Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer

by Harold Schechter

  Even so, in July, 1924, New Yorkers were less wary of certain perils than they soon would be. Clearly, George Stern couldn’t imagine that, at the height of a sun-baked afternoon, on a lazy summer day, an eight-year-old boy could enter the woods that served as the neighborhood park and never come out alive.

  When Francis failed to return home by suppertime, his parents became concerned. It was only then that Albert told them about the gray-haired old man who had called Francis away from their game. Immediately, Arthur McDonnell, still dressed in his police uniform, went out to scour the neighborhood. Unable to locate his son, he telephoned his colleagues at police headquarters. By the next morning, an alarm had gone out and a massive search was underway throughout Staten Island. Besides friends, neighbors, and police, a large volunteer force of Boy Scouts was involved in the hunt.

  In the end, it was a trio of Scouts—Henry Laszarno, Thomas Passone, and Henry Wood—who found the missing boy. The three were passing through a clump of trees on the Charlton property when Wood, who was walking in front of his friends, literally stumbled upon the body.

  It had been hastily concealed under a pile of branches and leaves. The clothes below Francis’s waist—stockings and shoes, underpants, khaki knickerbockers—had been violently ripped from his body. He had been, as the newspapers would put it, “atrociously assaulted,” then strangled with his suspenders, which were twisted so tightly around his neck that they seemed embedded in the flesh.

  Within an hour of the discovery of the corpse, more than fifty police officers were on the scene, including Captain Ernest Van Wagner, Chief of Detectives on Staten Island; Deputy Chief Inspector Cornelius Calahan; and Captain Arthur Carey, head of the Homicide Bureau. Assistant Medical Examiner of Richmond County Dr. George Mord showed up shortly thereafter but was prevented from touching the victim’s savagely mauled corpse until police photographers and fingerprint experts arrived from Manhattan. Much to Dr. Mord’s dismay, it took nearly four hours for the Manhattan specialists to reach the scene.

  By the next morning, July 16, an additional two hundred and fifty plainclothesmen had been assigned to the case. Arthur McDonnell, attached to a precinct in Manhattan, was officially transferred to Staten Island so that he could participate in the hunt for his son’s murderer. “If I catch the killer,” McDonnell assured reporters, “I’ll turn him right over to Captain Van Wagner. I’ll not harm a hair on his head. I want to see him punished as he deserves, but the law must take its course.” A contingent of police guards was posted in Charlton’s Woods to keep away the morbidly curious, who, as soon as the news of the murder was made public, began arriving in hordes to view the scene of the crime.

  Hysteria swept across the borough. Police stations throughout Richmond were flooded with calls, most of them from young women, eager to report recent encounters with menacing-looking strangers. Typical was the story told by seventeen-year-old Jennie Carlson. According to the girl, she had been walking in Charlton’s Woods the previous Saturday when she happened upon a man who looked to be in his late fifties, “unkempt, with gray hair and a thick growth of beard, about five feet six inches tall, and wearing blue trousers, a soiled white shirt and no coat.” The man was eating something out of both hands, “with his face down and his body crunched over like an animal.” As Jennie hurried past this sinister figure, he looked up and called out to her “in a foreign tongue which sounded like Italian.” Terrified, the girl began to run, whereupon the stranger leapt up and began to chase her through the underbrush. When she reached a clearing not far from her home, however, he stopped, turned around, and melted back into the woods.

  The police paid polite attention to this anecdote, but did not attribute tremendous significance to it, since they had already heard several dozen similar stories in the days since the discovery of the McDonnell boy’s body. Indeed, if these tales were to be believed, there was scarcely a rock, tree, or bush on Staten Island without a murderous, gray-moustached derelict lurking behind it.

