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deeply shaken.
    The detectives were so impressed by this performance that they immediately ordered a new search of the Gowanus Canal. A police diver spent much of the following day searching the muddy bottom of the water-way
    But like every other source that claimed to know the whereabouts of Billy Gaffney, the spirit that had spoken through the mouth of William Hersting had been wrong.
    By early spring, the Gaffney story, which had been covered more extensively by the city’s newspapers than any kidnapping in recent memory, had begun to disappear from their pages. Even the tabloid audience was growing tired of it. The drama simply refused to arrive at a satisfyingly happy—or tragic—conclusion. Small news items about Billy continued to appear from time to time, but they were relegated to the back pages. Soon, the flood of letters that had poured into the Gaffney home since the tragedy began had slowed to a trickle. By mid-April, even the cranks had lost interest.
    On July 7, 1929—more than two years after Billy’sdisappearance—a small article appeared in
The New York Times
. Mrs. Elizabeth Gaffney, her health broken by her unrelenting grief, had been taken to Bellevue Hospital with severe chest pains. Never a heavy woman, Mrs. Gaffney had lost forty-six pounds since that terrible day. Besides heart trouble, she had also developed a severe infection of her tear glands—a consequence of her chronic sleeplessness and uncontrollable bouts of weeping.
    She was released several weeks later, but her life remained dominated by her loss. Often, in her fitful sleep, she would dream of Billy. In the middle of the night, she would awaken her oldest daughter, Irene, to tell her of an especially wonderful dream—of Billy running up the steps, hammering on the door, crying, “Mamma, mamma, let me in!”
    On special holidays she always set a place for Billy. “I know he will come back some day,” she told reporters, who visited her apartment at Christmastime in 1930. “There is nothing a mother can do but hope.”
    For the rest of her life, Elizabeth Gaffney would never reconcile herself to the loss of her son. Even after the truth came to light, years later, she refused to accept it—an understandable act of denial, given how appalling the truth turned out to be.

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    …
horrid king, besmeared with blood of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears.
    JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost
    H e had always been a man of passion. Now, his lust had become even stronger, a terrible appetite that seemed to grow more ravenous with each new feeding.
    In the beginning, he had craved only the pain. It wasn’t until later that the blood-hunger had possessed him. He remembered the first time he had sought to satisfy it. He had cut off a piece of the monkey—just the tip—with a pair of scissors. But the little one had set up such an awful howl, even through the gag, that he had taken pity on it and run away, leaving it bleeding and moaning on the bed.
    Afterward, though, he couldn’t get the picture out of his mind—the cropped and bleeding monkey, the agony on the little one’s face. Even now he stiffened at the memory.
    Sometimes, he felt overcome with contrition. At such moments, the urge to atone for his sins by butchering one of Christ’s lambs was impossible to resist. A verse floated into his head: “Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones/And dasheth their heads against the stones.”
    The latest sacrifice had been the sweetest. It, too, had made pitiful noises—from the moment he had led it from the roof until its final seconds, when its dying bleats truly sounded like those of a bleeding little lamb.
    The commandments came more frequently now. Hewould need another victim soon, another Isaac offered as a sacrifice for his own iniquities, sins, and abominations in the sight of God.
    His work had always made it easy for him to find, and snare, his prey. But he was often without work nowadays and had to depend on other tricks. There