150. Terrifying True Urban Legends: Cropsey and The Missing Children

For decades, there's been an urban legend that swirled around the woods of Central Staten Island. Residents would lock their doors at night, check over their shoulders when they went out to start their cars, and told their children to be extra careful while outplaying with friends. Because, they said, there's a monster that lives in those woods. And he has a name, Cropsy. Cropsy wanders throughout the back alleys and side streets of nearby suburbs, a transient man looking for work, but wherever he goes, children tend to disappear. The legend goes that Cropsy lives in the ruins of an old abandoned mental institution. That's where he lures children to, and they're never seen again. He was once a patient at the asylum, but he was kept isolated from the outside world for his own protection. Now the asylum they're referring to, Willowbrook State School, was a very real institution that was built at a time before modern advances in medicine and in mental health. Patients lived in overcrowded, unfurnished worlds with hardly a single caught to call their own. Sanitation was essentially non-existent. It was a filthy, hopeless life. The patients that didn't die of disease were left to waste away into little more than skeletons. Eventually, New York State shut the asylum down and let the patients go free. But some former residents, like Cropsy, didn't know what to do with themselves, the legend goes. So, unable to ingratiate back into society, they wandered back into the ruins of their former home and lived there, typically in the old tunnels that existed beneath the ruins. Children were warned that they may see Cropsy walking near the edge of the woods near the asylum, dragging an old, rusted axe behind him, waiting to find the perfect victim to drag down into those tunnels. And if you do see him, just pray that he doesn't see you because no child that's interacted with him has lived to tell the tale. Like the best campfire stories, the tale of Cropsy has been passed from generation to generation, picking up new details as it goes. But what makes Cropsy so different from your average urban legend is that it's built around a true story. Like I mentioned, the asylum talked about in this campfire story actually existed. It was called Willowbrook State School, an institution that used to be run by New York's Department of Mental Hygiene. It was the largest facility for the developmentally disabled in the country. And like many institutions of the time, it promised a safe haven for children with special needs, but it functioned more like a prison than a school. Because for Cropsy himself, well, it seemed for the longest time like this was just a legend born from the scary ruins of the hospital. But then, in the 1970s and 80s, something started to stalk the children of Staten Island, forcing the public to reconsider whether this was just an urban legend, or if there was actually some truth to it. Welcome back to Hercers Counting, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kayla Moore. Today's story is going to be a dark one. It concerns child abuse, medical cruelty, and murders that remain unsolved to this day. But it's also one of my favorite kinds of episodes to do, where we find an urban legend and look into it until we can find the true story that's hidden at its center. And today, I want to share with you two very dark pieces of history that make up this urban legend. We're going to dive into the story of Willowbrook State School because that's really the foundation of this legend. But then I want to tell you about the person involved in Willowbrook, who became a monster and terrorized Staten Island. But before we dive in, if you're new here to our Rogue Detecting Society, welcome. You're amongst friends in our headquarters for the Darkly Curious. We gather here every Wednesday evening, listeners from all over the world gather here with me. But today, I specifically want to shout out the five listeners that we have in Kyrgyzstan. Your video editor lives here in the US, but she was back visiting Kyrgyzstan in the summer, and she probably single-handedly doubled the listenership in the country. So thank you, Polina, and no matter where you're listening or watching, thank you for being here. Seriously, your support means the world to me. And if you want, you can go ahead and comment where you're listening from because I love seeing how many countries are represented in our listenership. Okay. But for now, let's head back to New York. Nestled in the woods of the Willowbrook neighborhood in Staten Island, just south of Manhattan, lays a crumbling stone foundation and empty buildings with shattered windows. It's hard to picture the area as anything more than just rubble, but in 1948, when the Willowbrook State School opened, it lauded itself as a fine institution set on helping some of society's most vulnerable. This campus was around 365 acres with the capacity to serve 3,000 patients, mostly children with intellectual disabilities. It was the largest facility of its kind in the United States. And for many parents, it seemed like a godsend. From the outside, it was idyllic. Brand new buildings and wards, white trim and clean brick all set amongst the beautiful, thick woods of Staten Island. Willowbrook really advertised itself to struggling parents who didn't know what to do with their child with learning disabilities. And