The Devil's Dozen (7 page)

This incident occurred in the village of Göhren, on the resort island of Rügen. It was Germany’s largest island in the Baltic and at this time no bridge connected it to the mainland. But it was nevertheless a popular tourist destination, because of its pristine beaches, white chalk cliffs, beechwood trees, and rugged but spectacular landscape. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, people went there for “rest cures,” a fad at this time throughout Europe.

It was July 1, 1901, a Sunday. Six-year-old Peter Stubbe and his older brother, Hermann, eight, had gone into the woods to play. No one worried, since the pretty island was considered safe and the boys often played in the woods. But when they failed to return for supper, their parents grew concerned. They looked around the immediate area but saw no sign of their sons, so they enlisted the help of neighbors. It was growing dark and they began to fear that Peter and Hermann might be lost in the woods. By nightfall, the search party had to light torches to continue. Everyone shouted the boys’ names, hoping to see them emerge or call out their location, but their voices were not heard. The search continued all night.

As the first light of day entered the woods and the weary searchers were about to give up hope, one man came across the bodies. It was the boys, both murdered. They lay together in some bushes and it was clear that their killer had crushed their skulls with a rock. More grotesque, he’d torn or cut off their arms and legs, and even removed the heart of the older boy, taking it away. The limbs were scattered about the area.

This scene resembled an incident that had occurred in the area just three weeks before. A farmer claimed he’d found seven of his sheep slaughtered, torn apart, and disemboweled. He had arrived in time to see a man running away, and while he did not recognize the person, he believed he could identify him if he saw him again. The sheep mutilation had not yet been solved.

As with the double homicide in Lechtingen, the police began interviewing everyone in the area. One villager said he had noticed the boys the day before, talking with a carpenter that he knew as Ludwig Tessnow. People tended to look askance at Tessnow, who disappeared for long stretches to travel around the country, and who lived as a recluse. No one knew him well, and one person who lived near Tessnow’s home said he had seen the man on Sunday evening wearing clothing with dark stains.

Investigators went to Tessnow’s home to ask some questions. He listened to their concerns about the boys, but denied any knowledge about them. Nevertheless, he was asked to step aside while they searched his home and carpentry shop. They found freshly laundered clothing that bore suspicious stains. Tessnow claimed that the stains came from wood dye, which he used daily in his carpentry work. He told them, step-by-step, where he had been all day on Sunday, and finally, with no evidence against the man, the police had to withdraw. But they did bring Tessnow in to see if the farmer whose sheep had been slaughtered might recognize him. Indeed he did, claiming that Tessnow was the man who had run away from the bloody scene. Tessnow denied it, and since it was one man’s word against another’s, with no witnesses, the law enforcement officers knew that nothing much could be done. Still, they confiscated some of the carpenter’s clothing and decided to keep an eye on him.

A local magistrate, Johann-Klaus Schmidt, thought about what had happened to the boys and recalled the two girls who were murdered and dismembered in the woods in a village not far away. He contacted officials there and learned that the name of their key suspect, who had since left the village, was Ludwig Tessnow.

The circumstances were now plain enough: Tessnow was killing but successfully eluding arrest. Schmidt discussed the situation with a prosecutor, Ernst Hubschmann. It turned out that he had read Paul Uhlenhuth’s recently published paper, “A Method for the Investigation of Different Types of Blood,” so he went to Uhlenhuth and asked him to examine the stains on Tessnow’s clothing. Over the course of four days, Uhlenhuth applied his method, which involved dissolving the stains in distilled water, to more than one hundred spots that he found on the material. While some stains did test positive for the presence of wood dye, in seventeen stains Uhlenhuth also detected traces of both animal and human blood. The animal blood proved to be from a sheep. He also found human blood on the rock believed to have been the weapon used on the boys. So much for Tessnow’s claim of innocence.

With this evidence, and the circumstances, Tessnow went to trial and Uhlenhuth appeared as an expert witness to explain to the judge and jury how his analysis worked. Tessnow was convicted of the murder of both Stubbe boys and sentenced to be executed. Thus a depraved killer was finally stopped.

It’s assumed that, while he was not tried for the murders of the girls in Lechtingen, he was also responsible for them. He apparently suffered from the sort of bestial bloodlust that Krafft-Ebing had documented in other sex murderers and seemed non-discriminating as to whether it was children or animals that he ripped into pieces. Although it was never determined whether his behavior was compulsive or committed during fits of psychosis, he fit the pattern of those “werewolf” killers who had been studied. Even today, what Krafft-Ebing identified is applicable to some of the most extreme cases of bloodlust and cannibalism.

Dr. Stephen Giannangelo has studied serial killers who derive a joy from their killing sprees in
The Psychopathology of Sexual Murder
. He says that they experience a “pervasive lost sense of self and intimacy, an inadequacy of identity, a feeling of no control.” These things then manifest in an ultimate act of control—murder. Such killers develop deviant sexual motivations that become consuming fantasies that issue in an initial murder. When they find reward in that, they continue to look for other opportunities, refining their approach and acting out further deviance. The form it takes is influenced by whatever image or object is a sexual hot button in their fantasy. Bestial paraphilias that encourage savage attacks are obviously potentially dangerous.

We will see similar cases later in this book, including the next one. Fortunately, the killers met their match in brilliant, indefatigable investigators.

