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

aside. He was baffled. The tenants of the building, most of whom had young children, were careful to keep the wooden hatch closed at all times, and no boy as young as Billy Beaton or Billy Gaffney could have possibly moved it aside.
    “Where’s Billy Gaffney?” Mr. Beaton asked. “Is he still up there?”
    His son shook his head.
    Mr. Beaton, who only a moment before had beenawash with relief, suddenly felt his throat tighten with anxiety. “Where is he then?”
    Billy Beaton’s reply, offered without hesitation, would be a source of continuing controversy in the days and weeks ahead. It was the sort of answer that a three-year-old could be expected to give and, for that reason, the authorities were inclined to discount it. Indeed, it would be six years before the world came to realize that the Beaton child had been right all along.
    “The boogey man took him,” Billy Beaton said.
    By the following day, twenty-five detectives and patrolmen, under the command of Sergeant Elmer Joseph, had been assigned to the case. Little Billy Beaton, along with his father and Johnny McNiff—the last people to see the missing boy—were interrogated closely. Each time he was asked what had happened, the Beaton boy repeated his story, but Sergeant Joseph dismissed it as a three-year-old’s prattle. “All children talk about the boogey man when they sense trouble,” he explained.
    A kidnapping made no sense to Sergeant Joseph. The Gaffneys were desperately poor. Edmund, the father, worked as a truck driver for a local stocking company, a job that barely paid him a living wage. Indeed, at the moment of her son’s disappearance, Elizabeth Gaffney had been seated at the kitchen table, patching a pair of her son’s tattered gray knickers. These and another equally shabby navy-blue pair were the only pants her child owned. He had been wearing the blue knickers, along with a gray middy, black stockings and black shoes (but neither hat nor coat) when he vanished into the gloom.
    No one in his right mind, Sergeant Joseph reasoned, would kidnap the child of such penniless people in the hope of obtaining a ransom. It was the sergeant’s opinion that the unsupervised boy had wandered out into the street and fallen into trouble. It was conceivable that he had taken it into his head to explore one of the many nearby factory buildings and had become trapped inside. Or—a much grimmer possibility—that he had made hisway to the Gowanus canal, located less than five blocks from his home, and met with an accident. A police scow was dispatched to the canal, and two officers spent the day dredging its muddy bottom with grappling hooks. But they managed to bring up nothing except a sodden assortment of trash.
    Over the days and weeks ahead, the tenement district surrounding Billy Gaffney’s home was the scene of one of the most intensive hunts in New York City history. Before it was over, more than three hundred and fifty policemen, plus untold numbers of civilian volunteers—neighbors, school children, Boy Scouts, and others—had taken part. Every cellar, sewer, loft, factory, church, alleyway, lumber yard, coal bin, and crawlspace in the area was searched and searched again. But no trace of Billy could be found. As one dispirited detective put it, it was as if the earth had swallowed him up.
    Throughout this period, Mrs. Gaffney remained sequestered in her dusky apartment, grieving and growing more haggard by the day. Her three married sisters had hurried to her side to offer what comfort they could, and it was only at their insistence that Mrs. Gaffney ate and slept at all. Though she remained firm in the conviction that Billy was still alive, the thought of her “candy boy” (as she called him) lost somewhere in the wintry streets was an unrelenting torment. “He was always so pale—in the house so much,” she cried to reporters. “I can’t bear to think how he looks now, without food and all.”
    To make matters worse, the