Albert Fish
Albert Fish was caught because of a letter he mailed in November 1934 to the mother of a girl he had killed six years earlier. Mrs. Budd could not read, so her son read the pages aloud to her. The letter carried no signature. Police traced its author within weeks. How had he stayed free for so long? Why did the doctors who examined him reach opposite conclusions about his mind? And how did a jury settle an argument that the experts could not?
Hamilton Howard Fish was born in Washington, D.C., on the 19th of May 1870, the youngest child of Randall Fish and Ellen Francis Howell. Randall was a fertilizer manufacturer and former riverboat captain. He was 75 when his son was born, which made him forty-three years older than his wife. Three siblings survived beside the baby: Walter, Annie and Edwin.
On the 16th of October 1875, Randall suffered a fatal heart attack at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station. His widow then placed the boy in Saint John's Orphanage in Washington. Beatings were common there, and Fish came to enjoy the pain they brought. By 1880 his mother had secured a government job, and she was able to take him home. The orphanage left him a mocking nickname, "Ham and Eggs". It also left him a wish to be called Albert, after a sibling who had died.
Mental illness ran through the family. An uncle had mania, a brother was confined to a state mental hospital, and a paternal half-brother suffered from schizophrenia. A sister was diagnosed with a "mental affliction", three other relatives received psychiatric diagnoses, and his mother had "aural and/or visual hallucinations".
In 1882, at age 12, Fish began a relationship with a telegraph boy, who introduced him to practices involving bodily waste. Fish spent much of his weekends at public baths, watching other boys undress. For the rest of his life he also wrote obscene letters to women whose names he took from classified advertisements and matrimonial agencies. That habit of writing to strangers would one day lead detectives to his door.
By 1890, at age 20, Fish had moved to New York City. There he worked as a male prostitute and began molesting and raping boys, most of them younger than six.
In 1898 his mother arranged his marriage to Anna Mary Hoffman, who was nine years younger than he was. They had six children: Albert, Anna, Gertrude, Eugene, John and Henry. In 1903 Fish was convicted of embezzlement and sent to Sing Sing Prison.
Fish later described a visit to a wax museum with a male lover. A wax model showing a human body cut in two fascinated him and started an obsession with sexual mutilation. Around 1910, while working in Wilmington, Delaware, he met a 19-year-old named Thomas Bedden. The two began a sadomasochistic relationship. It is unclear whether Bedden consented, and Fish's own account implied that the young man was intellectually disabled.
After ten days Fish took Bedden to "an old farm house" and tortured him there for two weeks. He finally mutilated him with a knife. Fish had meant to kill Bedden and cut up the body, but he feared that the hot weather and the smell would draw attention. Instead he dressed the wound, left a $10 bill and went home. "Took first train I could get back home. Never heard what become of him, or tried to find out," he recalled.
In January 1917, Fish's wife left him for John Straube, a handyman who boarded with the family. Fish later told a newspaper that she took nearly everything they owned. He was left to raise the children alone.
Soon after, Fish began to hear voices. He once wrapped himself in a carpet, saying he was obeying the instructions of John the Apostle. He also started pushing needles into his groin and abdomen. After his arrest, X-rays showed at least twenty-nine of them lodged in his pelvic region. He beat himself with a paddle studded with nails and burned himself with wool soaked in lighter fluid.
Fish was never thought to have attacked his own children. Even so, he encouraged them and their friends to strike him with the same nail-studded paddle. He was now a single father, and the first of his three proven child murders was still seven years away.
Around 1919, Fish stabbed an intellectually disabled boy in Georgetown. He tended to pick victims who were mentally disabled or African-American, and he explained that he assumed nobody would miss them. He also claimed that he sometimes paid boys to bring other children to him. He called his tools his "implements of Hell": a meat cleaver, a butcher knife and a small handsaw.
