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

by Harold Schechter

  The text accompanying the pictures urged readers to recall whether they had ever seen Fish “in real life. If so—when—where-—under what circumstances? You may be in a position to aid police in solving a number of mysterious disappearances…. If you can add to what is already known about Fish’s movements, communicate instantly with the City Editor of the Daily Mirror, MUrray Hill 2-1000, or call personally at the Mirror office, No. 235 E. 45th Street.”

  Studying the photos, Meehan realized with a shock that he did, in fact, remember that face. It belonged to the wizened old man he had observed that long-ago night on his trolley car. Meehan waited until the next morning, Wednesday the 19th, before taking action. Then he made his way to the nearest telephone and dialed the number of the Daily Mirror.

  Later that day, Lieutenant Elmer Joseph, who had been in charge of the Gaffney investigation seven years before (when he was still a sergeant), arrived at Meehan’s apartment. After questioning the former motorman for over an hour, Joseph was convinced that the case had finally been cracked. Arrangements were made to transport the semi-invalid Meehan to the Tombs the following day. In the meantime, several police officers set about tracking down Anthony Barone, whose testimony at the time of the Gaffney disappearance had been, along with Meehan’s, the only solid lead in the case.

  Shortly before noon on Thursday, December 20, Lieutenant Joseph, along with Detectives James Dwyer and Jeremiah Murphy of the Fifth Avenue police station in Brooklyn, picked up Meehan at his apartment and drove him to the Tombs, where he was scheduled to view Fish in a lineup. Barone, who had been located and interviewed at his home the previous evening, arrived at the prison shortly afterward.

  The two former co-workers were ushered into the lineup room. Under the harsh glare of the klieg lights, nine men—five of them aged and gray, the rest somewhat younger—shuffled onto the platform. Barone and Meehan studied them carefully. Though Barone thought he recognized Fish, he couldn’t positively identify him as the man he had seen with the little boy on his streetcar seven years before. But Meehan had no doubt. He pointed his cane at Fish and exclaimed, “That’s the man!”

  “Are you sure?” asked Lieutenant Joseph.

  Meehan nodded emphatically. “I’m positive. I would remember him anywhere. He looks the same now as he did then. The only difference is that he was wearing an overcoat when I saw him with the boy.”

  Within twenty-four hours, the story would be carried in every newspaper in the city. The “boogey man” who had spirited four-year-old Billy Gaffney away from his Brooklyn tenement seven years earlier, setting off one of the most intensive manhunts in New York City history, had been identified as Albert Fish.

  Even as Meehan was making the identification, the Westchester Grand Jury was in the process of indicting Fish for the murder of Grace Budd.

  The proceedings lasted less than two hours. During that time, the jurors heard the testimony of thirteen witnesses, including Albert, Delia and Edward Budd, Captains Stein and McQuillan, Detective King, Sergeant Hammill, several Greenburgh police officers, and Medical Examiner Squire. Dr. Morton’s findings were offered as evidence, along with Grace’s dental chart and the small, sad pile of imitation pearls, which Mrs. Budd identified as the remains of her daughter’s favorite necklace. Both Mrs. Budd and her husband broke down at the sight of the yellowed, weatherworn beads.

  The jurors needed little time to complete their deliberations. Shortly after two P.M., they returned an indictment accusing Albert H. Fish of murder in the first degree for the slaying, “with malice aforethought,” of Grace Budd.

  The shock of Meehan’s bombshell was still reverberating when the Fish investigation took another dramatic turn, the second in as many days.

  Early Friday morning, Fish—dressed in the same, shabby, mismatching suit he had worn when he was captured—was arraigned in Homicide Court before Magistrate Benjamin E. Greenspan. The proceedings were over quickly. Surrounded by detectives, Fish stood silently, eyes downcast, while Frederick W. Ruscoe, Chief Deputy Sheriff of Westchester County, stepped forward and handed Magistrate Greenspan a bench warrant. After commending Detective King for his outstanding work on the case, Magistrate Greenspan formally surrendered the prisoner to the Westchester authorities.

