Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer Read Online Free

Francis McDonnell seems to have gotten away,” blared the
New York Daily News
. “But even if he should be apprehended—even if a confession should be wrung from his lips—there is little likelihood that the grim and merciless punishment that an outraged citizenry would look for could be inflicted by law!” “The chair,” fumed the editor of another city paper, “will be far too good for the perpetrator of this atrocious deed.”
    Not long after these remarks appeared, some of the “outraged citizenry” of Staten Island had a chance to vent their wrath. The victim was a hapless drifter named John Eskowski, who had been squatting in an abandonedshack on the south shore of Staten Island, ten miles from the spot where Francis McDonnell was slain.
    For several weeks, stories had circulated through the area—rumors of a sinister “hermit” who had been accosting local boys. Late one afternoon, a teenager named William Bellach happened upon Eskowski in the woods. Convinced that Eskowski was the child molester, Bellach ran to a nearby gas station and alerted the proprietor, Salvatore Pace, who armed himself with a pistol and followed the boy back to Eskowski’s shack. Pace leveled his weapon at Eskowski and began to lead him from the woods, but the drifter—believing Pace to be a bandit—pulled his own gun from his coat pocket and ducked behind a tree.
    The two men exchanged shots, but neither was hit. Beating a hasty retreat to his gas station, Pace called the police. Within minutes, a troop of mounted officers descended on the woods, followed by a mob of a hundred armed, enraged citizens, convinced that the killer of Francis McDonnell had finally been found.
    Eskowski, who had taken cover behind some rocks, opened fire on his pursuers, who fired back. Hit in the side, Eskowski fell to his knees and, seeing the circle of men approaching, put his pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger. He survived only long enough to reveal that he was a farmer who had abandoned his home several weeks earlier after a bitter quarrel with his wife. Checking his story, the police confirmed that, at the time of the murder, Eskowski had been living in Radnor, Pennsylvania.
    The Eskowski incident made it briefly into the headlines, but for most of the public, the McDonnell case was rapidly receding into the past. The Leopold and Loeb trial was well underway by then, and its irresistible mix of murder, money and courtroom melodrama made it the most popular show in America. The slaying of Francis McDonnell had become a matter of interest only to those most directly concerned with the crime—the police, the residents of Port Richmond, and, of course, the boy’s parents. Just a few weeks after the discovery of her son’s strangled and mutilated body, the heartbroken mother made one final appeal to a public that had already begun to regard her tragedy as yesterday’s news.
    “Help us catch the monster who murdered our little boy,” Anna McDonnell implored. “Help us find the gray man.”

2

    “O come and go with me, no longer delay, Or else, foolish child, I will drag thee away.” “O father! O father! Now, now keep your hold, The Erl-king has seized me—his grip is so cold!”
    JOHANN GOETHE, “The Erl-king”
    T here are certain wounds that time never heals. For the parents of Francis McDonnell, the savage murder of their child was an unabating horror, made even more unbearable by the escape of the creature who had committed it. The years went by, but—in spite of the ongoing efforts of the New York City police, who found it hard to swallow the unsolved murder of a fellow officer’s son—the killer was still on the loose. To Anna and Arthur McDonnell, the gray man was as real as the grief that racked their hearts. But only their pain—and a small white coffin buried in the old Calvary cemetery—proved that he had existed at all. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the gray man had vanished, seemingly