Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer

by Harold Schechter

  After Inspector King’s departure, Captain Stein and a few of his men spent some time hammering away at Fish about the disappearance of Billy Gaffney. Fish, sitting hunched on a wooden stool, simply shook his head and protested his innocence. But the investigators were unconvinced. They had, in fact, begun to suspect that Fish was responsible not only for the Gaffney crime but also for another, older atrocity as well—a case which still rankled in the memory of the New York City police, since it had been committed against one of their own. This was the 1926 murder of eight-year-old Francis McDonnell, the Staten Island patrolman’s son who had been savagely attacked and strangled in the woods near his home.

  By 4:15 P.M., the woods around Wisteria Cottage were growing dark. Most of Grace Budd’s skeleton had been located by then, and the searchers had turned their attention to the recovery of the tools Fish had used to dismember the little girl’s corpse.

  A man named Robert Walton, one of the dozens of locals who had spent the day tramping around the property, found the first of Fish’s “implements of hell”—the curve-handled compass saw, its tapered blade corroded with rust. Shortly afterward, another Greenburgh man, a trucker named Jerry Reale, showed up at Wisteria with an interesting story. About two years earlier, while strolling through the woods behind the abandoned house, he had come upon an old cleaver with a rotted wooden handle. Deciding that the tool was beyond salvaging, he had pitched it into the underbrush. Reale pointed to the place where he had tossed it. Sure enough, as soon as the police began searching the area, they came upon the rusty remains of the cleaver.

  That left only one more tool to find. But in spite of the number and diligence of the searchers, no one could turn up the butcher knife. Finally, Captain McQuillan, who had arrived from Manhattan earlier in the afternoon, decided to try burning off the underbrush. A fire was lit and immediately began burning out of control. By the time the Greenburgh Fire Department arrived and extinguished the blaze, it was too dark to continue the search.

  McQuillan took charge of the evidence. After posting some of his men around the property for the night, he returned to Greenburgh police headquarters with the two rusted tools and the picnic basket full of bones.

  Sergeant Hogan was sent around the corner to Butler’s grocery for a larger container. A short while later, he came back carrying a shipping carton imprinted with the name of a popular brand of canned beans. McQuillan carefully transferred the little girl’s remains into the grocery carton and locked the evidence in his closet.

  The picnic basket was shaken clean of bone chips, pebbles, and dirt and returned to Mrs. Thornton, with the thanks of the Greenburgh police.

  Suppertime was approaching, but back in Manhattan, Detective King hadn’t relaxed his exertions. Specifically, he was searching for a piece of evidence that would help identify the skeletal remains found at Wisteria as Grace Budd’s. At around 6:30 P.M., he found it.

  Digging through the records of the dental clinic at New York Hospital, where Grace had been treated the year before her disappearance, he came upon the little girl’s records. The chart indicated the position of several teeth which had been filled during her visit to the dispensary. At a glance, King could see that the fillings matched the ones in the skull that Captain Stein had brought back from Wisteria.

  By that time, reporters covering the case already recognized that King was the true hero of the story, the indefatigable manhunter who had refused to rest until the Budd criminal had been tracked down and brought to justice. At a news conference to announce the discovery of the dental chart, Commissioner Valentine was asked if King could expect any official recognition for his work on the case.

  The commissioner confirmed that King could look forward to a promotion from second- to first-grade detective. The higher rank would mean a pay hike of $800 per year, bringing King’s annual salary up to $4,000.

  King had one final task to perform that day. He was one of the officers who accompanied Fish when the old man was transferred to the Tombs.

  Arriving at the prison shortly before midnight, Fish was stripped of his necktie, belt, and shoelaces. A round-the-clock guard was posted outside his cell to make sure that he did not inflict any harm on himself. The police, of course, were thinking about suicide. At that point, no one knew anything about the other far more extravagant, if less fatal, forms of self-abuse that were among the old man’s dearest pleasures.

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  “Budd Murder Mystery Solved … Justice Always Wins!”

  Page One, New York Daily Mirror, Dec. 16, 1934

  From the moment it broke on December 14, the Fish story kept New York City spellbound with horror. By Friday afternoon, the news of the arrest was splashed across the front page of every paper in town, and for the following two weeks, the dailies covered each new development in lavish detail.

  The Mirror and Daily News in particular served up a nonstop feast of juicy revelations, seasoned with the tabloids’ own special blend of prurience and moral indignation. The Mirror did an especially loving job of dishing out lurid tidbits for its readers’ delectation and never hesitated to spice up the facts when the truth wasn’t zesty enough for its sensationalistic standards. Fish’s statement that he had strangled Grace Budd slowly, for example, was transformed into the even more horrific but completely fictitious admission that “It must have taken me fully an hour to strangle her once I got my hands on her throat.”

