The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

days after Grace’s disappearance, the police publicized their search for the origin of the Western Union message that had been sent to the Budds. Telegraphers and clerks sifted through tens of thousands of message duplicates. Finally, the source was found: the message had been sent from the Western Union office at Third Avenue and 103rd Street in Manhattan.

Detectives figured that the cheese and strawberries given to the Budds had probably been purchased near the Western Union office. Sure enough, the police located a nearby deli selling the type of cheese Howard had brought to the Budds. And a peddler in the neighborhood recognized the price scrawled on the strawberry container as from his own hand. But no one at the deli recalled who had bought the cheese, and the peddler remembered nothing about the man who had bought the strawberries.

The locations of the Western Union office, the deli, and the pushcart peddler suggested to detectives that the man they were hunting lived in East Harlem or at least spent time there. But where exactly, and who the hell was he?

And something else: unlike nearly all kidnappings of the era, there had been no demand for ransom. Not that it would have mattered: the Budds had no extra money. Every dollar they brought in went to pay for rent, food, and modest clothing (when the hand-me-downs were finally too threadbare to wear).

For Grace’s parents, the brutally hot summer was a season of torture. They hoped—or tried to hope—that their beloved daughter was still alive, that whoever had taken her would not… They couldn’t stand to dwell on the possibilities.

No doubt, some newspaper readers and some detectives wondered at the gullibility of people who would let their daughter go off with a man who was little more than a stranger. What kind of parents would do such a thing?

Albert and Delia Budd had not been given much in life. Delia was obese and illiterate. Albert had one good eye, along with a strange-looking glass eye. Every day, he opened doors for people who dressed better than he did, were better educated than he was, and earned far more money than he ever would. Sometimes, they thanked him; often, they ignored him.

The world of Albert and Delia, like their apartment, was a small, cramped place. That was why they didn’t know that Columbus Avenue ended at 110th Street. That was why they had been duped by the seemingly friendly man, the prosperous farmer, who had treated them with respect and brought them gifts.

On the very Sunday that Grace disappeared, the New York Times was stuffed with ads meant for people whose lives were a galaxy away from the world of the Budds. Macy’s offered a forty-three-piece porcelain dinner set “with border of rose and black” for only $18.74. Readers were reminded that “travel is that most delightful of diversions if one is properly equipped with the right luggage and clothes.” Maine, Cape Cod, Havana, and Bermuda beckoned.

The glitter and glamour that lucky people partook of in the late 1920s would never touch the lives of Albert and Delia Budd. They knew that, and they did the best they could.

What kind of parents were they? They were parents who loved their children and took them to church on Sunday. They raised a sturdy son, Eddie, who by the age of eighteen was eager for a good day’s pay for a hard day’s work.

And until June 3, 1928, they were raising a lovely young girl who, by all appearances, would grow up to be a lovely woman. Albert and Delia Budd, who had never had much, had lost their priceless jewel.

Then, just days after Grace vanished, came a tiny flicker of hope.

“I have Grace. She is safe and sound. She is happy in her new home and not at all homesick. I will see to it that Grace has proper schooling. She has been given an Angora cat and a pet canary. She calls the canary Bill…”42

An Angora cat and a canary named Bill? A ten-year-old girl spirited away but not homesick in her new life? Some detectives thought the letter was from a crank. They were right. Nothing came of the letter, just as nothing came of various messages and phone tips right after Grace vanished.

Over the next two and a half years, the patience of Detective William King was tested in ways so bizarre, they would have been funny had he not been engaged in a deadly serious investigation. A prison warden in Florida thought one of his recent inmates, an inveterate liar and con man who had once posed as a doctor and recruited young girls to pose as his daughters, might be the man King was looking for. Delia Budd identified the new suspect as the beast who had taken her daughter. That was enough for a grand jury to indict him.

Then a seemingly better suspect was dragged into the investigation, this one the estranged husband of a bitter wife who claimed in September 1930 that she had seen him in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, with a lovely little girl on June 3, 1928, the very Sunday that Grace Budd had walked out of her parents’ lives.

But why had she waited so long to come forward? “I was sick at the time,” she explained. “By the time I got better, I had forgotten. Then something made me remember…”

Delia Budd identified him with the same certainty she had shown with the Florida ex-con. He, too, was indicted and even went to trial—for one day. Then the judge saw that the evidence wasn’t just flimsy. Given Delia Budd’s unreliability, it was virtually nonexistent.

The judge threw out the case. The indictment against the Florida ex-con was also dismissed. The investigation was back where it had started.

William King had joined the police force in 1907, left to fight in the Great War, then rejoined the department in 1926. He had been around long enough to see the awful things that people could do