Paul Kuler got Calm, New York City, June fifth, nineteen twenty eight.
Three little children today gave detectives their first clues in the search for ten
year old Grace Bud, missing since last Sunday, when her parents permitted her
to leave her home at four oh six West fifteenth Street for the ostensible purpose
of going to a children's party with an apparently refined and well to do stranger
who had visited the Bud home on the pretext of employing her brother, Edward
eighteen, on his farm. The stranger, who gave the name of Frank
Howard and represented himself as a farmer of Farmingdale, Long Island, took Grace
in a blue sedan to the fourteenth Street Ferry, Manhattan and over to New
Jersey. The children and told how the stranger took Grace away in an automobile
which had been park facing south on the west side of ninth Avenue, a
few feet from the corner of fifteenth Street, so as to be out of
view of the Bud home. The two boys were playing at ninth Avenue in
fifteenth Street. The girl came out of her home a few minutes after Grace
appeared from her own home next door with the stranger. Loretta added, a
body ten years old said quote, Gracey looked nice, all dressed up in
white. She had hold of the man's hand, and she was so happy.
She was jumping and skipping. I walked up the street behind them.
James Kenny at the corner was throwing torpedoes on the pavement. When Gracey and
the man came up to him, he threw a torpedo at Grace's feet to
frighten her. The man picked her up in his arms and carried her across
Ninth Avenue to the automobile. It was all shiny blue, with two seats
and covered with glass. He put Gracey on the front seat and had to
climb over her to get to the wheel. Quote. I went over to
the car and called, where are you going, Gracie. The man started
the car, and Gracie only told me good bye. The man drove the
car down Ninth Avenue and turned into fourteenth Street toward the river. Unquote.
The affable stranger completely won the confidence of the girl's mother and father by his
refined manner and his apparent willingness to give Edward a farm job, for which
he had advertised in a Manhattan newspaper. The man told them he was going
to take Grace to a children's party his sister was giving at her home at
one hundred and thirty seventh Street in Columbus Avenue. There is no such a
dress, but the Buds did not know this. The stranger described his alleged
farm at Farmingdale as of twenty one acres, with hundreds of chickens, two
motor cars, and a Swedish cook. He said he had six children,
one of them a cadet. At was When the police found he was unknown
in Farmingdale, Long Island, they inquired for him at Farmingdale, New Jersey.
He was equally unknown there. Albert Budd, the father of five children,
is a porter in the Equitable Building. He was delighted when the stranger,
as a result of Edward's ad, offered the youth a job on his
farm at fifteen dollars a week and board. Grace was a quiet, studious
child, according to her parents and neighbors. She was four feet in height,
weighed about seventy pounds, and for the party dressed up in her white
confirmation dress with white stockings and shoes. She has blue eyes, dark hair,
and a sallow complexion. Howard the Buds say is five feet seven weighs
one hundred and thirty five pounds, has blue eyes, gray hair, small
gray mustache, slightly bowed legs. You wore a blue suit and dark felt
hat. True crime historian presents an Eye for an Eye, a special edition
of Yesterday's News exploring the criminal justice system at its most extreme, inflicting the
death penalty. Episode onety one is, without doubt, the bile is case
you'll ever hear on this program, because I don't think I could find a
worse one if I tried. There's a lot of evil discuss here, torture
and cannibalism and more. Consider this your trigger warning turned back if I were
you, or at least put the kids to bed and plug it in your
earbuds. Keep this between us, Happy Halloween. I'm true crime historian Richard
O. Jones, and I give you what Happened to Grace the Atrocities of
Albert Fish, my dear missus Bud. In eighteen ninety four, a friend
of mine shipped as a deckhand on the steamer Tacoma Captain John Davis. They
sailed from San Francisco for 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 one to three dollars a pound. So great was
the suffering among the very poor that all the children under twelve were sold for
food in order to keep the others from starving. A boy or girl under
fourteen was not safe in the street. You could go into 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 stayed
there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to
New York, he stole two boys, one seven, one eleven, 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 eleven year 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 the head, bones and guts. He was roasted in the
oven. All of his ass boiled, broiled, fried, and stewed.
The little boy was next went the same way. At that time, I
was living at four o nine East one hundredth Street, right side. He
told me so often how good human flesh was. I made up my mind
to taste it. On Sunday Day, June third, nineteen twenty eight,
I called on you at fourh six West fifteenth Street, brought you pot,
cheese, strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat on 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 off all my clothes. 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, and then I hid in the
closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked,
she began to cry and tried to run down the 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 into small pieces so I could take my meat to
my rooms, cook it and eat it. How sweet and tender her little
ass was roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her
entire body. I did not fuck her, though I could have had,
I wished. She died of virgin December fourteenth, nineteen thirty four, Albert
H. Fish, sixty five year old house painter, was arraigned in homicide
Court Manhattan today for the abduction and killing in June nineteen twenty eight Grace Bud,
then a child of ten. He was ordered held without bail, and
Magistrate Stern adjourned the proceedings for a week so the authorities might decide whether to
bring him to trial in Manhattan, where the girl was kidnapped, or in
Westchester, where she was brutally killed and where parts of the dismembered body was
found. One aspect of the police investigation into the Fish case pointed to the
possibility of an adult victim slain in the same way as Little Grace Bud.
That developed when police found a bone about ten inches long in the basement of
the house in Westchester where the Bud child was killed and near which the girl's
skull was found yesterday and other parts of the skeleton today. Doctor amos O's
squire medical examiner said the bone was probably from a human body, but certainly
not a child. Police recalled that nearly four years ago, the body of
a woman about two twenty years old was found in the woods about a mile
away. She is still unidentified. Residents in the neighborhood recalled that fish had
been seen in the vicinity in the company of a woman they thought to be
his wife. On one occasion, a boy was with them. No relatives
of fishes appeared to aid him, but at four twenty nine Astoria Boulevard,
Astoria, missus Anna Strab revealed that she had been his wife, but divorced
him twenty years ago after giving birth to six children. The eldest of these,
Albert Fish Junior, commented, quote the old skunk I knew something like
this would happen sooner or later. What was the name of the little girl
he's accused of killing? Unquote? When told it was Grace Bud, he
exclaimed, my God, that was the name he used to scream out when
he awoke out of his sleep on Amsterdam Avenue unquote. Fish, who led
police to the scene of the killing yesterday, repeated his confession today at the
police lineup and re enacted his crime with vivid gestures before a group of three
officials, including District Attorney Coin of Westchester, who will probably have the duty
of prosecuting him for murder, with Coin and the Missing Persons Bureau at police
headquarters at the time, where Captain Peter J. McQuillan of Greenberg, the
Westchester town where Fish had pointed out the buried skull of the sling girl,
enacting Captain John Stein of the Missing Persons Bureau. Here, a complete confession
was taken down as Fish spoke it with illustrative gestures by a stenographer for his
signature, but as they listened to one confession after another, all to the
same effect. The police sought to find out whether Fish was responsible for unsolved
kidnappings of other children who have strangely disappeared in the metropolitan district, and also
whether the killer of little Grace Bud was all also a practicing cannibal. Two
of the numerous letters which Fish sent to Missus Delia Bud, mother of Grace,
and which led to his downfall, raised the horrible possibility of cannibalism in
New York. One of the letters, dated November seventh, spoke of a
brother who was in the navy in eighteen ninety four, went to China and
ran into a famine there and quote was forced to eat human flesh unquote.
