On October 30, 1911 a postcard reached Roy Gilson, the chief of police at Lackawanna in New York State. It read: Joseph Joseph will be found in the bottom of a water closet with three seats, back of the saloon near Doyles, on Ridge Road. A drunk crazed brain done the deed, and remorse and sorrow for the parents is bringing results that will soon come to an end. The demon whisky will then have one more victim, making four in all.
Joey Joseph, who was seven, had disappeared eighteen days earlier. The Buffalo police had helped and there had been almost nothing to work with.
The card did not end it. More followed over the next year, and on November 16, 1912 the Buffalo Evening News printed photographs of them on its front page. A renewed search of the outhouse pit behind the saloon on Ridge Road recovered what was left of the boy. He had been strangled and sexually assaulted, as the first card had said.
John Frank Hickey was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on October 29, 1865, to Irish parents, Michael Hickey and Mary Ann Magrath, and baptized two streets from where they lodged. He said after his arrest that his father had beaten him. In his teens he joined the First Congregational Church on Kirk Street and became an official of the Lowell YMCA and of the Christian Endeavor society.
On September 1, 1883, at eighteen, he told police he had found Edwin W. Morey dead on the floor of McGibbons drugstore, where they both worked. Morey was thirty-four and a pharmacist. Hickey said he had been low for some time because of drink and that he had been trying to help him stop. A doctor thought poison and sent for a stomach pump. Morey showed signs of life around midnight and died a little after three in the morning. Years later Hickey admitted he had killed him with laudanum, afraid that if their employer found Morey drunk he would fire them both.
He went on to a respectable life for a while. Giving his occupation as secretary of the YMCA, he joined Lowell's William North Masonic Lodge in 1887 and became a Master Mason in 1889. In March 1895 he was arrested for stealing twenty gallons of alcohol from his employer, and on June 12 the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts expelled him as a liar and profane; his later claim to be a thirty-second-degree Mason was false. In 1896 he left Lowell for good and drifted through Canada and the Northeast in industrial jobs.
On December 10, 1902 he met Michael R. Kruck, a newsboy aged ten or eleven by different accounts, and told him he would buy every paper he had if the boy followed him into Central Park. There he strangled him and left the body with the bundle of newspapers under its head. The coroner found no sign of sexual assault, and the inquest returned death by strangling at the hands of persons unknown. Michael Kruck was buried at Washington Jewish Cemetery in Brooklyn two days later.
By 1911 Hickey was supervising at a steel plant in Lackawanna. On October 12 he saw Joey Joseph playing at his father's menswear shop. Later the boy was making mud puddles in the street with a friend and Hickey waved them over, gave Joey a few pennies for sweets for them both, and when he came back told the friend it was time to go home. He took Joey by the hand and walked him to the outhouse behind the saloon.
Handwriting was the whole case. Lackawanna police compared the script against samples taken from transients and casual workers around Buffalo, and after the newspaper published the cards it led to him.
He confessed to the three killings and to a number of other attempts on boys, which he said he could not control. Police in Buffalo, Lackawanna, Boston, Cleveland and several places between had lists of unsolved disappearances they wanted to put to him, and he was suspected of at least twelve further murders, but he admitted nothing else and nothing else was ever proved.
The trial in December 1912 turned on his sanity. Handwriting experts, psychiatrists and doctors gave evidence for days, and two jurors would not return first-degree murder because they thought him insane. He was convicted of murder in the second degree, which took the electric chair off the table, and on December 23 he was sentenced to twenty years to life.
The Buffalo Evening News quoted him that day: I ought to be electrocuted. I do murder and forget all about it in five minutes.
He died at Auburn State Prison on May 8, 1922, aged fifty-six, and was buried without ceremony in the prison cemetery. The remains were later moved to a mass grave.
Lackawanna had buried Joey Joseph on November 18, 1912. The shops shut for the morning and the schools closed.