Deranged (11 page)

Like most New Yorkers, Vetter had followed the Budd story with grim fascination, but only recently had it occurred to him that there might be a connection between the gray-haired man and the mysterious Frank Howard. It had taken him nearly two months to make that connection. Now he wasted no time in getting in touch with the police.

Vetter was invited to headquarters, where he was asked to go through pictures from the Rogue’s Gallery. He pored over scores of photos before he came upon one that looked exactly like the face he remembered—the face of the man who had visited the S.P.C.C. at the beginning of June.

It was the face of Albert Edward Corthell.

Lieutenant Dribben had every reason to feel pleased. For the first time in weeks, his optimism—which was becoming increasingly hard to sustain—seemed justified. But before he would let himself believe that the kidnapper had finally been identified, he needed some key corroboration.

The Budd family was brought down to police headquarters and shown the photograph of Corthell. Albert Budd, half-blind and still stupefied with grief, thought the man in the picture looked like Frank Howard but couldn’t say for sure. Nor could his son. But Grace’s mother was adamant. The man in the photograph was Frank Howard, all right. Mrs. Budd was ready to swear to it. She’d know that monster’s face anywhere.

By the beginning of August, rumors had reached the press that a big break in the Budd case was about to be announced—rumors that were confirmed on Friday, August 3, when the grand jury returned an indictment against Albert E. Corthell and General Sessions Judge Koenig issued a bench warrant for the ex-convict’s arrest.

This sudden turn of events was a boost for the Missing Persons Bureau, whose men were still smarting from their failure to solve the mystery of Billy Gaffney’s disappearance. And it was enormously heartening to Mr. and Mrs. Budd, who were infused with fresh hope that their daughter would be recovered safely after all. Whatever else Corthell might be, he was no murderer. And if Warden Blitch was right about Corthell’s motives for snatching the girl, then Grace was sure to be alive and even well cared for.

Finally, after two dispiriting months of dogged but fruitless detective work, everything seemed to be falling into place. The police had a positive identification, an indictment, and a warrant for the suspect’s arrest. True, they didn’t have the suspect himself—or his young victim—but Dribben had received reliable tips that Corthell had been spotted in Toledo, Ohio. According to Assistant District Attorney Harold W. Hastings, detectives from the Missing Persons Bureau were “hot on the trail” of the kidnapper. It was only a matter of days, Hastings assured reporters, before Corthell would be in police custody—and little Grace Budd restored, at last, to the bosom of her family.

10

A hero is a man who does what he can. ROMAIN ROLLAND, Jean Christophe

Among the detectives assigned to the Budd case was a member of the Missing Persons Bureau named William F. King. A tireless and resolute lawman with gunmetal eyes and the leathery mug of a Marine drill sergeant, King conformed so closely, in both appearance and manner, to the popular image of the tough, big city “dick” that he could have been dreamed up by Dashiell Hammett. Only King was no Hollywood crimebuster, no make-believe hero with a hardboiled style and the soul of a crusader. He was the real thing.

King possessed several qualities which made him particularly well suited for his job. To begin with, he was a man of action, a former locomotive fireman who became a cop in 1907, quit a decade later to fight in the Great War, then rejoined the department in 1926 after working for a number of years in the private sector. At the time of the Budd kidnapping, he had risen to the rank of detective lieutenant in the Bureau of Missing Persons.

Besides determination and toughness, King was renowned for his tenacity. He was a man of supreme patience, dogged in his refusal to give up on a case until it was solved. This attribute would stand him in especially good stead in the case of the Budd abduction. In the late summer of 1928, King was one of several detectives dispatched to the Midwest to follow the trail of “Dr.” Corthell. As it turned out, the trip would be only the first leg of a journey that would eventually cover many thousands of miles and span several years. King wouldn’t rest until Corthell was in custody, and, in the end, he would get his man.

