8B
Tuesday, May 1, 1990 / University Daily Kansan
Child's death haunts family for 33 years
The Associated Press
ALBANY, N.Y. — When they found 11-year-old Billy Ruff hung from the big maple tree he loved to climb, innocence died in the hearts of his brothers and sisters.
They saw his killer everywhere, in anyone. The surviving Ruff children, five who were living when Billy died three years ago and three who were born later, lived with a fear so deep it darkened every waking moment. Their terror was inspired by a real-life bogman who preyed on happy, fresh-faced kids who loved raisin cookies and baseball.
Kids like Billy, Kids like them.
Kids like Billy. Kids like them.
"All of us, at one time or another, didn't think we'd reach the age of 11," said Tim Ruff, who was 3 when Billy died.
Then one day three years ago, Christopher Ruff glanced up at the bulletin board in the police station where he worked and into the face of the man who killed the brother he never knew.
"Mom and I knew, as soon as I called her," said Chris, the youngest Ruff at age 24, born eight years after his brother's death and two years later. "His body was both started to shake and say 'This is it.'"
On April 21 he saw the man again in Albany Court, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Billy's terms.
It was not murder, however, that put Billy's killer on a wanted poster; it was a sex-abuse charge involving a girl about Billy's age. The awful secret his family had hidden was that Billy Ruff had been sodomized before he died.
"This sort of thing wasn't spoken about," said Mildred Ruff, sitting in her living room surrounded by six of her children. "People were talking about a child molesting. It was a bush-hugging thing."
Disappearance
Smith Avenue, where the family lived in the northwestern suburb of Albany, was a street full of children in a rural landscape of fields and trees the day Billy disappeared.
He was last seen at 4:30 p.m. Saturday,
Aug. 31, 1987, with his pocket full of raisin
cookies and a length of trayed clotheshe
was used to steer a homemade go-cart
in his hand.
He did not show up for dinner. Mildred Ruff
remembers wrapping his plate of lamb
chops, boiled potatoes and corn on the cob in
wax paper and putting it in the refrigerator.
At 9 p.m., she called her husband at work, and he began a search that lasted until dawn.
In her fiftiful sleep that night, Mildred Ruff had a dream or a vision, she was not sure which: "I saw Billy, on his knees, hanging by a rope."
That is the way he was found the next day by a friend's daughter. He was hung with his own clotheline in a densely wooded lot after he arrived. And where, years after, they still play.
Police interviewed hundreds of people
"They didn't care how many hours they put in," said Raymond Rasmussen, one of the first state police detectives put on the case. "We got to feel very close and very compassionate for the family and what they'd been through."
What they could not know was that the killer was there among them; then, in the noise and confusion of grief and police work, he was gone.
"The night of the wake, a priest friend of ours said it may take 20 years, but nobody can keep this thing to themselves," Mildred Ruff said. "And I said, if it takes 20 days, I'll lose my mind."
Family copes
Instead, she found strength and faith enough to last her family through Billy's death, the death of her husband eight years later and her own fight with cancer. For years, she carried in her apron pocket a rosary her husband had given her. The black beads had worn to brown from constant fingering.
Twenty days became 20 months. The investigation died down. The police stopped coming by with mug shots of child molesters.
Seven years passed. The police came around one last time to tell the family a forensics expert had decided Billy's death was accidental. His family scioffed that knew the truth would surface, a belief that never wavered as 19 years became 20, then 30.
"We know what it's like to have a lot of unanswered questions," said John, born four years after Billy's murder. "But in the back of our minds, there was always the hope."
There also was fear — of the dark, of being alone, of getting too close to people.
"Everybody grew up with a paranoia, a normal childhood because we were damned normal."
'Ever since the day I found out, I've been enraged. He shook my hand, and that's what's enraged me ever since. Knowing what he'd done to my own brother, he shook my hand and breathed the air I was breathing.'
Jav Ruff
There's not one time we can walk into an empty house and feel safe. Not one of us."
The oldest Ruff, Regina, who was 13 when Billy died, and Tommy, who was 5, told their mother they knew there was a boggy man because he got their brother. Also, Regina, Tum, Tim, Joe, Lisa, Jay, John and them — worried he was out to get another of them.