Four days later, in another anonymous letter, he wrote that quote I have
been shanghaied and am now in Shanghai unquote, where again there was famine and
cannibalism, and he wrote, I have developed a great taste for human flesh
with grim irony. The letter assured Missus Bud that her daughter had died innocent,
her morals unimpaired. Questioned by Coining the police about that, he shook
his head in denial. He also denied he was responsible for nd any other
kidnapping than that of the Bud girl. When he was asked about Billy Gaffney,
who disappeared from his home on Fifteenth Street in nineteen twenty seven, and
about Mary Helen O'Connor, fifteen year old schoolgirl who disappeared from her home in
Rockaway Beach in January nineteen thirty three, her dead body being found a few
days later in Massapequa. Fish answered, quote, I had nothing to do
with the Billy Gaffney kidnapping or with any others. The only thing I knew
about was what I read in the newspapers. Those are the kind of stories
I used to like to read unquote. With a certain air of virtuous pride,
he added quote, I would have given myself up anyway, because I
feel my days are about over. But I would not have given myself up
to the police unless I learned that an innocent man was about to be convicted
for this crime unquote. In court, Fish was arraigned on a short affidavit
charging kidnapping and homicide. The preceding was a earned at the request of Assistant
District Attorney Wider. While that was going on in New York, Westchester police
digging among dirt covered leaves and other debris in an old vacant house in Worthington
Woods, not far from where the skull of Grace Bud was found unearthed.
Other parts of a child's skelton, believed to be that of the Bud girl.
Bones of a child's legs, arms, fingers, and vertebrae were found.
The first discovery was made at a point about eight feet from where the
skull had been found. There was some evidence, the police said, of
at least an attempt on the lives of other children, and there was also
evidence which the authorities refused to reject, that he was a practicing cannibal.
Two boys, respectively eleven and twelve years old, the police said they had
learned, were in Fish's apartment on East's one hundredth Street, Manhattan, on
the day in June nineteen twenty eight when the house painter was visiting the Bud
family. They discovered the tools which he later used in dismembering the girl's body
and fled. One of the boys, according to detectives, had been located,
and Fish was closely questioned about that and any other children with whom he
might have been associated. After repeated grillings through the night, the elderly prisoner
was locked in Manhattan headquarters at two a m. Today. There he sat
on the edge of his cot, stroking his forehead alternately with the right hand
and the left. He did not sleep, and he refused food. A
sandwich and a cup of coffee left for him at four thirty o'clock remained untouched.
He wore a gray tweed suit and a gray shirt without a collar.
His fingerprints were taken and he was recorded as sixty four, a painter,
and having the aliases Frank Howard, James Pell, and Robert Hayden. His
address is given as fifty five East one hundred and twenty eighth Street, Manhattan.
He is described as five feet six inches, weighing one hundred and eighteen
pounds, slight of build, with gray hair, blue eyes, a ruddy
complexion, and with a gray mustache. He was born in Washington, d
c. According to the record, and carries an identifying scar behind the right
thumb and another scar on the right side of the mouth. He was booked
for quote taking Grace Bud, ten years of age, under the pretense of
taking her to a party and killing her in a vacant house in Worthington Woods,
causing her death by strangulation and then dismembering the body and burning the parts
in various locations unquote. Police were of the opinion it would be almost unnecessary
to call the dentist to identify the teeth, the likeness being remarkably obvious between
the reins of the dead child's head and the pictures of her. All the
teeth were found, including two upper back teeth with fillings. Included in Fish's
police record is an arrest on December fifth, nineteen thirty for distributing obscene literature.
On that he was remanded to the psychopathic ward of Bellevue, from which
he was discharged as sine on probation of six months. Detective King, almost
alone responsible for the arrest of Fish, joined the Apartment on May fourth,
nineteen o seven, and the Missing Persons Bureau in nineteen twenty four. Before
he came to the bureau, he worked on the Chinatown and Broadway squads.
In nineteen seventeen, he resigned from the Department and joined the Navy. For
the war, he was attached to the destroyer Salem. He returned to the
department after the war. The veil was finally lifted last night from the mystery
that had surrounded the disappearance of the child for the past six years, when
Fish unfolded the gruesome story to detectives and led them to a desolate spot in
the Worthington Woods in Westchester County, the child's grave and the body. Fish,
who six years before had led Grace away to that same grave by gaining
the consent of her parents to take her to a party, was cornered as
a result of anonymous letters he had dispatched to the parents. Confronted with these
letters, he freely admitted that he had abducted the child, taken her to
a deserted house in the Worthington Woods, and killed her, and then interred
her body in the shallow grave where it was found. The wizened little man
related how posing as Frank Howard, he went to the apartment of mister and
Missus Albert Budd at four sixty West fifteenth Street, Manhattan, on May twenty
eighth, nineteen twenty eight, to offer Edward Budd, then ten eighteen,
one of the five children, a job on his farm. The youth had
placed an advertisement in a newspaper for a farm hand job. While Fish was
talking to Edward about his farm, in walked Grace, her little face wreathed
in smiles. She immediately caught the eye of the impostor. He took her
up on his knee, fondled her, and told her little stories. When
he left the apartment, all he could think about was the little child he
had played with on his lap, and he decided to go back there again
soon he did. He returned six days later, discussing the job he had
waiting for Edward and a chum of his, and then casually asked where Grace
was. It was Sunday, and the little girl was all dressed up in
her Sunday best. She skipped in to say hello again to this man who
was apparently so nice to her brother, and once more he grabbed her up
on his lap. The child's parents were quite taken with the fatherly interest he
seemed to have in their daughter, and when he asked Grace's mother if he
might take the child to a birthday party for one of his nieces, she
readily consented. After cheery goodbyes, they left the apartment together, and that
was the last Grace's parents ever saw of her until last night. On his
way to the apartment that Sunday, fish purchased a piece of canvas six feet
long and four feet wide. Inside were wrapped a saw, a long butcher
knife, and a cleaver, bought in a store somewhere near seventy fourth Street
and Second Avenue. His intention originally was to use them to dismember the bud
boy's body. The bundle was left at a newsstand at ninth Avenue in fourteenth
Street. King continued, after taking the bud girl from her home, he
walked to that corner, got his bundle, and with Grace along, took
an L train to Sedgwick Avenue and a Putnam Division train to Worthington, where
he had formerly lived and where he was known. He took her to an
old house which was unoccupied. The house is about seventy five feet from the
old Dublin Road. He took Grace to a room one flight up, and
after a little while told her to go out on the lawn and pick wildflowers.
A few minutes later, he called Grace to come back again. Fish
confessed that he seized her, choked her, and cut her throat unquote.
Four days later, King said, Fish came back to the house, picked
up the little body, and carried it to a thicket about two hundred feet
from the house where he hit it. On his way to Westchester in the
elevated train, Fish became so engrossed in the child that he completely forgot about
his bundle of murder instruments and would have left them on the train had not
Grace reminded him of them. In arcing the events that led up to the
trapping of the slayer, King said that shortly after the child vanished, he
discovered a Western Union blank on which Fish had written a telegram to Grace's parents.
It was dated the day before the abduction and sent from the office at
Third Avenue in one hundred and fourth Street. This, King said was the
clue that finally nailed Fish. King declared that he only knew the writer of
the telegram as Howard, but he retained the blank, hoping that in some
way it would prove of service in landing the child's killer. Then, on
November eleventh, last, the Bud family received a letter postmark from the Grand
Central Post Office. It was one of a number of anonymous messages they had
received since Grace disappeared. They gave it to King. That was the beginning
of the end for fish King said that he found the handwriting was the same
as that on the blank that he had held on to so tenaciously and hopefully.
Quote. On the back of the envelope was a hexagon diagram with the
letters NYPCBA. Upon investigation, this was found to be the initial letters of
the New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association of six twenty seven Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.