it assured them that it was okay to send their children away, a brochure that was entitled Willowbrook and you reads, quote, "It has been a big step for you to come to the conclusion that the best thing for you, your family, and your mentally defective child is to have him cared for and treated at Willowbrook. Even though he is admitted here, you have not surrendered him to the state, nor have you put him away. And this marketing really worked. The school opened its doors officially in 1948, and in six years, it had significantly exceeded its maximum capacity of 3,000 patients. And there was still a really long line of people waiting to admit their children. So as a result, the school had to hire a lot of staff really fast, and one of the women they hired was named Diane Buglioli. She began working as a nurse at Willowbrook when she was just 19 years old. She heard that it was starting to get a little bit overcrowded there because of the demand, and so she being a really good person just wanted to help these children however she could. She walked up to the large, ex-shaped building that formed Willowbrook's central complex, thinking she was ready for whatever came next. And once she was inside, she was quickly ushered to the children's ward where she would spend most of her time. But one thing was strange to Diane. There wasn't a lot of children around, she noticed. What happened to the "overcrouting" problem that the school said it had? But she didn't really have time to think about that. An orderly came over, gave her a large key, and pointed her to this long foreboding hallway. And they told her that she needed to go down to the ward at the end. Now, as Diane walked down this hallway, she realized that this school didn't feel as welcoming on the inside as she had expected. She reached the door at the end of the hall, it was large, it was made of cold steel, the key opened it, and she found herself facing another identical steel door. So she unlocked that too, and that revealed a third steel door. By this point, she found herself wondering, what institution keeps their patients behind three steel doors? When she finally opened this last door, what she saw nearly broke her heart and was honestly incredibly difficult to read about. It was a room of she estimated 40 toddlers all looking up at her with uncomprehending expressions. The paint on the walls was peeling. At least half of the children weren't properly clothed or had soiled themselves. And this was the reality of Willowbrook, that management did not want the public to see. The truth of the matter was the hospital had no idea what it was doing. It was understaffed, it was overcrowded. Instead of tending to each child's needs, they were often locked behind steel doors and left to fend for themselves. Every word was completely overcapacity, with as many as 50 patients to each employee. And the population size created all of these problems within Willowbrook that people like Diane would face every day. There weren't enough clothes for patients, there weren't enough toothbrushes or towels or living space even, something as simple as daily meals became this really exhausting or real for everyone involved. Because of the sheer number of patients, staff only had around 3 minutes to feed each child. Their meals were typically mashed up and forced fed to them in order to make this feasible. And without proper solid food, a lot of the kids started becoming really malnourished. This led to a lot of the children losing their teeth. And without toys or education for the vast majority of the population, children would be left with little to do besides sit in one place and really just waste away. And also it would later be revealed that a bunch of the doctors either thought the children would hurt each other or they just didn't want to deal with the children so they would sedate each child with thorazine and just let them sit there. So basically there were two horrible variables that were arising at Willowbrook that would end up colliding just a few years after the place opened. On one hand, you had staff and leaders who thought that, even though the neglect of these children was cruel and horrible, it was still better than letting them be a burden on society. They had this idea that they were doing some ultimate good, and that allowed them to get away with this gross mistreatment. And then, on the other hand, you had this rise in untreatable diseases amongst the population. And when you mix this rise in diseases with doctors who think they have a free past to mistreat patients, it led to one of the most inhumane human experiments that I've ever read about. When Nina's mother brought her 10-year-old to Willowbrook in the 1950s, she felt like it was her only option. Today, we understand that Nina was most likely autistic, but back then, they didn't really have the language to diagnose the girl. Nina's mother just knew that her daughter needed care that was beyond what she could provide for her. And that's honestly one of the most heartbreaking realizations that any parent could have. The two had traveled from institution to institution to find a place that would really work for Nina and for her needs. And finally, after getting a really convincing pitch from a doctor at Willowbrook, they decided that it was the best fit. Nina's mom knew that Willowbrook had problems, but all of the asylums had their problems and she was really desperate to find