DERANGED (by Harold Schechter)

 

"He bore the name of a great american family.... and soaked that name in Blood!"

In May, 1928, a kindly old man came to the door of the Budd family home in New York City. A few days later, he persuaded Mr. And mrs. Budd to let him take their adorable little girl, Grace, on an outing.

Albert Fish appeared to be a harmless, white-haired grandfather. The Budds never guessed that they had entrusted their child to a monster.

Six years later, after a relentless search by a New York detective and nationwide press coverage, the mystery of Grace Budd’s disappearance was finally solved - and an unparalleled crime of gore and horror was revealed. The truth behind Grace’s murder was so revolting, so shocking, that it changed American society forever. What Albert Fish did to Grace Budd, and perhaps fifteen other young children, went beyond every parent’s worst nightmare. And he did it in a way that caused experts to pronounce him te most deranged human being they had ever seen.

 

---

"America had never known crimes like his..........

 

Before Grace and the old man proceeded on their journey, he had a stop to make.

At the corner of Fourtheenth Street and Ninth Avenue he retrieved his canvas-wrapped bundle and thanked the man inside the newsstand for watching it.

Then he and Grace continued on their way, the old man cradling his bundle in his arms.

 

Wrapped inside were a butcher’s knife, a meatcleaver and a small handsaw - the three items that the little gray man with the kindly eyes and friendly smile liked to think of as his "implements of Hell".

 

 

---

 

 

On March 6, 1932, readers of The New York Times, sipping their breakfast coffee or settling back on the livingroom sofa, were jaared from the enjoyment of their Sunday morning ritual by an alarming

full-page feature, headlined, "KIDNAPPING: A RISING MENACE TO THE NATION".

Though the article was occasioned by the shocking abduction, just five days before, of Charles Lindbergh Jr. - the infant son of America’s most revered hero - it was not illustrated with a photo of the missing baby or of his famous parents.

Rather, the portait that appaered on the top of the page was that of another, earlier kidnap victim, who had disappeared from her home in 1928, never to be seen again.

This was a sweet-featured, ten year old girl with bobbed brown hair, a gentle smile, and a name which evoked such vivid images of tenderness and purity that no novelist would have dared to invent it: Grace Budd.

From the day of her dissapearance, the mystery of little Gracie’s whereabouts - and the effotrs of the New York City Police Department to unravel it - had riveted the public’s attention. What made the case so sensational was not simply the flowerlike innocence of the victim but, perhaps even more, the chilling circumstances of the crime.

The child had been lured from her home and family, by an elderly kind-seeming gentleman who had offered to take her to a birthday party.

Neither Gracie nor her grizzled companion - a figure of such cadavarous coloring that he came to be known in the tabloids as the ‘Gray Man" - returned that night. Or ever again.

The Budd kidnapping struck a powerfully disturbing chord in the hearts of parents throughout the country. In a way the crime was even more unsettling then the abduction of the Lindbergh baby. Because of the aviator’s extraordinary renown, the theft of his child (whose corpse was eventually uncovered in a shallow grave not far from home) became the most infamous crime of the Depression. It was a deed that seemed not simply heinous but - given the worshipful regard in which the "Lone Eagle"was held by his countrymen - almost inconceivably wicked. As terrible as it was, however, the snatching of Lindbergh’s twenty- month old son was commited out of conventionally base motives. It was a straightforward (if appalingly cruel) kidnapping for ransom.

The abduction of the Budd girl was something else, a crime that couldn’t fail to induce a shiver of dread in the parents of every young child. Only the rich, after all, had to worry thet their offspring might be stolen for money.

But no child was safe from the evil that had befallen Grace Budd - from the treachery od a smiling stranger, whose friendliness concealed a sinister intent. More than any other child-snatching of the Depression years, the Budd kidnapping brought home a terrible truth: that the world contains creatures who batten on innocence and that the trustfullness of children makes them frighteningly vulnarable to such beings.

In our own time, when child abduction has become epidemic and even our milk cartons are imprinted with the faces of the missing, that truth has been confirmed with dismaying regularity. To be sure, most kidnapped minors are the victims of broken marriages, of bitterly divorced spouses stealing their own children away from a hated ex-husband or wife. But the carrying off of young ones by predatory strangers happens often enough to be alegitimate fear.