Quote. I went there and informed Arthur Innes, its president, of
the significance of this envelope. He cooperated and called a special meeting of the
Association, at which I addressed the members asking who had by any manner circulated
those envelopes. A boy named Lee of six point twenty two Lexington Avenue,
who frequented the association's headquarters, admitted taking a number of these envelopes while he
had resided at two hundred East fifty second Street, which is a furnished roomhouse
at the corner of Third Avenue operated by mister Missus Schneider. The boy had
four envelopes on a shelf over the bed of his room when he moved out
of that place. I then looked through the register of the rooming house to
compare handwritings and finally found that an Albert H. Fish, who had lived
there after the Lee Boy moved out, had signed the register in a handwriting
similar to that of the telegram. This was the first time that the suspect
was identified by another name other than Howard. On November twelfth, a letter
written by Fish to a Vincent Burke at the Holland Hotel, New York City
was mailed in another envelope of the Chauffeur's Association. The letter was returned to
the association because of mister Burke was not known at the hotel. I compared
the handwriting on the envelope with that of Howard and found it to be similar.
This letter also had been mailed from the Grand Central Post Office. I
discovered that the center of this letter was living at two hundred East fifty second
Street. On November eleventh, at four pm out I learned that the letter
came from him on December fifth, containing a check for CCC work by his
son, Albert, twenty four years old at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. The
check was for twenty five dollars. I knew that he would return for the
check, and I kept a constant watch on the place. I also learned
that Fish was accustomed to hanging out between thirty seventh and fifty fourth streets.
Finally, at one pm yesterday, he returned to the East fifty second Street
to dress for the check. I arrested him immediately and took him to police
headquarters. After two hour questioning, he confessed to the crime and said the
body was in the Worthington Woods. Fish said that something overpowered him and drove
him to the crime. He wore a black overcoat, a gray tweed jacket,
black trousers, blue gray shirt, red tie, and battered brown felt
at When he was brought in for questioning, he was obviously nervous, moved
with a pronounced slout, and had to be pushed onto the lineup platform under
the bright lights. There, he blinked, winced, and shook his head
from side to side. Throughout the proceedings, a distinguished onlooker was doctor Allan
Dafoe, the physician who brought the dionne quintuplets sisters into the world and has
kept him here. His only comment expressed at the end was that the proceedings
were interesting. Question what prompted you to pick on little Grace Bud when there
are so many other girls in the city. Answer. I had intended to
take her brother, but when I saw her something overtook me. I can't
explain the feeling. I had intended to kill the brother, but something overpowered
me. Question did you ever take any other children and kill them? Answer?
No? Question did you ever tell anybody about this crime? Answer?
I never told anyone about the murder of the girl, not even members of
my own family. Question were you ever confined to an institution? Answer Bellevue
and King's County Hospitals. Question where you ever arrested? Answer several times?
Question ever go back to the scene of the murder? Answer I went back
several times, yes, but never to the same spot. Question why did
you write so many letters to the mother of the girl? Answer? I
don't know. I can't give any reason. It's writing those letters that proved
the end of me. I would never have been arrested if I had not
written those letters. Fish was then let off the platform, almost brushing doctor
Defoe, who had been observing the proceedings at close range, and the lobby.
Fish posed, but with all the signs of nervousness for the photographers.
Captain Dougan, expressing praise of Detective King and the Post Office and other agencies
which cooperated in running the criminal down, said quote, this is one of
the most shocking crimes ever committed, one of the most shocking in the annals
of the New York Police Department. Here's a helpful hint. You can easily
avoid the advertising by listening to true crime historian at the safe house at www
dot patreon dot com slash true crime historian Edward Bud waved a raisor menacingly as
he shaved before the mirror over the dining room mantle. If the police have
the man who murdered my sister Grace, he said grimly. I'm going to
see that he gets his It's the man, Eddie, said missus Dilia Bud,
mother of the ten year old Grace, who was spirited away from her
home in nineteen twenty eight by a man who called himself Frank Howard. Yes,
but Ma, said Albert Bud, father of the dead girl. You
thought it was so many men before this. Only Missus Bud was in the
dingy fifth floor walk up apartment at one thirty five Less twenty fourth Manhattan,
when detectives called yesterday with Albert Fish in tow. She has become so confused
by six years of apprehension and hope that police no longer depend on her for
identification. But both Edward and mister Bud identified the suspect from photographs. The
Bud family was gathered last night to discuss the tragic ending of the six year
old searchs We never really gave up hope. Then the police came yesterday with
the man they say murdered Gracie. The father said, mister Bud is a
middle aged man who has worked for fifteen years as a porter in the Equitable
Building at one twenty Broadway, Manhattan. Quote that man, Frank Coward or
Fish, seemed like such a gentleman to us that we were sure he wouldn't
harm Grace. He was very impressive when he came to answer Eddie's ad that
afternoon. He must have been wearing a ten dollars hat it looked that good,
and a diamond ring, and what a roll of bills he had with
him. He asked Grace if she could count. She said she could,
and he asked her to sit on his lap and count his money. He
had ninety two dollars. He seemed so kind and told us what he would
do for Eddie and all that. When he asked if Grace could go with
him to a children's party his sister was giving, we were glad to let
her go. Unquote, missus Bud said nothing. She listened dazedly to her
husband's account, as if she knew the story so well it had become almost
meaningless to her. She sat huddled in the corner of the room, a
gorn green sweater over her house dress and apron quote. We never thought anything
was wrong until police told us that the addressed Grace was taken to wasn't an
address at all, that there wasn't any one hundred and thirty seventh Street in
Columbus out. One thing that no one seems to mention was that a few
days after Grace disappeared, her friend Loretta Adabody, who lived at our old
place, four oh six West fifteenth Street, said that there was a young
boy along in the car that Grace and mister Howard or Fish went away in.
If they can trace this youth, maybe he can tell us something.
The boy, said, mister Bud was about seventeen. The Bud family Albert
twenty, George nineteen, Beatrice eleven, and Eddie twenty four clustered around the
mother as she seemed to collapse. Can't you see she's ill, mister Bud
said angrily at a room full of reporters and photographers as he showed them out
the door, said Eddie, quote, there's nothing else to say or do
unless they've got the guy who killed Gracey. Whoever killed her has been writing
his letters all along, and the police say that's how they traced him unquote,
December fifteenth, nineteen thirty four, under the foundations of the house in
which Grace Bud was choked to death and her body dismembered. Workmen began digging
today for evidences of other murders that might have been committed by the elderly Albert
Howard Fish. On orders of doctor amos O Squire, Westchester Medical Examiner.
They ripped up the basement floor of the deserted house at Greenberg, in which
Fish has confessed he committed the crime, and started a careful thorough search of
the earth. The medical examiner said that a man like Fish who had committed
a murder like that of ten year old Grace Bud quote, would be apt
to commit other murders unquote. Though Fish under close guard in the tomb's prison,
Manhattan, I had specifically denied any connection with the kidnapping of Billy Gaffney,
or the kidnapping and slang of Mary Helen O'Connor, or any other kidnapping
or killing except that of Grace Bud. Doctor Squire was not ready to believe
him. Quote. It seemed strange to me that when I casually lifted aboard
in the basement, I found a bone unquote. That bone, about ten
inches long, may be the bone of an animal. The medical examiner conceded,
but he thought it unlikely that anyone would hide an animal bone so carefully.
In any event, he would make certain by a methodical search what other
evidence might be found that would indicate the commission of other murders. The ground
in the vicinity of the murder house was also being carefully dug up and searched
with the same purpose. Meanwhile, the Whizzen soft voice house pain or Fish
waited in a cell in Murderer's row and the tombs, with suicide guards standing
watch to prevent any attempts he might make on his own life. As soon
as Westchester is ready to try him, New York officials are prepared to turn
him over. Meanwhile, they are making sure no attempt at suicide will succeed.
