Authors: Harold Schechter
The detectives were impressed by Mrs. Pope’s story—so much so that on the following day, September 4, 1930, at the East 78th Street apartment he shared with his widowed sister, Charles Edward Pope was arrested for the kidnapping of Grace Budd.
Once again, Delia Budd was called down to the stationhouse to pick out the suspect from a lineup. And once again, she provided a positive identification. “That’s the man who stole my Gracie,” she declared, pointing directly at Pope. And there was no doubt that the old janitor—a wizen-faced codger with a bushy gray moustache and a shriveled physique—bore a vague resemblance to the man who had called himself Frank Howard.
The next morning, the tabloids trumpeted the news: “BUDD KIDNAP SUSPECT CAPTURED AFTER TWO YEARS!”
As an angry crowd—consisting mostly of neighborhood mothers and assorted friends of the Budd family—gathered outside the police station, Pope tearfully protested his innocence. He shook his head in amazement as his wife told police that Pope was “a dangerous man” who had once been confined to a mental institution in Gowanda, New York.
It was true, Pope admitted, that he had been locked up in Gowanda for a few months. But he had been sent there by his wife, who had conspired to commit him in order to get her hands on some money his father had left him. His only crime, Pope insisted, was a weakness for the game of “Klondike crap.” Questioned at police headquarters by King, Maher, and a third detective, Samuel Ryan, Pope explained that he was the son of a steamboat inspector and the executor of his father’s $30,000 estate, though he himself had only come in for a pittance of that inheritance. He had been trained as an engineer, but he had not practiced that profession for many years. Now, with the Depression underway, the only work he had been able to find was as the superintendent of an apartment building on Madison Avenue. He lived with his sister, an elderly spinster, and supported them both on his meager salary.
Ada Pope, the suspect’s sister, confirmed every part of his account. Though her brother and his estranged wife had been married for forty-two years, their relationship had always been difficult. Indeed, over the course of those decades, they had been separated more than twenty times. Her brother, Ada Pope tearfully told the detectives, was a hard-working but soft-hearted man who had fallen victim to the malice of a spiteful woman. “I do not know why she hates Charlie and me so much. Charlie has not been able to give her much money these past few years. He does not make very much, and he is looking out for me.”
Investigating Pope’s story, King discovered that it checked out in every detail. The old man had no police record. And though it was true that he had been institutionalized for eight months between September 1924 and July 1925, the superintendent of the asylum, Dr. E. H. Mudge, affirmed that Pope’s ailment was of “a mild nature.” There was nothing violent or dangerous about the man at all.
Reluctantly, King and his colleagues were beginning to conclude that their elation over the capture of Grace Budd’s kidnapper had been premature. What they had on their hands, it seemed, was not the long-sought solution to the girl’s disappearance but a sordid squabble, motivated by rankling resentments over money, between a pathetic old man and a bitterly vindictive woman. It was true that Delia Budd had unhesitatingly picked Pope out of the lineup. But Mrs. Budd had already proved herself a notoriously unreliable witness.
From the moment of Pope’s arrest, the city’s papers, from The New York Times to the Daily News, had been running major stories about the successful climax of the two-year manhunt for the Budd kidnapper. But just two days after Pope was arraigned before Magistrate Anthony Burke—who set his bail at $25,000—reporters learned that King and his fellow investigators now had serious doubts about Pope’s guilt and were on the verge of dropping all charges against him.
Before that could happen, though, events took a sudden and very dark turn for the unhappy Mr. Pope.
During his initial two-hour interrogation of the suspect, King had learned that Pope owned an old farmhouse on an acre of land in Shandaken. New York, a small town in the Catskills. A search order was put through to the State Police base at nearby Sidney, New York. Early the next morning—Sunday, September 7—a contingent of troopers, led by Lieutenant Matthew Fox, arrived at Pope’s place and proceeded to ransack the two-story farmhouse from basement to attic. There was nothing even remotely suspicious inside the house. Concluding that they had been sent on a wild goose chase, Lieutenant Fox and his men made ready to leave. Determined, however, to “leave no stone unturned” (as Fox later told reporters), they decided to take a look inside the small garage at the rear of the farmhouse.