On the 11th of July 1924, Fish found 8-year-old Beatrice Kiel playing alone on her parents' farm on Staten Island, New York. He offered her money to help him look for rhubarb. Her mother chased him away just as the girl was about to leave with him. Fish came back later and tried to sleep in the Kiels' barn, until Beatrice's father found him and forced him out. That year, aged 54 and suffering from psychosis, Fish believed God was commanding him to torture and sexually mutilate children.
Three days later, a boy named Francis McDonnell failed to come home after playing catch with friends in Port Richmond, Staten Island. Searchers found his body hanging from a tree in a wooded area near his home. He had been sexually assaulted and strangled with his own suspenders.
The boy's friends described an elderly man with a grey moustache. His mother, Anna McDonnell, said she had seen the same man earlier that day. "He came shuffling down the street mumbling to himself and making queer motions with his hands... I saw his thick grey hair and his drooping grey moustache. Everything about him seemed faded and grey." Newspapers named the stranger "The Grey Man", and the case went cold.
It stayed cold until the Budd investigation. Several eyewitnesses, including the Staten Island farmer Hans Kiel, identified Fish as the odd stranger seen around Port Richmond that day. Richmond County District Attorney Thomas Walsh announced that he would seek an indictment. Fish first denied the charge. He said later that he had meant to castrate the boy but ran when he heard someone coming. Only in March 1935, after his trial and after he had confessed to another killing, did he admit that he had raped and murdered McDonnell. The New York Daily Mirror declared that the admission confirmed him as "the most vicious child-slayer in criminal history".
That other killing took place in Brooklyn on the 11th of February 1927. Four-year-old Billy Gaffney and 3-year-old Billy Beaton were playing in an apartment hallway with Beaton's 12-year-old brother. When the older boy went home, both small boys vanished. Beaton turned up later on the roof. Asked about Gaffney, he said, "the bogeyman took him." Gaffney's body was never found.
Police first looked at another suspect, Peter Kudzinowski. Then Joseph Meehan, a Brooklyn trolley motorman, saw Fish's picture in a newspaper. He recognized the old man who had dragged a crying, jacketless little boy on and off his trolley that day. Beaton's description of the "bogeyman" also matched Fish. Detectives learned that Fish was working as a house painter for a Brooklyn real estate company that month, at a site a few miles from the abduction.
Elizabeth Gaffney visited Fish at Sing Sing with Detective King, hoping to ask about her son. Fish refused to speak to her. In a letter to his attorney, he described in horrifying detail how he had killed and eaten the child.
Shortly before he took Grace Budd, Fish tried to test his tools on a 10-year-old he had been molesting, Cyril Quinn. Fish invited Quinn and a friend up to his apartment for sandwiches. While the boys wrestled on Fish's bed, they knocked the mattress loose. Underneath lay a knife, a small handsaw and a meat cleaver. The frightened boys ran out. Soon afterward, Fish would see a small advertisement in a Sunday newspaper.
In May 1928, Fish noticed a classified advertisement in the Sunday edition of the New York World. It read, "Young man, 18, wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street."
On the 28th of May, the 58-year-old Fish called on the Budd family in Manhattan. He gave his name as Frank Howard, a farmer from Farmingdale, New York, and promised to hire Edward and a friend. He said he would send for them in a few days. He did not appear, but a telegram of apology arrived and set a later date. Fish later confessed that his real plan was to tie Edward up, mutilate him and leave him to bleed to death.
When Fish returned, he met Edward's younger sister, 10-year-old Grace, known as Gracie. His plan changed on the spot. He invented a birthday party for his niece and persuaded her parents, Delia Bridget Flanagan and Albert Francis Budd Sr., to let Grace go with him that evening. The date usually given for her death is the 3rd of June 1928.
Fish took her to Wisteria Cottage, an abandoned house at 359 Mountain Road in East Irvington, New York. He had picked it out in advance. There he strangled her, then decapitated and dismembered her body. By his own account, he ate most of the remains over the following days.
The wrong man was arrested first. On the 5th of September 1930, police detained Charles Edward Pope, a 66-year-old superintendent, after his estranged wife accused him of involvement in Grace's disappearance. Pope spent 108 days in jail before his trial opened on the 22nd of December 1930. He was found not guilty.