Detective William F. King has a favorite notation in a six year diary
of the search for the killer of Grace Bud. It is the one under
an October nineteen thirty four date in which he records that he told Missus Delia
Bud, the slain girl's mother, that quote, at the next full of
the moon, you're going to get another letter from the kidnapper. Don't open
it, for it is going to break the case. Unquote. At the
next full of the moon came a letter, which Missus Budd did not open,
but turned it over to Detective King. It was mailed the postmark showed
at the Grand Central Annex post Office. A return address in the upper left
hand corner had been carefully scratched out, but it had been ignored on the
flap of the envelope. Ny pc BA six twenty seven Lexington Avenue. King
went to the New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association at the Lexington Avenue address called
a meeting of the members learned from one that several of the envelopes of the
association had been left in a rooming house at two hundred East fifty second Street,
Manhattan, and it was there Detective King trapped as man. It is
his own private belief, which, however, he does not permit to interfere
with the methodical pursuit of clues. That quote, the full of the moon
is the time for catching people with a sex twist unquote, like the blood
lustful elderly Albert H. Fish, said King. Quote. That's the time
when they come out of their hiding places and do things they wouldn't dare try
any other time. They get reckless, they seemed to have been influenced by
the moon and leave themselves open to well good detective work. Anyhow, I
really think the full of the moon had something to do with my catching him.
Fish told Detective King. He was the youngest of a family of six,
that he was born in Washington, d c. And that he had
attended school there as high as the eighth grade. His brother, a sailor,
told him stories of famines in China and how young boys and girls were
hung up like cattle, eaten alive these gruesome tales, the slinking old man
told King, afforded him great delight. To further satisfy his sadistic tastes,
he would read assiduously all literature that had anything to do with being eaten alive.
Fish related with fiendish glee. To Detective King, the cannibalistic episodes in
the period expedition, I can't read an enough of the stuff. King quoted
the wizened old house painter, who boasted his penchant for anything that savored of
dissolute revelries. And in the thousands of letters that fish has written since he
lured little Grace Bud to a wooded grave, he never failed to touch upon
some sadistic pleasure. King revealed quote. He is an inveterate letter writer.
He is known to have closeted himself in his furnished room on East fifty second
Street and written from nine a m. Till midnight. He would get the
names of people who looked for furnished rooms, parents seeking boarding school for their
boys and girls in the newspapers. He writes splendidly fine handwriting like a highly
educated person. The letters would start off in a regular businesslike fashion and then
in would seep the sex stuff unquote. As a result of this unusual epistolary
habit, Fish would receive many letters by every mail, even special dy livery
letters. Fish, several years before the commission of the ghastly crime, worked
as a caretaker at the Second Presbyterian Church in Terrytown. One year before the
murder, he told Detective King he had worked in a similar capacity at Doctor
Kyle's School for Boys at Flushing. Fish has a married daughter, Missus Ralph
Collins, living in Astoria. The couple have two children. Fish's youngest son,
Henry, twenty one, is living with them. The Collins home was
covered by Detective King for many days and nights for the CCC check for twenty
five dollars sent from camp by John W. Fish, stationed at Smoke Mountain,
North Carolina, was drawn to Missus Collins. When the elderly Fish ascertained
that the check could not be honored by his married daughter because she herself was
receiving home relief, he wrote his son requesting that he Fish be made recipient.
It was the information that a mister Burke, who had moved away,
returned periodically to the East fifty second Street rooming house to get a C.
C C check, which convinced King that he was on the right trail.
Fish had occupied room number seven at two hundred East fifty second Street. Detective
King, for two weeks, had occupied room number four. As Fish walked
in, Detective King seized him and invited him to his tiny room for a
heart to heart chat. Fish vigorously denied at first that he had ever written
letters under various aliases. He maintained that he had always signed his letters A.
H. Fish, King said. After King showed him a batch of
missives bearing the alias John M. Pell, Frank Howard, Robert E.
Hayden, Albert H. Fish, Robert E. Haslin, the prisoner is
said to have admitted they were all his handwriting. Fish also admitted having written
many letters to the dead girl's mother. The contents of these letters King refuses
to divulge at this time. The police have a trunk full of letters purported
to have been written by Fish. They will be used for investigation going deeper
into other cases. King said numerous decoy letters had been sent out to trap
the old painter, but he somehow never called for them. When Deductive King
was assigned to the case. On June fourth, nineteen twenty eight, he
said he called at the Bud home at four six West fifteenth Street and learned
that the Bud family consisted of five children in a border quote. The day
before Little Grace was taken away, Fish called at the house and presented them
with pot cheese and strawberries contained in Agate quart cans. King later learned that
Fish had bought the Gray Agate cans from a pushcart peddler on Second Avenue.
It was after thus ingratiating himself into the Bud family that Fish Fish made the
overtures to take Little Grace to a birthday party. Fish at this time lived
at forty East one hundredth Street, on the ground floor in the rear.
A clever piece of police work was the composite picture Detective King Maid of eight
pictures he had missus Bud view. These were photos of suspects and of persons
resembling an appearance the kidnapper. The composite bears a striking resemblance to the old
prisoner and was said by King to have aided him materially in finding his man
in the grim gray abandoned house at Greenberg, Westchester, in which elderly Albert
H. Fish had murdered, by his own confession, ten year old Grace
Bud. Evidence was unearthed yesterday of other homicides which he may have committed,
although the wizened, hawk faced house painter in the tombs persisted that he never
killed anyone except the one little girl. Westchester's county medical examiner, doctor Amos
O. Squire, expressed the belief that Fish was quote apt to commit other
murders unquote, and seeking evidence along that line, sent a squad of men
digging under the basement of the Greenberg house late yesterday afternoon. They dug up
some thirty bones, which resembled human bones, varying in length from an inch
to ten inches each. Said doctor Squire, quote, of course, it's
possible that people who lived in this house used to bury their dogs under the
basement floor, but I would be better satisfied of that if I could find
a few dog skulls. So far, no skulls of any sort have been
found unquote. That made him believe that it was not animal bones he was
dealing with. He would at any rate submit them to professors of anatomical research
at Columbia, who he believed could determine whether they were human or animal bones
two wells on the property or to be pumped dry and search. Doctor Squire
said he requested the county authorities to throw police lines around the house today or
he was afraid souvenir hunters would carry the house away. As the excavation work
was being concluded for the day, a dentist who had extracted two teeth from
Grace Bud in nineteen twenty seven when she was nine, called at police headquarters
in Manhattan and tentatively identified the little girl's skull as that of Grace Bud.
While the identification was practically positive, Detective King last night appealed to the press
to publish a call for another dentist's identity unknown who could identify three fillings in
the child's teeth as that of Grace Bud. Such an identification would be final
and would have establish the corpus delecti in the murder trial of Fish. I
am a man of passion. You don't know what that means unless you are
my kind. At the orphanage where they put me just before Garfield was assassinated,
there were some older boys that caught a horse in a sloping field.
They got the horse up against a fence down at the bottom of the field
and tied him up, an old horse. They put kerosene on his tail
and lit it and cut the rope, and away went that old horse,
busting through the fences to get away from the fire. But the fire went
with him, that horse. That's me. That's the man of passion.
The fire chases you and catches you, and then it's in your blood.
After that. It's the fire that has control, not the man. Blame
the fire of passion for what Albert Hfish has done? What has Albert Hfish
done? Sometimes I myself am not sure what is real and what is not,
what I've really done, and what are things I wanted to do and
thought about doing so long that it got to be as if I had done
them, so that I remember them just as clearly as the real things,
just as clearly as that hot sunday in June when I went to the window
and whistled to that little grace Bud, and she stopped picking daisies and came
in. There are a lot of us, but some of these other things
are just as real. Though I can see that people don't believe me when
I tell them. That makes me mad. I mean, not being believed
makes me mad. What's the matter with these people? Don't they want to
believe the truth about me? Do they just want to close their eyes and
ears and make believe to themselves that the sort of thing I can tell about
doesn't exist. Well, it does, and plenty. There are lots of
us. We know how to find each other and get together and have fun.
We use the matrimonial agencies and the want ads, and there are hundreds
of other ways. We have our own language, a sort of code.
