Albert Fish
Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish was an American serial killer, rapist, child molester and cannibal who committed at least three child murders between July 1924 and June 1928. He was also known as the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire, the Moon Maniac, and the Boogey Man. Fish was a suspect in at least ten murders during his lifetime, although he only confessed to three murders that police were able to trace to a known homicide. He also confessed to stabbing at least two other people.
Fish once boasted that he "had children in every state", and at one time stated his number of victims was about 100. However, it is not known whether he was referring to rapes or cannibalization, nor is it known if the statement was truthful. Fish was apprehended on December 13, 1934, and put on trial for the kidnapping and murder of Grace Budd. He was convicted and executed by electric chair on January 16, 1936, at the age of 65.
Early life
Albert Fish was born Hamilton Howard Fish in Washington, D.C., on May 19, 1870, to Randall Fish and Ellen Francis Howell. Fish's father was American, of English ancestry, and his mother was a Scots-Irish American. His father was forty-three years older than his mother and aged 75 at the time of his birth. Fish was his family's 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 and 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 had mania, one of his brothers was confined in a state mental hospital, a paternal half-brother suffered from schizophrenia, and his sister Annie was diagnosed with a "mental affliction". Three other relatives were diagnosed with mental illnesses, and his mother had "aural and/or visual hallucinations".
On October 16, 1875, Fish's father, a fertilizer manufacturer and former riverboat captain, suffered a fatal heart attack at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station. His mother then put him into Saint John's Orphanage in Washington, D.C., where he was frequently physically abused. However, Fish began to enjoy the physical pain brought by the beatings. By 1880, Fish's mother secured a government job and was able to remove him from the orphanage.
In 1882, at age 12, Fish began a relationship with a telegraph boy. The youth introduced Fish to such practices as drinking urine and eating feces. Fish began visiting public baths where he could watch other boys undress, spending 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, at age 20, Fish moved to New York City. There he engaged in male prostitution and began molesting and raping boys, mostly less than six years old. In 1898, Fish's mother arranged a marriage for him with Anna Mary Hoffman, who was nine years his junior. They had six children: Albert, Anna, Gertrude, Eugene, John and Henry Fish. In 1903, Fish was arrested for grand larceny, convicted and incarcerated in Sing Sing Prison.File:Pelvis of Albert Fish.jpg|thumb|left|X-ray of Fish's pelvis and perineum, introduced as evidence at his trial, demonstrating more than two dozen self-embedded needles
Fish later recounted an incident in which a male lover took him to a wax museum, where he was fascinated by a bisection of a human penis and subsequently became obsessed with sexual mutilation.
Several years later, around 1910, Fish was working in Wilmington, Delaware, when he met a 19-year-old man named Thomas Bedden. He took Bedden to where he was staying and the two began a sadomasochistic relationship; it is unclear whether the sadomasochism was consensual on Bedden's part, but Fish's later confession implied that Bedden was intellectually disabled. After ten days, Fish took Bedden to "an old farm house", where he tortured him over two weeks. Fish eventually tied Bedden 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 Bedden, cut up his body, and take it home, but he feared the hot weather would draw attention; instead, Fish poured peroxide over the wound, wrapped it in a Vaseline-covered handkerchief, left a $10 bill, kissed Bedden goodbye and left. "Took first train I could get back home. Never heard what become of him, or tried to find out," Fish recalled.
In January 1917, Fish's wife left him for John Straube, a handyman who boarded with the Fish family. Fish was subsequently forced 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.
Fish 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 by embedding needles into his groin and abdomen. After his arrest, X-rays revealed that Fish had at least twenty-nine 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 Fish 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.
1919–1930: Escalation
Around 1919, Fish stabbed an intellectually disabled boy in Georgetown. He often chose people who were either mentally disabled or African-American as his victims, later explaining that he assumed these people would not be missed when killed. Fish would later claim to have occasionally paid boys to procure other children for him. 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 8-year-old Beatrice Kiel playing alone on her parents' farm on Staten Island, New York. 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 Beatrice's father and forced to leave. In 1924, the 54-year-old Fish, suffering from psychosis, felt that God was commanding him to torture and sexually mutilate children.Shortly before he abducted Grace Budd, Fish attempted to test his "implements of Hell" on a 10-year-old child he had been molesting named Cyril Quinn. Quinn and his friend were playing box ball 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.
Despite already being married, Fish married Estella Wilcox on February 6, 1930, in Waterloo, New York; they 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 another in 1931, he was sent to the Bellevue 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, Fish, then 58 years old, visited the Budd family in Manhattan under the pretence of hiring Edward; he later confessed that he planned to tie Edward up, mutilate him, and leave him to bleed to death. Fish introduced himself as "Frank Howard", a farmer from Farmingdale, New York. He promised to hire Budd and his friend and said he would send for them in a few days. Fish failed to show up, but he sent a telegram to the Budd family apologizing and set a later date. When Fish returned, he met Edward's younger sister, 10-year-old Grace "Gracie" Budd. He apparently shifted his intentions toward Grace and quickly made up a story about having to attend his niece's birthday party.He persuaded the parents, Delia Bridget Flanagan and Albert Francis Budd Sr., to let Grace accompany him to the party that evening. Fish subsequently took Grace to an abandoned house he had previously picked out to use for the murder of his next victim, Wisteria Cottage at 359 Mountain Road, located in the East Irvington neighborhood of Irvington, New York. There, Fish manually strangled her to death, then decapitated and dismembered her body, and ate most of the remains over the next several days. The police arrested 66-year-old superintendent Charles Edward Pope on September 5, 1930, as a suspect in Grace's disappearance, accused by Pope's estranged wife. Pope spent 108 days in jail between his arrest and trial on December 22, 1930. He was found not guilty.
Letter to the mother of Grace Budd
In November 1934, an anonymous letter sent to Grace's parents ultimately led the police to Fish. Budd's mother was illiterate and could not read the letter herself, so she had her son read it to her. The unaltered letter reads:Police investigated the letter and although the story concerning "Capt. Davis" and the famine in Hong Kong could not be verified, the part of the letter concerning the murder of Grace was found to be accurate in its description of the kidnapping and subsequent events, though it was impossible to confirm whether Fish had actually eaten parts of Grace's body.