Serial Killers: Confessions of a Cannibal

by Robert Keller

  With the gentlemen of the jury looking slightly green around the gills, Wertheim continued, describing Fish’s religious mania and his growing obsession with the idea of castrating a boy. That had been his plan when he had initially responded to Edward Budd’s advertisement. But then he’d spotted Grace and his plan had changed.

  Dempsey had now brought his star witness to the issue on which his case rested. The D.A. had already explored the abduction and murder in great depth and Dempsey had no intention on going over that ground again. What he wanted to explore was the part that the prosecution had so conveniently skirted - the issue of cannibalism.

  Wertheim had no doubt that Fish had cannibalized Grace Budd. Fish had told him that he had, and Wertheim believed him. According to Wertheim, Fish had admitted to him that he made a stew of Grace’s flesh and had enjoyed “absolute sexual excitement” while consuming it.

  The following morning, Wertheim was back on the stand, ready to face the question that Dempsey hoped would establish once and for all the fact of Albert Fish’s insanity. This single question ran to over 15,000 words and 45 pages.

  “Suppose doctor, that on May 19, 1870, a male child was born in Washington DC,” Dempsey began, continuing on for an hour and fifteen minutes, framing Fish’s entire history as a hypothesis rather than a fact, eventually terminating with the question: “What in your opinion is the medical condition of that man today?”

  Wertheim’s answer was somewhat more succinct. “He is insane,” he said simply.

  Dempsey’s other expert witnesses, Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe and Dr. Henry Riley, both backed up Wertheim’s diagnosis.

  On Thursday, March 21, A.D.A. Gallagher called his own expert witnesses to rebuff those of the defense. First up was Dr. Menas S. Gregory, former head of the Psychiatric Department at Bellevue. Gregory, who had examined Fish in 1930, when he was an inmate at the hospital, contended that Fish was “abnormal but sane,” a diagnosis that clearly annoyed Dempsey.

  “Is it a common thing, Doctor,” he asked on cross-examination, “for a man to drink urine and eat human feces?”

  “Its not as uncommon as you think,” Gregory countered. “I know of successful people, artists, teachers, financiers, who have the same perversion.”

  Dr. Charles Lambert answered the same question in similar vein. “I know individuals prominent in society, one individual in particular that we all know…”

  “Who actually ate human feces?” Dempsey cut in.

  “Who regularly uses it as a side dish in his salad,” Lambert said.

  Dempsey had no more success trying to press the remaining two defense experts into an admission that Albert Fish might be insane. He eventually retired having done all he could. Moments later the State rested its case and the judge adjourned proceedings. Summations were scheduled for the following day. After that, the matter was going to the jury.

  Chapter Seventeen:

  The Verdict

  Closing arguments began at 9:15 on Friday, March 22. First up was James Dempsey.

  It is not often that you hear a defense attorney describe the crime committed by his client as “fiendish, brutal and inexcusable.” But these were exactly the adjectives that Dempsey used to characterize the murder of Grace Budd. The crux of his case was that no man in his right mind could have committed such an atrocity, much less dined on the flesh of his young victim after he had killed her.

  Dempsey then went on the attack, accusing the police of covering up the cannibalism angle, accusing Mr. and Mrs. Budd of negligence in allowing their ten-year-old daughter to go off with a total stranger. He then returned to his central theme. How could a sane man have committed the crime of which Albert Fish stood accused?

  Would a sane man have just decided to kill someone, without consideration for who the victim was? Would a sane man have kidnapped his victim “in the broad light of a mid-afternoon in June?” Would a sane man have killed his victim in front of a window overlooking the neighboring house? Would he then have gone out and cleaned the blood from his hands in the front yard? How could any man who would eat the flesh of another human being be deemed sane?

  These were all questions that Dempsey posed to the jury. He acknowledged that Fish had employed cunning to abduct Grace and to avoid detection thereafter. However, he insisted that these were not indicative of a reasoning mind, but rather of the animalistic survival instinct inherent in all criminals. “The fact that a man can connive and plan an outrageous, dastardly, fiendish crime like this is no indication of the fact that a man is in his right mind,” he said.

  Finally, Dempsey impressed upon the jury the gravity of the decision they had been asked to make. His plea was for mercy and he ended by reminding them that the day would come when they too would be judged. “And if you say ‘Let him die,’ may he who breathed life into your nostrils judge you more mercifully than you judged this maniac,” he concluded.

  Dempsey’s summation had lasted two hours. But if he hoped for some indication from the jurors as to which way they were going to lean he got none. The twelve men of the jury remained impassive, even when Fish brought his hands together in a praying gesture and looked towards them in a pathetic plea for mercy. Then, the old man’s eyes filled with tears and he began weeping silently. It was one of the few times during the trial that he expressed any emotion at all.

