Who is albert fish

In , Fish abducted and strangled the girl. After her death, he penned a letter to her parents, detailing how he consumed her remains for the next week and a half. Mental health professionals determined that Fish, who had been hospitalized in a psychiatric facility in , was a sadomasochistic and a pedophile. Fish regularly engaged in self-harm and later developed a propensity toward torture and cannibalism. Prior to his final arrest in December , Fish had a criminal record dating back to , when authorities arrested him on multiple counts of grand larceny.

From to , Fish terrorized American parents and children alike with the looming threat of The Boogeyman. He often targeted young boys and girls, as well as mentally disabled teens. The thrice-married Fish was a father of six himself. In , New York State executed Fish via the electric chair, and the infamous child killer died at age Fish was a sadomasochist, meaning that he craved feeling pain as well as inflicting it, and he did so for sexual gratification. Fish reportedly developed the tendency for sexual sadism throughout his formative years.

He would often subject himself to painful procedures, most notably driving nails into this body, especially the area between his scrotum and his rectum.

At first, he would drive them in and pull them out again, but eventually, he started driving them in so far that he couldn't get them back out. After he was arrested and examined by a doctor, an X-ray showed 29 needles stuck in his pelvis.

In , when he was 28, Fish wed year-old Anna Mary Hoffman in a marriage his mother arranged. Hoffman had six children with Fish before she abandoned her family in to take up residence with a previous boarder. Although they never legally divorced, Fish subsequently wed two other women in short-lived unions.

One of Fish's sons, Albert Fish, Jr. Albert Fish, Jr. After Fish's arrest in , the son told a newspaper reporter about his strange upbringing in an interview: "That old skunk […] I always knew that he would get caught for something like this.

In his testimony, Fish Jr. The kindly old man was a fraud. None of it was true. Police began the normal investigative activities. They checked out everything "Frank Howard" had told the Budds. They also had the Budds go through their "rogue's gallery" of photos and checked on all the known child molesters, mental patients, etc. It came to nothing.

No trace of Gracie. On June 7, New York police mailed out 1, fliers to police stations throughout the country with a photo of Gracie and a description of Mr.

There were a couple of solid clues. Police found the Western Union office in Manhattan from which "Frank Howard" had sent his message to the Budds, plus the original handwritten message. From the writing and grammar, it was clear that "Howard" had some education and refinement. Police also located the pushcart where "Howard" had bought the pot cheese that he had given to the Budds.

Both addresses were in East Harlem, which then became a focal point of intense search and investigation. The New York police were not strangers to child kidnapping. In fact, there was an oddly similar case just the year before. On February 11, , four-year-old Billy Gaffney played in the hallway outside his apartment with his three-year-old neighbor who was also named Billy. A twelve-year-old neighbor who was babysitting his sleeping baby sister went to join the boys, but went back to his apartment quickly after hearing his sister cry.

A few minutes later, the older boy noticed that the two Billys were gone and told the younger Billy's father. After a desperate search, the father found his three-year-old son alone on the top floor of the building. His son had been up on the roof. The next day when a platoon of detectives came to investigate the disappearance of the Gaffney boy, they ignored the three-year-old witness, who stuck to his simple explanation. At first the police thought the boy had wandered outside into some of the factory buildings in the neighborhood or, worse, had fallen into the Gowanus canal a few blocks away.

People in the community organized a search and the canal was dredged, but there was no sign of little Billy. Eventually, someone listened to the three-year-old witness who gave them a description of the "boogey man. The police paid no attention to the description and did not connect it to a crime that had been committed by the "Gray Man" a few years earlier. His mother sat nearby, nursing her infant daughter when she saw a gaunt elderly man with gray hair and moustache in the middle of the street.

She stared at the strange shabby old man who constantly clenched and unclenched his fists and mumbled to himself. The man tipped his dusty hat to her and disappeared down the street. Later that afternoon, the old man was seen again watching Francis and four other boys play ball.

The old man called Francis over to him. The other boys continued to play ball. A few minutes later, both the old man and Francis had disappeared.

A neighbor noticed a boy that looked like Francis walking that afternoon into a wooded area with an elderly gray-haired tramp behind him. The disappearance of Francis was not noticed until he missed dinner. His father, a policeman, organized a search. They found the boy in the woods under some branches.