  Fish was to be transferred to the county jail in Eastview to await trial for the Budd murder. Instead of taking him directly to the car that would drive him up to Westchester, however, detectives led him into the courthouse detention pen. Then, they brought in a man who walked straight over to Fish, took a long look at his gaunt, stubbled face and declared without hesitation, “That’s him.”

  This latest accuser was Hans Kiel. Ten years earlier he had owned a farm in Port Richmond, Staten Island. In February, 1924, Kiel’s daughter Beatrice, then eight years old, had been approached by a gray-moustached stranger, who offered her a nickel if she would accompany him into the woods and show him where to find “wild rhubarb.” Kiel’s wife, Alice, had appeared at that moment, and the old man had hurried away. That night, however, Kiel had discovered the grizzled stranger sleeping in his barn. He had roused him awake and driven him off his property.

  Three days later, eight-year-old Francis McDonnell was brutally assaulted and strangled to death in the woods adjoining Kiel’s property by a gray-moustached stranger who precisely matched the description of the vagrant Kiel had chased from his barn. Kiel had never forgotten the face of the gray-moustached stranger. And so he had gone straight to the police when he’d seen it again just a few days before, looking out at him from the pages of his Sunday newspaper.

  Following Kiel’s identification. Fish was questioned for two hours by Assistant District Attorney Edward T. Kelly of Richmond County. At first, Fish denied having ever laid eyes on Kiel. Finally, he admitted that he had, in fact, been doing a painting job on Staten Island at the time of the McDonnell boy’s murder and vaguely recalled seeing Kiel a few times on the ferry. But he firmly maintained that he was innocent of Francis McDonnell’s murder.

  The authorities remained as firmly convinced that he was lying. Kelly announced that Kiel’s wife and daughter would be driven to Eastview to view Fish sometime during the next week. If they, too, identified him as the man lurking on their property a few days before the McDonnell crime, Kelly would seek an indictment against Fish for murder.

  Mrs. McDonnell’s ten-year-old prayer appeared to have been answered. It looked as though the “Gray Man” had been found at last.

  During the next week, Fish was interrogated several times in his second-tier cell in Eastview. Just a few hours after his arrival, he was visited by the two psychiatrists hired by the DA’s office—Doctors Vavasour and Lambert—who examined him for slightly more than three hours.

  Several Connecticut detectives traveled to the jail to question Fish again about the decapitated child found in Darien. And Harold King, the Nassau County police inspector investigating the 1932 murder of fifteen-year-old Mary O’Connor, paid several calls.

  Inspector King had learned about Fish’s obscenity arrest in the summer of 1931, when the old man was employed as a dishwasher in the Steeplechase Hotel in Far Rockaway. As it happened, the O’Connors lived only a short distance from the Steeplechase, and Mary—who had befriended one of the guests, a teenage girl on vacation with her parents—was known to have visited the hotel a number of times during that summer.

  King had also discovered that, early in 1932, at around the time of the O’Connor girl’s murder, Fish had been painting a house in Massapequa, less than half a mile from the lonely stretch of woods where the girl’s bludgeoned body had been dumped.

  Fish, however, steadfastly continued to deny any knowledge of either the Connecticut or Long Island crime.

  While police on Staten Island searched for other eyewitnesses who could link Fish to little Francis McDonnell, a Brooklyn man named Benjamin Eiseman came forward with a story that investigators found extremely interesting, since it placed Fish on Staten Island at the approximate time of t
he McDonnell murder. Eiseman’s experience also bore striking parallels to some of the particulars of the Budd case.

  The twenty-six-year-old Brooklyn man (who, like Meehan and Kiel, had recognized Fish’s picture in the newspapers) told police that in July, 1924, when he was sixteen, he had been sitting on a bench in Battery Park, watching the incoming ocean liners when a gaunt, gray-moustached man sat down beside him and struck up a conversation. Discovering that Eiseman had worked as a painter’s helper, the friendly old man—who described himself as a housepainter and handyman—told the boy of a job he was doing on Staten Island and asked if he would like to work as his assistant. Eiseman, recently arrived from Russia and unemployed, readily agreed, and the pair set out together on the ferry.

