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

tofind an open store on Sunday evening? The old man and his companions exchanged an anxious look; then, without another word, they hurried away. Mrs. DeMille, winded and shaken, conducted Desmond back home, scolding him for having given her such a scare and admonishing him to be more careful of strangers.
    It wasn’t until Tuesday, when the story of the Budd girl’s disappearance hit the newsstands, that Mrs. DeMille suspected she had rescued her son from the clutches of the very criminal who had snatched little Grace. Contacting the police at once, she provided them with a description of the old man that, as the
Daily News
put it, “tallied exactly” with that of Frank Howard.
    The police, who had been operating under the assumption that they were hunting for a single kidnapper, a “lone hand” in Detective Dribben’s words, were suddenly faced with a new and even more unsettling possibility—that somewhere, loose in the city, was a ruthless band of professional child-snatchers, consisting of at least three individuals and headed by a cunning old man, who had masterminded and carried out the abduction of little Grace Budd.
    The Budd kidnapping was big news and, predictably, the plight of the family drew the poisonous attention of the usual collection of cranks. Crude handwritten messages—ranging from lunatic ramblings to the crudest of taunts—came pouring in through the mail. Typical of this warped correspondence was a postcard that arrived at the Budds’ apartment on Wednesday morning, less than twenty-four hours after the story broke, and that seemed almost identical to one of the many crazed communications that had been sent, a year earlier, to the grief-racked parents of Billy Gaffney: “My dear friends. All little girl is to cellar and into water.”
    Before long, the Budds were receiving dozens of crank notes a day, though few of them were more vicious than the one that read, “My Dear Mr. and Mrs. Budd. Your child is going to a funeral. I still got her. HOWARD”
    Of all the letters mailed to the Budds, one, at least, had been written out of genuinely charitable impulses. Sentby a woman named Martha Taggart, who had been appalled to read of the horror that had descended on the Budd family as a result of Edward Jr.’s innocent classified ad, the note contained a small but concrete form of consolation—an offer of a summer job for young Edward on her husband’s farm in the Bronx. But Edward’s summer, like that of his family and a sizable contingent of New York City police detectives, would be occupied with another, far more urgent matter—the search for his missing sister.
    On Thursday morning, June 7, one thousand circulars—containing detailed descriptions of Grace Budd and Frank Howard, along with a black-and-white photo of the missing girl in a plaid dress, puffy bonnet, and gray cloth coat—were mailed to police departments throughout the United States and Canada. By the middle of the following week, several thousand more had been printed up and posted around New York City—in subway stations and ferry terminals, bank lobbies and barber shops, post offices, grocery windows, and corner luncheonettes.
    The immediate result of this massive publicity effort was a rash of false sightings. Dribben’s office was flooded with reports—that Howard and his captive had been spotted in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, Monmouth, New Jersey, Mineola, Long Island, Niagara Falls, New York, and dozens of other locales. In the weeks following the Grace Budd kidnapping, any gray-haired old man out for a stroll with his granddaughter was in danger of being identified as a child-snatcher. Each of these stories was scrupulously checked out by one of the two dozen detectives that, by this point, had been assigned to the case (some from the West 20th Street Precinct, others from the Bureau of Missing Persons). Ultimately, each story turned out to be completely worthless.
    There was, however, one solid lead which the