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

thousands of enlisted sailors swarmed into Times Square and Coney Island in search of good times in the big city. The friendly invasion got saturation coverage in the newspapers.

On Monday, June 4, the Daily Mirror ran a big photo spread of the festivities. A prominent photograph showed two smiling young sailors in the company of a pair of pretty teenage girls. A Brooklyn woman saw the face of one girl, a brunette, and was startled. The woman had followed the case of Grace Budd, the lovely young girl who had vanished in 1928 after a seemingly friendly old man said he wanted to take her to a birthday party.

The woman snipped out the photo, drew an arrow pointing to the brunette, and wrote, “This is the girl, Grace Budd.” Then she mailed it to the Budds, whose address, 135 West Twenty-Fourth Street in Manhattan, had been in the papers occasionally. Still living in borderline poverty, the Budds had moved to a smaller apartment since Grace’s disappearance.135

Delia Budd looked at the photograph and thought it looked like an older Grace. Several relatives and friends agreed. So the next day, Delia and her husband, Albert, took the photo to the police to show Detective Lieutenant William F. King of the missing persons bureau.

The detective understood the parents’ desperate need to hold on to hope, but he was highly skeptical. Was it really possible that the pretty brunette was Grace Budd? If the girl in the photo was her, how to explain why she had not reached out to her parents? Was she being held against her will, with no chance to escape or to cry for help? Did she have amnesia?

Nevertheless, King did not discourage reporters from reviving the Budd case. Revisiting an unsolved crime, especially around its anniversary, was a staple of journalism then, as it is today. The anniversary of Grace’s vanishing was on June 3. So the New York papers pounced on the chance to reprise the case, displaying the photo of the pretty girl and hinting that she just might be Grace Budd.

Not many days after the photo was published, a sixteen-year-old Bronx girl named Florence Swinney walked into a police station and identified herself as the brunette in the picture. She and a friend had been photographed with two nice sailors they had met in the city. End of story. End of a flicker of hope for Albert and Delia Budd.

But as sorry as he was for Grace’s parents, Detective King was not displeased. The latest spate of stories had revived the public’s interest in the Budd case. Some good might come of that, especially if that interest were rekindled at the right moment. King knew how to do that, but how would he know when? Instinct.

“I checked on the Grace Budd mystery,” the enormously popular newspaper columnist Walter Winchell declared in the Daily Mirror in November 1934. “She was eight when she was kidnapped about six years ago. And it is safe to tell you that the Dep’t of Missing Persons will break the case, or they expect to, in four weeks. They are holding a ‘cokie’ now at Randall’s Island, who is said to know most about the crime. Grace is supposed to have been done away with in lime, but another legend is that her skeleton is buried in a local spot. More anon.”136

Winchell’s grammar and syntax ran off the rails, as usual, but so what? Winchell got Grace Budd’s age wrong: she was ten, not eight, when she vanished in 1928. Again, so what? The error was minor by Winchell’s standards, and the columnist wasn’t paid for his graceful language. He was paid for dishing out juicy gossip, some of which even turned out to be true eventually.

But King knew that if anything in Winchell’s latest column was true, it was pure chance. The police did not expect to break the Grace Budd case in four weeks. There was no jailed cocaine addict who knew anything about her disappearance.

Winchell had not “checked on” the Budd case, as he claimed. He had simply been fed a fictional tidbit by King. The detective had learned that doling out morsels about the Budd case to select journalists, sometimes coinciding with the anniversary of Grace’s disappearance, always sparked letters and phone calls to the police. Some were from sincere people who thought they might have clues. Most were from screwballs.

King thought the filthy skunk who had stolen Grace probably looked at the papers now and then. Maybe he’d be tempted to get in touch, just to remind people he was still out there somewhere. You just never knew what might happen when you planted stuff in the papers.

King was willing to try just about anything. He was the very embodiment of tenacity, having traveled some fifty thousand miles by the autumn of 1934 to pursue possible clues, however far-fetched they seemed, to the fate of Grace Budd.

He had been the lead investigator in the Budd case early on and had seen how Grace’s parents had been broken by their daughter’s disappearance. He’d even postponed his retirement to pursue the case.

King figured that, if the creep who called himself Frank Howard did read the papers, he might have gotten a sick thrill over the false sighting of Grace over the Memorial Day weekend. Maybe the Winchell item would further stimulate him.

On the morning of Monday, November 12, a letter arrived at the Budds’ apartment. It had been mailed the night before from the Grand Central Annex post office in Manhattan. It was addressed to Delia Budd, who couldn’t read. She gave it to her son, Eddie, who had barely begun to read it before he bolted from the apartment and ran to a police station.

By midmorning, Detective King had the letter, which began “My dear Mrs. Budd.” The writer said he had taken Grace to an abandoned house in Westchester County, killed and dismembered her, then eaten her flesh over the next nine days. He rhapsodized