Inside was an old Dodge touring car bearing 1929 license plates. But what caught the lieutenant’s eye were three small trunks lined up against the far wall of the little building. Dragging them out into the sunlight, the troopers swung open the lids. The contents of the first two seemed innocent enough—newspaper clippings and old magazines, used clothing, and “assorted odds and ends.”
The third, however, was filled with more provocative material—pictures and postcards of women and girls, many of them in alluring poses. There were also various bundles of letters. Undoing the ribbon around one of the packets, Fox scanned a few of the letters and discovered that they had all been written by women and were of a most personal nature—“mushy notes,” as he described them.
Though the postcards and letters shed new light on the private life of the elderly caretaker, they weren’t especially incriminating in themselves. But that couldn’t be said of the other items in the trunk. Three strands of deep brown hair, tied with white ribbon, lay concealed beneath the letters. Judging by their color, length and texture, Fox concluded that the strands had been clipped from the head of a young girl.
Back in New York City, the news of the discovery hit like a bombshell. “RIBBONS, CURLS FOUND IN TRUNK IN BUDD SUSPECT’S OLD HOME,” blared the headline of the next morning’s Daily News. Suddenly, Charles Edward Pope no longer seemed like the put-upon victim of a termagant wife. A new and sinister light had been cast on the old caretaker. Perhaps he was the Budd kidnapper after all.
The discovery of the hair clippings set off an intensive search of the Shandaken property. Troopers from the Sidney base swarmed over the premises, digging up the entire yard in an effort to uncover more clues. The contents of the three trunks were carefully removed and closely analyzed. Tucked among the old clothes in one of the trunks was a box of revolver ammunition. Even more significantly, troopers found a pair of white child’s stockings with darned heels—similar, according to Mrs. Budd’s testimony, to the ones that her daughter had been wearing on the morning she left home forever.
By Wednesday, September 10, things were looking grim for Charles Pope. “NEW CLEWS TIGHTEN BUDD KIDNAP NET,” the Daily News reported. According to the article, the police, in searching Pope’s property, had found a file of letters covering the period from 1891 to 1929. Suspiciously, one entire year’s worth of correspondence was missing. That year was 1928. Grace Budd, of course, had been abducted in June, 1928.
Investigators also learned that Grace had spent a few weeks in the vicinity of Pope’s farm during the summer of 1927, when she had been sent to live with a local family under the sponsorship of the New York Tribune’s Fresh Air Fund.
And then there was the story told by Albert H. Kilner, a Phoenicia, New York, radio mechanic. According to Kilner, he was called to the Pope farm to repair a radio in the late summer of 1928. “I happened to stop my car at some little distance from the house,” Kilner told police.
I reached the front door without seeing anyone. I went around to the back and while there I heard the sound of wood splitting. I pushed the door open. Inside, to the right, I saw another closed door. I opened it. It was a bedroom. Pope was inside. I had a quick glance at what he had been doing. The floor boards were ripped up and I saw several piles of earth. Pope turned red in the face and snarled at me: “What do you mean by entering the house this way? Get out!” He forced me to leave without fixing the radio. Later I went back and did the job.
Checking Kilner’s story, state troopers discovered that the ground beneath Pope’s bedroom did indeed show signs of digging. They announced plans to excavate the spot to a depth of five feet in an effort to unearth more evidence—perhaps even the remains of the missing girl herself.
* * *
Though the tabloid press had been doing its best to convict Pope without a trial, the preliminary hearing held on September 11 made it clear that there were still serious reasons to question his guilt.
Jessie Pope—the suspect’s main accuser—proved to be a highly dubious witness. Under cross-examination by Pope’s lawyer, James A. Turley, she admitted that she had schemed to have her husband committed to an insane asylum in order to get her hands on the money willed to him by his father. And her recollection of the clothing worn by the little girl she had supposedly seen with Pope in Perth Amboy—a blue dress and a blue hat with a red band—didn’t gibe at all with the description of the confirmation outfit Grace had been wearing at the time of her disappearance.
Mrs. Budd’s testimony was equally suspect. She admitted that the white stockings found on Pope’s farm were not, in fact, very much like her daughter’s (though she stoutly maintained that another item uncovered by the police—a clasp made of imitation pearl—was identical to an ornament on Grace’s handbag). And she acknowledged that, before she came down to view Pope in the lineup, his wife had already provided her with such a minutely detailed description of the old man that it would have been next to impossible not to recognize him.