  Arriving at St. George, Staten Island, they boarded a train and rode for half an hour. The old man then led the boy to a deserted shack. “Wait here while I get my tools,” he said, then disappeared inside the house.

  Eiseman was standing outside when another man—“an elderly Negro,” in Eiseman’s words—suddenly appeared. “Listen, son, you better get out of here,” the man said. “A lot of kids have gone in there and didn’t never come out.” Alarmed by the stranger’s warning, Eiseman turned and fled back to the ferry.

  The penniless boy prevailed on the conductor to let him ride back to Manhattan for free. Back home, he spilled out the story to his mother, Mrs. Rose Eiseman, who immediately contacted the Clinton Street police station. Several detectives were dispatched to the Eisemans’ Henry Street apartment. According to Eiseman, the detectives offered him one dollar if he would return to Battery Park the next day and act as a decoy. But the teenager, deeply shaken by his experience, refused.

  Now, having seen Fish’s face in the papers, Eiseman was absolutely certain that the old man was the same one who had lured him to the isolated shack ten years before. “I would never forget that face,” he declared. He would never forget the man’s strange, coarse whisper, either. Indeed, said Eiseman, if the police brought him to Eastview and positioned him so that he could hear Fish speak without seeing him, he would be able to identify the old man from the sound of his voice alone.

  On Sunday, December 23, while Brooklyn police were checking their records to substantiate Eiseman’s story, four more witnesses were brought to the Westchester County penitentiary to view Fish. For the first time since Fish had been arrested, he refused not only to speak to his visitors but also to so much as look at them.

  The four witnesses were the wife and three daughters of Hans Kiel, the Staten Island farmer who had identified Fish as the suspicious stranger he had chased off his farm a few days before the McDonnell murder.

  Informed of the women’s arrival, Fish announced that he would not allow himself to be seen by them. The McDonnells were led to the corridor directly outside his cell. Seeing them approach, Fish covered his face with a newspaper. The women withdrew, but returned about ten minutes later. This time, Fish knelt on his cot and buried his face in the blankets.

  Once again, the four women pretended to depart, only to tiptoe back in another ten minutes. Fish was caught off guard. Though he hastily lowered his head between his knees, eighteen-year-old Beatrice was able to get a glimpse of his face.

  It was all she needed. Fish, she declared, was the old man who had approached her ten years before and offered her five cents to accompany him into the woods—the same woods in which Francis McDonnell’s brutalized corpse had been discovered four days later.

  * * *

  Christmas Eve, 1934, was the first day since Fish’s transfer to Eastview that no one came to interview, interrogate, examine, or inspect him. He passed the day quietly, gazing through the bars of his cell at the Christmas tree that had been set up in the corridor. Late in the afternoon, he asked to see an Episcopal minister.

  The next day, he joined the other inmates for a special chicken dinner, then received a visit from Reverend Reginald Mallett, rector of the Grace Church in White Plains. The two men prayed together. Afterward, Fish asked the minister to send him a pen so that he could write some letters. Informed of the old man’s request, prison officials told Reverend Mallet that a pencil would be safer. By then, they had reason to be leery of the uses to which Fish might put a pointed metal object.

  On Thursday, December 27, Benjamin Eiseman’s story was verified when police at the Clinton Street station, searching through their records from 1924, located their files on his case.

  That afternoon, Thomas J. Walsh, District Attorney of Richmond County, announced that Eiseman’s story, plus the testimony of Hans and Beatrice Kiel and several other Staten Island residents, had persuaded him to seek an indictment against Albert Fish for the murder of Francis McDonnell.

  28

  “These X-rays are unique in the history of medical science.”

