benjamin E. Greenspan. The proceedings were over quickly. Surrounded by detectives, Fish stood silently, eyes downcast, while Frederick W. Ruscoe, Chief Deputy Sheriff of Westchester County, stepped forward and handed Magistrate Greenspan a bench warrant. After commending Detective King for his outstanding work on the case, Magistrate Greenspan formally surrendered the prisoner to the Westchester authorities.

Fish was to be transferred to the county jail in Eastview to await trial for the Budd murder. Instead of taking him directly to the car that would drive him up to Westchester, however, detectives led him into the courthouse detention pen. Then, they brought in a man who walked straight over to Fish, took a long look at his gaunt, stubbled face and declared without hesitation, “That’s him.”

This latest accuser was Hans Kiel. Ten years earlier he had owned a farm in Port Richmond, Staten Island. In February, 1924, Kiel’s daughter Beatrice, then eight years old, had been approached by a gray-moustached stranger, who offered her a nickel if she would accompany him into the woods and show him where to find “wild rhubarb.” Kiel’s wife, Alice, had appeared at that moment, and the old man had hurried away. That night, however, Kiel had discovered the grizzled stranger sleeping in his barn. He had roused him awake and driven him off his property.

Three days later, eight-year-old Francis McDonnell was brutally assaulted and strangled to death in the woods adjoining Kiel’s property by a gray-moustached stranger who precisely matched the description of the vagrant Kiel had chased from his barn. Kiel had never forgotten the face of the gray-moustached stranger. And so he had gone straight to the police when he’d seen it again just a few days before, looking out at him from the pages of his Sunday newspaper.

Following Kiel’s identification. Fish was questioned for two hours by Assistant District Attorney Edward T. Kelly of Richmond County. At first, Fish denied having ever laid eyes on Kiel. Finally, he admitted that he had, in fact, been doing a painting job on Staten Island at the time of the McDonnell boy’s murder and vaguely recalled seeing Kiel a few times on the ferry. But he firmly maintained that he was innocent of Francis McDonnell’s murder.

The authorities remained as firmly convinced that he was lying. Kelly announced that Kiel’s wife and daughter would be driven to Eastview to view Fish sometime during the next week. If they, too, identified him as the man lurking on their property a few days before the McDonnell crime, Kelly would seek an indictment against Fish for murder.

Mrs. McDonnell’s ten-year-old prayer appeared to have been answered. It looked as though the “Gray Man” had been found at last.

During the next week, Fish was interrogated several times in his second-tier cell in Eastview. Just a few hours after his arrival, he was visited by the two psychiatrists hired by the DA’s office—Doctors Vavasour and Lambert—who examined him for slightly more than three hours.

Several Connecticut detectives traveled to the jail to question Fish again about the decapitated child found in Darien. And Harold King, the Nassau County police inspector investigating the 1932 murder of fifteen-year-old Mary O’Connor, paid several calls.

Inspector King had learned about Fish’s obscenity arrest in the summer of 1931, when the old man was employed as a dishwasher in the Steeplechase Hotel in Far Rockaway. As it happened, the O’Connors lived only a short distance from the Steeplechase, and Mary—who had befriended one of the guests, a teenage girl on vacation with her parents—was known to have visited the hotel a number of times during that summer.

King had also discovered that, early in 1932, at around the time of the O’Connor girl’s murder, Fish had been painting a house in Massapequa, less than half a mile from the lonely stretch of woods where the girl’s bludgeoned body had been dumped.

Fish, however, steadfastly continued to deny any knowledge of either the Connecticut or Long Island crime.

While police on Staten Island searched for other eyewitnesses who could link Fish to little Francis McDonnell, a Brooklyn man named Benjamin Eiseman came forward with a story that investigators found extremely interesting, since it placed Fish on Staten Island at the approximate time of the McDonnell murder. Eiseman’s experience also bore striking parallels to some of the particulars of the Budd case.