resources for her daughter. And it's maybe, unfortunately, because of this desperation that Nina's mom received a phone call shortly after she applied to Willowbrook. She spoke to a man who introduced himself as Dr. Saul Krugman, and he said that he had a way of getting Nina to jump the line, basically ensuring she would get admission, but it required her mother to sign some paperwork. What it was was a consent form, which would allow Nina to participate in a study about hepatitis. Nina's mom, of course, had some questions at first, like, what would this study entail? And Dr. Krugman explained that they'd been having some hepatitis outbreaks at Willowbrook, and this might be the best chance that doctors had to learn about the disease and maybe develop a cure. It was a noble cause, he said, that Nina could play a meaningful role in. There was something about this pitch that Nina's mom didn't really trust, but she felt like she had no choice. Her only other option was for Nina to get rejected from Willowbrook and possibly get no care at all. So she signed the consent form. Nina at just 10 years old was admitted to Willowbrook into the hands of Dr. Saul Krugman. Krugman ultimately selected 50 children for this study, all between five and 10 years old. Step one of the study was to intentionally infect the children with hepatitis, which as a reminder, at the time was incurable. You're talking about giving a five-year-old and incurable illness. Now, I have to warn you before we get to this next part of the story that the way they conducted this study was absolutely disgusting and completely heartbreaking. Basically, Dr. Krugman gave each of the children a glass of chocolate milk and he told them to drink it very quickly when he didn't tell them. Or their parents was that the milk had been mixed with the feces of other infected children. The first time I read this, I felt sick to my stomach for obvious reasons, but also just the thought of giving a child so young such a horrible illness at the time that they essentially had no way to cure for the rest of their lives. And hepatitis can also cause some really severe issues down the road, like some of these children probably ended up getting liver cancer because of this infection. It does make it a little bit better at least to hear that Krugman wasn't necessarily representative of what doctors believed at the time. When he started publishing his findings, basically looking for recognition and his field for this study that he was running, other doctors immediately objected and told him what he was doing was wildly unethical. And even though all of the other doctors agreed that developing a vaccine for hepatitis was a very noble goal, they accused him of human experimentation and child abuse. Yeah, duh. It didn't matter that he technically had gotten parental consent. These experiments were to quote another doctor at the time, unjustifiable whatever the aims, and however academically or therapeutically important the results. Now Krugman did come forward and tried to defend himself. He said that things were already so bad at Willowbrook that his experiments were not meaningfully making the kids' lives any worse. And as horrible as that sound, he did have a point. Living at Willowbrook as a child was as bad as drinking milk laced with feces, then neglect the malnutrition being locked behind all of those steel doors, but unfortunately for everyone involved. It was about to get worse. On September 1st, 1965, Senator Robert F. Kennedy paid a visit to Willowbrook. And in a press conference, he compared the conditions to a snake pit. And I think particularly at Willowbrook, that we have a situation that borders on the snake pit that the children live in. Ville, that many of our fellow citizens are suffering tremendously because lack of attention, lack of imagination, lack of adequate manpower. After this tour, Kennedy gave a speech to Congress trying to get them to revamp the facility and improve care for the thousands of children and young adults living within the walls. However, New York was in the middle of this budget crisis at the time. So really, instead of offering any help to Willowbrook, they just decided to slash its budget. By 1970, Willowbrook had cut 600 employees. That's almost 30% of their staff, even though the number of patients was still increasing. And this was already a place that didn't have enough people working there in general. Diane Buglioli, the nurse I talked about earlier, was still working there in the late 1960s. It was appalling, she said. The work was so stressful, but what else could she do? She couldn't abandon the children. She cared so deeply about them. And the horrible truth was that few of her coworkers cared as much about the children as she did. The staff was largely made up of low-income locals who were really desperate for work, many of whom had little to no background in caregiving. And Willowbrook was so desperate for staff that they were not doing background checks on any of these people. To give you a quick picture of the kind of person that Willowbrook was hiring at the time, there was a custodian who worked there in the late 1960s, known as Frank Rouchetta. That wasn't his real name. He lied on his job application, they just never checked. We don't really know why he did that, but it's easy enough to guess after what ended up happening later. In 1969, he was caught by police having lured a nine-year-old