  Assistant District Attorney Gallagher took a different approach to his summing up, sticking strictly to the fact of the case. His businesslike manner suggested that the jury should have little problem in reaching the right conclusion. Albert Fish had committed a brutal, cold-blooded murder and should be made to bear the consequences of his actions.

  “Mr. Dempsey has asked you to remember certain things about the defenseless Mr. Fish,” he said. “Gentlemen, I want you to remember poor, defenseless little Grace Budd as she kicked and screamed in the springtime of her life and said that she would tell her mama.”

  Gallagher then went on to address the main pillar of the defense case, Fish’s sanity. He reminded the jury of the testimony offered by the three alienists presented by the prosecution. All of these had declared Fish legally sane. “The defendant is undoubtedly a conniving and scheming sexual pervert,” Gallagher said. “He undoubtedly has engaged in revolting practices with women and children. But that does not make him insane.”

  Like his opponent, Gallagher took nigh on two hours to present his summary of the case. Now he wrapped it up with an appeal to the jurors. “And so gentlemen, the People leave this case in your hands, knowing that whatever you do, you will do the right thing by the people of this county, of this state, and by the defendant.”

  The lawyers had said their piece. Albert Fish’s fate now rested with the twelve men called upon to weigh up the evidence.

  Justice Close began his brief to the jury after the lunch recess, explaining the six possible outcomes they could deliver, ranging from an acquittal, to guilty of first-degree murder. Pointedly, he stressed that a propensity to commit horrific acts without care for the consequences of those acts does not make a person incapable of understanding that what he is doing is wrong. At 3 p.m. he sent the jurors to consider their verdict. An informal poll, taken among reporters covering the case, concluded that Fish would likely be found insane.

  Jury deliberations were expected by many to be concluded quickly but by 6 p.m., when the jurors recessed for dinner, the matter was still undecided. At around 8:20, word came that a decision had been reached and a short while later the twelve men filed back in and took their places in the courtroom. Jury foreman, John Partelow, was asked to rise.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” the clerk asked. Partelow acknowledged that it had. “And how do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty?”

  “We find the defendant guilty as charged,” Partelow intoned somberly.

  Albert Fish, sitting at the defense table, slumped visibly at the news. The rest of the courtroom observed a respectful silence although outside there was pandemonium.
As reporters rushed to telephones to file their stories, the news began to ripple through the gathered crowd. Fish’s children, waiting in the corridor, heard the verdict from a reporter. His two daughters immediately broke into uncontrollable sobs. The Budd family’s response was contented, yet muted. As Edward Budd observed, “It won’t bring Gracie back, but at least he got what he deserved.”

  The verdict, of course, carried a mandatory death sentence, but Dempsey asked that sentencing be delayed until Monday and the judge agreed. As Fish was being led from the courtroom, a reporter asked him how he felt about the verdict. “I feel bad,” he said. “I was expecting Matteawan.” Matteawan is the New York State hospital for the criminally insane.

  Chapter Eighteen:

  Confessions Of A Cannibal

  In the aftermath of the Budd case, much was made of Albert Fish’s desire to be executed. This is simply not true. Fish, in fact, was desperate to escape the punishment that he so richly deserved. Why else would he have fired his original attorney? Why else would he have tearfully entreated the jury to show mercy? Why else would he have been so dejected at the guilty verdict?

  What is true is that, even before sentence of death was officially pronounced upon him, Fish had accepted his fate. Asked by a reporter how he felt about being executed, Fish is said to have replied: “What a thrill it will be to die in the electric chair. It will be the supreme thrill, the only one I haven’t tried.”

  Whether or not this was just bravado, we shall never know, but within a day of being found guilty of killing Grace Budd, Fish decided to come clean about the other murders of which he was suspected.

  On Sunday evening, March 24, Fish was brought to the warden’s office, where a delegation – including New York District Attorney Walter Ferris – awaited him. The previous day, in a letter to his attorney James Dempsey, Fish had admitted to killing 4-year-old Billy Gaffney. Now he was required to provide details of the crime. If his version of events is to be believed, Billy’s murder had been even more horrific than that of Grace Budd.

  “I took him to the public dumping ground in Riker Avenue in Astoria,” Fish told the assembled lawmen. “There is a house near there that I painted for the man that owns it. I took the boy there and stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a rag I picked up at the dump. Then I burned his clothes and threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took the trolley at 59th Street at 2 a.m. and walked from there home.

  “The next day about 2 p.m., I took tools and a homemade cat-o-nine-tails. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears and nose, slit his mouth from ear to ear. I gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood.