  With the opening of the Leopold and Loeb trial still a few days away, the New York City news media had the opportunity to play up its own child-murder. The Daily News informed its readers that Staten Island was aswarm with sexual perverts—“overrun with old men, morons, degenerates of all types, men picked out of the gutters and bread lines of New York City and sent to the city farm colony on the island. At present, there are nearly five hundred men on the poor farm and many of them are known to be degenerates.” According to The New York Times, “the sixty square miles of territory in Staten Island include large areas of uncultivated land, with woods and wild undergrowth, which are believed to be used as hiding places and meeting places by robbers, bootleggers, fugitives from justice, and criminals of various kinds.”

  Indeed, the lurid tales related by two men picked up as suspects in the case—Clyde Patterson and Jacob Gottlieb, orderlies at the Sea View hospital in New Dorp, Staten Island—seemed to confirm this grim picture. According to these “confessed perverts” (as they were characterized by the Daily News), the woods near the McDonnell residence concealed a small hollow known to its habitués as “Rattlesnake Nest,” a place where child molesters gathered to engage in “wild orgies of degeneracy.” This revelation not only made the two hospital employees the prime suspects in the case but also produced a public call for beefed-up police protection on Staten Island. When investigators went to check the place identified by Gottlieb and Patterson as “Rattlesnake Nest,” however, they discovered not a rendezvous for sex fiends but an abandoned real estate shack used by local children as a playhouse. The two men were arraigned on sodomy charges but discounted as suspects in the McDonnell murder.

  The manhunt went on. Scores of men were questioned and at least a dozen were taken into custody. Jacob Herman, an escaped inmate from a New Jersey insane asylum, provided police with a graphic description of the McDonnell boy’s corpse, which he claimed to have chanced upon shortly after his getaway: “Tuesday, I was going through the woods. I stumbled upon the body. I touched it. It felt like putty. I was afraid. I ran.” But investigators soon concluded that Herman’s facts had been gleaned from newspaper stories—several clippings related to the case were found in his coat pocket—and that he had, in fact, been nowhere near Port Richmond at the time of the slaying.

  Other suspects were grilled: a truck driver who had been arrested in Brooklyn for impairing the morals of a minor; a middle-aged man charged with troubling little children in a playground; a male music teacher, accused of taking a young boy into the woods and talking to him about “sex psychology.” But all of these individuals turned out to have solid alibis.

  As their hopes for an early arrest evaporated, the police stepped up their search, canvassing the Port Richmond district door-to-door, questioning construction workers on the streets, stopping milkmen and ice-wagon drivers as they made their daily rounds. Tramps were rounded up from public parks across the city. Several promising suspects—a dishwasher discovered with a rubber ball like little Francis’s in his possession, a paroled laborer who had been convicted of killing a dog in Charlton’s Woods, an epileptic who displayed an “absorbing interest” in the crime—were arrested, interrogated, and, in the end, released for lack of evidence.

  At Francis’s funeral—attended by his parochial school classmates and a throng of curiosity seekers who had made their way to St. Mary’s church from all around the city—detectives mingled with the crowd on the chance that, as Captain Van Wagner explained, the killer might put in an appearance, drawn to the scene by an “irresistible fascination.” But no suspicious-looking strangers showed up. Dressed in his first communion suit, little Francis lay in an open white coffin, the terrible bruises on his face concealed by heavy makeup. Nearby, his stricken mother pillowed her head on her husband’s shoulder and struggled to control her grief.

  The autopsy report on the victim revealed the presence of undigested raisins in his stomach—the bait, the coroner theorized, which had been used to lure the boy into
the woods. Because of the condition of the corpse, the medical examiner also speculated that the murderer couldn’t have been as old as Mrs. McDonnell claimed. Only a man in his prime could have administered such a ferocious beating. Indeed, Dr. Mord suggested, there may well have been more than one killer involved.

  In spite of these pronouncements, however, Anna McDonnell stuck to her original story. She knew exactly what the killer looked like, she insisted. She could see his features plainly, whenever she shut her eyes.