into his car. He pled guilty to attempted sexual assault, and he went to prison for the crime. But the fact that a man like this was allowed to work with children, let alone children with developmental and intellectual disabilities. For years is chilling, but here's the thing. In the coming years, it wouldn't just be the children that felt unsafe. A bunch of female staff also started noticing something strange, as if there was a threat lurking in the woods where the institution stood, one that was closing in on them. On October 24th, 1978, Ethel Louise Atwell was on her way to work at Willowbrook. It was very early in the morning between 5.30 AM and 6 o'clock. She drove through the dark woods, eventually pulling into the parking lot outside of the school. Atwell was a physical therapist for the patients there, and her mid-forties, and she was very dedicated to her job. That morning, she stepped out of her car and she locked the door behind her. The nearest building to Atwell's car was Building 47. A couple of other nurses were already inside. After a little while, those nurses heard Atwell's voice coming from the dark outside. But they didn't see her. She was talking with someone though. They could hear that much, and it sounded like it was a man. Now, no one that was inside could see who this man was, but they heard him say something like, come on, come on. It was as if he was trying to lure her near him. They swore that they heard Ethel respond, no, you'll beat me. Followed by a loud scream outside. This caused the nurses inside to call the police immediately. But by the time the authorities arrived, it was too late. There was no one in the parking lot. The police combed the area looking for Ethel everywhere. Her car was there, but it was still locked. And a small handful of objects were scattered by the side door, like her pocketbook, one of her shoes and earring, and half of her set of dentures. The police looked for a while, but they never found Ethel, or really any trace of her. Other than in the woods, about 75 feet from the parking lot, they found her car keys that were discarded in the underbrush. The man she had been talking to, was never identified. Her co-workers hadn't recognized his voice and no one got a good look at him. Now, 1978 was a pretty transitional period for Willow Brook. Six years earlier, a doctor at the school blew the whistle on the conditions inside to a journalist who ran this really big story for eyewitness news. And as a result, a big group of parents who previously had no idea what was going on filed a class action lawsuit and the school had to try to really clean up its act after that. But this had some unintended consequences as well. Patients were discharged, they were pulled out or they were moved to other facilities in an attempt to ease the overcrowding. Staff were reassigned, and now there was almost an eerie emptiness to a lot of the campus. You could pull up to work before the sun rose just like Ethel and not see a single other car in the parking lot. You could walk from one building to another along the edge of the woods completely alone. Though a lot of the staff claimed that they didn't feel alone during these times, it felt almost like someone was watching them. And Ethel Louise Atwell, she was not the first Willow Brook employee to disappear that year. Back in July of 1978, a 44-year-old nurse named Shindley had clocked out of her shift sometime around midnight. Her plan was to just walk home. She lived not far away from the Willow Brook campus, and it was just a short walk, the same one that she made every night. But that particular night, she walked out into the darkness and she never came back. A few weeks later, her body was found in a shallow grave with evidence that she had been strangled to death. The police had no clues when it came to either of these women, and so a rumor started spreading around the community that there was someone lurking in the thick woods waiting to snatch women leaving the buildings. But the thing is, with rumors, most of the time they're exaggerations. The people, though in the surrounding community, had no idea how true this rumor was, or how much worse it was about to get. Picture this, it's the late 1980s, Willow Brook is mostly shut down at that point. Its staff had been reduced severely as well as its patient count. There's only maybe 250 residents left in one or two buildings. The rest of the campus, all 375 acres, lies empty. Buildings have been decaying for years, there's no funding to patch them back up. Windows have been smashed in, brick walls have been vandalized. The forest has essentially risen up all around the complex and tried to take it back. For a decade at this point, rumors of a bogeyman in the surrounding woods have been told on nearby playgrounds. But that's all it is, right? It's just a rumor. Well, in July of 1987, a few neighbors noticed a local 12-year-old girl named Jennifer Schweiger out in the woods nearby the edge of the woods. Beside her was an older man that none of them recognized. Now, Jennifer had Down syndrome, so when neighbors saw her with a stranger, they immediately became very concerned. But by the time anyone could call it into police, she was gone without a trace. And so was the man. Her parents were devastated to say the least, and they got to work pretty much immediately, gathering a search party. Within a week, their entire neighborhood had been mobilized to