So. I wanna tell you a story. About a man named Will King, an NYPD detective, like me.
King investigated the 1928 disappearance and presumed death of 10-year-old Grace Budd, who left home to attend a birthday party and never returned. There wasn’t much to go on. In fact, there was nothing at all. No body. No eyewitnesses. No physical evidence of any kind. Little Grace simply vanished, so no arrest was made for a full two years—that is, until Charles Edward Pope was accused of the murder by his estranged wife. Mrs. Pope claimed her husband had confessed to her, but since there was nothing for a jury but her word against his, Charles was found not guilty in December, 1930. He went home a free man after spending 108 days in jail on nothing but an accusation. I’m sure, when he got there, he had a few choice words for his wife.
For a time, it seemed like that would be the end of it. But in 1934, four years after the trial and six years after the murder, Grace’s mother received an anonymous letter, purportedly from the killer, which described in bald tones how he had enticed the girl into his room on the pretense of needing help, how he had quickly removed his clothes on her way up the stairs so as not to get her blood on them, how he had strangled her and butchered her body, and how he had eaten it, roasted in the oven, over a period of nine days. The note ended with the “reassurance” that the girl had died a virgin.
“But I could’ve done it,” he said. “If I’d wanted to.”
Mrs. Budd was illiterate and had to have her eldest son read the letter to her, after which she gave it to the police. Although there was nothing distinguishing about the page, it had been delivered in an envelope that was marred in one corner. Once dampened and viewed under a magnifying glass, the mark revealed an emblem containing the letters N.Y.P.C.B.A., for the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association. After interviewing the Association’s employees, Detective King discovered a janitor who admitted to stealing some stationery, although he claimed to have left it in an apartment he had rented on East 52nd. King got the names of all the recent tenants from the landlady, and there in the middle—much to his surprise—he saw one he recognized.
Albert Fish was a real grandfatherly type. He had a bit of a shamble to his walk. He was warm and soft-spoken. He was a father of six and visibly delighted in his youngest grandson. He read the Bible and could quote it prodigiously. By all accounts, he was a liked and respected man, and at 68 years old, with a head of gray hair and that sideways gait, he was the picture of harmlessness. Which is why, without a shred of physical evidence to link him to the murder, Fish had been quickly exonerated, despite that he had actually been the last to see Grace Budd alive—when he accompanied her to the birthday party with her mother’s blessing.
The landlady on East 52nd informed Detective King that Albert Fish no longer lived there, but he’d been receiving money from his son and was due one more check, which had just arrived. King decided to wait outside the room until his quarry came to collect the letter, whereupon he intercepted the soft-spoken old man and asked him to come to the station for questioning. Fish agreed, but as soon as Detective King turned, the doting, Bible-reading, gray-haired father of six produced a razor blade and tried to slice the policeman’s neck open. He failed and was subdued and arrested and ultimately brought to trial.
After the arrest, Albert Fish claimed to have committed close to a hundred murders in a number of different states, although he was only ever linked to nine and was only ever convicted of one—that of Grace Budd, for which he received the electric chair. Prior to the trial, he described a pair of involuntary ejaculations he’d experienced while he dismembered the little girl’s body, and since it could never be proved whether he had eaten her or not, the motive was described as sexual and no account of the supposed cannibalism was given to the jury.
What is true beyond a shadow of a doubt, however, is that the kind and elderly Albert Fish, who spent all that time reading the Gospels, regularly heard the voice of God emanating from his Bible, which he carried everywhere—a voice that commanded him to torture people “with implements of Hell.” What’s true is that he liked to beat himself with a nail-studded board and to stick wool soaked in lighter fluid in his anus and light it on fire. What’s true is that he liked to insert needles in his scrotum. And to leave them there. An X-ray revealed more than two dozen were present at the time of his arrest—so many, in fact, that the electric chair shorted in the middle of his execution and kind old Albert Fish had to wait in excruciating agony, half electrocuted, while they reset the switches and finished the job.
I imagine Detective King was changed by that case. I would’ve been. I bet he was changed by the knowledge that he’d had the killer from the start and had let him go. I bet he wondered how many people had been killed in the intervening years. I bet he never again made the mistake of presuming innocence just because the alternative was inconceivable. I bet he was proud of the fact that he’d finally caught Grace Budd’s killer and had seen him punished. I bet it never made up for all the ones that got away.
Why am I telling you this?