  “He came shuffling down the street,” she told reporters, “mumbling to himself, making queer motions with his hands. I’ll never forgot those hands. I shuddered when I looked at them. I shudder every time I think of them—how they opened and shut, opened and shut, opened and shut. I saw him look toward Francis and the others. I saw his thick gray hair, his drooping gray moustache. Everything about him seemed faded and gray.

  “I saw my neighbor’s two police dogs spring at him, and I saw Philip,” the hired man, call them off. The gray man turned to me and tipped his cap.

  “And then he went away.”

  As she spoke, her husband sat by her side on their living-room sofa, one arm around his wife’s shoulders. At their feet lay Francis’s dog, Pal. “If Pal had only been with him,” said the sorrow-worn father, “Francis would never have been killed. Pal would have chewed that man’s leg off before he would have let him touch the boy.”

  As days passed and the police seemed no closer to a solution, the tabloids became increasingly shrill in their cries for retribution. “The fiend who attacked and killed Francis McDonnell seems to have gotten away,” blared the New York Daily News. “But even if he should be apprehended—even if a confession should be wrung from his lips—there is little likelihood that the grim and merciless punishment that an outraged citizenry would look for could be inflicted by law!” “The chair,” fumed the editor of another city paper, “will be far too good for the perpetrator of this atrocious deed.”

  Not long after these remarks appeared, some of the “outraged citizenry” of Staten Island had a chance to vent their wrath. The victim was a hapless drifter named John Eskowski, who had been squatting in an abandoned shack on the south shore of Staten Island, ten miles from the spot where Francis McDonnell was slain.

  For several weeks, stories had circulated through the area—rumors of a sinister “hermit” who had been accosting local boys. Late one afternoon, a teenager named William Bellach happened upon Eskowski in the woods. Convinced that Eskowski was the child molester, Bellach ran to a nearby gas station and alerted the proprietor, Salvatore Pace, who armed himself with a pistol and followed the boy back to Eskowski’s shack. Pace leveled his weapon at Eskowski and began to lead him from the woods, but the drifter—believing Pace to be a bandit—pulled his own gun from his coat pocket and ducked behind a tree.

  The two men exchanged shots, but neither was hit. Beating a hasty retreat to his gas station, Pace called the police. Within minutes, a troop of mounted officers descended on the woods, followed by a mob of a hundred armed, enraged citizens, convinced that the killer of Francis McDonnell had finally been found.

  Eskowski, who had taken cover behind some rocks, opened fire on his pursuers, who fired back. Hit in the side, Eskowski fell to his knees and, seeing the circle of men approaching, put his pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger. He survived only long enough to reveal that he was a farmer who had abandoned his home several weeks earlier after a bitter quarrel with his wife. Checking his story, the police confirmed that, at the time of the murder, Eskowski had been living in Radnor, Pennsylvania.

  The Eskowski incident made it briefly into the headlines, but for most of the public, the McDonnell case was rapidly receding into the past. The Leopold and Loeb trial was well underway by then, and its irresistible mix of murder, money and courtroom melodrama made it the most popular show in America. The slaying of Francis McDonnell had become a matter of interest only to those most directly concerned with the crime—the police, the residents of Port Richmond, and, of course, the boy’s parents. Just a few weeks after the discovery of her son’s strangled and mutilated body, the heart broken mother made one final appeal to a public that had already begun to regard her tragedy as yesterday’s news.

  “Help us catch the monster who murdered our little boy,” Anna McDonnell implored. “Help us find the gray man.”

  2

  “O come and go with me, no longer delay, Or else, foolish child, I will drag thee away.” “O father! O father! Now, now keep your hold, The Erl-king has seized me—his grip is so cold!”

  JOHANN GOETHE, “The Erl-king”

  There are certain wounds that time never heals. For the parents of Francis McDonnell, the savage murder of their child was an unabating horror, made even more unbearable by the escape of the creature who had committed it. The years went by, but—in spite of the ongoing efforts of the New York City police, who found it hard to swallow the unsolved murder of a fellow officer’s son—the killer was still on the loose. To Anna and Arthur McDonnell, the gray man was as real as the grief that racked their hearts. But only their pain—and a small white coffin buried in the old Calvary cemetery—proved that he had existed at all. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the gray man had vanished, seemingly forever.

