Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer Read Free Page A

could participate in the hunt for his son’s murderer. “If I catch the killer,” McDonnell assured reporters, “I’ll turn him right over to Captain Van Wagner. I’ll not harm a hair on his head. I want to seehim punished as he deserves, but the law must take its course.” A contingent of police guards was posted in Charlton’s Woods to keep away the morbidly curious, who, as soon as the news of the murder was made public, began arriving in hordes to view the scene of the crime.
    Hysteria swept across the borough. Police stations throughout Richmond were flooded with calls, most of them from young women, eager to report recent encounters with menacing-looking strangers. Typical was the story told by seventeen-year-old Jennie Carlson. According to the girl, she had been walking in Charlton’s Woods the previous Saturday when she happened upon a man who looked to be in his late fifties, “unkempt, with gray hair and a thick growth of beard, about five feet six inches tall, and wearing blue trousers, a soiled white shirt and no coat.” The man was eating something out of both hands, “with his face down and his body crunched over like an animal.” As Jennie hurried past this sinister figure, he looked up and called out to her “in a foreign tongue which sounded like Italian.” Terrified, the girl began to run, whereupon the stranger leapt up and began to chase her through the underbrush. When she reached a clearing not far from her home, however, he stopped, turned around, and melted back into the woods.
    The police paid polite attention to this anecdote, but did not attribute tremendous significance to it, since they had already heard several dozen similar stories in the days since the discovery of the McDonnell boy’s body. Indeed, if these tales were to be believed, there was scarcely a rock, tree, or bush on Staten Island without a murderous, gray-moustached derelict lurking behind it.
    With the opening of the Leopold and Loeb trial still a few days away, the New York City news media had the opportunity to play up its own child-murder. The
Daily News
informed its readers that Staten Island was aswarm with sexual perverts—“overrun with old men, morons, degenerates of all types, men picked out of the gutters and bread lines of New York City and sent to the city farm colony on the island. At present, there are nearly five hundred men on the poor farm and many of them areknown to be degenerates.” According to
The New York Times
, “the sixty square miles of territory in Staten Island include large areas of uncultivated land, with woods and wild undergrowth, which are believed to be used as hiding places and meeting places by robbers, bootleggers, fugitives from justice, and criminals of various kinds.”
    Indeed, the lurid tales related by two men picked up as suspects in the case—Clyde Patterson and Jacob Gottlieb, orderlies at the Sea View hospital in New Dorp, Staten Island—seemed to confirm this grim picture. According to these “confessed perverts” (as they were characterized by the
Daily News
), the woods near the McDonnell residence concealed a small hollow known to its habitués as “Rattlesnake Nest,” a place where child molesters gathered to engage in “wild orgies of degeneracy.” This revelation not only made the two hospital employees the prime suspects in the case but also produced a public call for beefed-up police protection on Staten Island. When investigators went to check the place identified by Gottlieb and Patterson as “Rattlesnake Nest,” however, they discovered not a rendezvous for sex fiends but an abandoned real estate shack used by local children as a playhouse. The two men were arraigned on sodomy charges but discounted as suspects in the McDonnell murder.
    The manhunt went on. Scores of men were questioned and at least a dozen were taken into custody. Jacob Herman, an escaped inmate from a New Jersey insane asylum, provided police with a graphic description of