On
this date, January 16, 1936, a Serial Killer, Albert Fish was executed by the
electric chair in Sing Sing
Correctional Facility, New York. I will post information about this
Serial killer from Wikipedia and other links.
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Albert Fish
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Born
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May 19, 1870
Washington, D.C. |
Died
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January 16, 1936 (aged 65)
Ossining, New York |
Cause of death
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Electrocuted, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
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Other names
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Frank Howard,
The Gray Man, The Werewolf of Wysteria, The Brooklyn Vampire, The Moon Maniac, The Boogey Man |
Height
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5' 5" (1.65 m)
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Weight
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130 pounds
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Criminal penalty
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Death
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Motive
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Sexual gratification
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Conviction(s)
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Killings
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Victims
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3-9
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Span of killings
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1924–1932
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Country
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USA
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State(s)
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New York
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Date apprehended
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December 13, 1934
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Hamilton Howard
"Albert" Fish (May 19, 1870 – January 16, 1936)
was an American serial killer. He was also known as the Gray Man, the Werewolf
of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire, the Moon Maniac, and The
Boogey Man. A child rapist and cannibal, he boasted that he "had children
in every state", and at one time stated the number was about 100. However,
it is not known whether he was talking about rapes or cannibalization, less
still whether he was telling the truth. He was a suspect in at least five
murders during his lifetime. Fish confessed to three murders that police were
able to trace to a known homicide, and he confessed to stabbing at least two
other people. He was put on trial for the kidnapping and murder of Grace Budd,
and was convicted and executed by electric chair.
Early
life
Birth and childhood
Fish
was born in Washington, D.C., on May 19, 1870, to Randall (1795 – October
16, 1875) and Ellen (née Howell; 1838–c. 1903) Fish. His father was American,
of English ancestry, and his mother was Scots-Irish American. Fish said that he
was named after statesman and politician Hamilton Fish, a distant relative. His
father was 43 years older than his mother and 75 years old at the time of his
birth. Fish was the youngest child and had three living siblings: Walter,
Annie, and Edwin. He wished to be known as "Albert" after a dead
sibling and to escape the nickname "Ham & Eggs" that he was given
at an orphanage in which he spent much of his childhood.
Fish's
family had a history of mental illness. His uncle suffered from mania. A
brother was confined in a state mental hospital. His sister was diagnosed with
a "mental affliction". Three other relatives were diagnosed with
mental illnesses, and his mother had "aural and/or visual
hallucinations".
His
father was a river boat captain and, by 1870, was a fertilizer manufacturer.
The elder Fish died in 1875 at the Sixth Street Station of the Pennsylvania
Railroad in Washington, D.C. of a myocardial infarction. Fish's mother then put
her son into Saint John's Orphanage in Washington, where he was frequently
treated sadistically. He began to enjoy the physical pain that the beatings
brought. Of his time at the orphanage, Fish remarked, "I was there till I
was nearly nine, and that's where I got started wrong. We were unmercifully
whipped. I saw boys doing many things they should not have done."
By
1880, his mother had a government job and was able to remove Fish from the
orphanage. In 1882, at age 12, he began a relationship with a telegraph boy.
The youth introduced Fish to such practices as urolagnia (drinking urine) and coprophagia
(eating feces). Fish began visiting public baths where he could watch other
boys undress and spent a great portion of his weekends on these visits.
Throughout his life, he would write obscene letters to women whose names he
acquired from classified advertising and matrimonial agencies.
1890–1918: Early adulthood and
criminal history
By
1890, Fish arrived in New York City, and he said at that point he became a prostitute
and began raping young boys. In 1898, his mother arranged a marriage for him
with a woman nine years his junior. They had six children: Albert, Anna,
Gertrude, Eugene, John, and Henry Fish.
Throughout
1898, he worked as a house painter. He said he continued molesting children,
mostly boys younger than age six. He later recounted an incident in which a
male lover took him to a waxworks museum, where Fish was fascinated by a bisection
of a penis. After that, he became obsessed with sexual mutilation. In 1903, he
was arrested for grand larceny and was sentenced to incarceration in Sing Sing.