  The Mirror scribes were particularly inventive in coming up with lurid labels for the decrepit old killer. In the course of a single story, Fish was described as the “Ogre of Murder Lodge,” the “Vampire Man,” the “Orgiastic Fiend,” the “Modern Bluebeard,” the “Aged Thrill-Killer,” and the “Werewolf of Wisteria.” The articles themselves were written in an equally inflammatory style: “Out of the slime of the sadistic butchery of Grace Budd by the benign-looking Albert Howard Fish,” began a typical piece, “there emerged last night the hint of an even greater horror. A horror of multiple killings. Revealing a new type of Jack the Ripper … in the guise of a kindly old gentleman.”

  Compared to the visual aids which accompanied the stories, however, the writing was a model of cool objectivity. On Saturday, December 15, for example, the Mirror ran an artist’s graphic rendition of the Budd murder. Headlined “HOW THE THRILL VULTURE POUNCED ON HIS COWERING PREY,” the drawing was a step-by-step reconstruction of the killing, culminating in a close-up of the little girl’s strangulation. In a bow to the public’s sensibilities, Fish was shown fully clothed. The Mirror, after all, was a family newspaper.

  On another day, the paper printed a sequence of photographs that traced the route Fish and Grace had taken on their trip to Wisteria. Each photograph was accompanied by a breathless caption that did its best to summon up the titillating horrors of that day. “What were you doing on Sunday, May 28, 1928?” began the caption under the first picture in the series, a shot of the Budd’s old apartment building on West 15th Street. “On that day, Albert Fish was killing little Grace Budd!” The other landmarks in the series were the “el” at 14th Street (“Perhaps you used the station that day, rubbed shoulders with them …”), the Sedgwick Avenue Station (“Perhaps you were on that very train. Were you? The horrible ogre sat beside the little girl, planning his horrible crime”), Worthington Station (“Fish left his bundle on the train. She went after it, carrying her own death weapons!”), and, of course, Wisteria Cottage (“The old man went inside, leaving the little girl out of doors picking flowers. When he called her, she went trustfully to him, and he killed her”).

  The Mirror also tried to take as much credit as it could for Fish’s capture. In a sidebar headlined “FIRST AGAIN!” it quoted Walter Winchell’s fortuitous prediction of November 2. It also reprinted the June 4 fleet photograph of the two sailors and their dates, claiming (with some justification) that the picture had ultimately led to Fish’s arrest.

  The Daily News, though less melodramatic than its competitor, also tricked out the truth for the sake o
f added color. It was the News, for example, which first promulgated the fiction that Fish—whose creative aptitude consisted of an ability to slap several coats of paint on an apartment wall—had been known in his younger days as “a pleasant, affable artist struggling to support his wife and five children. Cubism was an enthusiasm of his at the time and he often asked friends to admire the products of his queer artistic fetish.” Clearly, as far as the News was concerned, a taste for cubism was itself a symptom of incipient madness and a possible precursor of child-murder.

  Though the News avoided the horror-movie metaphors favored by the Mirror, it lost no time in suggesting that Fish was very probably a mass murderer of historic dimensions, who had slain untold victims in the deserted precincts of “Old Wisteria House.” The paper was also the first to disclose the cannibalistic content of Fish’s letter to the Budds. The old man, reported the News, had been driven to kidnap the little girl by a sudden “yearning for the thrill of eating human flesh and drinking human blood,” a desire which had come over him “as a result of reading of cannibalistic practices in the Orient.”

  In one instance, however, the News did demonstrate an unusual degree of self-restraint. Though the paper was the first to draw a connection between Fish and the illustrious family he claimed to be part of, it never made specific mention of the old man’s namesake—U.S. Congressman Hamilton Fish. Instead, the paper simply asserted that Fish was “descended of Revolutionary stock.”

  Like the Mirror, the News tried to find parallels for Fish among the “most bestial” criminals in history. The Mirror came up with Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper. But the association made by Jack Alexander of the News was much more interesting—and, as it turned out, apt. Ranking Fish with “the worst human monsters of mod ern times,” Alexander could think of only one comparable case: that of the German psychopath Fritz Haarmann, the notorious “Vampire of Hanover.”

  Born to a working-class couple in 1879, Haarmann was a sullen and slow-witted child whose favorite pastime was dressing up as a girl. At seventeen, he was committed to the Hildesheim asylum after being arrested for child-molesting. The examining doctor declared him “incurably feeble-minded.” Six months later, he escaped to Switzerland and gradually made his way back to Hanover.

  For a while, he attempted to lead a more settled life, working with his father in a cigar factory, getting engaged to a young woman he had impregnated. This period of relative normalcy didn’t last. Haarmann’s ill-tempered father detested his son. And Haarmann’s baby was stillborn. Haarmann deserted his fiancé and ran off to join the Jäger regiment in Alsace. His commanding officer declared him a “born soldier.”

  Back in Hanover in 1903, Haarmann launched into a life of petty crime. Throughout his early twenties, he was in and out of jail for various offenses, ranging from pocket-picking to burglary. He spent World War I locked up in prison.

  Released in 1918, he returned to Hanover and joined a postwar smuggling ring that trafficked in black-market meat, among other commodities. Haarmann also functioned as a police stool pigeon, a sideline which afforded him protection for his illicit activities. In 1919, however, after being caught by police in flagrante delicto with a young boy, Haarmann was shipped off to prison again.

