Free Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer by Harold Schechter

the moment he arrived—an act which Albert Budd had noted with only casual curiosity at the time but whose full, ominous import had suddenly become all too clear.
    The news broke on Tuesday, June 5—“ HUNT MAN AND CHILD HE TOOK TO ‘PARTY ,’” read the headline in
The New York Times
. During the next few weeks, the public must have experienced a disconcerting sense of déjà vu, since the story was, in so many respects, a grim replay of the Gaffney abduction, which had dominated the news the year before. The Budd case contained all the ingredients of the earlier tragedy—the clues that led nowhere but to blind alleys and dead ends, the suspects hauled in and promptly released, the well-meaning tipsters and anonymous cranks, the kidnap-hysteria that swept through the boroughs, the cheap melodrama of the tabloid press (“Follow the search for little Grace Budd and her kidnapper in tomorrow’s DAILY NEWS!”).
    There were, however, a few elements peculiar to the Budd case that, right from the start, made it even more gripping—and sensational—than the snatching of little Billy Gaffney: a fiend in the guise of a benevolent old man; a trusting mother and father beguiled by a smoothtalking tempter; and, most riveting of all, a lovely little girl in a communion dress, a victim whose very name seemed emblematic of her unprotected innocence and who—believing she was being taken to a birthday party—was lured to a nameless fate.
    Assisted by Gracie’s older brothers, officers from the West 20th Street precinct conducted an exhaustive search of the Budds’ Chelsea neighborhood—cellars and rooftops, alleyways and empty lots, lodging houses, movie theaters, subway stations, and garages. But no trace of the girl could be found.
    At the same time, several detectives traveled out to Farmingdale, Long Island, in an attempt to locate the truck farm supposedly owned by Grace’s abductor. But that effort, too, proved fruitless.
    A more promising lead turned up in another town called Farmingdale, this one located in New Jersey. Because Howard had telegrammed that he had “been over in New Jersey” on Saturday, Lieutenant Dribben—determined to pursue every possibility—dispatched Detective Jerry Maher to the little town across the Hudson River. Sure enough, Maher discovered that, some fifteen years earlier, a man named Frank Howard, who answered in a general way to the description of Grace Budd’s abductor, had owned a small chicken farm in the town. Maher was also able to obtain the name of one of Howard’s relatives, a woman named Low, who had recently moved to Weehawken.
    In Weehawken, Maher quickly located the woman—Mrs. Birdsall Low of 508 Park Avenue—who confirmed that she was the niece of a farmer named Frank Howard. Her uncle, Mrs. Low explained, had lived in Farmingdale until 1913, at which point he had sold his farm and moved his family to Chicago.
    Maher was heartened, but his hopes were exceptionally short-lived, nipped by Mrs. Low’s next piece of intelligence. Her uncle was clearly a most promising suspect—a farmer named Frank Howard who had lived in the town of Farmingdale and whose appearance conformed in important ways to the physical characteristics of Grace Budd’s kidnapper. There was only one problem. As Mrs. Low informed Maher—and as a quick phone check with the Chicago police confirmed—her uncle had died ten years before.
    On the evening of Tuesday, June 5, police at the West 20th Street precinct received a frantic call from one of the Budds’ neighbors, a woman named Juliette Smith, who reported that an elderly man had just attempted to lure her ten-year-old son, Arthur, into a tenement hallway. Within a short time, several officers arrived on the scene and quickly arrested fifty-nine-year-old JosephSlowey of 86 Eighth Avenue on a charge of impairing the morals of a minor.
    Interrogated at the stationhouse, Slowey admitted that he had approached the boy, though he denied having