Around
1910, while he was working in Wilmington, Delaware, Fish met a 19-year-old man
named Thomas Kedden. He took Kedden to where he was staying, and the two began
a sadomasochistic relationship; it is unclear whether or not Fish forced Kedden
to do these things, but in his confession he implies that the man was
intellectually disabled. After ten days, Fish took Kedden to "an old farm
house", where he began to torture him. The torture took place over two
weeks. Fish eventually tied Kedden up and cut off half of his penis. "I
shall never forget his scream, or the look he gave me," Fish later
recalled. He originally intended to kill Kedden, cut up his body, and take it
home, but he feared the hot weather would draw attention to him; instead, Fish
poured peroxide over the wound, wrapped it in a vaseline-covered handkerchief,
left a $10 bill, kissed Kedden goodbye, and left. "Took first train I
could get back home. Never heard what become of him, or tried to find
out," Fish said.
In
January 1917, Fish's wife left him for John Straube, a handyman who boarded
with the Fish family. Fish then had to raise his children as a single
parent. After his arrest, Fish told a newspaper that when his wife left
him, she took nearly every possession the family owned. He began to have auditory hallucinations. He once wrapped
himself in a carpet,
saying that he was following the instructions of John
the Apostle.
It
was about this time that Fish began to indulge in self-harm.
He would embed needles into his groin and abdomen. After his
arrest, X-rays
revealed that Fish had at least 29 needles lodged in his pelvic
region. He also hit himself repeatedly with a nail-studded paddle and inserted
wool doused with lighter fluid into his anus and set it alight. While he was
never thought to have physically attacked or abused his children, he did
encourage them and their friends to paddle his buttocks with the same
nail-studded paddle he used to abuse himself. He soon developed a growing
obsession with cannibalism, often preparing himself a dinner consisting
solely of raw meat and sometimes serving it to his children.
1919–1930: Escalation
In
about 1919, he stabbed a mentally handicapped boy in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.. Fish
chose people who were either mentally handicapped or African-American
as his victims, explaining that he assumed these people would not be missed
when killed. Fish tortured, mutilated, and murdered young children with his
"implements of Hell": a meat cleaver, a butcher knife, and a small
handsaw.
On
July 11, 1924, Fish found eight-year-old Beatrice Kiel playing alone on her
parents' Staten Island farm. He offered her money to come and
help him look for rhubarb. She was about to leave the farm when her mother
chased Fish away. Fish left but returned later to the Kiels' barn, where he
tried to sleep but was discovered by Hans Kiel and forced to leave. During
1924, the 54-year-old Fish, suffering from psychosis,
felt that God was
commanding him to torture and sexually mutilate children.
Shortly
before his abduction of Grace Budd, Fish attempted to test his "implements
of Hell" on a child he had been molesting named Cyril Quinn. Quinn and his
friend were playing boxball on a sidewalk when Fish asked them if they had eaten
lunch. When they said that they had not, he invited them into his apartment for
sandwiches. While the two boys were wrestling on Fish's bed, they dislodged his
mattress; underneath was a knife, a small handsaw, and a meat cleaver. They
became frightened and ran out of the apartment.
Bigamy
Fish
remarried on February 6, 1930, in Waterloo, New York, to Estella Wilcox but
divorced after only one week. Fish was arrested in May 1930 for "sending
an obscene letter to a woman who answered an advertisement for a maid."
Following that arrest and one in 1931, he was sent to the Bellevue psychiatric hospital for
observation.
Murder of Grace Budd
On
May 25, 1928, Fish saw a classified advertisement in the Sunday edition of the New
York World that read, "Young man, 18, wishes position in country.
Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street." On May 28, 1928, Fish, then
58 years old, visited the Budd family in Manhattan
under the pretense of hiring Edward; he later confessed that he planned to tie
Edward up, mutilate him, and leave him to bleed to death. He introduced himself
as Frank Howard, a farmer from Farmingdale, New York. Fish promised to hire
Budd and his friend Willie, and said he would send for them in a few days. He
failed to show up, but he sent a telegraph to the Budd family apologizing and
set a later date. When Fish returned, he met Grace Budd. He apparently changed
his intended victim from Edward Budd to Grace Budd and quickly made up a story
about having to attend his niece's birthday party. He convinced the parents,
Delia Flanagan and Albert Budd I, to let Grace accompany him to the party that
evening. The elder Albert Budd was a porter for the United States
Equitable Life Assurance Society. Grace had a younger sister, Beatrice, two
older brothers, Edward and George Budd, and a younger brother, Albert Budd II.
