Authors: Harold Schechter
Dribben did what he could to comfort Mr. and Mrs. Budd—who seemed to have passed beyond panic into a state of glazed stupefaction—then ordered Maher and McGee to make a thorough search of neighborhood rooming houses.
Meanwhile, Detective Murphy escorted young Edward and his chum Willie Korman back to the stationhouse, where the boys spent an hour or so searching through the rogue’s gallery in the hope of identifying Gracie’s abductor.
Two more detectives were put on the case that day. One was dispatched to the main office of the Motor Vehicles Bureau to check its records for Howard’s name and address.
Another was assigned the task of tracing the Western Union message that the old man had sent to Edward Budd on Saturday and whose contents Grace’s parents had detailed for Lieutenant Dribben. Mr. Budd remembered something else about the message, too. He described the way Howard had asked about and then pocketed the telegram virtually the moment he arrived—an act which Albert Budd had noted with only casual curiosity at the time but whose full, ominous import had suddenly become all too clear.
The news broke on Tuesday, June 5—“HUNT MAN AND CHILD HE TOOK TO ‘PARTY,’” read the headline in The New York Times. During the next few weeks, the public must have experienced a disconcerting sense of déjà vu, since the story was, in so many respects, a grim replay of the Gaffney abduction, which had dominated the news the year before. The Budd case contained all the ingredients of the earlier tragedy—the clues that led nowhere but to blind alleys and dead ends, the suspects hauled in and promptly released, the well-meaning tipsters and anonymous cranks, the kidnap-hysteria that swept through the boroughs, the cheap melodrama of the tabloid press (“Follow the search for little Grace Budd and her kidnapper in tomorrow’s DAILY NEWS!”).
There were, however, a few elements peculiar to the Budd case that, right from the start, made it even more gripping—and sensational—than the snatching of little Billy Gaffney: a fiend in the guise of a benevolent old man; a trusting mother and father beguiled by a smoothtalking tempter; and, most riveting of all, a lovely little girl in a communion dress, a victim whose very name seemed emblematic of her unprotected innocence and who—believing she was being taken to a birthday party—was lured to a nameless fate.
Assisted by Gracie’s older brothers, officers from the West 20th Street precinct conducted an exhaustive search of the Budds’ Chelsea neighborhood—cellars and rooftops, alleyways and empty lots, lodging houses, movie theaters, subway stations, and garages. But no trace of the girl could be found.
At the same time, several detectives traveled out to Farmingdale, Long Island, in an attempt to locate the truck farm supposedly owned by Grace’s abductor. But that effort, too, proved fruitless.
A more promising lead turned up in another town called Farmingdale, this one located in New Jersey. Because Howard had telegrammed that he had “been over in New Jersey” on Saturday, Lieutenant Dribben—determined to pursue every possibility—dispatched Detective Jerry Maher to the little town across the Hudson River. Sure enough, Maher discovered that, some fifteen years earlier, a man named Frank Howard, who answered in a general way to the description of Grace Budd’s abductor, had owned a small chicken farm in the town. Maher was also able to obtain the name of one of Howard’s relatives, a woman named Low, who had recently moved to Weehawken.
In Weehawken, Maher quickly located the woman—Mrs. Birdsall Low of 508 Park Avenue—who confirmed that she was the niece of a farmer named Frank Howard. Her uncle, Mrs. Low explained, had lived in Farmingdale until 1913, at which point he had sold his farm and moved his family to Chicago.
Maher was heartened, but his hopes were exceptionally short-lived, nipped by Mrs. Low’s next piece of intelligence. Her uncle was clearly a most promising suspect—a farmer named Frank Howard who had lived in the town of Farmingdale and whose appearance conformed in important ways to the physical characteristics of Grace Budd’s kidnapper. There was only one problem. As Mrs. Low informed Maher—and as a quick phone check with the Chicago police confirmed—her uncle had died ten years before.
On the evening of Tuesday, June 5, police at the West 20th Street precinct received a frantic call from one of the Budds’ neighbors, a woman named Juliette Smith, who reported that an elderly man had just attempted to lure her ten-year-old son, Arthur, into a tenement hallway. Within a short time, several officers arrived on the scene and quickly arrested fifty-nine-year-old Joseph Slowey of 86 Eighth Avenue on a charge of impairing the morals of a minor.