But before that day arrived, the search for Grace Budd’s kidnapper would take a sudden and wholly unexpected twist.

Two years had passed since Assistant D.A. Hastings had made his hopeful pronouncement that Corthell’s arrest and Grace Budd’s recovery were only a few days away. In spite of such official optimism—and the unflagging efforts of Detective King and his colleagues to track down the suspect—the slippery con man remained at large and little Gracie’s whereabouts a mystery.

Intermittently during those two years, the police would uncover clues that sent the hopes of the Budd family soaring. But inevitably, each of these leads would fail to pan out. In March 1930, for example, the Budds received a strange packet in the mail. By this time, the family had moved to even cheaper quarters, a basement apartment at 404 West 15th Street, several doors away from their former address. (The Depression was now in full swing, and though Albert Budd was better off than millions of his countrymen, having managed to hang onto his job, his salary remained pitifully small.)

Inside the packet was a copy of The Christian Science Monitor, dated March 21. The paper itself, mailed anonymously from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, contained nothing of apparent significance. But Delia Budd’s attention was instantly caught by the penciled address. It was written in a hand that looked remarkably like her daughter’s.

Pulling one of Grace’s schoolbooks out of the bureau drawer where she had carefully stored them, Mrs. Budd compared the two samples of handwriting. To her eager eyes they looked the same. She quickly called in a few of her neighbors, who confirmed the similarity. At that point, Mrs. Budd threw on her overcoat and, packet in hand, made her way to the West Twentieth Street precinct.

The packet was turned over to Detective King, who had by this point become the primary investigator in the Budd case. Indeed, the Budd girl’s kidnapping had become more than the focus of King’s professional life. It had become a personal obsession.

Carefully examining the envelope and its contents, King discovered a small mailing label affixed to a corner of the newspaper. It bore the name of Herbert J. Sherry, U.S. Navy, Portsmouth. The following day, King, accompanied by Detective Jerry Maher, was on a train headed for New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, Delia Budd met with reporters to announce the good news. “I am certain that the writing is in the hand of Grace,” she proclaimed, “and so are the neighbors. I am very hopeful that something may come of it. It is the first word of any kind we have had since Grace went away.”

Even as she was speaking, however, King and Maher were reluctantly coming to a very different conclusion. They had already surmised that, since Sherry was in the U.S. Navy, he was undoubtedly too young to be the kidnapper himself. But perhaps he might be the mysterious accomplice who, according to various eyewitnesses, had driven the getaway car.

No sooner had they arrived in Portsmouth than the two detectives discovered that Sherry—who was doing time in the brig for desertion—couldn’t possibly have been involved in the abduction. Sherry’s service record showed that he had been in trouble before and that, at the time of the girl’s disappearance, he had been confined to the naval prison at Parris Island, South Carolina. King and Maher remained in Portsmouth for a few days, hoping to locate the person—presumably Grace herself—who had addressed the envelope to the Budds.

As it turned out, the two men could have saved themselves the effort. Shortly after they returned emptyhanded to New York, a report from a police graphologist revealed that the handwriting on the mysterious packet was not, in fact, Grace Budd’s—though who the writer was, and why the newspaper had been sent to the Budd family in the first place, no one could say.

Several months after the Sherry incident, in early June, 1930, Detective King was traveling again—this time on a train headed south, in pursuit of a man who called himself Charles Howard.

A fifty-year-old Floridian, Howard had married a vacationing New York City woman in May. Immediately after the wedding, the happy couple returned to the city, where they moved into an apartment belonging to the bride’s aunt at 2410 Second Avenue. Exactly eight days later, Charles Howard disappeared, absconding with $2,800 of his wife’s cash, plus $ 1,000 more of her aunt’s.

The hoodwinked bride rushed to the police and lodged a complaint against Howard. She also suggested that the two-faced reprobate might well be the other Howard the police had been searching for, the one who had kidnapped little Grace Budd.