Grace left with Fish that day but never returned.
The
police arrested 66-year-old superintendent Charles Edward Pope on September 5,
1930 as a suspect, accused by Pope's estranged wife. He spent 108 days in
jail between his arrest and trial on December 22, 1930. He was found not
guilty.
Letter
In
November 1934, an anonymous letter was sent to the girl's parents which
ultimately led the police to Fish. Mrs. Budd was illiterate and could not read
the letter herself, so she had her son read it to her. The unaltered letter
(complete with Fish's misspellings and grammatical errors) reads:
My dear Mrs BuddIn 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the steamer Tacoma, Capt John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco to Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was a famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1–$3 Dollars a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold to the Butchers to be cut up and sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak – chops – or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys one 7 one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them – tortured them – to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 yr old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was cooked and eaten except Head – bones and guts. He was Roasted in the oven, (all of his ass) boiled, broiled, fried, stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time I was living at 409 E 100 St, rear – right side. He told me so often how good Human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3 – 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese – strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her, on the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wild flowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mama. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick – bite and scratch. I choked her to death then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.
Police
investigated the letter. The story concerning "Capt. Davis" and the
"famine" in Hong Kong were unable to be verified. The part of the
letter concerning the murder of Grace Budd, however, was found to be accurate
in its description of the kidnapping and subsequent events, although it was
impossible to confirm whether or not Fish had actually eaten parts of Grace's
body.
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Mugshot of 1930
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Capture
The
letter was delivered in an envelope that had a small hexagonal emblem with the
letters "N.Y.P.C.B.A." representing "New York Private
Chauffeur's Benevolent Association". A janitor at the company told the
police he had taken some of the stationery home but left it at his rooming
house at 200 East 52nd Street when he moved out. The landlady of the rooming
house said that Fish checked out of that room a few days earlier. She said that
Fish's son sent him money and he asked her to hold his next check for him.
William F. King was the chief investigator for the case. He waited outside the
room until Fish returned. Fish agreed to go to headquarters for questioning,
then brandished a razor blade. King disarmed Fish and took him to police
headquarters. Fish made no attempt to deny the murder of Grace Budd, saying
that he meant to go to the house to kill Edward Budd, Grace's brother. Fish
said it "never even entered [his] head" to rape the girl, but he
later claimed to his attorney that, while kneeling on Grace's chest and
strangling her, he did have two involuntary ejaculations. This information was
used at trial to make the claim the kidnapping was sexually motivated, thus
avoiding any mention of cannibalism.
Other crimes discovered after Fish's
arrest
Francis
McDonnell
During
the night of July 14, 1924, eight-year-old Francis McDonnell was reported missing
by his parents. He failed to return home after playing catch with friends in
the Port Richmond neighborhood of Staten
Island. A search was organized and his body was found—hanged by a tree—in a
wooded area near his home. He had been sexually assaulted, then strangled with
his suspenders. According to an autopsy, McDonnell had also suffered extensive
lacerations to his legs and abdomen, and his left hamstring had
almost entirely been stripped of its flesh. Fish refused to claim
responsibility for this, although he later stated that he intended to castrate
the boy but fled when he heard someone approaching the area.
McDonnell's
friends told the police that he was taken by an elderly man with a gray
mustache. A neighbor also told the police he observed the boy with a
similar-looking man walking along a grassy path into the nearby woods.
Francis's mother, Anna McDonnell, said she saw the same man earlier that day.
She told the reporters, "He came shuffling down the street mumbling to
himself and making queer motions with his hands ... I saw his thick gray hair
and his drooping gray mustache. Everything about him seemed faded and gray."
