Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer by Harold Schechter Read Free Book Online

were many of them, and by now he knew them all.
    His hungry eyes never stopped scanning the world for the signs that would lead him to his preordained prey.
    He had found them everywhere—on the streets, in the churches, in the houses of the poor and the insane.
    A message might arrive at any time, from any place.
    It was only a matter of knowing where to look.

4

    What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!
    SHAKESPEARE,
Richard III
    E dward Budd was a short but powerful eighteen-year-old, built like a bantamweight. Square-jawed and square-shouldered, he had the cockiness of the young Jimmy Cagney. Even standing still, he seemed tensed for motion, charged with the buzzing energy of the New York City streets.
    In this respect, he differed markedly from his parents, who seemed to have been defeated, if not crushed, by the hardness of their life. Albert Budd, a head taller than his son, seemed like a wisp in comparison. A porter for the Equitable Life Assurance Company, he had a hapless air about him and a look of perpetual bewilderment that was partly the result of a flagrantly phony glass eye. By contrast, his wife, Delia, was a mountainously large woman with an underslung jaw that added to her look of stubborn immobility. Seeing the oddly matched pair together, more than one observer was reminded of the old nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife.
    Besides Edward, Mr. and Mrs. Budd had four other children: Albert Jr., George, baby Beatrice, and—the flower of the family—little Grace, a sweet-tempered ten-year-old, strikingly pretty in spite of her city-child’s sallowness.
    All seven Budds inhabited a cramped apartment at the rear of 406 West 15th Street at the edge of Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The apartment was overheated in thewinter and—in the pre-air-conditioned days of 1928—unbearably oppressive in the summer. Young Edward had resolved to spend the summer outside of the city, away from its ceaseless clatter, rotting-garbage smells, and deadening heat. He had been working part-time as a truck drive but had no regular job. What he wanted most was a few months of fresh country air and a chance to work his muscles. He wanted to spend to spend the summer on a farm. The question was how to secure such a position. And the answer, proposed by his mother, was to take out a classified ad.
    And so, on Friday, May, 25, 1928, the teenager rode the subway to the offices of the
New York World
, where he arranged to have a one-line classified inserted into Sunday’s edition: “Young man, 18, wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street.”
    Two days later, his notice appeared in the “Situations Wanted” section of the newspaper’s morning edition, and Edward, after satisfying himself that his ad had been printed as scheduled, went off to spend the day with his buddies, confident that his classified would do the trick.
    On that same Sunday, in a different part of the city, an elderly man at a rickety kitchen table, studying, as he did every day, the classifieds in the
New York Work World
. When he got to Edward Budd’d ad he stopped and read it again. And then again.
    To anyone else’s eyes, there would have been nothing notable about the ad, except, perhaps, for its simple reflection of old-fashioned American virtues—industry, youthful ambition, a feel for the outdoors.
    It look a mind already hopelessly lost to sanity to attach a very different meaning to it and to feel, at the sight of those innocent words, an overpowering thrill of malignant desire.

5

    The soul of the wicked desireth evil: his neighbors fundeth no favor in his eyes.
    PROVERBS 21:10
    A t around 3:30 in the afternoon of the following day—Monday, May 28, 1928—someone knocked on the door of the Budds’ apartment.
    Seated on the creaky double bed she shared with her husband, Delia Budd was folding up underwear from a shapeless pile of freshly washed laundry that sprawled at her side. The day was warm and muggy, and