He had been horribly assaulted. His clothes had been torn from his body and he had been strangled with his suspenders. Francis had been beaten so badly that police doubted that the "old" tramp could have really been as old and frail as he looked. The beating was so severe that perhaps the old tramp had an accomplice who had the strength to maul the child.

In a short period of time, Manhattan fingerprint experts and police photographers were enlisted in the case as well as some two hundred and fifty plainclothesman. The huge manhunt yielded several promising suspects, except that none of them looked like the gray-haired, moustached old tramp. His face was burned forever in the memory of Anna McDonnell: "He came shuffling down the street, mumbling to himself, making queer motions with his hands.

I'll never forget those hands. I shuddered when I looked at them I saw him look toward Francis and the others. I saw his thick gray hair, his drooping gray moustache. Everything about him seemed faded and gray. Despite the massive efforts of the police and the community, the "Gray Man" had vanished into thin air. In November of , the Budd case was officially still open although nobody ever expected it to be solved.

Only one man, William F. King, continued to pursue the case. Every once in awhile, King would plant a phony item about a break in the case with Walter Winchell.

On November 2, , Winchell took the bait once again:. And it is safe to tell you that the Dep't of Missing Persons will break the case, or they expect to, in four weeks. Ten days later, Delia Budd received a letter that her lack of education fortunately prevented her from reading. Her son Edward read it instead and ran out the door to get Detective King.

The letter was singularly barbarous:. Budd, In a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. You could go in any shop and ask for steak -- chops -- or stew meat.

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.

Several times every day and night he spanked them -- tortured them -- to make their meat good and tender. Every part of his body was Cooked and eaten except the head -- bones and guts. He was Roasted in the oven all of his ass , boiled, broiled, fried and stewed. At that time, I was living at E st.

He told me so often how good Human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. Brought you pot cheese -- strawberries. You said Yes she could go. How she did kick -- bite and scratch. Nobody wanted to believe that this letter was true. It had to be the ravings of some perverted, sadistic crank. But, Detective King realized that the details of his meeting with the Budds and Grace were accurate.

Also, the handwriting on this horrible letter was identical to the letter the elderly kidnapper had written for the Western Union messenger six years earlier. The envelope had an important clue: a small hexagonal emblem had the letters N. With the cooperation of the president of the association, an emergency meeting of the members was held.

In the meantime, police checked out the handwritten membership forms looking for handwriting similar to "Frank Howard's. A young janitor came forward, admitting that he had taken a couple of sheets of paper and a few envelopes. He had left the stationery in his old rooming house at East 52nd Street. The landlady was shocked when she was given "Frank Howard's" description.

He sounded just like the old man who had lived there for two months. The old man who had checked out of her rooming house just a couple of days earlier. The former tenant had called himself Albert H. The landlady mentioned that Fish had told her to hold a letter that he was expecting from his son who worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps in North Carolina. The son regularly sent money to his old dad. Finally, the post office told Detective King that it had intercepted a letter for Albert Fish.

Detective King was becoming worried that Fish had not contacted his former landlady. The police worried that something had scared him away. On December 13, , the landlady called Detective King. Albert Fish was at the rooming house looking for his letter. The old man was sitting with a teacup when King opened the door.

Fish stood up and nodded when King asked him if he was Albert Fish. Suddenly, Fish reached into his pocket and produced a razor blade which he held in front of him. Infuriated, King grabbed the old man's hand and twisted it sharply. The confession of Albert Fish would be heard by many law enforcement officials and psychiatrists.

A severely edited version of it would appear in the newspapers. It was an odyssey of perversion and unspeakable depravity which seemed unbelievable until detail after detail was corroborated. It was all the more amazing considering how decrepit and harmless Fish appeared. He was a stooped, frail-looking old man about pounds and 5 feet 5 inches tall.

Detective King took the initial confession. Fish told him that in the summer of he had been overcome by what he called his "blood thirst" -- his need to kill. When he answered Edward Budd's ad for employment, it was the young man, not his sister Gracie, that he intended to lure to a remote location, restrain him and cut off his penis, leaving him to bleed to death. After he left the Budd house the first time, Fish had purchased the tools he would need to murder and mutilate the boys: a cleaver, saw and butcher knife.

