Deranged (14 page)

The appearance of this column—which resembled nothing so much as the capsule summary of weekend sports results that appeared on page one every Sunday—was a striking sign of the sudden, shocking prevalence of the crime. By the summer of 1933, kidnappings were occurring so frequently that news readers required a scorecard to keep track of them.

In July alone, The New York Times reported on over a dozen cases, including the actual or attempted abductions of John J. O’Connell, Jr., scion of one of New York State’s most powerful political families; August Luer, a seventy-eight-year-old banker from Alton, Illinois; John “Jake the Barber” Factor, a Chicago “stock promoter” wanted in England on swindling charges; Dr. Walter Hedberg, a prominent Minnesota chiropractor; two well-to-do Brooklyn residents, Dr. Jacob Wachsman and bakery owner Harry Pechter; Charles F. Urschel, millionaire oil man from Oklahama City; William Hamm, Jr., St. Paul brewer; Miss Edia Neumoegen of Mahopac, New York; Miss Mary McElroy, daughter of City Manager H. F. McElroy of Kansas City, Missouri; two infant grandchildren of Park Avenue attorney Henry W. Taft; and an unnamed motion picture actress targeted for abduction by the Oklahoma gangster, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd.

Though all of these were highly publicized cases, the attention they received was negligible compared to the notoriety of a 1932 crime that had first brought the “kidnapping situation” to the forefront of the national news. This was, of course, the abduction and murder of twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr. Though public concern with kidnapping had been growing since the late 1920s, it was the tragedy which had befallen America’s golden couple—“Lucky Lindy” and his lovely young wife, Anne—that transformed concern into national obsession.

On the evening of March 1, 1932, Colonel Lindbergh was chatting with his wife in the living room of their sprawling new house near Hopewell, New Jersey, when he heard a sudden crack, like the snapping of a tree branch, outside the window. His wife had heard nothing except the ordinary noises of a gusty night. They listened a moment longer, then returned to their conversation.

Sometime later, at around ten o’clock, Betty Gow, the nursemaid, entered the baby’s second-story bedroom to take him on his nightly trip to the toilet. Bending over the crib, she discovered that he was missing. The blankets, affixed to the mattress by a pair of large safety pins, were undisturbed, as if the child had been carefully extracted from his bedding.

The Lindberghs and their help made a frantic search of the premises. On the radiator grill in the nursery, beneath the corner window, lay a white envelope. Lindbergh ordered the servants not to touch it.

The Hopewell police were notified and arrived minutes later. Outside the house, directly beneath the nursery window, Police Chief Harry Wolfe discovered two holes in the dirt, evidently formed by a ladder. About sixty feet away, he came upon the ladder itself, a crude homemade affair with a single splintered rung—the source of the snapping sound Lindbergh had heard several hours earlier.

The white envelope was opened. Inside was a ransom note, badly misspelled and ungrammatical, as if its author had only a rudimentary command of English. The note demanded $50,000 in cash for the safe return of the baby.

The weeks that followed were a nightmare of false leads, dashed hopes, wild rumors, and cruel hoaxes. In the course of that time, the distraught parents received over one hundred thousand letters offering comfort, advice, and a staggering quantity of well-intentioned but thoroughly useless information.

President Hoover issued a statement deploring the crime. Will Rogers wrote columns conveying the shock of the nation. William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, called on his entire membership to help track down the perpetrator. From a holding cell in the Cook County jail, where he was awaiting transfer to the Atlanta penitentiary to begin an eleven-year sentence for income-tax evasion, Al Capone offered a reward of $10,000 for the return of the child. “It’s the most outrageous thing I ever heard of,” Capone declared. “I know how Mrs. Capone and I would feel if our son were kidnapped, and I sympathize with the Lindberghs. If I were out of jail, I could be of real assistance. I have friends all over the country who could help in running this thing down.”

While Mrs. Lindbergh issued heartbreaking bulletins to the kidnappers, detailing the baby’s dietary needs, her husband broadcast a fervent appeal over the radio, offering not only the ransom money but full immunity from prosecution in exchange for his unharmed child. In desperation, he enlisted two notorious bootleggers to serve as go-betweens with the underworld.

Finally, through another intermediary, a retired Bronx schoolteacher named John Condon who had managed to make contact with the abductor, the ransom was paid in $50,000 worth of marked bills. But the kidnapper’s claim that the child would be found safe onboard a sailing boat lying off Martha’s Vineyard proved to be a vicious hoax. Five weeks after the snatching, the whereabouts of the Lindbergh baby remained an agonizing mystery.

Its terrible resolution, a month later, sent the country into a paroxysm of outrage and grief. On the afternoon of May 12, a gray, drizzly Thursday, a forty-six-year-old laborer named William Allen was driving down a deserted stretch of road a mile from the village of Hopewell. Pulling his truck off to one side, he slid out of the cab and entered the woods to empty his bladder. Fifty feet from the roadside, in a thicket of maple and locust, he suddenly came upon the half-buried remains of what he took, at first, to be an animal. Peering closer, he saw a tiny human foot protruding from the shallow grave.

The drama of the hunt for the missing Lindbergh baby, which had kept the American public spellbound for seventy-two days, had come to a devastating climax in a dreary clump of woods less than five miles away from the slain child’s home.

The snatching and murder of the Lindbergh baby (for which a German-born carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann would eventually be arrested, convicted, and electrocuted) made the magnitude of America’s kidnapping crisis stunningly clear. Kidnapping—once a crime so uncommon that the legal codes of many states (including New Jersey) did not define it as a felony—had spread through the land like a plague, a full-blown epidemic from which no one, no matter how revered or lucky, was immune.