"We'd stand at the window, stand there and watch when people weren't home on time," said Lisa, who was 8 months when Billy was murdered. "I remember standing at my bed in the back bedroom, looking out the window and knowing I was doing the same thing as Mom was. We were always scared."
The fear became something they lived and breathed. In time, they would pass it on to their spouses and their children.
"I was terrorized by nightmares most of my life," Regina wrote in a recent letter to her mother. "I had to force myself to go home. I was afraid of the dark and of the daylight."
"All this destruction, all this fear — and I am only one of eight. Multiply the damage to me by every other life this touched."
Seeking the killer
While Billy's brothers and sisters struggled with demons, his killer was finishing a stint in the Air Force and spending short periods as an Albany police officer and an ironworker. He married three times and fathered two children by a fourth woman. In the 1970s he wandered the streets, a homeless alcoholic.
when the case was 24 years old, Chris and his brothers found some old newspaper clippings in the basement. "They wanted to know more," Mildred Ruff said. "They wanted to know why it was unsolved."
"I think he was a man that had this on his mind all that time," Rasmussen said. "Maybe that caused him to become what he was."
From state police she learned that the file on Billy's murder was about to be destroyed, the fate of unresolved cases after 25 years. Desperate to save the records, Mildred Ruff called Rasmussen, who was then in charge of the state police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. He ordered the file permanently retained.
"In my mind, I guess I was always hoping someday somebody would make an arrest in the case," Rasmussen said. "Comparing my thoughts and hopes that someday this might be resolved with how much space that little file took up in our huge record section, there was no question in my mind what I should do."
There never was any question in Chris Ruff's mind what he should do, either. He wanted to be a policeman. As a child, he drew a self-portrait with a badge on his chest. He dropped out of college to join the suburban Police, where he worked as a dispatcher.
His mother says it was providence that he missed a promotion to patrolman. That would have sent him to the police academy, but he was able to station when the killer's photo was posted.
Chris contacted the state police and met the next day with two senior investigators.
"They looked at the newspaper clippings and said, 'I think we may have something. This may be the missing link, the reason we could never find anything back then.' "Chris said. "Don't get your hair out." We'll keep eye out for him, and we'll let you know." ^
Cousin was the killer
Months went by. Then came the break the police had been waiting for; someone inquired about buying the killer's car, which they did not find. The police contacted police. Their man was in Florida.
Under questioning, he admitted molesting a 10-year-old girl but would not talk about Billy Ruff. After he failed a lie-detector test, he was apprehended in part, "I killed Billy, and I need help."
Eventually, he signed a confession that told how he "threw the rope over a branch above
my head, grabbed the rope and ran with it,
pulling Billy up off the ground. . . I ran like
hell."
It was only then, with the man safely in police custody, that Chris and his mother were ready to tell the rest of the family that the man confessed to Billy's murder was their own first cousin, Richard Ruff. Family had done this to family.
"Ever since the day I found out, I've been enraged," Jay said, recalling his first encounter with his cousin in 1982. "He shook my hand, and that's what it's enraged me ever told me. He'd done to my own brother, he shook my hand and breathed the air I was breathing."
Richard Ruff, S3, was sentenced last week for the first-degree felony murder of William Ruff Jr. He stood trial after recanting his sentence, saying police had frightened him into it.
In August 1957, 20-year-old Richard Ruff was on leave from the Air Force. He had dropped by his uncle's home that week to show off a red Chevy convertible, which Billy had admired. The day Billy's body was found, he gathered with the family as another grieving relative. He left soon after. Police never questioned him.
Living with the truth
Most of the Ruff family attended all nine days of the trial, reliving the horror of Billy's murder. They saw autopsy photos and heard testimony about the pain Billy sustained. They also learned why he was killed.
"This little boy was a naive, sweet, 11-year-old kid, and he had his fellow seldomize him, and I'm sure the first words out of his mouth were, 'I'm going to tell my mother and father on you,'" said Chief Assistant District Attorney Daniel Dwyer. "The ultimate result was Richard was going to be found out, and he couldn't handle that."
For the Ruffs, there is relief in knowing the truth, knowing that the man who killed Billy will never hurt another child. They want other families to have faith that killers can be found, no matter how hard they want them to know that solving the mystery cannot erase all the pain.
"We've lived this for 33 years, we'll live it for another 33 years," Chris said. "There's no punishment that would equal what he did to our brother and to us."
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