He wrapped up these implements of destruction into a bundle which he left at a newsstand before he went to the the Budd home for the second and last time. When Fish saw the strapping young Edward, the size of a full-grown man, and his friend Willie, he convinced himself he could overpower the two of them. But then Fish had a lot of experience in that regard. It was only after seeing Gracie that he changed his mind and his plans.

It was she he desperately wanted to kill. With the unsuspecting Gracie in tow, he stopped back at the newsstand to pick up his bundle before taking a train to the Bronx and then to the village of Worthington in Westchester. For Grace, he only bought a one-way ticket. Grace was enthralled with the forty-minute ride into the countryside. Only twice in her life had she been out of the city. This was a wonderful treat for her. At the station in Worthington, Fish was so absorbed in his monstrous plan that he left his bundle of tools on the train.

Ironically, Grace noticed and reminded him to bring his package. They walked along a remote road until they reached an abandoned two-story building called Wisteria Cottage in the midst of a wooded area. While Grace entertained herself outside with the various wildflowers, Fish went up to the second floor bedroom, opened up his bundle of tools, and took off his clothes.

With the wildflowers she had gathered arranged in a bouquet, Gracie came into the house and up to the bedroom. When she saw the old man naked, she screamed for her mother and tried to escape. But Fish had grabbed her by her throat and choked her to death. He was sexually aroused by the act of strangling her. He propped up her head on an old paint can and decapitated her, catching most of the blood in the paint can.

Afterwards he threw the bucket of blood out into the yard. He undressed the headless child, then he went back to her body and cut it in two with the butcher knife and cleaver.

Parts of her body he took with him wrapped in newspaper. The rest he left there until he returned several days later when he threw the portions of her body over a stone wall in the back of the house. He disposed of his tools in the same fashion. After his confession, Detective King had a final question: What caused him to do this horrible thing?

Captain John Stein asked him why he had written the letter to the Budds and Fish responded that he didn't know why. That day, the police went to Wisteria Cottage and recovered the remains of Gracie. Albert Fish stood nearby, completely without emotion of any kind. That night at 10 P. Fish was interrogated by Assistant District Attorney P. Francis Marro. When Marro asked Fish why he had murdered Gracie, he explained that "a sort of blood thirst" had overwhelmed him. Once it was done, he was overcome with sorrow.

Marro asked if he had raped Gracie and Fish was adamant: "It never entered my head. Nothing was asked at that time nor was anything volunteered about the cannibalism mentioned in Fish's letter to the Budds. The police may have considered it too insane to be true. Or, perhaps, they were already thinking that including horrible details about cannibalism would bolster the inevitable defense case for insanity.

That night the capture of Albert Fish had leaked to the newspapers and reporters descended on the Budd apartment with the news. Shortly afterwards, Detective King drove Mr. Budd and his son Edward to the police station to identify Fish. Edward did more than identify Fish. He threw himself at the old man.

Dirty son of a bitch! Budd was surprised at Fish's lack of emotion. Albert Fish, not surprisingly, was no stranger to police. His record stretched back to when he had been jailed for grand larceny. Since then, he had been arrested six times for various petty crimes, such as sending obscene letters and petty theft. Half of those arrests occurred around the time of Gracie's abduction.

Each time, the charges were dismissed. He had been in mental institutions more than once. We lived on B Street, N. He was a Potomac River boat captain, running from D. John's Orphanage in Washington. 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. I sang in the choir from to -- soprano, at St. I came to New York. I was a good painter -- interiors or anything.

We lived at 76 West st Street, and that's where I met my wife. After our six children were born, she left me. She took all the furniture and didn't even leave a mattress for the children to sleep on.

His six children ranged from age 21 to Albert Fish was facing indictments in Manhattan and Westchester County. First Westchester County indicted him on a charge of first degree murder, while Manhattan was preparing an indictment for kidnapping.

Meanwhile police got a really major break. The motorman on the Brooklyn trolley line saw a picture of Fish in the newspaper and came forward to identify Fish as the nervous old man that he saw February 11, , who was trying to quiet the little boy sitting with him on the trolley.