As a reporter for The New York Times named R. L. Duffus put it, “No conceivable event, unless it were an invasion of the White House itself, could have so dramatized the crime of kidnapping as did the carrying off of the infant son of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.” Appearing just a few days after the abduction, Duffus’s article, “Kidnapping: A Rising Menace to the Nation,” traced the recent evolution of the crime from a practice largely confined to members of the underworld—gangsters snatching other gangsters for extortion or revenge—to a highly professional operation “organized on an unprecedented scale and with unheard-of extremes of cruelty and audacity.”

True, abductors had been plying their trade since the days of Joseph and his brethren. And famous kidnappings had occurred throughout American history. But in terms of cunning and sophistication, Duffus wrote, present-day kidnappers were as far removed from their predecessors as “the airplane from the one-horse shay.”

Because of legal loopholes (soon to be sewn up in the wake of the Lindbergh outrage), it was virtually impossible to prosecute a criminal who transported a kidnap victim across state lines. As an activity involving minimal risks and potentially great rewards, kidnapping had become the crime of choice for the “best brains” in the business. In 1932 alone, there were 282 reported kidnappings in twenty-eight states. And all but sixty-five of the perpetrators had gotten away scot-free with their crimes.

Duffus’s article was illustrated with photographic portraits of four well-known kidnap victims, all of them children. There was Jackie Thomas of Detroit, looking glum in his little boy’s sailor suit. There was Edward Cudahy of Omaha, posing stiffly in a starched, highcollar shirt. There was Marion Clarke of Manhattan, a curly-haired two-year-old sporting a big floppy bow.

But the most arresting image of all was the first in the series. It was a picture of Grace Budd, smiling winsomely at the camera, her big dark eyes alight with intelligence and pleasure.

The four innocent faces made a poignant group. But though Duffus didn’t stress it, there were significant differences between Grace Budd and the rest. In contrast to the other cases, no ransom demand had ever been made in the Budd kidnapping. Moreover, whereas Clarke, Cudahy, and Thomas had all been restored to their parents in fairly short order, no trace of Grace Budd had so far been found.

And on the day Duffus’s article was published, March 6, 1932, Grace Budd had been missing for close to four years.

13

“I am not insane. I am just queer.” ALBERT FISH

Late one muggy afternoon in midsummer 1934, Albert Fish, Jr., then thirty-five years old, returned unexpectedly to the four-room apartment he snared with his father. The two men were living together at 1883 Amsterdam Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, one of three buildings on the block that they had been hired to superintend.

Because of his age and infirmity, the elder Fish—a prematurely decrepit sixty-four-year-old at the time—took responsibility for the lighter chores, such as sweeping the rear alley and keeping the vermin in check, while his son handled the more strenuous ones like painting, plumbing repairs and carpentry work.

On this particular afternoon, sometime around four, the younger man was painting the lobby of 1887 Amsterdam when a tenant in one of the top-floor apartments ran downstairs to tell him that a pipe in the bathroom sink had burst and the room was flooding with water. Albert dropped what he was doing and hurried to his apartment to fetch his tools.

His father was often home during the day, so Albert wasn’t surprised to hear noises from inside the apartment as he opened the front door. What did surprise him was the source of the sounds. They were coming, not from his father’s bedroom, but from his own. And the sounds themselves were very strange—thuds, slaps, and muffled cries.

He walked quietly down the corridor and peered inside his room.

The window shades had been drawn, but enough light filtered through the fabric for Albert Jr. to see clearly. The old man was standing in the center of the room, completely nude, stroking his swollen member with one hand while, with the other, he reached behind and smacked himself with a nail-studded wooden paddle. Wild-eyed and panting, he jumped and cried out with every blow. His skin was soaked with sweat, and his face looked almost as red as his raw and bloody buttocks.

Lost in some unimaginable ecstasy of voluptuousness and pain, the old man continued his self-flagellation, completely oblivious to his son’s presence. For a few moments, Albert simply stood there and stared, too paralyzed by embarrassment and dismay to say or do anything. Then, shaken and confused, he backed away from the doorway, retrieved his toolbox from the hallway closet, and crept out of the apartment.

As disconcerting as this episode was to Albert Fish, Jr., it was not the first time that he had come upon evidence of his father’s weird proclivities. For as long as he could remember, his father had displayed certain extreme peculiarities of behavior.

He clearly recalled the time back in 1922, for instance, when he and his brothers, Henry and Gene, had been kicking around a football outside the old cottage they used to rent up in Worthington. Albert had just bent down to catch a low kick, and as he straightened up to boot the ball back to Henry, he caught sight of his father standing in the apple orchard on the little hill behind the bungalow. The old man had his right hand raised high in the air and was shouting something over and over. Albert had strained to listen. The old man was shouting, “I am Christ.”

And as for this paddle business, Albert had known about it for at least five years—since an evening in 1929, when he was living with his father in a little flat on 74th Street. The old man had gone off for the day, leaving his son with a few dollars to buy food. Albert—who was unemployed at the time—had spent most of the afternoon at the movies, returning home around six to prepare supper.

He was standing at the kitchen sink when his foot struck something concealed in the shadowy corner behind the pipes, something that made an odd-sounding clatter. Albert crouched to take a closer look.

There, leaning against the wall, were a pair of crude, homemade paddles, each about two feet in length and bristling with finishing nails, which protruded about one and a half inches from the wood. The nails seemed stained with dark paint. Reaching under the sink, Albert removed one of these strange instruments and looked at it closely in the light. He was taken aback to see that the nails were covered, not with paint, but with blood.

A short time later, at around six thirty, the old man returned to the flat. No sooner had he walked through the door than his son confronted him with the paddles. What was the idea of these damned things? he demanded.