  “I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in the grip. Then I cut through the middle of his body, just below the belly button, then through his legs about two inches below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head, feet, arms, hands and the legs below the knee. This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to North Beach. The water is three to four feet deep. They sank at once.

  “I came home with my meat. His monkey and pee wees and nice little fat behind I roasted in the oven to eat. I made a stew out of his ears, nose, pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good.

  “Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put it in the oven. Then I picked four onions and when the meat had roasted for about a quarter hour I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon, so the meat would be nice and juicy.

  “In about two hours it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was a sweet as a nut but his pee wees I could not chew. I threw them in the toilet.”

  On the morning of Monday, March 25, Albert Fish was brought before Justice Close who sentenced him to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing. The execution date was set for a little over a month later, on April 29. Before that could happen, Fish would confess to another infamous murder, that of eight-year-old Francis McDonnell. Fish admitted that he was the man Anna McDonnell had seen walking along the road on that fateful July afternoon in 1924. He confessed that he had lured young Francis into the woods and had strangled him to death with his own suspenders. He had been about to butcher the corpse when he’d thought that he heard someone approaching and had fled.

  As details of Fish’s latest confessions became public knowledge, the Daily Mirror declared Fish the “most vicious child-slayer in criminal history.” Going purely by numbers this is probably an exaggeration. We shall never know the exact number of victims who died at Albert Fish’s hands, although Fish reportedly admitted to his psychiatrist, Frederic Wertheim, that he was responsible for the torture slayings of at least fifteen children.

  Chapter Nineteen:

  Justice

  Directly after his death sentence, Albert Fish was sent to Sing Sing to await execution. On April 3, 1935, his attorney James Dempsey filed an appeal, citing among other things the judge’s “definite hostility towards the defense” and the jury’s failure to consider that there might be a reasonable doubt as to Albert Fish’s sanity.

  “Albert Fish is a psychiatric phenomenon,” Dempsey’s petition declared. “It is noteworthy than no single case history, either in legal or medical annals, contains a record of one individual who possessed all of these abnormalities. The jury, undoubtedly through passion and prejudice, disregarded evidence of Albert H. Fish’s insanity. His conviction proves merely that we still burn witches in America.”

  It was a valid argument, well made. On November 26, 1935, the New York Court of Appeals rejected it, leaving Dempsey with just one more chance of saving his client, an appeal to the governor.

  So it was that on a frigid morning in early January 1936, Dempsey set off for Albany and a meeting with Governor Herbert Lehman. Accompanying him on this last desperate journey, were Dr. Frederic Wertheim and five of Fish’s six children.

  Dempsey’s plea to Governor Lehman was impassioned. He was not asking for mercy on behalf of Albert Fish, he said, Fish did not care one way or another whether he lived or died. Nothing, however, would be gained by putting the old man to death. On the other hand, placing Fish in an institution, where psychiatrists would have the opportunity to study him, might save countless victims of men like Fish in the future.

  Frederic Wertheim backed up Dempsey’s statement. “The science of psychiatry is advanced enough so that with proper examination, a man like Fish can he detected and confined before committing such outrages,” he declared.

  If this argument had any impact on the Governor it did not show in his expression. After listening impassively to the arguments, he rose from his seat, nodded slightly and left the room without saying a word. It was left to Lehman’s counsel to usher Dempsey and Wertheim out. Their appeal had failed. Albert Fish was going to the chair.

  On the morning of January 16, 1936, Fish was moved to a cell in the death house at Sing Sing, an area referred to by inmates as the “dance hall.” He ate a hearty lunch of T-bone steak that day and ordered a chicken dinner, although by evening he appeared to have lost his appetite. He barely picked at his final repast.

  At around 10:30 p.m., the Protestant chaplain of the prison, Reverend Anthony Peterson, arrived to pray with Fish. At 11, a couple of guards entered the cell. One of them knelt before Fish and slit open his right trouser leg. Then, with the guards flanking him, and the priest behind, Albert Fish was escorted from the cell and walked
along the short corridor towards the death chamber.

  Fish showed no emotion as he caught his first glimpse of the electric chair. He simply allowed himself to be led towards the apparatus and slumped himself down in it, bringing his hands together in a praying gesture while the attendants busied themselves with strapping his legs, torso and finally his arms into place. His face appeared drawn and gaunt in the moment before the executioner, Robert Elliott, dropped the black hood over his head.

  The leather cap with its attached electrode was then placed on Fish’s closely cropped pate with the chinstrap fastened to hold it in place. Elliott then dropped onto one knee and secured the second electrode to Fish’s right leg. All was now ready. Elliott stepped away and positioned himself at the control panel.