Albert Fish

 

Albert Fish is one of the most bizarre of all serial killers. At the time of his arrest he looked like everyone’s idea of a kind old grandfather. And yet this seemingly harmless pensioner was a paedophile cannibal whose greatest thrill was to eat the flesh of the children he lusted after and strangled. No one will ever know exactly how many children Fish murdered, but there’s no doubt that if it had not been for the Herculean efforts of a New York detective, Will King, there would have been many more.

 

Sadistic Urges

 

Albert Fish was born in Washington DC on May 19, 1870. His given name was actually Hamilton Fish, in honour of some distant connection to Washington’s famous political family of that name. Later in childhood he adopted the name Albert, which had belonged to a sibling who died young. Albert’s parents were relatively well-to-do. His father, Randall Fish, was a boat captain, working on the Potomac River.

However, his father was already an old man and in 1875, when Albert was five years old, he died. His mother was unable to cope with looking after her four children and Albert was placed in an orphanage. There Albert was regularly beaten for being a bed-wetter. Gradually he came to enjoy the beatings and whippings he received. His lifelong sadomasochistic urges had been awakened.

He regularly ran away from the orphanage and, when he was nine years old, his mother was able to take him back home, having found herself a job working for the government. By the time he was twelve years old, however, Albert was engaged in a homosexual relationship with a telegraph boy who initiated him into a whole range of sexual perversions much to the young boy’s delight.

By 1890, when he was eighteen, Fish had moved to New York City, where he worked as a male prostitute. Gradually, though, he acquired a more legitimate skill and began to work as a painter and decorator, a trade he would follow for the rest of his life. Indeed, for a long while he seemed to become a respectable citizen. In 1998 he married a woman he’d been introduced to by his mother, and they had six children together: Albert, Anna, Gertrude, Eugene, John and Henry Fish. Later on Fish would claim to have committed his first murder during this domestic period. His family doubted this, suggesting instead that his descent into barbarity only began when his wife left him for a mentally retarded handyman called John Straube in 1917.

 

Extreme Masochism

 

Following this desertion Albert Fish began to behave very strangely indeed. He would eat huge quantities of raw meat every time there was a full moon and began to indulge in acts of extreme masochism. He would drive needles into his genital region, he would place pieces of fabric in his anus and set them on fire and he would burn himself with red hot pokers. He made a wooden paddle and studded it with nails then asked his children to use it to beat him on his naked buttocks.

After a while his children could stand no more of this and his eldest son, Albert Jr., threw his father out of the house. At this point Albert Fish Snr. dispensed with the respectable life. He became a wandering loner, living in flophouses and supporting himself by getting odd jobs as a painter and decorator.

Over the next decade or so, from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, Fish carried out a huge number of rapes and murders, just how many we will never know for sure. Tragically he was regularly arrested over these years – sometimes for theft, sometimes for vagrancy and on several occasions for sending obscene letters to women – and invariably sent for psychiatric evaluation, but each time the psychiatrists decided that he was an odd bird, perhaps prematurely senile, but basically harmless. And so they let him back onto the streets.

In June 1928, he carried out his most notorious crime and the one that would lead to his eventual arrest. On May 28, 1928, Fish came to the house of the Budd family in Lower Manhattan. The family was struggling financially and their eldest son Edward had placed an ad in the newspaper looking for a residential job in the countryside. Fish claimed to be a farmer called Frank Howard and offered the young man a job at the excellent rate of fifteen dollars a week. The generosity of the offer allowed the Budds to ignore the supposed Mr Howard’s rather shabby appearance, and they were happy to accept him as a benefactor. With grossly misplaced trust they even allowed ‘Mr Howard’ to take their twelve-year-old daughter Grace to a birthday party at his sister’s house.

There was, of course, no such party. Instead Fish took Grace to an abandoned house in Westchester. While Grace was outside collecting wild flowers, Fish took all his clothes off, then called out to the girl to come indoors. When she did so, she was horrified by the naked apparition that confronted her. She tried to escape but her abductor was too strong for her. He strangled her, then dismembered her body. Over the next nine days he cooked up and ate as much of her remains as he could, before burying her bones in the yard.