Interrogated at the stationhouse, Slowey admitted that he had approached the boy, though he denied having harmed him in any way. As for his involvement in the Budd case, Slowey was so clearly ignorant of the crime that—though police would have liked nothing better than to have a suspect in custody—they quickly discounted him as a possibility.
The charge against Slowey was reduced to disorderly conduct. Two days later, he appeared before Magistrate Stern of the Jefferson Market Court, who dismissed the charge against him and ordered his immediate release.
Juliette Smith, Slowey’s accuser, was not the only mother in the Budd’s neighborhood whose fears had been raised to a high pitch by Grace’s disappearance. Canvassing the area in the days immediately following the kidnapping, the police heard the same story again and again. According to various women, who swore that they had observed the individual in question with their own eyes, an elderly man with gray hair and a neatly trimmed moustache had been “loitering around” the neighborhood for several weeks, casting suspicious looks at their children as though sizing up prospects.
The police were well aware that “sightings” like this often occurred in the aftermath of serious crimes. But they couldn’t afford to dismiss these reports as just the products of overheated imaginations. It was likely that the old man spotted in the neighborhood was nothing more than an innocent passerby—assuming that he existed at all. But slim as it was, there was always a chance that the women were right. If they were, the police had to assume that the Budd crime had been the work of a coolly premeditating individual—very possibly a professional kidnapper.
The possibility that the Budd girl had been the victim of a carefully planned and executed abduction was given added credibility by the testimony of several residents of her block, the last of her acquaintances to see her on the day she disappeared.
According to Loretta Adaboy, Jimmy Kenny, George Barrins, and Phillip Gully—the neighborhood children who had shouted taunts at Gracie when she passed them on Sunday in the company of her grizzled escort—a second man was involved in the crime.
All four of these small witnesses told police that, when the couple reached the corner, the girl had been ushered into a waiting automobile—a mud-spattered blue sedan with a yellow Pennsylvania license plate—which then sped away from the curb and down Ninth Avenue, a young straw-hatted man behind the wheel. Another eyewitness, a teenager named Margaret Day, who had been working at a candy store on the corner of Ninth Avenue at the time Gracie left home, corroborated the children’s account.
By the morning of Wednesday, June 6, investigators had learned of the existence of a second purported accomplice, this one a woman.
A Brooklyn mother, Mrs. Harold DeMille of 981 East Fifteenth Street, told police that at around 6:30 Sunday evening she had gone inside her house to fix supper, leaving her four-year-old son, Desmond, to pedal his tricycle up and down the block. No sooner had she left than a mysterious couple—an elderly fellow in a dark business suit and a handsomely dressed woman—strolled up to little Desmond and, after speaking to him briefly, helped him off his tricycle and led him up the street. A second man, much younger than the first, followed close behind, the tricycle in tow.
Mrs. DeMille had just begun her dinner preparations when a neighbor—a woman who lived across the street and had been relaxing on her front stoop when the boy was taken away—rushed into the kitchen with the news. Dashing onto the street, Mrs. DeMille ran up the block in the direction indicated by her neighbor, finally catching up with the foursome on 13th Street and Avenue U. Snatching little Desmond up into her arms, she began screaming at the old man—the obvious leader of the band—who calmly protested that he and his friends had only meant to buy the child a new bell for his tricycle.
Where, shouted the agitated mother, did they expect to find an open store on Sunday evening? The old man and his companions exchanged an anxious look; then, without another word, they hurried away. Mrs. DeMille, winded and shaken, conducted Desmond back home, scolding him for having given her such a scare and admonishing him to be more careful of strangers.
It wasn’t until Tuesday, when the story of the Budd girl’s disappearance hit the newsstands, that Mrs. DeMille suspected she had rescued her son from the clutches of the very criminal who had snatched little Grace. Contacting the police at once, she provided them with a description of the old man that, as the Daily News put it, “tallied exactly” with that of Frank Howard.
The police, who had been operating under the assumption that they were hunting for a single kidnapper, a “lone hand” in Detective Dribben’s words, were suddenly faced with a new and even more unsettling possibility—that somewhere, loose in the city, was a ruthless band of professional child-snatchers, consisting of at least three individuals and headed by a cunning old man, who had masterminded and carried out the abduction of little Grace Budd.
