Killer of Boy, 11, Faces Justice--33 Years After Crime : Murder: Billy Ruff was hanged from a tree with a go-cart rope. His killing remained a mystery--until a brother he never knew became a police dispatcher and solved the case.

When they found 11-year-old Billy Ruff hanged from a big maple tree he had loved to climb, innocence died in the hearts of his brothers and sisters.

They saw his killer everywhere, suspected everyone. The other Ruff children--five were living when Billy died 33 years ago and three were born later--lived with a fear so deep it darkened their every waking moment. It was a terror inspired by a real-life bogyman who preyed on happy, fresh-faced kids--kids who loved raisin cookies and baseball. 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 was killed.

Then one day three years ago, Christopher Ruff glanced up at the bulletin board in the police station where he worked and saw the face of the man who had killed the brother he never knew.

“Mom and I knew, as soon as I called her,” said Chris, 24, who was born eight years after his brother’s death and two months after his father’s. “We both started to shake and say, ‘This is it!’ ”

Earlier this month, Chris Ruff saw the man again--in Albany County Court being sentenced to life in prison for Billy’s murder.

It was not murder, however, that had put the killer’s likeness on the ‘wanted’ poster; it was a sex crime involving a 10-year-old girl. The awful secret the Ruff family had hidden was that Billy had been sodomized before he died.

“This sort of thing wasn’t spoken about,” Mildred Ruff said, sitting in her living room with six of her children. “People wouldn’t talk about child-molesting. It was a hush-hush thing.”

At the time Billy Ruff disappeared, Smith Avenue, in the northwestern suburb of Albany where the family lived, was a street full of children set in a rural landscape of fields and trees. Billy was last seen alive on Saturday afternoon, Aug. 31, 1957. He had a pocket full of raisin cookies, and in one hand a length of frayed clothesline he planned to use to steer a homemade go-cart. He didn’t 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 fridge. At 9 p.m., she called her husband at work, and he began a search that lasted until dawn.

In her fitful sleep that night, Mildred Ruff had a dream or a vision, she wasn’t sure which: “I saw Billy, on his knees, hanging by a rope.”

That’s the way a friend’s daughter found him the next day--hanged with his own clothesline in a densely wooded lot where all the kids played, and continued to play for years after.

The 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 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 among them. Then, in the noise and confusion of grieving and of 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.”

But she found strength and faith enough to last her family through Billy’s death and the loss of her husband eight years later. For years, she carried in her apron pocket a rosary her husband had given her. The black beads were worn to brown from constant fingering.

The 20 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 that a forensics expert had decided Billy’s death was accidental. His family scoffed; they knew the truth would surface, and that belief never wavered as 10 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 died. “But in the back of our minds, there was always the hope.”

There was also fear--of the dark, of being alone, of getting too close to people.

“Everybody grew up with a paranoia,” Chris said. “We couldn’t have a normal childhood because we were so damn scared. There’s not one time we can walk into an empty house and feel safe. Not one of us.”

Regina, the oldest, 13 when Billy died, and Tommy, who was 5, told their mother they knew there was a bogyman because he got their brother. All the Ruffs--Regina, Tom, Tim, Joe, Lisa, Jay, John and Chris--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 old 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 Mom was. We were always scared.”

Fear became something they lived and breathed. In time, they would pass it on to their wives and husbands, to 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 anywhere. 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.”

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 with a fourth woman. In the 1970s he wandered the streets as a homeless alcoholic.

“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.”

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.”

From the state police she learned that the case file would soon be destroyed, as are records of all unsolved cases after 25 years. Mildred Ruff called Rasmussen, who by then was in charge of the state police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. He ordered the file saved.

“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 records section--there was no question in my mind what I should do.”

There was never any question in Chris Ruff’s mind as to what he should do, either. He wanted to be a cop. As a child, he drew a self-portrait with a badge on his chest. He dropped out of college to work as a dispatcher for the police force of suburban Colonie.

His mother says it was Providence that he missed a promotion to patrolman. That would have sent him to the police academy, and he would not have been in the 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. “They said, ‘Don’t get your hopes up. We’ll keep an eye out for him, and we’ll let you know.’ ”

Months went by. Then came the break the police had been waiting for: Someone inquired about buying the killer’s car, which had a lien against it at a local bank. The bank contacted police. Their man was in Florida.

Under questioning, he admitted molesting a 10-year-old girl but wouldn’t talk about Billy Ruff. After he failed a lie-detector test, he wrote a note saying, in part, “I killed Billy and I need help.”

Eventually, he signed a confession of how he “threw the rope over a branch above my head, grabbed the rope and ran with it, pulling Billy up off the ground . . . (then) I ran like hell.”

It was only then, with the man in police custody, that Chris and his mother were ready to tell the rest of the family that the man who had 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 Ruff said, recalling his first encounter with his cousin in 1982. “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.”

Richard Ruff, 53, was sentenced this month for the first-degree felony murder of William Ruff Jr. He stood trial after recanting his confession, saying police had frightened him into it.

In August, 1957, Richard Ruff was 20 years old. 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 was there with the family, just another grieving relative. He left soon after. Police never questioned him.

Most of the Ruff family attended all nine days of the trial, reliving the horror. They saw autopsy photos and heard testimony about the pain Billy had suffered. They also learned why he was killed.

“This little boy was a naive, sweet, 11-year-old kid, and he had this fellow sodomize 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 Dist. Atty. 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 many years pass. But they also 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.