This
description resulted in the mysterious stranger becoming known as "The
Gray Man". The McDonnell murder remained unsolved until the murder of
Grace Budd. When several eyewitnesses, among them the Staten Island farmer Hans
Kiel, positively identified Albert Fish as the odd stranger seen around Port
Richmond on the day of Francis McDonnell's disappearance, Richmond County District
Attorney Thomas J. Walsh announced his intention
to seek an indictment against Fish for the boy's murder. At first Fish denied
the charges. It was only in March 1935, after the conclusion of his trial for
the Budd murder and his confession to the killing of Billy Gaffney, that Fish
confirmed to investigators that he also raped and murdered Francis McDonnell.
When the McDonnell confession was made public, the New York Daily Mirror wrote that the
disclosure solidified Fish's reputation as "the most vicious child-slayer
in criminal history".
Billy
Gaffney
On
February 11, 1927, 3-year-old Billy Beaton and his 12-year-old brother were
playing in the apartment hallway in Brooklyn with 4-year-old Billy Gaffney.
When the 12-year-old left for his apartment, both younger boys disappeared;
Beaton was found later on the roof of the apartments. When asked what happened
to Gaffney, Beaton said "the bogeyman took
him." Gaffney's body was never recovered. Initially, serial killer Peter
Kudzinowski was a suspect in the boy's murder. Then, Joseph Meehan, a
motorman on a Brooklyn trolley, saw a picture of Fish in a newspaper and
identified him as the old man whom he saw February 11, 1927; the old man had been
trying to quiet a little boy sitting with him on the trolley. The boy was not
wearing a jacket, was crying for his mother, and was dragged by the man on and
off the trolley. Beaton's description of the "bogeyman" matched
Fish's. Police matched the description of the child to Billy Gaffney.
Detectives of the Manhattan Missing Persons Bureau were able to establish that
Fish was employed as a house painter by a Brooklyn real estate company during
February 1927 and that on the day of Billy Gaffney's disappearance he was
working at a location a few miles away from where the boy was abducted. Fish
claimed the following in a letter to his attorney:
I brought him to the Riker Ave. dumps. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took him ... I took the G boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took trolley to 59 St. at 2 A.M. and walked home from there. Next day about 2 P.M., I took tools, a good heavy cat-of-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these half in six strips about 8 in. long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears – nose – slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood. I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in the grip. Then I cut him thru the middle of his body. Just below his belly button. Then thru his legs about 2 in. below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head – feet – arms – hands and the legs below the knee. This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to North Beach. Water is 3 to 4 ft. deep. They sank at once. I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee wees and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears – nose – pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when meat had roasted about 1/4 hr., I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about 2 hr., it was nice and brown, cooked thru. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was as sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet.
Elizabeth
Gaffney visited Fish in Sing Sing, accompanied by Detective King and two other
men. She wanted to ask him about her son's death, but Fish refused to speak to
her. Fish began to weep and asked to be left alone. After two hours of asking
him questions through his lawyer, James Dempsey, Mrs. Gaffney gave up. She was
still unconvinced that Albert Fish was her son's killer.
Trial
and execution
Albert
Fish's trial for the murder of Grace Budd began on March 11, 1935, in White Plains, New York. Frederick P. Close
presided as judge and Westchester County Chief Assistant
District Attorney Elbert F. Gallagher was prosecuting attorney. Fish's defense
counsel was James Dempsey, a former prosecutor and the one-time mayor of Peekskill, New York. The trial lasted for 10 days.
Fish pleaded insanity, and claimed to have heard voices from God telling him to
kill children. Several psychiatrists testified about Fish's sexual
fetishes, which included sadism,
masochism,
cunnilingus,
anilingus,
fellatio, flagellation,
exhibitionism,
voyeurism,
piquerism,
cannibalism,
coprophagia,
urophilia,
pedophilia
and infibulation.
Dempsey in his summation noted that Fish was a "psychiatric
phenomenon" and that nowhere in legal or medical records was there another
individual who possessed so many sexual abnormalities.
