Free Deranged by Harold Schechter

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 Joseph Slowey 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 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