 

Abducted and Eaten

 

When Grace Budd failed to return home by the following morning her distraught family raised the alarm. The story was soon picked up by the newspapers, accompanied by an angelic-looking picture of Grace, and a huge manhunt was launched. It was all to no avail, however. The mysterious Frank Howard had vanished into thin air.

That might have been the end of matters if it had not been for the determination of one man, veteran detective Will King. He became obsessed with the case. Not a day would go by for years without him trying to find some new angle on the case. And finally some six years later, in November 1934, his patience was rewarded in the most grotesque of ways.

During that month Mrs Budd received an anonymous letter. It was clearly written by her daughter’s murderer as it contained details of Mr Howard’s meeting with the family. The rest of its contents were unspeakably foul. The letter writer talked of being friendly with a sailor who had eaten human flesh while stranded in China. These tales had inspired the writer to embark on his own quest for human flesh and, as a result, he had abducted and eaten Grace. He did, however, assure the grieving mother that he had not raped the little girl. ‘She died a virgin’ the letter ended.

This bizarre missive must have been unimaginably distressing to its recipient, but it provided Will King with just the fresh piece of evidence he needed. Under detailed examination he noticed that the envelope used bore a minute emblem containing the letters NYPCBA (the New York Private Chauffeurs Benevolent Association). King followed the clue with renewed energy. He assembled all 400 members of the association and checked their handwriting against that of the letter writer. When none of them matched he asked if anyone had ever taken any of the association’s stationery for personal use. One member confessed that he had and that he might have left some of it in a lodging house he’d recently stayed in.

King hurried round to the lodging house and discovered that the chauffeur’s old room had recently been occupied by a strange old man called Albert Fish. King had a hunch that this might be the guilty man. Fish was no longer staying at the lodging house, but he was in the habit of coming by once a month to pick up a cheque. So determined to catch him was King, that he rented his own room in the lodging house and waited there till Fish finally showed up four days later.

Detective King found Fish talking to the landlady. When he told the apparently harmless old man that he was wanted for questioning, he was amazed to see Fish lunge at him with a straight razor. Razor or not, King was a much stronger man and he quickly overpowered Fish and arrested him.

 

Obscene Confession

 

Once back at the police station Fish made no attempt to deny his guilt. Instead he embarked on a long, wandering and graphically obscene confession not just to Grace Budd’s murder but to a whole string of crimes, most of which the police had no knowledge of. Typically grotesque was his account of the killing and eating of a four-year-old boy called Billy Gaffney in 1929: ‘I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did.’

Just how many people Fish actually killed remained a mystery. He claimed to have killed dozens, but his confessions were often very vague and in the vast majority of cases no body could be found to verify his stories. Apart from Budd and Gaffney there is only one other murder that he is unquestionably linked to, that of five-year-old Francis McDonell in 1934.

In the end he was only tried for the murder of Grace Budd, as that was the case with the most supporting evidence. His defence, the only possible one, was insanity. His defence lawyer simply read out Fish’s long confession as evidence that here was a madman. The jury, however, were unimpressed. Mad or not, they clearly wanted Fish to be punished for his crimes and he was duly found guilty and sentenced to death.

This didn’t seem to bother Fish in the slightest. When he was told that he was to die in the electric chair he reportedly said that this would be ‘the supreme thrill of my life’.

The sentence was carried out in Sing Sing Prison on January 16, 1936. At the first time of asking, the chair failed to electrocute Fish. Legend has it that this was because the metal pins that Fish had inserted into his body had caused the machine to short circuit. At the second time of asking there was no mistake and Fish was duly killed. His career of evil lives on, however, as his life and crimes provided some of the inspiration for Thomas Harris’s fictional serial killer Hannibal ‘the cannibal’ Lecter.