The
defense's chief expert witness was Fredric
Wertham, a psychiatrist with an emphasis on child development who conducted
psychiatric examinations for the New York criminal courts. During two days of
testimony, Wertham explained Fish's obsession with religion and specifically
his preoccupation with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis
22:1–24). Wertham said that Fish believed that similarly "sacrificing" a boy would be penance for his own sins and that even if the act
itself was wrong, angels would prevent it if God did not approve. Fish
attempted the sacrifice once before but was thwarted when a car drove past.
Edward Budd was the next intended victim, but he turned out to be larger than
expected so he settled on Grace. Although he knew Grace was female, it is
believed that Fish perceived her as a boy. Wertham then detailed Fish's cannibalism,
which in his mind he associated with communion.
The last question Dempsey asked Wertham was 15,000 words long, detailed Fish's
life and ended with asking how the doctor considered his mental condition based
on this life. Wertham simply answered "He is insane". Gallagher
cross-examined Wertham on whether Fish knew the difference between right and
wrong. He responded that he did know but that it was a perverted knowledge
based on his opinions of sin, atonement and religion and thus was an
"insane knowledge". The defense called two more psychiatrists to
support Wertham's findings.
The
first of four rebuttal witnesses was Menas Gregory, the former manager of the Bellevue psychiatric hospital, where Fish
was treated during 1930. He testified that Fish was abnormal but sane. Under
cross examination, Dempsey asked if coprophilia, urophilia and pedophilia
indicated a sane or insane person. Gregory replied that such a person was not "mentally
sick" and that these were common perversions that were "socially
perfectly alright" and that Fish was "no different from millions of
other people", some very prominent and successful, who suffered from the
"very same" perversions. The next witness was the resident physician
at The
Tombs, Perry Lichtenstein.
Dempsey objected to a doctor with no training in psychiatry testifying on the
issue of sanity, but Justice Close overruled on the basis that the jury could
decide what weight to give a prison doctor. When asked whether Fish's causing
himself pain indicated a mental condition, Lichtenstein replied, "That is
not masochism", as he was only "punishing himself to get sexual
gratification". The next witness, Charles Lambert, testified that
coprophilia was a common practice and that religious cannibalism may be
psychopathic but "was a matter of taste" and not evidence of a
psychosis. The last witness, James Vavasour, repeated
Lambert's opinion. Another defense witness was Mary Nicholas, Fish's
17-year-old stepdaughter. She described how Fish taught her and her brothers
and sisters several games involving overtones of masochism and child
molestation.
None
of the jurors doubted that Fish was insane, but ultimately, as one later
explained, they felt he should be executed anyway. They found him to be sane
and guilty, and the judge ordered the death
sentence. Fish arrived at prison in March 1935, and was executed on January
16, 1936, in the electric chair at Sing Sing.
He entered the chamber at 11:06 p.m. and was pronounced dead three minutes
later. He was buried in the Sing Sing Prison Cemetery. Fish is said to have
helped the executioner position the electrodes on his body. His last words were
reportedly, "I don't even know why I'm here." According to one
witness present, it took two jolts before Fish died, creating the rumor that
the apparatus was short-circuited by the needles that Fish inserted into his
body. These rumors were later regarded as untrue, as Fish reportedly died in
the same fashion and time frame as others in the electric chair.
At
a meeting with reporters after the execution, Fish's lawyer James Dempsey
revealed that he was in possession of his client's "final statement".
This amounted to several pages of hand-written notes that Fish apparently
penned in the hours just prior to his death. When pressed by the assembled journalists
to reveal the document's contents, Dempsey refused, stating, "I will never show it to anyone. It was the most filthy
string of obscenities that I have ever read."
Victims
Known
- Francis X. McDonnell, age 8, July 15, 1924
- Billy Gaffney, age 4, February 11, 1927
- Grace Budd, age 10, June 3, 1928
Suspected
- Emma Richardson, age 5, October 3, 1926
- Yetta Abramowitz, age 12, 1927.
- Emil Aalling, age 4, July 13, 1930
- Robin Jane Liu, age 6, May 2, 1931
- Mary Ellen O'Connor, age 16, February 15, 1932.
- Benjamin Collings, age 17, December 15, 1932.
OTHER
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