The monster who made children disappear
It began as an urban legend about a sinister child snatcher, linked to an old building. Then little girls started vanishing...
Deserted, the building stood like a scene from a horror film
Every town has its urban legends... And in the Staten Island district of New York during the 1980s, every scare story seemed to feature one place.
Willowbrook State School, an institution for the treatment and care of mentally disabled children and adults.
This imposing building loomed over the landscape, and it was little wonder that its shadowy corridors inspired fear in the locals.
Because here the urban legends were true and many knew the horrors that had once happened inside...
Overcrowding, along with budget cuts, turned Willowbrook State School into a chaotic, terrifying place.
By the late 1980s, the facility was plagued by tales of patients kept in cages, mentally ill and malnourished children roaming the floors.
Rumours of residents being physically and mentally abused were rife and the last patient left in 1987, when the centre at last closed its doors.
Deserted and surrounded by tangled trees, Willowbrook stood like a scene from a horror film, inspiring scary stories from local kids.
They whispered that a crazed madman lurked inside. A bogeyman who’d come out at night and snatch children from the safety of their families. As the stories were shared between friends around campfires and at sleepovers, no doubt this creepy figure crept into many of their nightmares.
Perhaps they told themselves that this was just a silly, scary story.
However, what no-one knew at the time was that there really was a man who lived in the abandoned institution. And the local children were in more grave danger than even the most sinister story could have predicted.
Drifter Andre Rand had briefly worked as an orderly at the Willowbrook facility, while it was still open in the 1960s.
He’d moved on, beginning a disgusting life of crime that centred around his sickening sexual interest in children.
In 1969, Rand persuaded a 9-year-old girl to get into his car and assaulted her.
A passing police car caught him in the act, and he pleaded guilty to sexual abuse, serving 16 months in prison before being paroled.
Then, in 1983, Rand struck again.
While working for a school bus company, he persuaded 11 schoolchildren to get on board – and took them on a day-long trip, without the permission of any of their parents.
The bizarre escapade included Rand treating the children to a fast-food lunch, followed by a trip to a nearby airport to watch planes land.
He was caught and charged with unlawful imprisonment,
but served just 10 months of his sentence behind bars.
And it seems prison did nothing to reform him...
On his release, in July 1987, Rand returned to the grounds of his former employer – the recently shut-down Willowbrook State School.
Setting up a tiny camp on the 384-acre, abandoned plot, Rand had a familiar, albeit makeshift place to call home.
Somewhere to plan his next evil act…
That year, local girl Jennifer Schweiger, 12, went for a short walk and never returned.
The police and volunteers desperately searched for the girl, but she seemed to have vanished completely.
Then an eye witness came forward.
The man reckoned he’d seen Jennifer – who had Down’s syndrome, walking hand-inhand with a man fitting the description of Andre Rand.
The police swooped and arrested him.
Over the next five weeks, none of Jennifer’s clothes or belongings were found and her parents were left in agony, wondering whether their daughter might still be alive.
Finally, a volunteer helping with the search noticed a spot near where Jennifer had gone missing, where the soil appeared to have been recently disturbed.
The area had been combed already, but the team decided to try again and began digging.
The location of that investigation was on the old Willowbrook estate – and, this time, a gruesome discovery was made. ‘We dug it up and found a little foot,’ said one of the volunteers. He added, ‘It’s something that’s going to stick with you the rest of your life.’ Already, Rand, 43, had been arrested and charged with kidnapping Jennifer. Now murder was added to the charge. But in court, a jury failed to reach a verdict on the killing. Instead, they convicted Andre Rand of abduction, and he was jailed for 25 years. He was due to be eligible for parole in 2008 but, in 2004, he was convicted of a second kidnapping – one that had taken place 23 years earlier. In 1981, 7-year-old Holly Ann Hughes had gone to the local shop with a friend to buy a bar of soap. A man fitting Rand’s description had pulled up next to the two little girls and dragged Holly into his car before driving off. The full story remains unknown, but Holly was never seen again. It took more than two decades for detectives to build a strong enough case to finally convict Rand of Holly’s kidnapping. He was eventually sentenced to another consecutive 25 years in jail, meaning he won’t be eligible for parole until 2037, when he will be 93.
To this day, Andre Rand remains a real-life monster.
Fellow prison inmates have commented on his perverse interest in children.
Rand even asked another inmate how he could get his hands on a pornographic magazine featuring children.
Although he is only serving time for two kidnappings, he is suspected to have been involved in a string of other missing-children cases.
Some of these date back decades, although he has never faced charges, due to lack of evidence.
Rand has never shown any remorse for his actions, instead choosing to send bizarre letters to the media from his prison cell, in which he claims to be a ‘scapegoat victim’ of a ‘corrupt’ legal system.
The area where he lived and committed his crimes has been changed forever by his despicable actions.
‘He terrified a whole community,’ one resident told the Press. ‘He still haunts us.’
As for the Willowbrook, the building stands to this day, with part of the estate cleaned up and taken over by a college.
But it would seem that the local children no longer need to make up scary stories.
Instead, they can just tell the terrifying tale of Andre Rand – the real-life bogeyman.
The soil appeared to have been recently disturbed