Fish, meanwhile, was living his own chaotic life. On the 6th of February 1930, he married Estella Wilcox in Waterloo, New York, although he was already married. They divorced after one week. In May 1930, police arrested him for sending an obscene letter to a woman who had answered an advertisement for a maid. After that arrest and another in 1931, he was sent to Bellevue Hospital for observation. A former manager of that hospital would later testify against him in court.
The letter began with a story about a sailor. A friend of the writer had supposedly joined the crew of the Steamer Tacoma under a Capt. John Davis, which sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong in 1894. The tale claimed that the sailor was stranded during a famine in China, where children were sold as food, and returned to New York with a taste for human flesh. Police could never verify the Davis story or the famine. The part describing Grace's kidnapping and what followed was found to be accurate, although nobody could confirm that Fish had actually eaten any of her.
The envelope held the clue that mattered. It bore a small hexagonal emblem with the letters "N.Y.P.C.B.A.", which stood for the New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association. A chauffeur at that organization told police that he had taken some of its stationery home. When he moved out of his rooming house at 200 East 52nd Street, he had left the paper there.
The landlady said that a man named Fish had checked out of one of the rooms just days earlier. His son sent him money, she said, and he had asked her to hold his next check. Detective William King, the chief investigator on the case, waited outside the room until Fish came back.
Fish agreed to go to headquarters for questioning. Then he pulled out a razor blade. King disarmed him and took him in. The arrest was on the 13th of December 1934. At headquarters, Fish made no attempt to deny killing Grace Budd. He said he had gone to the house meaning to kill her brother Edward, and that it had "never even entered his head" to rape the girl. With the question of who did it settled, the only dispute left was what kind of man he was.
Fish's trial for the murder of Grace Budd opened on the 11th of March 1935 in White Plains, New York. Frederick P. Close presided as judge. Elbert F. Gallagher, the Westchester County Chief Assistant District Attorney, led the prosecution. Defending Fish was James Dempsey, a former prosecutor and one-time mayor of Peekskill. The trial lasted ten days, and Fish pleaded insanity, saying that voices from God had told him to kill children.
One detail from Fish's later statements to his attorney shaped the prosecution's case. Fish claimed that he had experienced two involuntary ejaculations while strangling Grace. Prosecutors used this to argue that the kidnapping was sexually motivated, which let them avoid any mention of cannibalism.
Several psychiatrists testified about Fish's sexual fixations, which included sadism, masochism, flagellation, voyeurism, cannibalism and pedophilia. In his summation, Dempsey called Fish a "psychiatric phenomenon". He argued that no legal or medical record described another person with so many sexual abnormalities.
The defense's chief expert was Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist who specialized in child development and examined people for the New York criminal courts. Over two days of testimony, Wertham described Fish's obsession with religion, and in particular with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Fish believed that sacrificing a boy would be penance for his own sins. If God disapproved, he reasoned, angels would stop him. He had tried once before, but a passing car thwarted him. Edward Budd was meant to be the next victim, but Edward proved larger than Fish expected, so he settled on Grace. Wertham said it is believed that Fish perceived her as a boy. Fish also linked cannibalism in his mind with communion.
Dempsey's final question to Wertham ran to 15,000 words and traced Fish's whole life. Wertham answered in three words: "He is insane." Under cross-examination by Gallagher, he conceded that Fish knew right from wrong. But it was a perverted knowledge built on his ideas of sin and atonement, which Wertham called an "insane knowledge". Two more psychiatrists backed Wertham.
The prosecution called four rebuttal witnesses. Menas Gregory, the former manager of Bellevue Hospital, where Fish was treated in 1930, said Fish was abnormal but sane. He added that Fish was "no different from millions of other people" with the same perversions. Perry Lichtenstein, the resident physician at The Tombs, had no training in psychiatry. Dempsey objected, but Justice Close allowed him to testify and left the jury to weigh his opinion. Lichtenstein said Fish's self-inflicted pain was "not masochism", only punishment he used to gain sexual gratification. Charles Lambert said religious cannibalism might be psychopathic but "was a matter of taste", and James Vavasour repeated his view.