methodically search the area for the little girl. And this search ended up taking them past the houses through the woods straight to the ruins of Willowbrook. Like I said, it was in the process of getting shut down. There were plans to fully close the remaining buildings by September of that year, but as far as these parents were concerned, this was like walking through a ghost town. In the years since the Willowbrook scandal, the institution had really grown in the locals' imaginations. Parents in the search party later were called feeling a chill as they stepped amongst the old buildings, where thousands of children had been abused and neglected, and they were all calling out Jennifer's name looking for any sign of her. And that's when one of them saw something. Deep inside the Willowbrook grounds was a freshly dug shallow grave. And that is where they found the body of little Jennifer. Immediately, the New York Police Department got to work conducting an investigation into known predators in the area. A pair of eyewitnesses spoke to a detective named Bobby Jensen, and they were able to give him a description of the middle-aged man that they saw walking with Jennifer on the day that she disappeared. And one thing that really stood out to the detective was that the man was pushing a pale green bicycle with a basket on the front. When Detective Jensen heard this, he knew right away who they had seen. In fact, he had seen the same man mere days ago while he was out on patrol. It was a local transient man named Andre Rand. Now you're not going to recognize that name, but I have already told you about Andre Rand in this story. Remember Frank Bruschetta, the sex offender who had lied about his name to get a job at Willowbrook? Well, after his release from prison in 1972, he changed his name again. Perhaps this was a half-hearted attempt to keep a low profile or to evade law enforcement, or maybe it was just a way to give himself a fresh start. Whatever the reason he was now known as Andre Rand. And Andre Rand had a rap sheet, a very long one. Since his stint in prison for attempted sexual assault of a minor, he had been working various odd jobs in the area. All the while, he was going in and out of police custody for various offenses. But then, in 1981, he had attempted to assault another nine-year-old. He tried to lure this little girl into his car with a lollipop. And fortunately, she was able to escape him and run home even though Rand was following her in his car the entire way back. In that instance, for whatever reason, her parents decided that they were not going to press charges against him. And then, two years later, he attempted an even more dramatic kidnapping. He drove a bus to a local YMCA. He picked up 11 children and just drove off with them. He wound up stopping at a white castle where he bought all the kids' burgers, and then he took them to Newark Airport where they just spent the afternoon watching planes. And then, what he did next, is kind of confusing. He brought all the kids back to the YMCA where he found the police and concerned parents waiting for him. He was arrested and he served 10 months for the kidnapping. Why kidnap 11 kids just to drop them off exactly where you found them? Now, some people think it's because he had something really horrible in mind, but maybe got nervous and bailed on his own plan. Whatever the case, by the time Jennifer Schweiger disappeared, he was back on the streets and living at least part of the time in a camp on the grounds of his former police of employment, Willow Brook. Detective Jensen interrogated him when the search for Jennifer began, ultimately releasing him when he denied having seen her at all. But a month later, when her body was found, they did arrest him for her murder. As soon as photos of Andre hit the papers, the public was certain that they had their man. He was really creepy looking, first and foremost, he had this eerie, faraway gaze, a local photographer caught an image of Rand getting escorted out of the police headquarters. And in it, Rand doesn't really seem like he's resisting at all. He barely seems to know where he is. He's slumped in between three men and suits, and there's a line of drool running from his chin down onto his shirt. And when the public saw this photo, they branded him as a boogie man, the exact boogie man that they had been looking for. And as Rand's trial began, investigators started piecing together a trail of disappearances that stretched all the way back into the early 1970s. Before Jennifer Schweiger, five young people, many of whom had developmental disabilities had disappeared in that area. The one that was easiest to connect, Rand too, was a seven-year-old named Holly Ann Hughes, who had disappeared in 1981. Rand's green Volkswagen had been seen loitering near where she disappeared, though a search of his card didn't necessarily turn up any physical evidence. And honestly, that is maybe one of the more unsettling things about this case. There wasn't ever any physical evidence that definitively tied Rand to the series of victims he was accused of kidnapping and killing. Even Jennifer Schweiger, who was found buried basically next to Rand's campsite, could not be directly tied to him. The only links were the eyewitnesses who had seen them together, and the location of her body. Both of these are very damning, don't get me wrong. But remember, Willowbrook's grounds were huge, and Rand really