Four-year-old William Gaffney disappeared from the hallway outside his family’s Brooklyn apartment on February 11, 1927, after playing with two neighborhood boys aged three and twelve. The older boy briefly went into his apartment and on returning found William and the three-year-old gone; the younger boy was later found alone on the building’s roof, claiming a boogey man had taken William. The child described a slender, elderly man with gray hair and a gray mustache.

Investigators first searched nearby factory buildings and local canals, then concluded an abduction had occurred. Streetcar motorman Joseph Meehan later identified a man he had seen dragging a crying, coatless boy off his trolley that same day as William. After the 1934 arrest and later conviction of Albert Hamilton Fish for another child murder, Meehan and the three-year-old matched Fish to the man they had seen, and Fish confessed to killing William to his lawyer. William’s body has never been found.

Are there any family recollections, neighborhood memories, or documents about William Gaffney that could add detail to what happened that February day?