The Day Lynch Mobs Roamed the Streets of the Big Apple

Child’s rape and murder brings out primal instincts
by Robert A. Waters

The corpse looked like a rag doll splayed across a filthy bed. On the floor were pyramids of empty beer cans, hundreds of cigarette butts, rotting pizzas, a child’s purple snowsuit, underpants, and shoes.

It was February 22, 1961, and the frigid streets outside teemed with blue-suited cops. They were searching for hazel-eyed, golden-haired Edith Kiecorius (see picture above). The Chelsea section of Manhattan from which she’d vanished seemed to consist of endless rows of tenements. Beat-cops trudged down dark corridors, knocking on door after door of the depressing $8.00-a-week rooms. One had a locked steel door. It was on the second floor of a row house at 307 West Twentieth Street. Police officers periodically rapped on the door, but no one answered.

Police cruisers and “sound trucks” with microphones crept up and down the streets blaring descriptions of the missing girl. Helicopters flew low over roof-tops and police dragged the nearby Hudson River. A special team searched cellars of every apartment and business in the area.

A few hours before, Edith had been playing outside, just two blocks away from where her now-lifeless body lay. Manuel Duclet, her uncle, had watched as she skipped and hopped along the sidewalk. After a while, he stepped across the street to buy a pack of cigarettes. When he came back, Edith was gone.

One day passed, then two, then three as the media ratcheted up its coverage to a fever pitch. Where was the little girl they called “Googie?” Had she been snatched by a mother who wanted a child? Had she wandered away and been lost? Or had something more sinister befallen the child?

Her mother, a widow, could barely speak through her grief, although she made one poignant statement to the press: “Only a mother can understand the way I feel...” She couldn’t finish her thoughts without bursting into a torrent of tears. Edith’s uncle was said to be in shock.

On the fourth day, a tenant told police of a suspicious character who lived in one of the apartments on 307 West Twentieth Street. Officers crashed down the steel door and rushed into a nightmare.

Interviewing the landlord and the tenant, investigators learned that a man named Fred J. Thompson had rented the room. He was a short, toothless derelict with red hair and a British accent. He’d left his room shortly after Edith disappeared and hadn’t returned.

When the police commissioner informed Edith’s mother they'd found the child's body, she began screaming.

Fred J. Thompson had a minor arrest record and police quickly obtained his fingerprints. They matched the prints found on the beer cans in the room where they’d found the girl. Police now began a manhunt unlike anything ever seen in New York City.

Newspapers reported the suspect’s name and published a bio of sorts. It was reported that Thompson was indeed from England and had abandoned his family fifteen years before. He’d migrated to America where he worked menial jobs, none of which lasted for more than a few days. As soon as he had enough money to go on a drinking spree, he would abandon his employers like he abandoned his family. A photograph of Fred J. Thompson headlined every newspaper in the northeast.

When it was learned that Edith had been raped and savagely beaten from head-to-toe, a primal shock stunned New Yorkers. Vengeance hung in the air like poison.

One week after the girl vanished, a man applied for a job at a chicken farm in Manchester Township, New Jersey. Max Pesko, the farmer who hired the stranger, recognized him as the wanted man even though he called himself “John Andrews.” After consulting a newspaper photograph to make sure, Pesko called police. Soon Thompson was in custody.

He quickly confessed. “It was the worst crime I’ve ever heard of,” Thompson told cops. “And I committed it.” He said he saw the girl playing alone and approached her. Smiling at her, he said, "I have a little girl like you, but she's sick at home. Would you like to come and visit her?" Once he got Edith into his room, he said, he couldn’t control himself.

An article in the Red Bank (NJ) Register described lynch mobs forming in Manhattan. It read: “Thompson spent last night in a cell at the Beach Street police station, far from the scene of the crime, where he was booked on a homicide charge. He was taken there by police to ‘avoid trouble’ after a surging, chanting crowd of about 500 appeared at the West 20th Street station near the murder scene. ‘We want the murderer,’ [they shouted]. ‘Hang him like an animal. Hang him.’”

On that same day, little Edith Kiecorius was laid to rest at the St. Rose of Lima Church. A spokesman for the congregation told the press that “in the eyes of the church she is equivalent to an angel, being an innocent child.”

At trial, Fred J. Thompson received the death penalty. A year later, however, he was committed to a mental institution.