  And then, one day, on a mild afternoon in early 1927, he came back.

  It had been an unusually temperate winter, and, by mid-February, people throughout New York State were already detecting the first signs of spring. Pussy willows were budding in Watertown, new grass had begun to sprout in Saratoga Springs, and, even in the northernmost reaches of the state, robins, starlings, and black birds had returned from their winter migrations. In New York City, at a time of the year when children could normally be found playing outside in the snow, the streets were full of lightly clad youngsters, skipping rope, shooting marbles, or clattering down the sidewalks on roller skates.

  On Friday, February 11, the mildness of the weather was matched-by the pleasantness of the local news. The metropolitan pages of The New York Times were full of sunny stories: the early coming of spring; the first, exciting demonstration, held at Manhattan’s Rivoli Theater, of motion pictures with sound; the eightieth birthday of Thomas Edison, America’s greatest inventor, who favored reporters with his “billion-dollar smile” and declared that work remained his greatest pleasure.

  Even the day’s top crime story was strikingly tame. The most sensational event in the city was the police raid on a trio of supposedly immoral Broadway shows, including a drama called “Sex,” whose popularity had as much to do with its title as with the talents of its author and leading lady, Mae West.

  In short, anyone reading the news of that Friday would have assumed that February 11, 1927, was a remarkably uneventful day in the city, a day when nothing very terrible had happened.

  But—though it took a little while for the truth to sink in—something very terrible had.

  It was the speed at which it happened that made the horror so hard to believe at first—that and the fact that the only witness was a child of three.

  The Gaffney family occupied a small, sunless apartment on the second floor of 99 Fifteenth Street, one of several rundown tenements crammed between Third and Fourth Avenues in Brooklyn. Late in the afternoon of Friday, February 11, just around dusk, Billy Gaffney, a slender four-year-old with his mother’s cornflower blue eyes and auburn hair, was playing in the dimly lit hallway outside his apartment. With him was his three-year-old neighbor, the Beaton boy, whose first name was Billy, too.

  An older neighbor, twelve-year-old Johnny McNiff, who lived on the top floor of the tenement and who was home minding his baby sister, heard the sounds of the two friends at play and headed downstairs to join them, leaving the infant asleep in her crib. A few minutes later, however, the baby began crying. Johnny hurried back up to his flat to quiet her. When he returned to the second floor, no more than three minutes later, the two Billys were gone.

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nbsp; Just then, Billy Beaton’s father, who was caring for his children while his wife was in the hospital, emerged from his flat and found Johnny in the hallway, looking puzzled. The boy explained what had happened. Mr. Beaton dashed to the Gaffney’s apartment, but the children weren’t there. Afraid that the boys might have wandered into the street, he ran down the two flights of stairs to the front stoop and began calling their names. But no one responded.

  Mr. Beaton’s apprehensions deepened by the moment. With Johnny at his side, he began a rapid search of the building, starting on the ground floor. But the two boys were nowhere to be found. As soon as they reached the top floor, however, Mr. Beaton heaved a sigh. There, alone by the ladder that led to the roof, stood his little boy.

  Taking his child into his arms, he asked what had happened. “Where were you? Where did you go?”

  Billy sounded excited. “We were on the roof,” he said, pointing overhead. “We saw chimneys and buildings and steamships!”

  Looking up, Mr. Beaton saw that the scuttle which opened to the rooftop had been shoved aside. He was baffled. The tenants of the building, most of whom had young children, were careful to keep the wooden hatch closed at all times, and no boy as young as Billy Beaton or Billy Gaffney could have possibly moved it aside.

  “Where’s Billy Gaffney?” Mr. Beaton asked. “Is he still up there?”

  His son shook his head.