Because despite what you see on TV, or hear from the government, that’s hardly ever how it goes. And I don’t just mean about cannibalism and needles in scrotums. I mean about who gets caught and who gets away.
If you believe the official statistics, just under 2/3 of all murders in this country are solved.
If you believe the official statistics.
They assume, for example, that all solved murders are solved correctly, which is horse shit. And the aggregate numbers hide a big difference between major metropolitan areas, like New York and Chicago, and the rest of the nation. If you live in a big city, a better rule of thumb is about half.
50/50.
Even with all the tools of modern forensic science, police still rely overwhelmingly on confession. Without one, the odds are poor. Nearly one out of every two murderers is never caught—which means you probably know one, at your work or church or school, even though it’s inconceivable to contemplate.
The difference between a cold case and a closed one isn’t skill or perseverance or even luck, which is all that brought Albert Fish to justice. Lots of guys I know have all three. No, catching the other half, the half that are almost never caught, requires something else. It requires you to contemplate the otherwise inconceivable—that there really was a voice emanating from Albert Fish’s Bible, an unnatural voice, perverting its word, driving him to kill.
Or even that a body can want to be found.
Take the corpse of one Jane Doe, nicknamed Bobbi Jo by the guys in white lab coats. Bobbi Jo’s killer took great pains to see that she would never rise from the watery tomb into which he’d placed her. He started by stabbing her thirteen times—after she was already dead from asphyxiation—in a rough checkerboard pattern up her torso and down her back, presumably so that the gas released during bacterial decomposition could escape rather than collect in her body cavities and so bring her to the surface, like a human-skinned buoy. Then he strapped exercise weights to her arms and legs, the kind athletes use during heavy workouts, and dumped her body in a drainage channel that emptied into the ocean. He was meticulous there, too. Rather than relying on Velcro, he wrapped each weight several times in clear plastic shipping tape, just to be sure.
All other things being equal, she should’ve been fish food. It’s doubtful that even her skeleton would’ve been found since that channel, farther out on Long Island, deliberately faced an outward flowing current. But as luck would have it, Bobbi Jo’s body was dumped right before a significant late summer storm brought warm temperatures and several inches of rain. The medical examiner suggested the killer might’ve chosen that day specifically on the theory that more water would dispose of the evidence that much faster. If he hadn’t attached the weights, it might have, because while the channel flooded quickly, the weighted body moved slowly and was diverted at high water to a runoff reservoir, where it sat for days in highly acidic city wastewater, which ate the adhesive off the tape. Gradually over the next twelve hours, the rain subsided, the runoff reservoir slowly drained, and Bobbi Jo’s swollen, turtle-nibbled, yellow-blue body came to the surface, like a bobbing apparition. Hence the name.
She was found by a pair of joggers running along the trail at the edge of the reservoir, which bordered a large city park, and although it was impossible to say where exactly she’d been dumped along the channel’s seven-mile stretch to the sea, everyone agreed it was something bordering on a miracle that she’d even been found at all.
I’ve often wondered if that wasn’t what all the old books meant when they talked about the dead coming back and why people nailed bodies to coffins and weighed them down with stones and the rest. Not that anyone expected they’d rise up on two feet and start walking around and causing trouble for everybody. Rather, that they might simply make another appearance—by whatever means: grave robbers, flash floods, freak gales, what-have-you. That there are forces that can propel the dead back among the living for them to wreak a fresh hell. A dead body can cause plenty of trouble for people without ever moving a finger, believe me.
Of course, everything the forensics guys needed to finish their job was either in or on that body. It was just a matter of diligence. My colleagues and I, on the other hand, were left the task of identifying her, of finding her killer, and of bringing some semblance of closure to her family. But just like the Grace Budd case, there wasn’t much to go on. The ME guessed she was in her early 30s—likely 32 or 33—that she was Caucasian, that she’d probably never had children, and that she’d been strangled to death and then mutilated postmortem with a kitchen knife in the manner I described. The only feature of real note, and the reason the case made its way to me, versus any other detective in my unit, was the strange knotlike mark that had been deliberately burned into the underside of her tongue, like a cattle brand.
I was staring at my computer screen, tabbing tediously through missing persons reports, hoping for a quick match to her general description, when a package was plopped onto my desk. Plain manila envelope. Sealed with clear shipping tape. Machine-printed label. Unmarked VHS tape inside.
And that’s how everything started.