I'll tell you all about it when I get to it, but I want
to make things clear at the start. Is that I'll put down the things
I know to be true, things I actually did. When I put down
something that was imagined and not carry out, I'll come right out and say
so. I'll say, now, that's one of the things I thought about
doing but never got around to doing it, principally because some ideas that you
get if you're a man of passion are so hard to carry out that you
never get around to it. And here I am sixty five years old,
and in so it looks like they'll have to be dropped after all. And
if they insist some of the things the biggest things I've ever done are imaginings.
Why I can answer them with if I am being tried for the murder
of that little girl, certainly that was not imagining, was it? And
if that really happened, why not the others. The thing that started me
on the real big things I've done in the last fifteen years was the trouble
I had in nineteen seventeen with my wife and that man John strab Marriage is
not all it's cracked up to be, but it certainly serves one purpose.
So long as the man and woman keep the bargain, they will both stay
out of other trouble. It is a good safety valve. As long as
Ana is stuck to me, and the children kept coming one after the other
until there were six, I might have my outside fancies, but would keep
my into the bargain and fancies they would stay thing more. But when the
dog sniffed at the attic door and I found straw lying up there waiting for
my wife to bring him the cuts she sneaked from the family table, my
eyes were open to the fact that no bargain holds and that only fools know
any restraints. That freed me. It threw off my chains. I had
a right after that to any fun I could find or grab. We were
living then in a house at number ten thirteen Fifth Avenue, College Point,
the eight of us Anna and myself and the six children, headed by Albert
who was eighteen and had a job at the John W. Rapp Works at
tenth Avenue in Third Street. We were getting along fine. I've always been
pretty good at my trade of house painting, and we set a good table
and paid the rent. We had a small dog, and it was always
my custom to keep a pretty good track of income and outgo it all down,
I say, and you'll never be fooled. I kept track and a
little book I carried with me, not only of the money, but of
food and clothing and all. And my book showed me about the time that
we were using up more food than I saw going down anybody's throat. I
asked Anna, what's become of all this food? The way I figured,
if there's about ten pounds of meat a week or other stuff over and above
what I can check. If I had any suspicions, I would have noticed
how she got confused when she passed it off by saying that the dog was
eating his hat off. That drew my attention to the dog, which was
just a cur the children had picked up. I wondered how such a small
dog could get away with so much food. I figured it out, he
must be cashing the food the way animals do. I set a watch,
and one evening I saw that dog start up the stairs, and I followed
him. The dog went on up to a door leading into a kind of
attic storeroom and began sniffing and whining at the crack. I thought to myself,
now I found the place where you cash all that stuff, and what
a mess that will be. I opened the attic door and went in.
It was a bit dark in there, and I stumbled over a heap on
the floor. It was this stroup, sound asleep on the floor, snug
as a bug and a rug and a spread of some of the best blankets
and quilts in the house. He sat up, half asleep and mumbled something
about what have you got for me this time? I've always liked things to
be easy and pleasant around me. Men of my type are like that,
even those I've handled rough. I would like it. If they liked it
too, if you know what I mean, if only pain were not so
painful. But my main thought was that this might be excitement, something new,
Live and let live. It was pretty funny. Leading It was pretty
funny, leading Strawb downstairs and walking into the dining room and telling him to
pull up a chair. He was struck dumb, so was my wife.
They didn't know what was coming next, neither did I. If I had
any definite idea in mind at all when I fetched Anna's lever down from the
attic and made him sit at the table across from me, with Anna between,
it was certainly no idea of violence that came after when he and Annas
sold the furniture to a junk man and left me the six children and took
a honeymoon in Bridgeport on the money. That was going too far after a
couple have been married nineteen years and had brought up six children. I think
it must be the rule that early passion is pretty well petered out. Why
not be frank about it. If the vitality peter's out with the passion,
everything comes out all right at the end, and the old folks sit around
getting their fun if any out of crossword puzzles and a pack of cards.
But the trouble is that vitality doesn't always peter out at the right time.
And why not be frank about this too? There are thousands, probably millions
of old people going around who have stuck up on the shelf and are too
lively to stay there. When I got looking around in the last few years,
hunting my own kind, why, I found that this world is simply
littered with people of both sexes on the wrong longside of fifty to the calendar,
but still twenty and full of old nick in their minds. Read this
m five twenty lonely widow would be a companion to some old man, love
home, and would do all of my power to make some man happy one
a man with a loving disposition, considered very nice looking for a lady of
my age, which is sixty, have dark brown hair and dark gray eyes.
Five five one hundred and eighty pounds, very friendly and sociable, have
some property. This is an ad from one of the matrimonial magazines. I
know all about these lonely widows. I married three of them in nineteen thirty
one. Was all right, and her daughter even better, as I shall
tell when I get to the story of my adventure with mRNA and Mary of
Ohio. But the best that can be said for the matrimonial agencies is that
the contracts they provide are better than nothing, better than sitting in the rocker
waiting for the undertaker. But the old don't want the old. The desire
for youth and beauty does not get less with time, but greater and greater
as the years go by. What to do? I must have found the
wrong answer. All this is meant to explain how I felt discovering that my
wife of nineteen years, mother of my six children, was keeping this fellow's
strawb in the attic. It was an anger, I felt, it was
envy. The anger came later when she did the really disloyal thing, walked
out on our bargain, which was to do the fair thing by our children,
and left me to shoulder that burden alone. A few days after I'd
heaped coals of on Strab's head by putting him at my table, he vanished,
and then I myself left the home in College Point to go out on
a job. A house painter usually moves in on his job I was a
good one in building and remodeling was booming, and that meant I was away
from home more than I was in it. My custom was to leave my
forwarding address with my eldest daughter, named Anna after her mother, and who
is missus Anna Collins now and lives in Astoria. The job was an interior
decorating one in White Plains, the same town where I face a murder trial,
now a bad place for me. The weather was bitter cold that winter,
and this was in the middle of January. I got daughter Ana's telegram
on January nineteenth, nineteen seventeen, at twelve Brookfield Street and White Plains,
which is in the Colored district now, but it was a white rooming house.
Then the Graham said, Papa, Mama is gone. Come home on.
I put two and two together and knew instantly that she had run off
with Straw. But it wasn't until I got to College Point that night that
I knew the whole damage she had done. When I went into the house,
the first thing that struck me was that the hall tree had been moved.
A neighbor woman met me in the hall and said, she's gone,
mister Fish and everything you had is gone with her. I heard the children
crying in the dining room and went in. The room was absolutely bare.
Even the stove was gone, along with the three leaf maple table and twelve
chairs of a set, and the sideboard and rug. Because of the icy
cold, the children were all huddled together at the street window and their hats
and coats, and I got the story from the mall. Mama gave us
all a dime and sent us to the movies at four o'clock. They all
screamed. Ten minutes after they all left for the movies, a van that
was waiting down the street moved up to the door, and John Strab showed
up. A neighbors said, the van men and Strab moved every stick out
of the house and drove off, and then your wife left two I rushed
through the place like a blind man. It was like being struck blind,
seeing nothing where there had been a home. The beds and even the bedclothing
were gone, so that, in pure pity, like after a fire or
shipwreck or something, the neighbors had to take us in for the night to
keep warm and to have time to think what to do next. The next
day I found out that the van. Everything I possessed in the world had
been sold by honor for next to nothing to the first second hand man she
had found. It was enough to get her and her lover over the state
line to Bridgeport, Connecticut. I had to rent a furnished flat by the
week. I remember the landlady took one look at my string of children and
boosted the rent to twenty five dollars a week, and also made me pay
ten dollars down on the breakage. We left that place two weeks later.
I had to make a complete new start in life as a mother and father
of six mouths. But I never got that ten dollars back, even though
one glass was all we broke all the time we were there. No trouble
for one is profit for two. My eldest son, Albert, was working
for a foreman named William Conzitt, who used to visit us at times.