And, after all, it takes only a single outrage, like the 1979 dissapearance of Etan Patz (the six-year-old Manhattan boy who set off for his school bus one Spring morning and was never seen again) or the slaying of little Adam Walsh (whose decapitated body was discovered shortly after he vanished from a Florida shopping mall in 1981) to poison the peace of mind of even the most carefree mother or father. Of all the evils that plague the modern world, none is more nightmarish from a parent's point of view than the crime we now call "stranger abduction".

For millions of Americans, the Budd case first gave birth to that nightmare. This is not to say that parents haven't always kept a close eye on their children or cautioned them to be wary of strangers. But the Budd kidnapping was one of the watershed crimes in American history. Before it happened, America was a more innocent place, a place where parents felt free to allow their young children to roam unattended, even in New York City, without fearing that they would disappear forever. Afterward, few parents would permit their sons or daughters to venture into the world without teaching them first that children who talk to, take candy from, or accept the generous offers of strangers sometimes come to very bad ends.

It would be sic years from the day of Grace Budd's disappearance before the case was finally solved, and when it was, the truth turned out to be infinitely more horrifying than her parents' worst fears. The "Gray Man" would stand revealed as a creature of unimaginable perversity and evil. Though his name has faded from public memory, his presence is inescapable. Behind the spectral features of the figure that haunts every parent's dreams - the fiend who lures children to destruction with the promise of a treat - lies the wizened face of the "Gray Man", whose name was Albert Fish.

 

The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough

(The secret murders of Milwaukee's Jeffrey Dahmer)

By Anne E. Schwartz

One night in July of 1991, two policemen saw a man running handcuffed from the apartment of Jeffrey Dahmer. Investigating, the officers made a gruesome discovery: three human skulls reposed in Dahmer's refrigirator, and the body parts of at least eleven more human beings were scattered throughout the apartment.

The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough spans the entire Dahmer case - from the early morning hours of July 23, when Anne E. Shwartz was first tipped to the story by a police officer, to the public ordeal of all those the case has thrown into the spotlight.

Shwartz, the Milwaukee Journal reporter who first broke the story, details:

-The dramatic scene when two officers first entered Dahmer's apartment - what they saw as the shocking story unfolded

-The episode two months before Dahmer was apprehended, when officers found a fourteen-year-old boy naked and bleeding in the street and returned him to Dahmer's apartment believing the incident was just a homosexual lover's quarrel. While the officers spoke with Dahmer, a victim's body was decomposing in the next room. Dahmer later confessed that he killed the boy immediately after the officers left

-The fascinating science of forensics and how old-fashioned police investigation has identified the sixteen Milwaukee victims to date

-The mind of Dahmer - the boy who killed a dog and displayed its head on a stake in the woods, the eighteen-year-old abandoned when his mother took his younger brother away after a bitter divorce. Did the events of his childhood cause him to kill?

-The personal stories of the victims' families and the outrage they felt toward the police, who were supposed to protect them. Schwartz has obtained exclusive access to the police, attorneys and judges involved. She reveals what it is like to be privy to confidential information and thrown into the position of deciding what the public can and cannot know. And the book will answer the ulimate queation:

Why wasn't Dahmer stopped sooner?

The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough will be read by all those who want to know the complete, inside story of the Dahmer case - and what happened in it's wake.

 

 

Perfect Victim

By ChristineMc Guire and Carla Norton.

A horrific true story that shocked me deeply.

The story of a young college girl who, while hitch hiking from her college back to her parent's house, happened to come across Mr and Mrs. Cameron Hooker, a couple as depraved as they come...

She was taken and immediately a box was placed around her head, later to be all to well known to her as "the headbox", she lived for years with them, still held captive and too afraid to run away, brainwashed after all the depravities she's had to undergo all these years.

This book is Colleen Stan's story , "the girl in the box", The Perfct Victim.

You have to read it to believe it, and try not to shiver at the atrocities both physical and mental...