The defense also called Mary Nicholas, Fish's 17-year-old stepdaughter. She described games Fish had taught her and her brothers and sisters, games with overtones of masochism and child molestation.
None of the jurors doubted that Fish was insane. One of them explained afterward that they felt he should be executed anyway. They found him sane and guilty, and the judge sentenced him to death by electrocution. Fish arrived at Sing Sing in March 1935.
Fish entered the death chamber at Sing Sing at 11:06 p.m. on the 16th of January 1936. He was pronounced dead three minutes later, at the age of 65. He is said to have helped the executioner position the electrodes on his body. His last words were reportedly, "I don't even know why I'm here." One witness said it took two jolts to kill him, which fed a rumor that the needles in his body had short-circuited the chair. That rumor was later judged untrue, because he reportedly died in the same manner and time as others. He was buried in the Sing Sing Prison Cemetery.
Afterward, Dempsey told reporters that he held a "final statement" written in Fish's hand in the hours before his death. Pressed to reveal it, he refused. "I will never show it to anyone. It was the most filthy string of obscenities that I have ever read."
The record of his crimes remains incomplete. Police could trace only three child murders to Fish, but he was a suspect in at least ten killings. He was also known as the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire, the Moon Maniac and the Boogey Man. Among the unproven cases was that of Yetta Abramowitz, a 12-year-old strangled and beaten on the roof of a Bronx apartment house on the 14th of May 1927. A man matching Fish's description had been seen trying to lure local girls into dark hallways that day. Another was Mary Ellen O'Connor, 16, whose mutilated body was found on the 15th of February 1932 in woods near a house Fish had been painting in Far Rockaway, Queens. Fish denied both.
Fish once boasted that he "had children in every state" and at one time put his number of victims at about 100. It is not known whether he meant rapes or cannibalism, or whether the boast was true. He also claimed to have sexually assaulted at least 100 boys, most of them African-American or developmentally disabled, because he believed police would not pursue such cases.
In 2007, John Borowski directed a documentary about Fish, and a biographical film called The Gray Man appeared the same year, with Patrick Bauchau playing Fish. The comedian Norm Macdonald built a recurring joke on his podcast, Norm Macdonald Live, around the crimes. He described the horrors in detail before delivering an intentionally anticlimactic punchline: "This guy was a real jerk!" The extreme metal band Macabre recorded several songs about Fish.
Kenneth Robert Wilson, founding drummer for Marilyn Manson, took his stage name Ginger Fish from Ginger Rogers and Albert Fish. The tenth track on Tyler, the Creator's second album, Goblin, is titled "Fish".
Continue browsing
Updated
Common questions
Who was Albert Fish?
Albert Fish, born Hamilton Howard Fish in Washington, D.C., on the 19th of May 1870, was an American serial killer who committed at least three child murders between July 1924 and June 1928. He was executed in the electric chair on the 16th of January 1936.
How was Albert Fish caught?
Albert Fish was caught through an anonymous letter he sent to the parents of Grace Budd in November 1934. The envelope carried the emblem of the New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association, which led police to a rooming house where Detective William King arrested him on the 13th of December 1934.
Who was Grace Budd, the victim of Albert Fish?
Grace Budd was a 10-year-old girl from Manhattan. Albert Fish, posing as a farmer named Frank Howard, persuaded her parents to let her attend a niece's birthday party, then took her to Wisteria Cottage in Irvington, New York, and killed her.
What was the verdict in the Albert Fish trial?
The jury found Albert Fish sane and guilty of the murder of Grace Budd, and the judge sentenced him to death by electrocution. The trial began on the 11th of March 1935 in White Plains, New York, and lasted ten days.
How did Albert Fish die?
Albert Fish was executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing on the 16th of January 1936. He entered the chamber at 11:06 p.m. and was pronounced dead three minutes later.
