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came time to identify Billy’s abductor.
    But that identification was still many years away.
    The New York City tabloids had wasted no time in exploiting the melodramatic potential of the Gaffney case. The Daily News in particular did its best to transform the Gaffneys’ personal tragedy into a shamelessly lurid soap opera, concluding each day’s article on the case with a breathless “don’t-miss-the-next-exciting-episode” tag:
    Somewhere in New York or nearby is little Billy Gaffney—or his body. An army of detectives, 350 strong, is hunting that somewhere. Watch for the results of that search in tomorrow’s NEWS. Hoping against hope, police continue their search for missing Billy Gaffney. Follow the trail in tomorrow’s NEWS. Will the seventh day bring joy or sorrow to the parents of little Billy? Read all the developments of the hunt in tomorrow’s NEWS.
    This kind of sensationalism not only sold papers but also had the effect of arousing the passions of many New Yorkers to a near-hysterical pitch. Within a single week in early March, on three separate occasions, mobs of enraged men and women attacked suspicious-looking strangers who were spotted in the company of neighborhood children.
    All three incidents occurred in Brooklyn, close to the tenement district where the Gaffneys lived. In the first, a sixty-three-year-old salesman named Giles Steele was strolling down East 92nd Street when a four-year-old boy stepped into his path. “Move aside, son,” Steele said, reaching down and taking the boy by the shoulder. At that moment, the child’s mother, Mrs. Sadie Bernstein, came to the door of her house and, seeing a strange man with his hand on her son, began to scream for help. A crowd of neighbors immediately descended on Steele and began pummeling him. After being rescued by a passing patrolman, the hapless Steele was taken to the local stationhouse, where police quickly determined that he had no knowledge at all of the Gaffney crime. Even Mrs. Bernstein, once she calmed down, admitted that she might have overreacted. Nevertheless, Steele was arraigned on a kidnapping charge and held on $10,000 bail.
    The other two men attacked by outraged mobs in Brooklyn that week were considerably more unsavory than Steele. Both of them—Louis Sandman, a forty-two-year-old waiter, and Samuel Bimberg, a dapper young man from Secaucus, New Jersey—were admitted pederasts with prior convictions for impairing the morals of minors. And both men were in the act of leading young victims into darkened tenement hallways when they were spotted and set upon by enraged neighborhood residents, who were prevented from beating the culprits to death only by the timely appearance of the police. Nevertheless, though detectives would have liked nothing better than to establish even a slender connection between one of these men and Billy Gaffney, Sandman and Bimberg—like Giles Steele—were quickly eliminated as suspects.
    To the legion of New Yorkers who had been following every twist and turn in the search for little Billy Gaffney and sharing in the hope that the missing boy might still be found alive, the front-page headline in the Wednesday, March 9, edition of The New York Times was a shocker: “FEAR SLAIN CHILD FOUND IN CASK IS GAFFNEY BOY.”
    On the previous afternoon, in Palmer, Massachusetts, a high school sophomore named Chester Kolbusz had been scavenging at the town dump. Lying on top of a refuse pile was an old wine cask that appeared to be partially burned. Peering inside the cask, Kolbusz saw a lumpy, burlap-wrapped object. He reached a hand into the cask and pulled aside the fabric. What he saw sent him dashing in terror to the nearest police station. The object was the corpse of a child, its face horribly mutilated.
    The police were on the scene within minutes. Nearly a month had now passed since Billy’s disappearance and, by this point, a description of the kidnapped Brooklyn boy had been wired to policemen