Deranged Read Online Free PDF

dilapidated house one recent morning, he had glanced up and seen, peering through the grimy panes of a second-story window, a wan child’s face resembling newspaper photos of Billy. Suddenly, a man’s hand appeared, clutched the boy by the shoulder, and jerked him from view. Then the blind had been hastily lowered. Inspector Sullivan immediately sent a dozen men to the address. But the house turned out to be empty.
    Subsequent rumors placed Billy in increasingly farflung locales. When an abandoned four-year-old was picked up on the streets of St. Louis, the police of that city believed that he might be the missing Brooklyn boy—until a frantic old lady showed up at the station house later that day, looking for her lost grandson. Some weeks later, Sergeant Joseph received a letter from a druggist’s wife in Deadwood, South Dakota, who claimed that Billy was living on a ranch in Montana. Joseph immediately contacted the Deadwood Chief of Police, who dispatched a man to check out the story.
    But like every other sighting of Billy, this one turned out to be a mirage.
    The only solid lead that police investigators received came from a trolley car conductor named Anthony Barone who, after a period of what he termed “mental struggle” during which he agonized over the wisdom of getting involved, finally stepped forward to relate what he had witnessed on the evening of Friday, February 11.
    It was shortly after 7 P.M.—not long after Billy’s disappearance—when an elderly man with a heavy gray moustache boarded Barone’s car at Prospect and Hamilton avenues in Brooklyn, just two blocks away from the Gaffney’s tenement. Accompanying this man was a little boy, dressed in a gray blouse and blue knickers. Though the sun had set at 5:30 and the evening was raw, the boy wore neither hat nor coat. Barone had taken special note of that detail. And there was something else about the boy that caught the conductor’s attention. He cried continuously, from the time he was led onboard until the moment he disembarked, in spite of the efforts of the wizened old man to hush him.
    According to Barone, the pair rode to the end of Hamilton Avenue. “Before they got off the car,” he explained to Inspector Sullivan, “the man asked me if they could get a ferry from there to Staten Island.” Barone explained that the best way to reach Staten Island was to take the Hamilton Avenue Ferry to the Battery and then the municipal ferry to St. George.
    Without another word, the old man—who seemed very jumpy, according to Barone—alighted from the trolley car, the little boy in tow. Instead of following Barone’s instructions, however, he turned in the opposite direction. The last that Barone saw of the old man, he was hurrying along Sackett Street, away from the ferry, “half dragging, half carrying” the weeping little boy. For a few moments, Barone watched the strange duo, the hunched old man and the frightened child, as they made their way down the dimly lit street, their figures moving in and out of the shadows. Then they disappeared into the night.
    Police investigators—who by this time had come to believe that Billy had, in fact, been the victim of a child-snatcher—attached considerable importance to Barone’s story, particularly after they interviewed Joseph Meehan, the motorman on the trolley, who confirmed the conductor’s account. Since there had been only one or two other passengers on the car at the time, Meehan recalled the man and boy clearly. Indeed, he had been struck by something Barone hadn’t mentioned. Throughout the ride, the old man had kept his heavy overcoat wrapped around the undepressed boy, as if to keep him warm—or conceal him.
    So important did Inspector Sullivan consider the testimony of the two transit workers that they were given a temporary leave of absence from their jobs and placed on the police payroll so that they could assist in the hunt. Meehan would prove to be a crucial eyewitness when it