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

the McDonnell boy’s corpse, which he claimed to have chanced upon shortly after his getaway: “Tuesday, I was going through the woods. I stumbled upon the body. I touched it. It felt like putty. I was afraid. I ran.” But investigators soon concluded that Herman’s facts had been gleaned from newspaper stories—several clippings related to the case were found in his coat pocket—and that he had, in fact, been nowhere near Port Richmond at the time of the slaying.
    Other suspects were grilled: a truck driver who hadbeen arrested in Brooklyn for impairing the morals of a minor; a middle-aged man charged with troubling little children in a playground; a male music teacher, accused of taking a young boy into the woods and talking to him about “sex psychology.” But all of these individuals turned out to have solid alibis.
    As their hopes for an early arrest evaporated, the police stepped up their search, canvassing the Port Richmond district door-to-door, questioning construction workers on the streets, stopping milkmen and ice-wagon drivers as they made their daily rounds. Tramps were rounded up from public parks across the city. Several promising suspects—a dishwasher discovered with a rubber ball like little Francis’s in his possession, a paroled laborer who had been convicted of killing a dog in Charlton’s Woods, an epileptic who displayed an “absorbing interest” in the crime—were arrested, interrogated, and, in the end, released for lack of evidence.
    At Francis’s funeral—attended by his parochial school classmates and a throng of curiosity seekers who had made their way to St. Mary’s church from all around the city—detectives mingled with the crowd on the chance that, as Captain Van Wagner explained, the killer might put in an appearance, drawn to the scene by an “irresistible fascination.” But no suspicious-looking strangers showed up. Dressed in his first communion suit, little Francis lay in an open white coffin, the terrible bruises on his face concealed by heavy makeup. Nearby, his stricken mother pillowed her head on her husband’s shoulder and struggled to control her grief.
    The autopsy report on the victim revealed the presence of undigested raisins in his stomach—the bait, the coroner theorized, which had been used to lure the boy into the woods. Because of the condition of the corpse, the medical examiner also speculated that the murderer couldn’t have been as old as Mrs. McDonnell claimed. Only a man in his prime could have administered such a ferocious beating. Indeed, Dr. Mord suggested, there may well have been more than one killer involved.
    In spite of these pronouncements, however, Anna McDonnell stuck to her original story. She knew exactly what the killer looked like, she insisted. She could see his features plainly, whenever she shut her eyes.
    “He came shuffling down the street,” she told reporters, “mumbling to himself, making queer motions with his hands. I’ll never forgot those hands. I shuddered when I looked at them. I shudder every time I think of them—how they opened and shut, opened and shut, opened and shut. I saw him look toward Francis and the others. I saw his thick gray hair, his drooping gray moustache. Everything about him seemed faded and gray.
    “I saw my neighbor’s two police dogs spring at him, and I saw Philip,” the hired man, call them off. The gray man turned to me and tipped his cap.
    “And then he went away.”
    As she spoke, her husband sat by her side on their living-room sofa, one arm around his wife’s shoulders. At their feet lay Francis’s dog, Pal. “If Pal had only been with him,” said the sorrow-worn father, “Francis would never have been killed. Pal would have chewed that man’s leg off before he would have let him touch the boy.”
    As days passed and the police seemed no closer to a solution, the tabloids became increasingly shrill in their cries for retribution. “The fiend who attacked and killed