Conzat looked me up. He was angrier about the whole fair than I was.
I was too stunned to feel rage. Conza told me I could get
strawb on the Man Act and at least get back the money value of what
had been stolen. I traced Anna and strawbed to a rooming house at twenty
one Harrison Avenue, Bridgeport and got a police, but when we crashed in
the birds had flown. I heard from once about three years later my three
youngest children had come down with the measles, and I was at my WIT's
end. She had heard about this and some roundabout way and wrote to daughter,
Anna, strab can't get a job, and your mother is literally starving
up here with her two new babies. I've heard about Jean and Girt and
Johnny having the measles, And if your father isn't too mad at me,
I would come back simply as a housekeeper and work for my keep and work
hard. Only one thing you are to tell him if he takes me in,
I have to bring these two babies with me, but not Strab.
Anna sounded me out on the letter, but I'd had enough and said so
Strab. I ran into once a few years later when I was working on
a building about a mile away, and I went over there and saw an
unfurnished two story house and Strab carrying a stack of shingles up an outside ladder.
I went after him. He saw me coming and ducked in a window
on the second floor. I went in after him and saw finished flight of
stairs ahead of me, and went up full speed. What I did not
know was that there was a piece of closet space to the one side of
the stairs, and that Strab had dived in there to hide while I rushed
by. I was going so fast when I got to the top that I
pitched over the edge of nothing and barely saved myself from a nasty fall by
hugging upright as I went over. Strob slipped down inside the house and out
the back while I was climbing back to safety, and left the job and
that part of the world over in Astoria, where he and Anna live now.
He must be one of those who figure that the worst the jury can
do to me here is all to the good. I can only hope and
pray that my faithless wife does not share that feeling against the husband whose only
offence against her is that she did I'm wrong. Children are solace for some
things, and I cherish and have cherished my own everyone. But they are
not solace for the loneliness that strikes a man when fate tells him that his
pleasures in life are over. I was driven in on myself in those years
years after the earthquake that demolished my home. That was when I began to
write the letters. I was visited by the peculiar dreams that got me through
the nights. The letters continued those dreams through the days. Dear miss,
the name does not matter. I got it from a nurse's registry. I
am a widower of some mean a stockbroker and standard oil of New Jersey.
I am sixty five years of age and in very feeble health. I have
a son of nineteen. He is a semi invalid. When five years of
age, he fell down the cellar stairs sustained a brain concussion. When twelve,
he had a severe attack of infantile paralysis. He cannot walk, run,
jump, and get in and out of a bathtub without assistance. There
is no lifting to do or a wheelchair to push. However, Bobby has
very little use of his hands and arms. He has to be washed,
dressed and undressed, given a bath, and rubbed all over daily with alcohol.
He has had one woman in charge of him for the past seven years,
Miss Helen Brown. She is leaving because of her coming marriage. Now
though Bobby is going on twenty, is good looking, well built, and
weighs one hundred and sixty five pounds. He is just as easy to spank
or switch as a boy of ten. Frequently he gets cranky and does not
mind. Miss Brown has a paddle in Cat of nine Tales. On such
occasions she did not hesitate to use one or both quite freely. In fact,
that is the only way you can handle them. I want a young
woman, not a mere girl, who can and will take full charge of
him. There is no woman in the house to butt in. You will
be entirely his boss, and mine as well. What he doesn't mind,
do exactly as Miss Brown did, and go as far as you like.
Don't be stingy. If I don't take my medicine or mind, you give
me the same as you do the boy. It is not a question of
money, good pay, good times, for good service. Signed Albert H.
Fish. The letter I have copied here is one of the kind I
got in the habit of writing after my wife left me to brood and face
old age alone. Of course, it is not the kind I wrote to
myself, not the kind I wrote to lots of people, the principally women,
after I had sounded them out and found out that their ideas ran along
the same as mine. Those other letters are freer and say exactly what was
on my mind. But I understand they cannot be printed, which is too
bad. There would be a lot less trouble in the world, lots less
of people keeping the lid on until they pop if you could write and print
things just as they come to mind, one free space talking to another free
spirit. And I found lots of free spirits to talk with and write to
after I got the hang of things and looked around. But this letter illustrates
something I wrote a while back about my kind having a way to find each
other out, a kind of code. I found out after I had been
in trouble a couple of times that in this letter writing business, you have
to sound people out before you let go and write what you want. This
letter is a sounding out letter. I might call it a good old number
one. Now. It is full of code. All that about alcohol,
rubs and the cat of nine tales and good pay and good times. That's
all code. If the party understands and answers in the same code, then
everything is clear sailing, and the beauty of it is that if the party
misunderstands and writes back about some real professional nursing, no harm is done.
You just write back, I can say sorry, the job is filled.
Bobby was my own special invention. I have no son named Bobby who is
an invalid. But you can't come write out in the first letter and say
that Bobby is yourself, that you are the one who needs to be handled
like a spoiled child and worse. Some people would think it silly, some
would think worse. But Bobby got to be more than a code to me.
He got to be real. Sometimes he drove me into a fury,
having to be babied intended day and night by me who had six other real
children on my hands. A big, blubbering lout of a fellow, though
handsome and well formed, it drove me to violence to be saddled with his
care. Then would come out the whip and strap, and he would get
what for. I believe those beatings I experienced were the origin of the habit
I contracted later of sticking needles into myself. The trouble with pain is that
you get tough and always have to invent something that hurts worse. In a
curious way too. Bobby was something else, neither me nor a code figure,
but a person long dead Albert H. Fish. Now, don't jump,
I'm not suggesting that I myself was long dead. That Albert Hfish did
die at the age of eighteen months in Washington, d C. In eighteen
sixty five. Mark Twain has a funny story about a pair of twins which
sort of applies in my case. The Twain story is told by the surviving
twin of a pair, one of which died in the cradle without the nurse
exactly knowing which of the two had died, and the story ends up with
the living twin saying the twin who died was me. I was not baptized
Albert H. Fish. Before I was born the nineteenth of May eighteen seventy
in washing Washington, d C. My parents had another boy who had been
baptized by that name just before he died from having been born with water on
the brain. The doctor in that case, and one who brought me into
the world, was a famous Washington doctor by the way, doctor Robert Rayburn,
one of the two specialists who later attended President Garfield on his deathbed when
he was shot and later got big congressional grants as fees. While Albert H.
Fish died in the cradle, and later I came along and was baptized
with a name that got me called insulting names in the orphanage, where I
lived three years of early childhood and learned most of the things which developed into
some of my unusual habits later on, the nicknames were unbearable. When my
mother got going after my father's death and took me out of the orphanage and
I was to go to public school, I told her all about the nicknames
and begged her to give me a new name. I remember how she looked
at me and past at my hand and sat me in her apron and said,
you can have the name of your baby brother. You never saw Albert
anyway. Getting you back from the orphanage was like getting my son back from
the dead. Sometimes I think there is no such thing as time. My
childhood seems yesterday, and yesterday seems long ago. You will have to follow
me if I jump back and forth from century to century. I'm old enough
to have done a lot of living in two. What I want to tell
now is partly in eighteen seventy five, partly in nineteen thirty one. Just
the other day in the steeple Chase Hotel at Rockaway Beach, where I got
to that trouble from tossing over the wall of that high school girls school.
There was a connection between my childhood and that trouble about the girls school.
You see, I had also been shut up in an orphanage, and I
knew just how those girls felt, being shut up in those finishing school grounds
with all their temperament going to waste. People who run schools and orphanages don't
know what they are doing when they try to keep the lid on the boys
and the girls under them. I do. The orphanage people were very strict.
