by Deborah Blum
One
He listened for the angel. It was out there, he knew. He knew the brush of its wings, its warm whisper. He could almost see the air change, that seep of blood red as it floated away. A man could learn to like that color.
The ferry docked in Port Richmond on Staten Island, and the Gray Man stepped out into the bustle of fishing boats and factory workers. He walked through the waterfront business district, down the wide avenues framed by 19th-century mansions. It was all wrong here: The sun shone too brightly, the sky gleamed like clear blue glass. So he kept going. He wanted the shadows for his work.
He was hunting out of his usual habitat that afternoon of July 14, 1924, away from the Manhattan alleys and tenements he knew so well. He kept walking, looking for the right place. A mile went by, then a few more, until he found himself amid a clutter of working-class wood-frame homes, shaded against the sunlight by leafy plane trees.
Walking down the long stretch of Decker Avenue, the Gray Man hesitated in front of a house where a little boy played on the front porch in view of his mother, who saw the stranger pause. Anna McDonnell was a policeman’s wife, wary of strangers. But the man in his shabby jacket looked harmless enough, smiling slightly. He tipped his hat and walked on.
There was a moment, as he walked away, when she felt a shock of nerves. His hands were squeezing open and shut as he walked, she would recount later, and he seemed to be exchanging bitter words with the summer air. She hesitated. But the man moved on, and she turned away and went into the house.
She didn’t see the stranger return. By now her 8-year-old son Francis had joined a ball game down the street, and the stranger walked over to the boys, calling out a question. Francis, always friendly, came over to answer. A neighbor later saw the little boy walking toward a nearby wooded lot, trailed by a grizzled older man—just a drifter, perhaps, looking for a place where he could spend the night.
Frances had not come home by suppertime, and his father, Arthur, still wearing his blue patrolman’s uniform, went out to look for him. But the boy couldn’t be found. McDonnell called his colleagues at the police station, alerting them to his missing child. By morning a panicked search had commenced, with police, neighbors, local businessmen, even Boy Scouts fanning out across Staten Island looking for the boy.
A trio of Boy Scouts, tramping through the wooded lot near where the boy had last been seen, made the discovery. Francis McDonnell’s body lay under a pile of branches and leaves. The child had been stripped below the waist, beaten, and finally strangled with his suspenders.
The hunt for Francis’s killer continued for weeks, then months. It was Anna McDonnell, meeting with reporters, who gave him his name. “Help us catch the monster who murdered our little boy,” she begged. “Help us find the gray man.”
But the Gray Man knew they wouldn’t find him. He would vanish as he always did, a smudge in the air, blown away on the wind.
Two
“If I catch the killer,” Arthur McDonnell promised after joining the search, “I’ll not harm a hair on his head.” The detectives in charge of the case might have wondered whether an angry, grieving father was the best choice for the search team, but at the moment they had bigger problems. “It looks like a long job because of the absence of clues,” Captain Ernest Van Wagner, chief of the New York Police Department detective bureau on Staten Island, told The New York Times. “It is one of the most difficult cases in my experience of police work.”
The police did what they could. They followed up on letters and phone calls from local residents, searched cellars and wood sheds, interrogated the vagrants known to drift through town parks. Van Wagner sent his men to investigate the nearby city poor houses, hoping that the killer had seeped out from somewhere in those collections of human flotsam and jetsam.
Such a manhunt might have caught a more conventional killer, one with some connection to his victim, or to Staten Island. But the Gray Man was something different altogether. He had learned not to repeat himself, not to linger in one place. His methods, his motives, and the sheer horror of his crimes would reveal to New Yorkers how little they knew not just of murder but of the human mind.
In 1924, no standard term existed to describe those who killed with no apparent motive except perhaps the pleasure of the act. Newspaper journalists had been trying out the description thrill killer. Police and students of the developing field of criminology preferred a less sensational description, but one that also recognized the essential coldness of such murderers. The term that was beginning to take shape in criminal justice circles was stranger killers.
Stranger killers operated so far out of the normal scope of murderous behavior that they often eluded police detection for years; this was an era, after all, in which even major urban police departments like New York’s lacked tools as basic as a centralized fingerprint database. Well-known examples included Chicago’s H. H. Holmes, executed after murdering and dismembering more than 27 people during the 1890s, and Belle Gunness, who vanished in 1908 after killing some 40 people and reputedly feeding pieces of their remains to the hogs on her Indiana farm. For many, the official terminology still failed to capture the basic horror of their stories. These were killers known to the public as monsters out of mythology: Holmes, the Arch-Fiend; Gunness, the Female Bluebeard; Peter Kürten, the Vampire of Düsseldorf, who slaughtered more than 20 people in the 1920s with weapons ranging from scissors to axes and then drank their blood.
