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praying for a miracle. The thought of his son, his “candy boy,” dying so grotesquely was more than he could stand. He stared out the window at the bleak late-winter landscape and did his best to steel himself for the dreadful confrontation that awaited him in a small-town Massachusetts mortuary.
    That confrontation never took place. Even before Mr. Gaffney arrived at Palmer, the police had discovered that the murdered child was not his missing son.
    He was, in fact, a local child, the son of twenty-five-year-old Ida Kelly, who worked as a housekeeper for a farmer named Albert Doe. Shortly after Christmas, Doe had lost his temper at the four-year-old boy and beaten him brutally while his mother looked on. The child died two days later. Doe hid the body in the cellar of his farmhouse for a few days, then stuffed it into a wine cask, drove it to the dump, and tossed it on a garbage heap, which he attempted—unsuccessfully—to set on fire. By the time Mr. Gaffney and Detective Dwyer showed up, Doe had already been arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
    The Gaffneys felt badly, of course, for the victim’s mother, but their overwhelming emotion was sheer gratitude and relief. “Thank God it wasn’t my son!” Mr. Gaffney exclaimed to reporters as he started back to NewYork. Though their prayers had been answered at another parent’s expense, Billy’s mother and father could only interpret the Palmer episode as a hopeful sign—an affirmation of their faith that their own child would yet be found alive.
    By this point, however, the Brooklyn police were rapidly approaching the end of their rope. It was a measure of their increasing desperation that, by early March, they had begun welcoming the assistance of various cranks. One of these was a crackpot inventor, who showed up at the Gaffney home one day with a contraption he described as a “mechanical bloodhound.” In effect, the apparatus was nothing more than an elaborately tricked-out divining rod with a rubber tube at one end, into which a strand of Billy’s hair was inserted. With the device vibrating in his hands, the inventor led a dozen policemen to a nearby varnish factory, which they spent the next several hours searching—in vain.
    Even more bizarre was a séance conducted by a building contractor and part-time hypnotist named Harry Culballah one evening in late March. As Billy’s parents, along with two New York City detectives—William Casey and Fred Shaw—looked on, Culballah put a cousin of Mrs. Gaffney’s, a man named Bill Hersting, into a deep trance. Culballah asked Hersting what he saw.
    “I see Billy in the spirit world,” Hersting replied in a heavy, drugged voice.
    “Look further!” Culballah commanded.
    “I see a man,” Kersting continued. “He is leading Billy by the hand.”
    “Where are they going?”
    The spectators stood transfixed as Hersting proceeded to give a highly detailed, and increasingly animated, recitation of Billy’s fate:
    “The man is taking Billy to 286 Sixteenth Street. This is a red brick building, three stories, with abakery on the ground floor. They go into the bakery and the man asks for a cup of coffee. He buys Billy some buns and has difficulty getting him to eat them, but Billy finally eats them.
    “The man and Billy now walk down Sixteenth Street, across Fifth Avenue. When they reach Fourth Avenue, the man seems to fade out of the picture. Billy continues to Third Avenue, then up Fifteenth Street. He stands at the curb. A woman appears and takes him by the hand, then leads him across the street and leaves him. Billy goes north on Third Avenue, walks to Twelfth Street, turns west and passes some factory buildings then a gas tank.
    “He reaches water. My God! He’s going into the canal! He’s disappeared!”
    At this point, Hersting leaped from his chair, his hands outstretched as if to grab the drowning boy. Then, with a terrified scream, he slumped back into his seat and awoke seconds later,