They kept the boys and girls separate, and of course we all thought
of how to get together. The higher ups never found out about those loose
planks and the dormitory floor. That sort of thing went on under cover while
the preying and the learning went on in the open. It was like living
two lives. One they knew about, one they didn't. And also I
learned in the orphanage to beg lie and steal. The orphanage was a charity
place, and their biggest expense was feeding the herd. They used to dress
us up in a kind of uniform and give us each a big cloth bag.
The bag had painted on it in big letters. Filled me up.
We went into the grocery stores and meat markets and stood near the door and
spread the bag so that the begging words showed. And then we folded our
hands and looked like praying until the owner saw that the customers expected it of
him, and filled the bag. And here is how I learned to steal
and lie. The Orphanage sent out the bigger boys with ten boxes with slits
in the top for dropping coins from pennies to half dollars. The last year
I was there, I was sent out with a bigger boy to learn.
We went to the right places and the box got filled. And then on
the way back, the bigger boy took me up an alley and showed me
a strip of ten he had hidden in his stocking. In how to use
it by poking it into the half dollar slot and getting the money to slide
out along it. I got rehearsed also in how to tell the orphanage heads
a long story about how people weren't giving quarters and halves anymore, but dimes
at the most, so I was as good a thief and liar as the
rest, and they let me on the tin box pool. So it was
really memories of all that had happened to me when I was behind walls that
drove me to toss those letters over the wall of the girls school near Rockaway
Beach. They were not the plainest letters I can write, either, but
just written for fun to make the girls laugh. But the head mistress Scott
one and complained to the detectives, and they came up and got me at
the Steeple Chase Hotel, where I had a job as a dishwasher and a
back room in the staff way. That was the second time I was taken
to a doctor for observation. I was taken to Bellevue in nineteen thirty and
the doctors there said I was harmless. This time I was taken to King's
count by doctor Lewis Burlatt of Rockaway Beach Hospital. But they let me go
again. And I think that this is what will happen a third time.
At the end of this trial of mine for putting that little bud girl out
of the way, I just got one thing to say, Www. Dot
Patreon dot com slash true crime historian That's It, White Plains, New York,
March eleventh, nineteen thirty five. Albert H. Fish, sixty five
went on trial in Supreme Court here today and indicated through his attorney that he
would seek to escape the death penalty by pleading that he was insane. The
slow squeaking machinery by which a jury is chosen in New York State had ground
out four accepted jurors by two thirty pm, out of thirty five men.
Questioned. Fish himself, with two deputy sheriffs seated just behind, sat through
the proceedings with eyes closed, his head resting on his hand, all together
unaware apparently of what was going on. Gray haired, hollowed cheeks, his
shoulders hunched up, he looks like a weird and motionless gargoyle. At the
end of the defense table, as the talismen were examined one after another,
it became evident that the best which the defense expected was a verdict of not
guilty for reason of insanity, and the defense expected also that the aged Fish
would be accused of more than the mere slaying of the bud girl. Defense
attorney James Dempsey playing for the sympathy of jurors, showed a keen anxiety lest
their sensibilities be hurt by the harrowing testimony to be given. Some of the
testimony, he asked, again and again, would be quote gruesome, shocking?
I'm afraid bloodthirsty? Is that going to upset you too much? Unquote?
None of the jurors thought he would be upset or inflamed too much.
There was an objection at one point to the phrasing of one such question,
and Dempsey explained, I understand they are going to charge that this defendant not
only killed the little girl, but also eight or I have a right to
know whether that would be the state's accusation. Supreme Court Justice Frederick P.
Close ruled that the prosecution did not have to commit itself on the subject for
the time being. Again and again, Dempsey, who was a former District
Attorney of Westchester and a former mayor of Peaksgill, asked whether the prospective juror
had any prejudice against the plea of insanity in a murder case, and pointed
out that it was incumbent on the state to prove the defendant sanity and that
the only test of sanity or insanity is whether the defendant knew the difference between
right and wrong and knew the nature and quality of his act at the time
he committed the act. Fish, his attorney, said, at one point,
quote has thirty needles in him. Will that prevent you from giving a
fair verdict? Unquote? Fish came hobbling into the court room, held up
and almost carried in by deputy sheriffs Charles Ingall and John Tucher. He left
the courtroom again when a recess was called at twelve thirty p m. In
the same way, dragging his feet, his shoulders hunched forward. He had
spoken no word throughout the session, and only once before the judge mounted the
bench did he look around the court room. Judge, close before the first
name was called for jury service, announced from the bench that this would be
an orderly trial, that the public would be permitted as long as there were
available seats. No one would be permitted to stand. Fish was suffering from
the effects of his latest self torture. To day, he jabbed himself in
the pelvic region with a pin sharp sliver of chicken bone Saturday night. Grassland
Hospital doctors said he was in no danger. A constant guard will be maintained,
the warden said, scouting the suggestion that Fish's acts were suicidal, he
said that the prisoner, pronounced sane by alienists, used the chicken bone to
try to cut out some of them more than a score of needles which he
had previously pushed into his flesh in a masochistic frenzy. Court attendants reserve special
seats for mister Missus Albert Budd, the slain child's parents, and her brother
Edward, who will be witnesses. March twelfth, nineteen thirty five. Grace
Bud's family, her mother, father, and brother, today identified shriveled little
Albert Howard Fish as the man who lured her away to be slain in a
lonely abandoned East Irvington, New York cottage. In a dramatic scene in Supreme
Court where Fish, described as sexually abnormal by the prosecution and insane by the
defense, is on trial for the slaying of Grace. Her parents and brother
pointed out the defendant as the Frank Howard they allowed to take the child to
a birthday party June third, nineteen twenty eight. She never returned. First
the matre mother dressed in black, identified Fish. Then Grace's brother Edward named
him as Frank Howard. The father, Albert Bud, provided the dramatic touch.
He said he was near sighted. The court told him to look at
Fish closely. Stepping from the stand, Bud, a powerfully built man,
walked over to the wizened Fish. He peered into Fish's eyes, his face
less than six inches away from the defendant. Suddenly he started to weep.
Fish slumped in his chair, his face expressionless, never flinched. Bud said,
his voice breaking, that's the man who took my child away, this
man right here. Bud continued his testimony, describing how Fish won the family's
confidence by offering his son Edward, a job on his farm. The Buds
were the first whose witnesses called. After the completion of the jury and the
opening statements by the prosecution in defense, revolving largely around a taunting letter allegedly
written by Fish, telling how he had choked the child to death, dismembered
her body, and of his cannibalistic tendencies. Detective William King of the New
York Missing Persons Bureau told the jury how this unsavory letter was traced and ultimately
led to Fish's arrest and confession. December fourteenth, nineteen thirty four, a
brown fragment of bone dug from a mat of dead leaves on the grounds of
the abandoned East Irvington, New York cottage, was placed in evidence as that
of the slain Grace Bud by the prosecution. The moment the exhibit was displayed
by Assistant District Attorney Albert T. Gallagher Defense Council Dempsey was on his feet,
fighting furiously for a mistrial, which was denied by Supreme Court Justice closevidence
was introduced during the questioning of Detective William King, who arrested the little sixty
five year old man and testified that Fish led him and other officers to the
cottage old wisteria, where he helped them dig up the child's remains. Fish
slumped in his chair, his head resting on his right hand, opened one
of his pale, gray eyes. His face was expressionless. A moment later
he closed his eye. Supreme Court Justice Frederick P. Close denied the motion
and permitted King to examine the skull on the witness stand. Fish told King
how he cut off her head with the butcher knife. After luring her from
her home in New York to the deserted house, Fish told the child to
pick flowers outside the uninhabited mansion. King said. Meanwhile, Fish spread a
canvas on the floor of a room on the upper story of the house,
disrobed, and then grace to come in. When the child saw him,
According to the detective's testimony of what Fish told him, she screamed, I'm
gonna tell my mama. Then, Detective King testified, Fish declared, I
grabbed her by the throat, and she scratched and kicked. I dragged her
into the room. I put my knee on her chest and choked her more
so as to be sure she was dead. Then I put a pail under
her neck and I cut off her head with the butcher knife. I put
all her clothes on the floor, and then I cut her in two about
the navel. I first used the butcher knife, and then I used the
meat cleaver. I did not use the saw at all. I put the
torso and legs behind the door and took the head out behind the house.