Joseph Meehan, the retired motorman, watched the two carefully. The little boy, who didn't have a jacket or coat, was crying for his mother continuously and had to be dragged by the old man on and off the trolley. The little boy, as it turned out, was the kidnapped Billy Gaffney. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took himI took the boy there. Then I walked back and took the trolley to 59 St.

I cut off his ears -- nose --slit his mouth from ear to ear. I cut off the head -- feet -- arms-- hands and the legs below the knee. During his interviews with police Fish further confessed, "I came home with my meat. I made a stew out of his ears -- nose -- pieces of his face and belly. Days later, a man from Staten Island came forward to identify Fish as the man who had tried to lure his then eight-year-old daughter into the woods not far from where Francis O'Donnell was murdered three days later in The girl, in her late teens, saw him in his cell and recognized him.

The "Gray Man" was found. Fish was also tied to the murder of a fifteen-year-old girl named Mary O'Connor in Far Rockaway. The girl's mauled body was found in some woods close to a house that Fish had been painting.

With all of those indictments in different counties. There was very little chance that Albert Fish was going to be acquitted. His only opportunity to beat the death penalty was to have the alienists or forensic psychiatrists declare him insane.

He was shocked at how "meek, gentle, benevolent and polite" Fish was. Fish's attitude towards his situation was one of complete detachment. I have no particular desire to be killed. It is a matter of indifference to me.

I do not think I am altogether right. When Dr. Wertham asked if he meant that he was insane. Fish answered, "Not exactly I never could understand myself. Psychosis seemed to have galloped through Fish's family history from what Dr. Wertham could ascertain: "One paternal uncle suffered from a religious psychosis and died in a state hospital. A half brother also died in a state hospital.

A younger brother was feeble-minded and died of hydrocephalus. His mother was held to be 'very queer' and was said to hear and see things. A paternal aunt was considered 'completely crazy. A sister had some sort of 'mental affliction. He claimed that his real name was Hamilton Fish, named after a distant relative who was President Grant's Secretary of State. Tired of being teased about that name, he took the name of Albert instead.

When he was twenty-six, he married a young woman of nineteen and had six children. When the youngest was three, she ran off with another man, leaving Fish to raise the children. Subsequently, he "married" three other times, although they were not legal since he had never been divorced from his first wife.

Wertham considered Fish's unparalleled perversity unique in the annals of psychiatric and criminal literature. Fish told him: "I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me.

I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt. Wertham told "experiences with excreta of every imaginable kind were practiced by him, actively and passively. He took bits of cotton, saturated them with alcohol, inserted them into his rectum, and set fire to them. He also did that with his child victims. Fish confided in Dr. Wertham a long history of preying on children -- "at least a hundred. He usually chose African-American children because he believed that the police did not pay much attention when they were hurt or missing.

He never went back to the same neighborhood. He said that he had lived in at least 23 states and in each one he had killed at least one child. Sometimes, he lost his job as a painter because he was suspiciously connected to these dead or mutilated children. He had a compulsion to write obscene letters and did so frequently.

According to Dr. Wertham," they were not the typical obscene letters based on fantasies and daydreams to supply a vicarious thrill. They were offers to practice his inclinations with the people he wrote his graphic suggestions to. Initially, Dr. Wertham had some concerns about whether Fish was lying to him, especially when he told the psychiatrist that he had been sticking needles into his body for years in the area between the rectum and the scrotum: "He told of doing it to other people too, especially children.

At first, he said, he had only stuck these needles in and pulled them out again. Then he had stuck others in so far that he was unable to get them out, and they stayed there. About the age of fifty-five, Fish started to experience hallucinations and delusions. He would go on endlessly with quotations from the Bible all mixed up with his own sentences, such as 'Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones and dasheth their heads against the stones.

Fish believed that God had ordered him to torment and castrate little boys. He had actually done so a number of times. Wertham was amazed as Fish described the horrible cannibalism of Billy Gaffney's body. He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, like a housewife describing her favorite methods of cooking But at times his voice and facial expression indicated a kind of satisfaction and ecstatic thrill.

I said to myself: However you define the medical and legal borders of sanity, this certainly is beyond that border. That Fish was suffering from some religious psychosis was a given as far as Dr.

Wertham was concerned. Fish's children had seen him "hitting himself on his nude body with a nail-studded paddle until he was covered with blood.