  FREDERIC WERTHAM

  Charles Lambert and James Vavasour, the two alienists engaged by the Westchester District Attorney to evaluate Fish’s sanity, had spent three hours and ten minutes examining him in his cell on the evening of December 21. According to their subsequent testimony, the old man spoke freely and frankly about the darkest secrets of his life—secrets that would, when they were divulged during Fish’s trial, make even hardened lawmen realize how little they had known about the limits of human depravity.

  Among his other astonishing admissions, Fish revealed—as he had in his December 16 letter to Detective King—that, as an act of contrition for killing Grace Budd, he had purchased a pack of sewing needles, and, using a thimble, had shoved five of them up behind his testicles, so deeply that they had remained permanently embedded inside his body.

  Though the claim seemed impossible to credit, authorities already had enough evidence of Fish’s manifold degeneracies to take it seriously. It was also true that the old man walked with an odd, bowlegged gait and seated himself very gingerly, as though suffering from some sort of discomfort between his legs. And so, on December 28, a week after his transfer from the Tombs to the Westchester County jail at Eastview, prison officials decided to check the old man’s story.

  Fish was driven to Grasslands Hospital, where he was X-rayed by the chief roentgenologist, Dr. Roy D. Duckworth. When the X-rays were developed, Duckworth clipped them to a shadow box and examined them closely. They were like nothing he had ever seen before. Or would ever see again.

  The X-rays were of Fish’s pelvic region. Scattered throughout the area of the old man’s groin and lower abdomen were a number of sharp, thin objects—long, black splinters that appeared to be floating in the bright tissue around and between his hip bones. The objects varied in length. A few were fragmented, though most were intact. It was obvious that they were needles, not only from their size and shape but also from their eye-holes, which were clearly visible in many cases.

  Duckworth saw at once that the needles could not possibly have been swallowed. Their location—around the rectum and bladder, just below the tip of the spine, and in the muscles of the groin—made it clear that they had been inserted into the old man’s body from below, evidently through his perineum, the flesh between his anus and scrotum.

  Duckworth’s response to the X-rays was the same as that of everyone who saw them in the days and weeks to come: he wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it. The old man had been telling the truth after all.

  Or at least part of it. As it turned out, Fish hadn’t been entirely forthcoming. He had told both Detective King and the two alienists that he had punished himself by pushing five needles into his body. But Duckworth did several counts of the black objects and came up with the same figure each time.

  Lodged inside the old man’s lower body were twenty-seven needles.

  That same day, December 28, all of the city’s newspapers reported on the results of the alienists’ psychological examination of Fish. Vavasour and Lambert had submitted their findings to Westchester’s new District Attorney, Walter Ferris, who had announced them at a press conference the previous afternoon
.

  According to the two psychiatrists, although the old man suffered from some “limited abnormalities,” there was no question in their minds that Albert Howard Fish was legally sane.

  PART 4

  Bloodlust

  29

  “I trust in Almighty God and have no fear as to what the outcome will be. He has the Power to Save.”

  ALBERT FISH

  Albert Fish’s murder trial would take place in early March, 1935, and when it did, its daily parade of horrific disclosures would make Fish a front-page fixture all over again. In the meantime, the Fish case was overshadowed by an even more sensational event—the trial of the accused Lindbergh baby killer, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a courtroom extravaganza that dominated the headlines for six solid weeks, from January 2, when jury selection began, until Hauptmann’s conviction on February 13.

  Like the rest of his countrymen, Fish followed the press accounts of the Hauptmann melodrama with keen interest. Reading newspapers, in fact, was one of his principal daily pastimes, as it had been throughout his adult life. He continued to search their pages for items of interest, though he could no longer indulge in two of his favorite activities—clipping articles about sex crimes and answering classified ads from landladies and professional masseuses in the hope of establishing an obscene correspondence.

  This is not to say that Fish was forced to give up his cherished letter-writing entirely. On the contrary, he was supplied with stationery and stamps and was permitted to write as many letters as he pleased, provided that he used the blunt-pointed pencil furnished by the warden. His correspondence was also restricted to family members and officials involved in his case.