 

 

Baring-Gould, Sabine.
The Book of Were-wolves.
Blackmask Online, 2002, first published in 1865.

Douglas, Adam.
The Beast Within.
New York: Avon, 1992.

Giannangelo, Stephen.
The Psychopathology of Serial Murder.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996.

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen.
Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Monsters.
New York: Checkmark Books, 2005.

Lee, Henry C., and Frank Tirnady.
Blood Evidence: How DNA Revolutionized the Way We Solve Crimes.
Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003.

Masters, R.E.L., and Eduard Lea.
Perverse Crimes in History.
New York: The Julian Press, 1963.

Oosterhuis, Harry.
Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Thorwald, J.
The Century of the Detective.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964.

Von Krafft-Ebing, R.
Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct.
Revised edition. Philadelphia: Physicians and Surgeons, 1928.

Wilson, Colin, and Damon Wilson.
Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection.
New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2003.

Wonder, A. Y.
Blood Dynamics.
San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2001.

On June 5, 1928, the
New York Times
ran an article about a missing child and a man who had taken her away two days earlier, on Sunday afternoon. New York, New Jersey, and Long Island police were notified about the incident and given a description of both. The man, in his late fifties, had called himself Frank Howard, although it was expected that this name could be an alias. He was five-foot-six, with gray hair, blue eyes, and a trimmed mustache. Of average weight, he had a bowlegged gait. When he arrived at the Budd home, he was wearing a blue suit and, by some reports, driving a small blue sedan.

This was the man’s second visit to the residence of Albert and Delia Budd at 406 West Fifteenth Street. The first had been six days earlier, in response to an ad placed by their eighteen-year-old son, Edward, who sought work in the country. Howard arrived, saying he was seeking a hired hand for his chicken farm in Farmingdale, Long Island, and he offered quite a bit of information about himself, including that he took religion seriously and had six children (although he was currently separated from his wife). He seemed so open and honest that Albert and Delia believed their son would be well employed by this man, who agreed to pay fifteen dollars a week. He also agreed to hire Edward’s friend, and said he would come back on Saturday to pick them up. However, he was delayed, so he sent a telegram announcing his arrival on June 3.

Cannibal killer Albert Fish.
AP/Worldwide Photos

He came, as promised, with strawberries and a can of pot cheese. Asking for his telegram back, he slid it into his pocket. Edward was away, so the Budds sent one of their four other children to fetch him. Ten-year-old Grace came into the room, dressed in a white Communion dress and glowing with little-girl charm. Howard was delighted with her and took her on his lap. He mentioned that he was going to a birthday party for his niece at 137th Street and Columbus Avenue. He thought Grace might like to come. Delia was hesitant, but Albert observed that Grace didn’t often get treats on his salary as a porter, so he granted permission. They liked the kindly, unassuming old man and believed their daughter would be safe. He promised to bring her back later, at which time he would give instructions to Edward for starting work.

However, Howard did not bring Grace back that evening, so the Budds spent an agonizing night before they sent Edward to the police. They soon learned that the address the old man had given was fictitious. Clearly, he had kidnapped their child. Little Grace Budd was described in the papers as having blue eyes and brown hair. At four feet tall, she weighed about seventy pounds and had been treated recently at New York Hospital. She wore white stockings, a white dress, a blue hat, and a gray coat.

Once again, an elusive killer would lead the police on a difficult chase, although this investigation would last so many years its solution would seem pointless to many on the team. Yet one investigator never gave up. Because of that attitude, he remained alert for news and clues.

Only a year before, the city had been rattled by another kidnapped child, Billy Gaffney, from Brooklyn. A boy who was with him at the time said the “bogeyman” had taken him. He described a thin elderly man with a mustache. Billy was never found. Something similar had happened with an eight-year-old boy named Francis McDonnell on nearby Staten Island in July 1924. He was the son of a police officer and his mother had reported a stooped elderly man in the area. His body was found, naked from the waist down, beneath a pile of branches. He had been assaulted and strangled.

Now the bogeyman had come for Grace. Police searched cellars, roofs, and hallways in the general area of the Budd home, but turned up nothing. When they checked in Farmingdale, they found no listing for a Frank Howard, and the locals there denied knowing anyone by that name. They got the same result in Farmingdale, New Jersey. But within a day, Joseph Sowley, fifty-nine, was arrested. This man liked to entice children into the hallway of his apartment building, and while there was no evidence he had visited the Budds, he was locked up for disorderly conduct.

Detectives did track down someone named Frank Howard at an address in New Jersey, but it turned out that this man, who had lived in Farmingdale at one time, had moved to Chicago, where he had died years earlier. Thus this promising lead dried up.

During those depression years, kidnapping had become a common “get rich quick” type of crime, and there were kidnapping syndicates in some of the major cities. Between 1928 and 1932, there were an estimated 2,500 kidnappings around the country. Everyone involved in looking for Grace anticipated finding a ransom note, although there was no reason for a man like Howard to expect to grow rich this way because the Budds were clearly a family of moderate means.

A postcard arrived from Station H, 173 West 102nd Street, bearing an enigmatic message: “Mr. and Mrs. Edward Budd. My dear friends, All little girl is to cellar and into water.” Then a letter arrived, written in pencil, which appeared to be a death threat: “Mrs. Budd,” it said. “Your child is going to a funeral. I still got her. HOWARD.” It had been mailed on Wednesday from the Madison Square Station in New York.