Free The Devil's Dozen by Katherine Ramsland Page B

mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick—bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.”
    The letter was unsigned. Why this person would send it so suddenly was a mystery, but that he knew small details confirmed his probable role in the crime. The handwriting was identical to that on the Western Union form that King had saved from the 1928 telegram Frank Howard had sent the Budds to announce his Sunday visit.
    King looked over the stationery and the envelope in which the letter had arrived. He noticed an emblem over an address that had been obscured with scribbling. It was hexagonal in shape and bore the letters NYPCBA—the New York Private Chauffeurs’ Benevolent Association, located in New York City at 627 Lexington Avenue. He called the organization’s president, Arthur Ennis, and asked for an emergency meeting of the members. Then he assigned other detectives to start looking at their handwriting. None matched Frank Howard’s. King asked the members whether someone might have taken any of the organization’s stationery.
    A young man named Lee Sicowski, who worked there part-time as a janitor, admitted to taking a few sheets and envelopes, although he hadn’t used them. He gave King the address of his rooming house, but when King investigated, he was crushed to find no one on the register whose handwriting matched Howard’s. He questioned Sicowski again, pressuring him, and then the janitor remembered that he had stayed briefly at another rooming house, at 200 East Fifty-second Street. He recalled that he had left four envelopes with the NYPCBA insignia on a shelf over his bed there, in room 7.
    King made another trip, once again filled with hope. He spoke to the landlady, Mrs. Frieda Schneider, asking about Frank Howard, but she did not know the name. The man who had taken the room after Sicowski moved out, she said, was Albert H. Fish. In case “Howard” was an alias, King described the man who had come to the Budds’ residence in 1928, and that description resembled Fish: an elderly man who had boarded with the Schneiders for about two months. In fact, Mrs. Schneider said, he had left only days ago, on November 11. King asked to see the register, and using the letter to Mrs. Budd, he compared the handwriting to Fish’s signature. He thought it was a match.
    Detective King believed he might be near the end of his long road. The best suspect he’d ever had was nearly within his grasp, as long as he could trace where the man had gone. Although the landlady had no forwarding address, she told King that Fish’s son sent him regular checks from Georgia and he had mentioned to her that one more would be coming. King alerted postal inspectors to be watching for it and set up round-the-clock surveillance at the boardinghouse. He then tracked down the address Fish had given in the letter he had written to Delia, 409 East 100th Street, and learned that an elderly man had boarded there temporarily in the summer of 1928.
    Fish had also used one of the envelopes to write to a man at the Holland Hotel, but no one by that name lived there, so the letter was returned to the chauffeurs’ organization. They turned it