My hands were covered with blood. There was no water, and so I
cleaned them on the grass. Then I went back and wrapped the tools and
put them behind the door. Four days later I returned and got the body
and the legs. I threw them onto the lawn behind the house. I
carried out the torso. Then I laid out the body as it would be
in life. I got the head and put it where it belonged. I
did not bury the body. Then I got the tools and threw them over
the wall. King told of the graphic portrayal of the crime that Fish in
pantomime gave the cordon of policemen he led to the abandoned house after his confession
in New York. It ended. The detective said when Fish grubbed in the
dead leaves, Dempsey, assigned by the court to defend Fish, and who
is contending the defendant is insane, leaped to his feet and said, I
move for a mistrial. This showing to the jury is prejudicial. These gruesome
bones are prejudicial. I submit I am titled to the withdrawal of the jury
and the declaration of a mistrial. The state placed evidence a letter Fish is
alleged to have written a detective King after his arrest, which said Fish poured
alcohol in his flesh and ignited it to torture himself. The letter stated quote,
misery leads to crime. I saw so many boys whipped and strip naked
in that home. The letter did not specify where that I've been led to
a life of crime. I have stripped myself and whipped my body. March
fifteenth, nineteen thirty five, Albert H. Fish thought he was Christ and
at times beat himself with nail studded paddles. His son, Albert H.
Fish Junior, testified today. The younger Fish, who is thirty five years
old and lives at eight oh seven Franklin Avenue, was called as the first
witness for the defense. He is a painter and a decorator. Fish testified
that nineteen twenty two, while he was playing football with his brothers at Worthington,
he saw his father in a nearby apple orchard, stand with his hand
raised and repeat I am Christ, I Am Christ, I Am Christ.
Early in nineteen thirty four, when he and his father serviced three apartment houses
at eighteen eighty three Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, he entered his father's bedroom unexpectedly
and found his father nude, jumping up and down and beating himself with a
nail studded paddle. He said his father's face was red and his eyes looked
wild. In nineteen thirty, the younger Fish testified he found two paddles in
his father's home on seventy fourth Street. They were nail studded. Fish said
that when he questioned his father about them, he was told, quote,
sometimes I get a certain feeling, and when I get that feeling, I
have to torture myself with those paddles unquote. March nineteenth, nineteen thirty five,
a police record disclosing that Albert H. Fish was placed in King's County
Hospital for observation for sadism was put in evidence by the defense, which is
seeking to prove the aged defendant insane. Detective John Paul Smith of the New
York City Police testified he made out the card on August twenty seventh, nineteen
thirty one, three years after Fish had allegedly slain the child and mutilated her
body in a deserted East Irvington, New York cottage. Smith described resting Fish
at the Steeplechase Hotel, Rockaway on suspicion of sending obscene letters through the mails
and of having him taken to King's County Hospital in an ambulance. Quote we
searched his room. He was a handyman. There. We found in his
room a cat of nine tales, and I asked him what he used it
for. He said he used it to beat himself, and what business was
it of ours. The last of the Fish children, Eugene twenty seven,
broke down on the stand and wept as he told of his father's self torture.
Afterward, the Reverend Harold G. Willis, rector of Saint Mark's Episcopal
Church, West Orange, New Jersey, testified that Fish had been employed as
a sexton at Saint Anne's Episcopal Church in New York. Defense Council James E.
Dempsey Junior again started reading into the record the obscene letters the old man
had sent. Through the mails, women were excluded from the court by Justice
Close. During a recess, Detective William King, who arrested Fish, introduced
Edward Budd, brother of the slain child, to the Fish children. One
of them, Missus Gertrude de Mario, broke down and started crying. March
twenty second, nineteen thirty five, Albert Howard Fish was described by his attorney
today as an insane fiend who should be confined for the rest of his life
in an asylum rather than be sent to the electric chair. Pointing to his
wizened client, James E. Dempsey Junior, summing up the defense, said,
quote, if I were a jurre, and even if there was a
reasonable doubt as to some technical point, I would not want it upon my
soul that I turned this man free to walk the streets. I haven't spared
this man, I said, and I say now that this man is a
fiend unquote. The defendant, his face covered by his hand, a man
who admittedly criminally assaulted at least one hundred children, sat motionless as his counsel
described his unnatural life. Asserting that Fish should have been sent to an insane
asylum years ago. Dempsey said it was a breakdown in the police system that
left him free to commit a more unspeakable crimes. Describing his client as a
degenerate, gruesome, obscene, and homicidal, Dempsey criticized Bellevue Hospital for declaring
him sane after three weeks observation in January nineteen thirty one, following his arrest
for sending obscene letters through the mail Fish, peeking through his hands which covered
his face, broke down and wept as Dempsey neared the end of the summation.
E. T. Gallagher, Assistant District Attorney, said, quote,
he wasn't insane on June third, nineteen twenty eight, that was the day
Grace was murdered and mutilated. He wanted to satisfy a desire and he did
regardless of the cost. And the state wouldn't be asking for the electric chair
if it was not positive that Fish was sane. Unquote. He described Fish
as a scheming and plotting, unnatural person. January seventeenth, nineteen thirty six,
The state has exacted the extreme penalty for the slaying of ten year old
Grace Bud, described by penologists as one of the most revolting crimes in New
York Police annals. Wizened little Albert H. Fish, sixty six, who
said as lust for blood led him to strangle the girl and dismember her body
nearly eight years ago, was put to death last night in the electric chair
at Sing Sing Prison. The watery eyed, stooped shouldered man followed John Smith,
a one legged man, in a double execution. He was the seventh
man to die in as many days at the hand of executioner Robert Elliott,
a devotee of self torture. X rays showed that he had thrust more than
thirty needles into his own abdot. Fish was quoted as having remarked that the
electric chair would be the supreme thrill of his life. Shortly before he died,
Fish said goodbye to three of his grown children, a daughter and two
sons, Ward and Lewis. E. Laws quoted Fish as saying, I
love children. I must have been out of my mind when I killed that
girl. When he shuffled into the death chamber, however, he clasped his
hands in silent prayer, and his parchment like skin turned a ghastly gray.
The Reverend doctor Anthony Peterson, Protestant chaplain, accompanied him to the death chamber,
where about fifty witnesses were waiting. Four guards strapped Fish in the chair.
Then executioner Elliot stepped quickly into a control room and closed the switch.
Three minutes later, two doctors pronounced Fish dead. It was reported that before
his execution, Albert Fish gave a handwritten manuscript to his court appointed attorney detailing
many of his crimes, including the murders of Billy Gaffney and Francis MacDonell,
which he had previously denied. While the lawyer admitted to having the document,
he told the press he was going to destroy it quote, I will never
show it to anyone. It is the most filthy string of obscenities that I
have ever read. Many of Fish's letters are out there, though some of
them in the files of the Smithsonian Institution. I recorded one of these confessions,
the story of his satomasochistic relationship with a young man named Thomas, but
I edited it from this episode because I couldn't bear to listen to it again.
If you're interested to hear the unedited tape, however, I'll post an
MP three file at Truecrimehistorian dot com. Slash Fish. Don't say I didn't
warn you. That was what happened to Grace. The Atrocities of Albert Fish.
Theme music by Dave Sam's and Rachel Shott, engineered by David Hish at
Third Street Music. Media management by Sean R. Jones, Production assistance by
Emily Seymer Brawn. And as for me, the only thing I knew about
was what I read in the newspapers. I'm true Crime historian Richard O.
Jones signing off for now. Oh good.