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

harmed him in any way. As for his involvement in the Budd case, Slowey was so clearly ignorant of the crime that—though police would have liked nothing better than to have a suspect in custody—they quickly discounted him as a possibility.
    The charge against Slowey was reduced to disorderly conduct. Two days later, he appeared before Magistrate Stern of the Jefferson Market Court, who dismissed the charge against him and ordered his immediate release.
    Juliette Smith, Slowey’s accuser, was not the only mother in the Budd’s neighborhood whose fears had been raised to a high pitch by Grace’s disappearance. Canvassing the area in the days immediately following the kidnapping, the police heard the same story again and again. According to various women, who swore that they had observed the individual in question with their own eyes, an elderly man with gray hair and a neatly trimmed moustache had been “loitering around” the neighborhood for several weeks, casting suspicious looks at their children as though sizing up prospects.
    The police were well aware that “sightings” like this often occurred in the aftermath of serious crimes. But they couldn’t afford to dismiss these reports as just the products of overheated imaginations. It was likely that the old man spotted in the neighborhood was nothing more than an innocent passerby—assuming that he existed at all. But slim as it was, there was always a chance that the women were right. If they were, the police had to assume that the Budd crime had been the work of a coolly premeditating individual—very possibly a professional kidnapper.
    The possibility that the Budd girl had been the victim of a carefully planned and executed abduction was given added credibility by the testimony of several residents of her block, the last of her acquaintances to see her on the day she disappeared.
    According to Loretta Adaboy, Jimmy Kenny, George Barrins, and Phillip Gully—the neighborhood children who had shouted taunts at Gracie when she passed them on Sunday in the company of her grizzled escort—a second man was involved in the crime.
    All four of these small witnesses told police that, when the couple reached the corner, the girl had been ushered into a waiting automobile—a mud-spattered blue sedan with a yellow Pennsylvania license plate—which then sped away from the curb and down Ninth Avenue, a young straw-hatted man behind the wheel. Another eyewitness, a teenager named Margaret Day, who had been working at a candy store on the corner of Ninth Avenue at the time Gracie left home, corroborated the children’s account.
    By the morning of Wednesday, June 6, investigators had learned of the existence of a second purported accomplice, this one a woman.
    A Brooklyn mother, Mrs. Harold DeMille of 981 East Fifteenth Street, told police that at around 6:30 Sunday evening she had gone inside her house to fix supper, leaving her four-year-old son, Desmond, to pedal his tricycle up and down the block. No sooner had she left than a mysterious couple—an elderly fellow in a dark business suit and a handsomely dressed woman—strolled up to little Desmond and, after speaking to him briefly, helped him off his tricycle and led him up the street. A second man, much younger than the first, followed close behind, the tricycle in tow.
    Mrs. DeMille had just begun her dinner preparations when a neighbor—a woman who lived across the street and had been relaxing on her front stoop when the boy was taken away—rushed into the kitchen with the news. Dashing onto the street, Mrs. DeMille ran up the block in the direction indicated by her neighbor, finally catching up with the foursome on 13th Street and Avenue U. Snatching little Desmond up into her arms, she began screaming at the old man—the obvious leader of the band—who calmly protested that he and his friends had only meant to buy the child a new bell for his tricycle.
    Where, shouted the agitated mother, did they expect