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

into darkened tenement hallways when they were spotted and set upon by enraged neighborhood residents, who were prevented from beating the culprits to death only by the timely appearance of the police. Nevertheless, though detectives would have liked nothing better than to establish even a slender connection between one of these men and Billy Gaffney, Sandman and Bimberg—like Giles Steele—were quickly eliminated as suspects.
    To the legion of New Yorkers who had been following every twist and turn in the search for little Billy Gaffney and sharing in the hope that the missing boy might still be found alive, the front-page headline in the Wednesday, March 9, edition of
The New York Times
was a shocker: “ FEAR SLAIN CHILD FOUND IN CASK IS GAFFNEY BOY .”
    On the previous afternoon, in Palmer, Massachusetts, a high school sophomore named Chester Kolbusz had been scavenging at the town dump. Lying on top of a refuse pile was an old wine cask that appeared to be partially burned. Peering inside the cask, Kolbusz saw alumpy, burlap-wrapped object. He reached a hand into the cask and pulled aside the fabric. What he saw sent him dashing in terror to the nearest police station. The object was the corpse of a child, its face horribly mutilated.
    The police were on the scene within minutes. Nearly a month had now passed since Billy’s disappearance and, by this point, a description of the kidnapped Brooklyn boy had been wired to policemen throughout the Northeast. By early Tuesday evening, Massachusetts state detectives had contacted their counterparts in New York with the details of the discovery. Inspector Sullivan broke the news to the Gaffneys as gently as possible, and arrangements were made at once for Billy’s father to travel up to Palmer the following day.
    By this point, of course, Billy’s parents had suffered through a spate of false alarms—supposedly reliable (but invariably erroneous) reports that their son’s body had been dumped in the East River or buried somewhere on Staten Island. Several weeks after Billy was stolen, a steam-shovel operator, digging up the grounds of a mental institution in Brooklyn for a new sewer line, turned up the body of a small boy wrapped in the remnants of a patchwork quilt. The police believed at first that the dead child was Billy Gaffney—until an autopsy revealed that the corpse had been in the ground for at least seven months. (The body turned out to be that of a neighborhood child, dead of natural causes, whose impoverished parents, unable to afford a funeral, had buried him by night on the hospital grounds.)
    For the Gaffneys, however, the grisly discovery in the Palmer town dump was far more distressing than any previous scare. For one thing, a hasty postmortem by the medical examiner seemed to indicate that the murdered boy had been dead for just over three weeks—exactly as long as Billy had been missing. For another—as
The New York Times
reported—the corpse in the wine cask was that of a little boy “answering in almost every detail” to Billy’s description.
    Like Billy, the victim was a thin, pale child with brown hair and large blue eyes. Even more ominously, the killerhad apparently taken pains to obliterate certain telltale features from the corpse, in places where Billy himself had identifying marks. The lower half of the murdered boy’s face, for example, had been badly disfigured, his jaw crushed by a series of savage blows. Billy had a scar on his lower lip, the token of a bad spill he had taken as a baby. And the skin of the dead boy’s stomach had been slashed with a sharp object. Billy had a distinctively shaped birthmark on his stomach, precisely where the corpse’s abdomen had been carved up.
    The following morning, in the company of Detective James Dwyer, Mr. Gaffney—whose employer had given him a paid leave of absence until the kidnapping was solved—took the train up to Palmer. During the entire ride, he sat in an agonized silence,