In 1943, Andre Rand the “Pied Piper of Staten Island” employed various pseudonyms to cov
In 1943, Andre Rand the “Pied Piper of Staten Island” employed various pseudonyms to cover his movements and criminal activities through the years. Between 1966 and ‘68, using the last name “Bruchette,” he worked as a physical therapy aide at New York’s Willowbrook State School - later renamed the Staten Island Development Center. On May 5, 1969, he was arrested in the South Bronx for kidnapping and attempting to rape a nine-year-old girl. Pleading guilty to a lesser charge of sexual abuse, he served sixteen months in prison, winning parole in January 1972. Back on the street, Rand was arrested three more times for “minor” offenses, including burglary. Along the way, his name was linked with disappearances of several children. Rand was working as a painter at a South Beach, Staten Island, apartment house when five-year-old Alice Pereira vanished from one of the flats in 1972, but officers were short on solid evidence required for an indictment. Nine years later, in July 1981, Rand was hauled in for questioning in the disappearance of seven-year-old Holly Hughes, from Port Richmond, and once more he was released for lack of evidence. On January 9, 1983, Rand collected eleven children from West Brighton, loaded them into a van, and set off on a five-hour jaunt into Newark, neglecting to ask parental permission. They spent the day eating hamburgers and watching planes land at Newark airport, and while none of the children were harmed, Rand was arrested on charges of unlawful imprisonment, convicted in March and sentenced to ten months in jail. He was back on the street by August, listed as a suspect when ten-year-old Tiahese Jackson vanished on Staten Island. No trace of the three missing girls had been found by July 9, 1987, when 12-year-old Jennifer Schweizer disappeared from her home at Westerleigh. A victim of Downe’s syndrome, Jennifer was traced to the grounds of the deserted Staten Island Development Center, where Rand had been living for several years in a makeshift shelter of his own design. Witnesses reported seeing Rand with Jennifer the day she disappeared, and after some preliminary questions, he was charged with her kidnapping on August 4, held without bail pending a psychiatric evaluation. Eight days later, Schweizer’s body was unearthed from a shallow grave, within sight of Rand’s lean-to, and a charge of murder in the first degree was added to his file. -- source link