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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 killer had 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, 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 New York. 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