Multiple murderers were nothing new, of course. The legend of Bluebeard, the mythical multiple wife killer, was supposedly inspired by the deeds of a French nobleman, Gilles de Rais, who was hanged in 1440 after being convicted of luring more than 100 young boys to their deaths in the well-protected privacy of his estates. But the formal study of the criminal mind was new, dating back only to late–19th century Europe. (In the United States, the first professional periodical on the subject, The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, started publication in 1910.) The new criminologists warned that modern urban life—with its impersonal factories, impoverished ghettos, and isolated existences—created new opportunities for stranger killers. They urged more preventive measures, from increased police patrols to the treatment of society’s “moral degenerates.” And they worked to assemble a rough portrait of the killers who were never satisfied with just one victim.
The murderers were mostly white males—women like Gunness were a rare exception—and underachievers. They tended to do poorly in school and struggled to hold jobs. They often grew up in troubled homes, the children of alcoholics, of vicious mothers or abusive fathers. Mental illness coiled through their family histories, in the form of brothers, uncles, or parents who’d been locked away in lunatic asylums.
Some of them, like Holmes, seemed chilled to the core. Others blazed with hate, in the way of Carl Panzram. Gang-raped as a child, shuttled from home to institution, the Minnesota-born Panzram described his life plan in six words: “steal, lie, hate, burn, and kill.” He proudly admitted to 21 murders in the 1920s, a litany of children and adults who had annoyed him. As he awaited execution in 1930, Panzram mocked his own hangman: “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard. I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.”
But Panzram, who simply killed when the mood took him, was unusual. Most stranger killers obsessed over their own special kind of victim—women or men, boys or girls—with a peculiar intensity. The Gray Man dreamed of his dead. And they were always, always children.
Three
On good days, he could even see the angels. He could see Christ sometimes, too, floating nearby in the kitchen, emerging from a closet, a shimmer of gold and light. He could hear the holy voices whispering in empty rooms, muttering their incantations of blood and children, children and blood.
When the building residents went looking for the boys, they found that a trapdoor to the roof, usually blocked shut, had been left open. Billy Beaton stood alone by the opening. He and his friend had been up on the roof, he told the searchers, when “the boogeyman” took Billy Gaffney away.
“All children talk about the boogeyman,” the detective in charge of the case shrugged. But eventually the child offered a description of this phantom. It was an old man with a gray mustache. A trolley car conductor on the line that stopped two blocks from the Gaffneys’ apartment remembered an older man and a little boy boarding his car that evening. The boy was sobbing, in spite of the man’s attempts to hush him. That was what the conductor remembered: the crying child. The man himself was nothing special. Just a mustached stranger faded to gray, he said, wrapped in an old coat.
The man had asked about ferries to Staten Island, the conductor said. But when he got off the car, he was “half dragging, half carrying” the little boy down Sackett Street, away from the pier. The police searched Staten Island anyway, and parts of New Jersey. They searched through the dump sites, apartments, factories, and churches of western Brooklyn, swept ash piles, dug up cellars, even dragged the nearby Gowanus Canal.
Three weeks after the disappearance, the body of a small boy turned up in a dump in Palmer, Massachusetts, stuffed in a wine cask. Billy’s father, Edmund, went with dread to the morgue to take a look. But it was another murdered child, not his own. And although no one but the Gray Man knew it at the time, there was a good reason that the searchers would never find a trace of the Gaffney child. His killer had decided that leaving a whole body behind was a waste of good flesh.
Four
The girl was moving toward the house, blossoms spilling over her small hands. She was almost translucent in the summer light, and he thought for a moment that he could hear the angel—wait, wait—calling him back. But no. He was alone in the abandoned house.
It was a little more than 15 months after Billy Gaffney’s disappearance that Eddie Budd placed his one-line ad in the Situations Wanted section of the New York World. It ran in the May 27 Sunday edition and read: “Young man, 18, wishes position in country.” If the spring of 1928 had been sweltering on Manhattan’s sidewalks, it was oven-hot in the Budd family’s apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood, with two parents and five children crammed into its small rooms. Eddie was hoping for a summer job outside the city.
The next afternoon, a slightly built older man knocked on the Budds’ front door. He introduced himself as Frank Howard, the owner of a small Long Island farm. He was looking to replace a hired man who had recently quit, he said. He wanted someone young and strong. “I ain’t afraid of hard work,” Eddie told him. Howard agreed to hire the Budd boy and one of his friends.
Six days later, on a late Sunday morning, Howard returned bearing gifts, a pail of crumbly pot cheese and a basket of strawberries. He promised to pick Eddie and his friend up for work the next day, then handed them a couple dollars to go see a movie. Howard himself stayed for lunch, playing with the younger children. By early afternoon, the Budds were thoroughly charmed.
The family had a pretty 10-year-old daughter named Grace, thin and tenement pale, with big dark eyes and dark hair. Would she like a treat? Howard asked. He was going uptown to a niece’s birthday party. He’d be happy to take her to share in the fun. He promised to bring her back by nightfall—with her parents’ permission, of course.