Pope himself had perfectly reasonable explanations for the pieces of evidence that had been made to seem so incriminating by the press. The stockings and other items of children’s clothing were hand-me-downs, passed along to Pope by tenants of the Madison Avenue apartment house he superintended. Pope collected them for his son, who had five young children of his own.
As for the three mysterious curls (which, as Turley pointed out, were much longer and wavier than Grace Budd’s straight, bobbed hair), they were, according to Pope, family keepsakes—snipped from his son’s head many years before and stored away in the trunk as mementos.
In spite of the questions that Turley had managed to cast on Jessie Pope’s motives and Delia Budd’s credibility, Magistrate George De Luca felt justified in holding Pope for the grand jury. Bail was continued at $25,000. Unable to raise that sum, the old man was returned to the Tombs.
On Monday, September 15, 1930, the grand jury indicted Charles Edward Pope for the kidnapping of Grace Budd, and a trial was scheduled for December.
In its excitement over Pope’s arrest, the press seemed to have forgotten all about the man who had been the primary suspect in the Budd case for two years—Albert E. Corthell. But Detective King, who was finding it increasingly difficult to believe in Pope’s guilt, hadn’t forgotten, and during the months that the old man languished in jail, awaiting his trial, King continued to pursue every lead.
In early December, just two weeks before the start of Pope’s trial, King finally got his man. Corthell, going under the name of J. W. West, was arrested in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was trying to cash a certified check in the amount of $ 15,000 made out to the treasurer of the Park Board of Joliet, Illinois. Under questioning by police, he finally admitted his true identity.
Extradition papers were quickly prepared, and on Wednesday, December 3, Detectives King and Maher set off for St. Louis. Four days later, on Sunday, December 7, they were back in New York City with Corthell in custody at last. The prisoner was booked at the East 51st Street station, then removed to Police Headquarters, where, early Monday morning, both Delia Budd and her husband picked him out of a lineup, acknowledging that Corthell “might be” the man who had stolen their daughter.
Suddenly, after two fruitless years of searching for the Budd kidnapper, the New York City police found themselves with two suspects on their hands.
But not for long.
The trial of Charles Edward Pope, began on Monday, December 22, 1930, and lasted only long enough to qualify as farce. Delia Budd, the first witness called to the stand, retracted her identification of Pope, admitting that she had “made a mistake in saying he was the man.” She had only accused him, she confessed, because Pope’s wife had persuaded her of his guilt. Both her husband and Willie Korman were even more emphatic in denying that Pope was Frank Howard.
Only Jessie Pope persisted in her denunciation, but Attorney Turley quickly undermined her testimony by establishing that she had been hounding her estranged husband for years. Judge William Allen put a few sharply worded questions to Mrs. Pope, then directed the jury to return a “not guilty” verdict.
After three-and-a-half months of imprisonment, Charles Edward Pope was a free man.
With Pope’s acquittal, Corthell resumed his status as the primary suspect in the Budd case. But—though he admitted to having spent some time in New York City during the summer of 1928—he fiercely maintained that he knew nothing at all about the kidnapping. And while Corthell was a thoroughgoing fraud and professional liar, it seemed as if he might actually be telling the truth.
Over the course of the next few months, the police made every effort to connect Corthell to the Budd crime. But they couldn’t come up with a single shred of evidence. And after her humbling experience with the Pope episode, even Delia Budd was unprepared to make a positive identification.
On Friday, February 6, 1931, following the recommendation of Assistant District Attorney John MacDonnell, Judge William Allen discharged Albert E. Corthell without a trial.
Corthell’s release was a devastating setback for the detectives involved in the Budd case. Not only had they wasted two years searching for the wrong man, but they were now left with no leads at all—not a single clue to the fate of little Grace Budd or to the identity of her kidnapper. Detective King, who had devoted the most time and energy to the hunt for Corthell, felt especially embitterred by the outcome of the affair. But for all his frustration, he remained undeterred. Holed up somewhere in the world was the cunning old fox who had made off with Grace Budd. And King was determined to sniff him out, no matter how long it took.