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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 a bakery 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, 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’s disappearance—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