Eat Thy Neighbour (14 page)

No one really noticed his disappearance until he failed to return home for dinner. Francis’ father, a policeman, lost no time
rounding up the neighbours and organising a search party. As they scoured the area around Charlton Woods, someone said they had seen a boy who seemed to match Francis’ description go into the woods with an old man who looked like a bum. Deep in the woods, the searchers found what was left of Francis McDonnell.

The boy’s clothes had been ripped from his little body before he was beaten to a bloody pulp. Finally, his own braces had been used to strangle the life out of him. The local police were immediately called in to examine the crime scene and their best detectives were certain that the ‘bum’ must have had an accomplice. A man as small and frail as the one Anna McDonnell, the boys from the ball game, and her neighbour had all described just couldn’t have been strong enough to do so much damage to Francis.

In her statement to the police, Anna McDonnell described her encounter with the old man. The thing that seemed to stick out in her mind was that ‘everything about him seemed faded and grey’. From this strange appraisal, the unknown assailant became known as the ‘Grey Man’. But just like a puff of grey smoke, the Grey Man vanished completely – at least, it was nearly three years before his next recorded appearance.

Billy Gaffney was four years old. On 11 February 1927 he and his best friend, a three-year-old also named Bill, were playing in the hallway outside their parents’ apartments. A neighbour’s twelve-year-old son was trying to keep an eye on them, but his attention was divided between the boys and his little sister who was asleep inside. At some point, while the older boy was checking on his sister, the boys disappeared. With the help of Bill’s father they found the three-year-old in the hallway on the top floor of the apartment building, but Billy Gaffney was nowhere to be found. When they questioned his little friend about Billy, all he could find to say was, ‘The bogeyman took him.’

The bogeyman, a small, grey-haired man in a worn suit, had taken Billy to a nearby trolley stop. The trolley driver noticed that the boy obviously did not want to get on board with the old man. He kept crying for his mother and the man had to forcibly keep him in his seat during the ride and then drag him off at the stop in Brooklyn. What happened to Billy Gaffney from that point is best left to the words of Albert Fish as he recalled the incident years later.

I brought him to the Riker Avenue dump. There is a house that stands alone not far from there. I took the boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes on the dump. Then I walked back and took the trolley to 59th Street, at 2 am, and walked home from there.

Next day about 2 pm, I took tools, a good heavy set of cat-of-nine-tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six strips about 8 inches long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. (After describing in blood-chilling detail his torture, mutilation and murder of the child, Fish recounted his dismemberment of his small victim.)

I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood. [Then] I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a [small suitcase] with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly . . . in my [suitcase] with a lot of paper. I put [the remaining pieces of the body] in sacks weighted with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water . . . along the road going to North Beach.

I came home with my meat . . . I made a stew out of his ears, nose, pieces of his face and belly. I put [in] onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good.

Then I split the cheeks of his behind open . . . I put strips of bacon on each cheek . . . and put them in the oven. Then I picked four onions and when the meat had roasted for about ¼ hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted [him] with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy.

In about 2 hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet, fat little behind. I ate every bit of the meat in four days.

While Albert Fish was torturing, murdering and devouring Billy Gaffney, Billy’s father had called in fellow police officers from across the five boroughs of New York. They organised a massive search and interviewed everyone they could find who might have seen the boy. The one thing they did not do, however, was take much notice of three-year-old Bill when he kept trying to tell them that the bogeyman had taken his friend Billy. Even when he tried his best to explain that it was a skinny old man with a moustache, no one made the connection between Bill’s bogeyman and the Grey Man who had abducted and murdered Francis McDonnell almost three years earlier. Once again, the Grey Man would simply vanish like vapour. Fifteen months later he reappeared.

When Delia Budd answered the door to her family’s shabby New York City tenement on Monday 28 May 1928 she found herself face-to-face with a small, frail-looking man at the top end of middle age. He was wearing a rumpled, worn suit and a battered old bowler hat that he removed politely when Mrs Budd asked who he was. He said his name was Frank Howard and he had come in answer to an advertisement placed in the
New York World
by Edward Budd.

Mrs Budd asked Mr Howard to come in and told her youngest daughter, Beatrice, to go and find her brother Ed. While they
waited, Delia sized up the stranger who had answered her son’s request for employment on a farm. He seemed quiet, almost shy; his diffident air was only accentuated by his silver hair and drooping moustache. He was polite even if he did look a bit shabby, but that was just what you might expect from a farmer who was unaccustomed to coming into the big city. Besides, the Budds were so poor that almost anybody looked good by comparison.

When the strapping, eighteen-year-old Edward arrived, Frank Howard appraised him with a smile. He explained that he had a small farm in Farmingdale, Long Island, and that he ran it with the help of a few farmhands, a cook and his six youngsters. Unfortunately one of his hands was leaving and he needed a good, strong young man to take his place. There was no doubt that Ed Budd was strong, but was he willing to work hard? Edward assured Mr Howard that he was and in return the man offered him $15 a week along with room and board. Ed Budd was delighted. Replacing his hat, Albert Fish – in the guise of Frank Howard – promised he would return on Saturday to pick Ed up and take him to the farm where he could begin work immediately.

Leaving the 15th Street tenement, Fish stopped at a hardware store long enough to buy the tools he would need to murder and dismember Edward Budd. He bought a meat cleaver, a hacksaw and a butcher’s knife, asking the clerk to wrap them up for him.