  After his release nine months later, Haarmann commenced his career of unparalleled depravity. Living in Hanover’s seamy Old Quarter, he fell under the sexual thrall of a handsome male prostitute and petty thief named Hans Grans. Together, the two systematically set about preying on the young male refugees that were flooding into the war-ravaged city. Though Haarmann was ultimately charged with twenty-seven murders, it seems likely that he was responsible for at least fifty. The method he employed to kill his victims was always the same.

  After luring a hungry boy to his rooms, Haarmann would feed him a meal, then overpower him (often with Grans’s assistance) and fall upon his throat, chewing through the flesh until he had nearly separated the head from the body. Generally, he would experience a sexual climax while battening on the boy.

  Afterward, Haarmann and Gans would butcher the body and dispose of the flesh by peddling it as steak at the Schieber Market, across from the Hanover railway station. During the five years that he engaged in these atrocities, Haarmann himself subsisted largely oh the meat of his victims. The victim’s clothes would also be sold and the inedible portions of his body dumped in the Leine canal.

  Gradually, Haarmann fell under suspicion. A woman who had purchased one of his black market “steaks” became convinced that it was human flesh and turned it over to the authorities. After inspecting it closely, a police analyst declared that it was pork. But as the number of missing boys mounted, the police suspected Haarmann and began to investigate. In May 1924, several skulls were found on the banks of the canal. Several weeks later, some boys playing near the spot stumbled upon a whole sackful of human bones. Two detectives from Berlin were called in on the case. Searching Haarmann’s rooms, they discovered bundles of boys’ clothing. The young son of Haarmann’s landlady was wearing a coat that belonged to one of the missing boys.

  In the end, Haarmann confessed. He was tried at the Hanover Assizes in early December, 1924, found guilty, and condemned to death. Gans received a life sentence that was later commuted to twelve years. At Haarmann’s trial, one of his neighbors, an elderly lady, testified that he had once given her some bones and suggested she make soup with them. She did as he proposed, but dumped out the soup without tasting it because the bones looked “too white.” Her suspicions saved her from unwitting cannibalism.

  While awaiting execution, the forty-six-year-old Haarmann produced a written confession in which he recounted, with undisguised relish, the details of his killings and the pleasure he derived from committing them. At his own request, he was beheaded with a sword in the city marketplace. After the decapitation, his brain was removed from his skull and shipped to Goettingen University for study.

  Comparing Fish to Haarmann, the Daily News pronounced that, of the two “lust slayers,” Fish was the more “baffling” case. Haarmann, after all, had come from a disadvantaged background, whereas Fish was (supposedly) descended from an old and distinguished American family. Moreover, Haarmann was not only an epileptic but also a homosexual—a trait which, the News implied, went a long way toward explaining his penchant for mass murder and cannibalism. Fish, on the other hand, was “the father of six children and the grandfather of many more.”

  Nevertheless, according to the reporter for the News, the “mousy soft-spoken” Fish and “the postwar German werewolf” were two of a kind. And in fact there was a connection between Haarmann and Fish, more of a connection than the News reporter could have possibly known about, since no one was aware of it at the time besides a handful of investigators from the Missing Persons Bureau.

  Fish was an inveterate clipper of newspaper and magazine articles dealing with subjects that excited his diseased imagination. Searching his rooms immediately after his arrest, detectives had discovered a large cache of these clippings, some stored in an old leather satchel, others squirreled away in various hiding places around the apartment—under his mattress, on cupboard shelves, beneath the rugs. Carrying this bizarre collection back to headquarters, the investigators had made a careful examination of it and had catalogued each of the items.

  There was a newspaper clipping about the marriage of two nudist couples in Chicago and another, datelined Hamden, Connecticut, about the arrest of several nude sunbathers on a disorderly conduct charge. There was a story about the forced sterilization of 325 people in Berlin. Another article from Europe, datelined Lille, France, dealt with a scientific operation that had transformed a woman into a man. One small packet of articles, all of them reports of various kidnappings, was held together by fourteen sewing needles threaded through the paper.

  And then there was another, much larger sheath of clippings, carefully scissored from various newspapers and neatly bound together with a piece of twine. When investigators undid th
e string and began reading these articles, they discovered that Fish had cut out and saved every news story he could find containing details of Fritz Haarmann’s enormities.

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  I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued…. Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them together with the entrails into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body, piecemeal….

  EDGAR ALLAN POE, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

  For the next few days, investigators in both New York City and Westchester continued to probe a possibility which the tabloids were already trumpeting as established fact—that Albert Fish, the “Ogre of Old Wisteria,” had murdered untold victims in the “charnel chambers” of the abandoned house and buried their remains around the premises.

  By the time the first carloads of Greenburgh police arrived at Wisteria Cottage early Saturday morning, the property was already aswarm with sightseers, eager for a close-up glimpse of the notorious Westchester “death lodge.” Before very long, traffic along Mountain Road and the nearby Sawmill River Parkway had become so snarled that a special squad of officers was dispatched from White Plains to keep the cars moving and prevent everyone except neighborhood residents from parking near the crime scene.