The claim seemed plausible, assuming that Charles Howard was simply another alias of the notorious Albert Corthell. Corthell, after all, had plied his criminal trade in Florida for many years. And the deception that had been practiced on the hapless New York woman was just the sort of swindle that a con man like Corthell would be liable to pull.

This time, King seemed to get lucky. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Florida, he managed to locate his quarry. On June 10, Charles Howard was arrested in Belvedere, Florida. A slight, stooped, prematurely grizzled man, he matched the description of Grace Budd’s abductor. Howard was brought back to New York City, where he was arraigned on a charge of grand larceny.

One fact immediately became evident—Charles Howard was not Albert Corthell. Indeed, Charles Howard was the man’s true name, not an alias at all. Still, King clung to the hope that his prisoner might be implicated in the Budd mystery.

A lineup was arranged. Delia Budd and Willie Korman (now a young man of twenty) were brought down to police headquarters to view the suspect. Korman couldn’t identify the man with any certainty, but Delia Budd seemed to harbor few doubts. “He looks like the man,” she insisted.

In the end, however, Howard was able to provide an airtight alibi. He was living in a completely different part of the country at the time of Grace’s disappearance. He remained locked up on the grand larceny charge but was cleared as a suspect in the kidnapping.

As it happened, this wouldn’t be the only time that Delia Budd would identify the wrong man as her daughter’s abductor. (In fact, she had already pointed the finger at several other individuals, including a detective from the Missing Persons Bureau, who had been recruited to fill out a lineup on an earlier occasion.) Nor would this be the only time that an incensed wife would accuse her husband of being the man who had stolen Grace Budd. Just a few months later, the same situation would figure in the most sensational—and surprising—development in the Budd case up to that point.

That development came about as a direct result of the Charles Howard episode. A woman named Jessie Pope had been reading newspaper accounts of Howard’s arrest as a suspect in the Budd case and his subsequent exoneration. The seed of an idea was planted in her mind, germinated there for several months, and finally came to fruition at the tail end of the summer.

On September 3, 1930, Mrs. Pope appeared at the West Twentieth Street station to inform the police that her estranged husband—a sixty-seven-year-old janitor named Charles Edward Pope—was the man who had snatched Grace Budd.

Mrs. Pope had an amazing story to relate. At the time of the kidnapping, she explained, she was separated from her husband and living with her sister, Mrs. Margaret McDougal, at 314 High Street in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. On June 3, 1928—the day of Grace Budd’s disappearance—a Western Union boy arrived with a message from her husband, asking her to meet him at the corner of High and Smith Streets, just a few blocks away.

Mystified but intrigued by the telegram, Mrs. Pope proceeded to the spot, where she found her husband waiting. With him was a sweet-faced, brown-haired girl, dressed up in her Sunday best.

Pope asked his wife if she would mind taking care of the girl for a few days while he went off on some unspecified business. The girl, he explained, was the daughter of a friend, and it would be “a great favor” to everyone if Mrs. Pope consented to look after the child.

Mrs. Pope had no idea what sort of funny business her husband was up to, but she refused to have any part of it. “Then I’ll have to take her back home with me,” Pope grumbled. After a brief but bitter exchange of words, Pope stormed away, leading the little girl off in the direction of the Perth Amboy-Tottenville ferry. Before they disappeared from view, the girl turned and gave Mrs. Pope a look that “she would never forget.”

Almost immediately after this strange incident, Mrs. Pope continued, she had become “seriously ill.” By the time she recovered, months later, the excitement over the Budd case had died down and the memory of that day had faded from her mind. Only recently, after reading about Charles Howard in the newspapers, had it all come back to her. Throughout the summer, her suspicions had mounted, until, just the day before, she had finally taken it upon herself to visit the Budds. Delia Budd had shown her photographs of the missing tenyear-old. As soon as Mrs. Pope laid eyes on them, she recognized who her husband’s mysterious, brown-haired companion had been.