What other names was Albert Fish known by?
Albert Fish was known as the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire, the Moon Maniac and the Boogey Man.
How many people did Albert Fish kill?
Police could trace three child murders to Albert Fish, and he was a suspect in at least ten killings. He once boasted of about 100 victims, but it is not known whether he meant rapes or cannibalism, or whether the claim was true.
All sources
44 references cited across the entry
- 1BookMurder Cases of the Twentieth Century: Biographies and Bibliographies of 280 Convicted Or Accused KillersDavid K. Frasier — McFarland — 1996
- 2BookThe World's Twenty Worst Crimes - True Stories of 10 Killers and Their 3000 VictimsKate Kray — John Blake Publishing — 2007
- 3BookProfile of Serial KillersChristina Doidge — CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform — 2012
- 4BookThe New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent CrimeMichael H. Stone et al. — Prometheus Books — 2019
- 5Sing Sing Prison's receiving blotter indicates Fish was 33 when his mother died. Available on Ancestry.com under Albert H. Fish.
- 6Ancestry of Albert FishWilliam Addams Reitwiesner
- 8BookDeranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish KillerHarold Schechter — Simon & Schuster — 1990
- 9Albert FishCrime Library
- 10BookThe Serial KillersColin Wilson et al. — Virgin Publishing — 2004
- 11BookCannibal Serial Killers: Profiles of Depraved Flesh-eating MurderersChristopher Berry-Dee — Ulysses Press — 2011
- 14BookMyths and Mysteries of New YorkFran Capo — Morris Book Publishing, LLC — 2011
- 15BookAlbert Fish: In His Own WordsJohn Borowski — Waterfront Productions — September 5, 2014
- 16Albert Fish: The Life & Crimes of One of America's Most Deranged KillersTroy Taylor — 2004
- 18Albert Fish: real life Hannibal LecterCrime Library
- 19BookCannibalism - The Last TabooBrian Marriner — Random House — 2011
- 20NewsEx-Wife UnconcernedDecember 15, 1934
- 21NewsMr. and Mrs. Budd Name Him on Stand as One Who Took Child Away Before MurderMarch 13, 1935
- 22Not #379 as reported in the news.com.au article. There is no house at #379, and the house pictured in the article is #359.
- 24NewsWife Accuses Caretaker as Abductor Who Vanished With Girl Two Years AgoSeptember 5, 1930
- 25NewsC. E. Pope Accused in Disappearance of Child From Her Home on June 3, 1928December 22, 1930
- 26BookThe A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial KillersHarold Schechter et al. — Pocket Books — 2006
- 27BookDeranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer!Harold Schechter — Gallery Books — 1998
- 28BookCannibal; The Case Of Albert FishMel Heimer — Lyle Stuart — 1971
- 29BookCannibal Killers: The Impossible MonstersMoira Martingale — Robert Hale Ltd — 1993
- 30Fish supplied the following biographical information in captivity: "I was born May 19, 1870, in Washington, D.C. We lived on B Street, N.E., between Second and Third. My father was Captain Randall Fis
- 31NewsDeserted House Where Girl Met DeathDecember 18, 1934
- 32BookThe Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of ViolenceColin Wilson et al. — Random House — 2011
- 33NewsBody of Small Boy is FoundJuly 17, 1924
- 34NewsLostFebruary 19, 1927
- 35Billy Gaffney's parents were Edward and Elizabeth Gaffney.
- 39NewsFish Case Will Go to the Jury TodayMarch 22, 1935
- 40BookAmerican Murder: Volume 1: Homicide in the Early 20th CenturyGini Graham Scott — Praeger — 2007
- 41NewsAlbert Fish, 65, Pays Penalty at Sing SingJanuary 17, 1936
- 42BookRiver of Blood: Serial Killers and Their Victims, Volume 1Amanda Howard et al. — Universal Publishers — August 1, 2004
- 43BookCannibal Serial Killers: Profiles of Depraved Flesh-eating MurderersChristopher Berry-Dee — Ulysses Press — 2011