Albert and Delia Budd would turn that moment over and over. The visitor’s gentle invitation, the mother’s hesitation, the father’s indulgent response: let her go, poor kid, she doesn’t see many good times. Their daughter walking down the sidewalk in her Sunday best with the elderly stranger in a dark suit, a felt hat on his silvery head.
In the initial furor over Grace Budd’s disappearance, the police assigned a posse of detectives to the case. Months, then years passed without progress, and in time almost all of them abandoned the search. The only one who did not was a detective named William F. King.
King was a tall, ruggedly built man with a fondness for tailored suits. He was middle-aged, and his dark hair was receding, so he kept it short and slicked back. He had first joined the NYPD in 1907 after working as a locomotive fireman. He’d left to fight in the Great War and returned afterward to serve in the NYPD’s Bureau of Missing Persons. At the time of Grace’s disappearance, he was a detective lieutenant in the bureau. It wasn’t a job that would make him rich—he was paid $3,200 a year—but it suited him. He had earned a reputation on the force for bullheaded determination. And he was determined not to give up on Grace.
The Budds had received dozens of letters claiming knowledge of Grace’s whereabouts. King went through them methodically, taking time out from his other assignments to chase down leads. Twice he thought he’d found the kidnapper only to see the case fall apart. One suspect was a nearby building superintendent who, it turned it out, had been set up by a vengeful estranged wife. The other was a known confidence man who liked to prey on young girls and had recently used the last name Howard for his schemes; King tracked him down in Florida, only to find that the man had an airtight alibi.
After several years and more than 40,000 miles of wild goose chases, King returned to the theory that his suspect was still in town. If that were true, maybe the answer was to bait him into the open. He persuaded some of the city’s newspaper columnists to occasionally drop hints, short items that reminded readers of the case. Even columnist Walter Winchell, of William Randolph Hearst’s powerful New York Daily Mirror, indulged King’s obsession from time to time.
“I checked on the Grace Budd mystery,” Winchell wrote in his November 2, 1934 column, “And it is safe to tell you that the Dep’t. of Missing Persons will break the case, or they expect to, in four weeks. They are holding a ‘cokie’”—a cocaine addict—“now at Randall’s Island, who is said to know most about the crime. Grace is supposed to have been done away with in lime, but another legend is that her skeleton is buried in a local spot. More anon.”
Winchell had made the entire story up, not that he ever admitted it. After all, in the weeks that followed, he would get credit for having exceptional police sources—and possibly clairvoyant talents. Because just nine days later, Grace Budd’s mother received a letter in the mail.
Five
The letter began cryptically with the story of a traveler—an alleged friend of the letter’s author—who had sailed from San Francisco to Hong Kong in 1894 as a deckhand aboard a steamer. Once ashore, the sailor had gotten drunk and returned late to the harbor to find his ship gone and himself stranded in Hong Kong, a city then in the depths of a famine. Conditions were so dire, the author wrote, that people had taken to eating the meat of young children—and the stranded traveler “staid there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh.”
Upon his return to New York, the letter continued, the sailor kidnapped two boys—a 7-year-old and an 11-year-old—and, after keeping them tied up in his closet for a time, killed and ate them. “He told me so often how good Human flesh was,” the writer added, and “I made up my mind to taste it.”
On Sunday June the 3, 1928, I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my 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.
She’d struggled with him, the killer wrote; she’d fought him until he choked her to death. And then, he carefully explained to her mother, he’d butchered the body. He’d taken the best pieces away with him, left the bits and bones behind. “How sweet and tender” she was, he wrote. It had taken him nine days to eat her.
Delia Budd couldn’t read well, and she handed the letter to Eddie. As he read it, the color washed out of his face. He ran for the police station to find Detective King.
King had grown accustomed to crackpot letters in the six years since Grace had disappeared, but this one had the feel of actual knowledge. King had one sample of the kidnapper’s handwriting, a photostat of a note that “Frank Howard” had sent to the Budds regarding the job for Eddie. He pulled it out of the file. The handwriting was identical.
The sender had left the letter unsigned, but he had tucked it into an envelope with a return address imprinted in the corner. Though it was half scratched out with a pen, King could still discern a hexagonal design and the initials NYPCBA: the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association.
At the association headquarters, the staff to a man denied any knowledge of the letter. The detective demanded a meeting of everyone who worked in the building, anyone who might have taken a few pieces of stationary. Finally, a janitor reluctantly confessed to taking some envelopes for his personal use. He’d kept them on the wall shelf above his bed in the old rooming house where he stayed.
King went to the rooming house, a tidy brownstone on East 52nd Street. The janitor’s former room was empty, the landlady said; the tenant who had taken it after the janitor moved out had packed up and gone just a few days earlier without leaving a forwarding address. But he was waiting for a check to arrive by mail, she went on, and she expected him to return at some point to collect it. King had been tracking his quarry for six years already; he was prepared to wait as long as it took for him to return.