wasn't the only one camping there. On top of the six children, Rand also became a suspect in the disappearance of Ethel Louise Atwell, and in the death of Shin Lee, the two Willowbrook employees I told you about. But again, with no physical evidence, it was impossible to charge him for these crimes. But Rand would eventually go on to be charged with the kidnapping and first degree murder of Jennifer Schweiger. He was convicted for kidnapping, but the jury just couldn't reach a verdict on the murder. Either way, he received a sentence of 25 years to life. Many years later, he would be retried for the kidnapping of Holly Hughes. news and given an additional 25 years to life. Rand is still behind bars to this day and he has never confessed to any of the murders attributed to him. He's going to be eligible for parole in 2037 at which point he'll be 91 years old. In the meantime, the legend of Rand, honestly, like most of the monsters that we recently covered on the show, has continued to grow and take on really a shape of his own, almost completely separate from his story. I mean, even the name "Cropsey" doesn't really have anything to do with Rand. It was the name that was given to him. The word "Cropsey" was actually taken from another common urban legend in New York that long predates the Willowbrook story itself. And in that story, there's a judge named George Cropsey, who is driven mad by the death of his family and takes out his fury on kids at a local summer camp. But now Cropsey is synonymous with Rand and with Willowbrook. And that's not the only way the legend has changed over time. In some versions, Andre Rand was a practicing satanist. According to some locals, the woods near Willowbrook were a popular ritual site for the process church of the final judgment. If that rings a bell to you, it's probably because they were one of the big groups that people wrote about during the height of the satanic panic, which was going on around the time of Jennifer's murder in the late 1980s. This, like many legends during the satanic panic, has been completely debunked. But one thing that I did want to mention is that the legend of Cropsey has now become the most popular story in the zeitgeist when it comes to Willowbrook. But what's even scarier, at least to me, is the horrors that persisted inside of those buildings for over 30 years. But that's not the stuff of legend. That was real. And it was horrible. And some of the victims are still alive today and dealing with the consequences of being sent there as a child, which is why I wanted to end the story today on some of the good that came out of that place. So former Willowbrook nurse Diane Buglioli helped found a nonprofit organization called a very special place, which offers services to the developmentally disabled. According to their website, they've helped over 1,600 people lead more fulfilling lives through their educational and community building services. And the class action lawsuit that parents filed against Willowbrook inspired legislation like the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act, which were some of the very first federal laws protecting the civil rights of disabled people. Today's Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, was built on the progress made by the Willowbrook families in the 1970s. Willowbrook was a place of horrors, but the name of this horribly mismanaged institution is now synonymous with disability rights. And that is a more worthwhile legacy than any summer camp boogie man. If you want to learn more about the history of Willowbrook and associated urban legends, the book Public Hostage, Public Ransom by Dr. William Bronston, and the documentary Crops E by Joshua Zeman and Barbara Broncoccio were two of the main sources that we used in our research today, and I highly recommend both of them to you guys. But that is all I have for you this week. Thank you once again for joining me here in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters. I know this one was heavy, but next week, my dear listeners, we're going to take you on another little morbid adventure with me, where we're actually going to go to Mount Everest. I want to tell you the stories that accompany some of the bodies that have been left on the mountain. And if you want to hear even more about Willowbrook, I do have a bit more dark history on the place that didn't make it into the episode, including some information on the supposed Satanist that were or were not living in the woods near the buildings. I'm going to be sharing that on footnotes, which is our weekly show for the High Council Tear on Patreon, so you can join me there to hear that. Alright. I will meet you here, once again, next week, and until then, stay curious. Hearts Arts Pounding is written and produced by me, Caleb Moore. Hearts Arts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Chino Hobbs, additional research and writing by Robteamstra. Sound design and mix by Peach Treesound, special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Journey and the team at WME and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out Hearts Arts Pounding dot com. If you want more darkly curious stories in your life, sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content. Our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jing sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com/hartsdartspounding. or whatever you do, stay curious.