Saturday 2 June came and went without any sign of Mr Howard. A telegram from him did arrive, however. In it he explained that something had come up making Saturday impossible, but that he would be at the Budds’ on Sunday morning. True to his word, an hour before noon the next day the Grey Man appeared at the Budds’ door. This time he was bearing gifts. He handed a small pot of soft cheese and a box of strawberries to Delia Budd, explaining that they were produce
from his farm. Delighted at such thoughtfulness, Mrs Budd insisted that he stay for Sunday dinner. Demurely, Fish accepted the invitation.

As the family and their guest were seating themselves round the table, a beautiful, dark-haired, pale-skinned, ten-year-old girl appeared in her best Sunday dress. Mrs Budd introduced her as their daughter Gracie, who had just come home from church. Albert Fish was enraptured. Asking the child to show him how well she could count, he handed her a wad of money that amazed the entire Budd family. Scooting herself on to the old man’s lap, Gracie carefully counted out the $92 and 50 cents. When Fish beamed at her, she kissed him on the cheek as though he were her favourite uncle. Albert Fish made an immediate change of plans.

After dinner, Fish told the Budds he would be back later in the evening to pick up Ed, but that he had to go to his sister’s house because it was his young niece’s birthday and he had been invited to the party. Almost as an afterthought, he asked Mrs Budd if it would be all right if Gracie came along. Delia was uncertain, but her husband – a man whose face showed every beating life had doled out to him – shook his head. ‘Let the poor kid go,’ he said to his wife. ‘She don’t see many good times.’ The matter was settled and Mr Howard promised faithfully to have little Gracie back by nine o’clock at the latest. It was the last time the Budd family ever saw Gracie.

Fish took Gracie by train from New York to rural Worthington in Westchester County. From the railway station they wandered down country lanes until they came to a deserted house that Fish had reconnoitred for the occasion. His disposition of Gracie’s small life appears below in Fish’s own words.

When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them.

When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in the closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma.

First I stripped her naked. How she did kick, bite and scratch me. I choked her to death.

It would appear, from a disjointed, later version of his statement, that Fish then drained Gracie’s blood into an old paint bucket he had found lying in the house. We now return to Fish’s own version of the story.

[I] then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook and eat it. How sweet and tender [she] was, roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her entire body.

When Gracie Budd failed to return home her family became frantic. In the morning Ed Budd went to the police station to report her disappearance and probable abduction. He gave them all the information he had on the mysterious Mr Howard, including the location of his farm in Farmington and the address he gave for his sister’s apartment. It only took the police a few minutes to discover that both addresses were fictitious. Anxious to track down the man calling himself Frank Howard, the police asked the Budd family to go through the mugshots of all known kidnappers, child molesters and mental patients known to be at large. There was no sign of Albert Fish.

The New York Police Department put an extraordinary effort into the case. More than twenty detectives and officers were assigned to the Gracie Budd disappearance and 1,000 fliers were printed and posted off to police stations all over the East Coast.
Eventually solid evidence did turn up. They located a street vendor who had sold the strawberries and cheese to the little man with the grey moustache and found the Western Union office from which Fish had sent word that he would be delayed in picking up Edward Budd. Fortunately, Western Union still had Fish’s original, handwritten copy of the telegram against which a possible ransom note could be compared. Because both the street vendor and the Western Union office were in East Harlem, this area was scoured for any sign of Gracie or a man matching Mr Howard’s description. No suspects were found and no ransom demand ever arrived.

Four and a half years later any hope of finding Gracie Budd had long since been given up. Still, there are always officers who refuse to give up no matter how ‘cold’ a case has become. One of these was Detective William King of the New York Metropolitan Police. Like a dog worrying a bone, he continued toying with the Budd case. Occasionally he would leak some tiny bit of information to the press which, true or not, would hopefully make the unknown suspect reveal himself. On 2 November 1934 King placed one such item with gossip columnist and radio personality Walter Winchell. Winchell broadcast the story, stating that a break had come in the Gracie Budd case and an arrest was expected at any time.

Ten days after Winchell’s radio broadcast, the Budds received a letter from Albert Fish. In it, he rambled on about cannibalism in general, gave a fictitious account of how he was introduced to eating human flesh and, finally, gave the graphic description of how he killed and ate their daughter, which was included above. A few lines from the letter will serve to illustrate its tone.

My Dear Mrs. Budd,

On Sunday June 3, 1928, I called on you at 406 W. 15 St. Brought you pot cheese, strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat on my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her.

He ended the letter with what, for the monstrously deranged Fish, may have been intended as a note of reassurance: ‘I did not fuck her tho I could have had I wished. She died a virgin.’

Fortunately for her, Delia Budd was illiterate. But when she handed the letter to her son Edward, now twenty-three, he ran straight to the police in a blind fury. Since the only person who was still up-to-date on the case was Detective King, Ed Budd and the letter were directed to him.

The letter was carefully examined and compared with the original, handwritten version of the telegram. The handwriting matched. King also noticed that the envelope was imprinted with the letters NYPCBA inside a hexagonal shield. This turned out to be the logo of the New York Private Chauffeurs’ Benevolent Association. While police checked through the Association’s membership cards trying to find a handwriting match, King requested any association member who had knowledge of any blank stationery which had left the club’s offices to come forward. A janitor at the NYPCBA, Lee Siscoski, admitted he had taken a few sheets of stationery and some envelopes for his own use and carried them back to his rooming house on 52nd Street.