Free Deranged by Harold Schechter Page B

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. Sent by 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 police had received even before their search had entered its second week. Thanks in part to a public “Notice to Telegraphers”—a printed plea for information run by the editors of the New York Daily News in the June 6th edition of the paper—investigators had been able to trace the source of Howard’s telegram to the Western Union office at Third Avenue and 103rd Street in Manhattan.
    An intensive search of the surrounding neighborhood quickly turned up a second important clue. Armed with the small enamel pail that had held the pound of pot cheese Howard had brought to the Budds, supposedly from his farm, Detectives Jerry Maher, Charles Reilly, and John McGee managed to locate the man who had sold it to Howard—the pushcart peddler Reuben Rosoff, who identified the handwritten price inscribed on its underside (“40¢”) as his own printing.
    The address of the telegraph office along with the location of Rosoff’s pushcart—100th Street and Second Avenue—strongly suggested that the elusive Frank Howard was, if not a resident, certainly a habitué of East Harlem. Detectives and patrolmen of the East 104th Street Station were put on alert and, along with Dribben’s men, they organized a dragnet of the area, checking rooming houses, restaurants, barber shops, newsstands, and any other place that Howard might be known.
    In the meantime, Captain John Ayres of the Missing Persons Bureau had obtained a copy