They also saw him stand alone on a hill with his hands raised, shouting: 'I am Christ. Fish told him: "What I did must have been right or an angel would have stopped me, just as an angel stopped Abraham in the Bible [from sacrificing his son]. Wertham, the defense alienist, believed that Fish was legally insane: "I characterized his personality as introverted and extremely infantilistic I outlined his abnormal mental make-up, and his mental disease, which I diagnosed as paranoid psychosis Because Fish suffered from delusions and particularly was so mixed up about the questions of punishment, sin, atonement, religion, torture, self-punishment, he had a perverted, a distorted -- if you want, an insane -- knowledge of right and wrong.

His test was that if it had been wrong he would have been stopped, as Abraham was stopped, by an angel. Wertham believed that Fish had actually killed fifteen children and mutilated about a hundred others.

Two other defense alienists testified that Fish was insane. The four alienists who were called by the prosecution testified that Fish was sane.

One of those prosecution alienists was the head of the psychiatric hospital where Fish had been detailed for observation a couple of years after the Budd and other murders and where he had been judged "both harmless and sane.

Close's court. Gallagher was in charge of the prosecution and James Dempsey was the defense attorney. Dempsey planned to attack the competence of the Bellevue Hospital alienists who had observed Fish in and declared him sane. He also planned to establish that Fish was suffering from "lead colic," a dementia often suffered by house painters. Gallagher's key strategy was summarized early in the trial: "Now in this case, there is a presumption of sanity.

The proof, briefly, will be that this defendant is legally sane and that he knows the difference between right and wrong and the nature and quality of his acts, that he is not defective mentally, that he had a wonderful memory for a man of his age, that he has complete orientation as to his immediate surroundings, that there is no mental deterioration, but that he is sexually abnormal, that he is known medically as a sex pervert or a sex psychopath, that his acts were abnormal, but that when he took this girl from her home on the third day of June, , and in doing that act and in procuring the tools with which he killed her, bringing her up here to Westchester County, and taking her into this empty house surrounded by woods in the back of it, he knew it was wrong to do that, and that he is legally sane and should answer for his acts.

Defense attorney Dempsey focused on Fish's strange life and the self-flagellation with nail-studded paddles and needles. Then he brought up Fish's competence as a father and his love for his children: "In spite of all these brutal, criminal and vicious proclivities, there is another side to this defendant.

He has been a very fine father. He never once in his life laid a hand on one of his children. He says grace at every meal in his house. In , when the youngest one of his six children was three, his wife left him. And from that time down until shortly before the Grace Budd murder in he was a mother and father to those children.

Grace's parents and brother Albert, Jr. Dempsey seemed determined to make the point that both Delia and Albert, Sr. When it came time for Grace's father to testify, he was overcome with emotion and began to weep loudly. On the third day of the trial, over the strenuous objections of the defense attorney, a box of Grace Budd's remains was brought into the courtroom as evidence, while Detective King recreated from Fish's confession how the girl was killed. Then Gallagher reached into the box and held out the small skull of the dead girl.

It was a very dramatic moment. Dempsey sought a mistrial. The writer tortured Mrs. Budd with details about the empty house her daughter was taken to in Worcester, New York, how she was stripped of her clothing, strangled, and cut into pieces and eaten. As if to provide solace to Mrs. Budd, the writer stated emphatically that Grace had not been sexually assaulted.

Tracing the paper the letter was written on eventually led police to a flophouse where Fish was living.

Fish was arrested and immediately confessed to killing Grace and other children. Fish, smiling as he described the grisly details of tortures and murders, appeared to the detectives as the devil himself. On March 11, , Fish's trial began, and he pleaded innocent by reason of insanity. He said voices in his head told him to kill children and commit other horrendous crimes. Despite the numerous psychiatrists who described Fish as insane, the jury found him sane and guilty after a day trial.

He was sentenced to die by electrocution. On January 16, , Fish was electrocuted at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York, reportedly a process Fish looked upon as "the ultimate sexual thrill," though later that assessment was dismissed as rumor. Petrikowski, Nicki Peter. Enslow Publishing, , pp. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile.

Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Government U. Foreign Policy U. Liberal Politics U. Table of Contents Expand. Roots of Insanity. Leaves the Orphanage. Father of Six. Polite Mr.