The Budd kidnapping was big news and, predictably, the plight of the family drew the poisonous attention of the usual collection of cranks. Crude handwritten messages—ranging from lunatic ramblings to the crudest of taunts—came pouring in through the mail. Typical of this warped correspondence was a postcard that arrived at the Budds’ apartment on Wednesday morning, less than twenty-four hours after the story broke, and that seemed almost identical to one of the many crazed communications that had been sent, a year earlier, to the grief-racked parents of Billy Gaffney: “My dear friends. All little girl is to cellar and into water.”
Before long, the Budds were receiving dozens of crank notes a day, though few of them were more vicious than the one that read, “My Dear Mr. and Mrs. Budd. Your child is going to a funeral. I still got her. HOWARD”
Of all the letters mailed to the Budds, one, at least, had been written out of genuinely charitable impulses. Sent by a woman named Martha Taggart, who had been appalled to read of the horror that had descended on the Budd family as a result of Edward Jr.’s innocent classified ad, the note contained a small but concrete form of consolation—an offer of a summer job for young Edward on her husband’s farm in the Bronx. But Edward’s summer, like that of his family and a sizable contingent of New York City police detectives, would be occupied with another, far more urgent matter—the search for his missing sister.
On Thursday morning, June 7, one thousand circulars—containing detailed descriptions of Grace Budd and Frank Howard, along with a black-and-white photo of the missing girl in a plaid dress, puffy bonnet, and gray cloth coat—were mailed to police departments throughout the United States and Canada. By the middle of the following week, several thousand more had been printed up and posted around New York City—in subway stations and ferry terminals, bank lobbies and barber shops, post offices, grocery windows, and corner luncheonettes.
The immediate result of this massive publicity effort was a rash of false sightings. Dribben’s office was flooded with reports—that Howard and his captive had been spotted in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, Monmouth, New Jersey, Mineola, Long Island, Niagara Falls, New York, and dozens of other locales. In the weeks following the Grace Budd kidnapping, any gray-haired old man out for a stroll with his granddaughter was in danger of being identified as a child-snatcher. Each of these stories was scrupulously checked out by one of the two dozen detectives that, by this point, had been assigned to the case (some from the West 20th Street Precinct, others from the Bureau of Missing Persons). Ultimately, each story turned out to be completely worthless.
There was, however, one solid lead which the police had received even before their search had entered its second week. Thanks in part to a public “Notice to Telegraphers”—a printed plea for information run by the editors of the New York Daily News in the June 6th edition of the paper—investigators had been able to trace the source of Howard’s telegram to the Western Union office at Third Avenue and 103rd Street in Manhattan.
An intensive search of the surrounding neighborhood quickly turned up a second important clue. Armed with the small enamel pail that had held the pound of pot cheese Howard had brought to the Budds, supposedly from his farm, Detectives Jerry Maher, Charles Reilly, and John McGee managed to locate the man who had sold it to Howard—the pushcart peddler Reuben Rosoff, who identified the handwritten price inscribed on its underside (“40¢”) as his own printing.
The address of the telegraph office along with the location of Rosoff’s pushcart—100th Street and Second Avenue—strongly suggested that the elusive Frank Howard was, if not a resident, certainly a habitué of East Harlem. Detectives and patrolmen of the East 104th Street Station were put on alert and, along with Dribben’s men, they organized a dragnet of the area, checking rooming houses, restaurants, barber shops, newsstands, and any other place that Howard might be known.
In the meantime, Captain John Ayres of the Missing Persons Bureau had obtained a copy of the Western Union blank on which Howard had written out his telegram. After studying it closely, Ayres met with reporters to describe its content and style. According to the captain, Howard “wrote a good, quick, clear hand and wasted no words in sending his message.” He seemed to be a man of some sophistication and schooling. For this and other reasons, investigators had concluded that, in Captain Ayres’ words, “Howard’s occupation was not that of a farmer.”
The captain’s announcement was certainly newsworthy, though not exactly startling. By this time, it could have come as no surprise to anyone following the case that, like everything else about Grace Budd’s shadowy abductor, his story of owning a lush twenty-acre farm on Long Island was nothing more than an elaborate—and diabolical—lie.