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

by Harold Schechter

  During the weeks leading up to his trial, a steady stream of letters flowed from Fish’s cell. The bulk of them were addressed to his children—or at least to five of them. His namesake, Albert Jr., who had publicly denounced his “old skunk” of a father, had become anathema to Fish. Indeed, the perfidy of his oldest son—whose name, from that point forward, he refused ever to mention again, either in speech or in writing—was a recurring theme in Fish’s letters to his other offspring.

  In a letter dated January 17, for example, Fish wrote to his married daughter (and favorite child), Gertrude: “What A does I don’t care, he is no son of mine … Now dear Gertie if you never do anything else for me, I want you to do this. Don’t you ever call him your brother again. Never allow him inside your home. Teach your little ones to despise him.”

  Fish urged his other children, Henry, Annie, John, and Gene, to extend the same treatment to their brother. “Slam the door in his face,” he wrote to Annie.

  The old man was equally vicious toward his first wife, Anna. In classic paranoid fashion, Fish blamed everyone but himself for his problems and traced the source of his troubles to the day in 1917 when his wife had run off with their boarder, a man named John Straube. (The fact that Fish’s life, from early adolescence onward, had been one long nightmare of sexual criminality and that he’d done a stretch in Sing Sing from 1903 to 1905 were only two of the many realities that the old man had trouble hanging on to.) “All I hope for,” he wrote to Gertrude, “all I want to live for, is to be able to go in court that I may tell what a bitch of a mother all of you had, the kind of wife I had.” In the same vein, he wrote to Annie: “Tell old Peg Leg, your bitch of a mother, that the day I go into court and take the stand will be a sorry one for her.”

  Fish’s estranged wife (whom he’d never bothered to divorce) wasn’t the only family member he blamed for his woes. From Fish’s demented point of view, his current predicament was chiefly the fault of his twenty-four-year-old son, John. If the boy hadn’t joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, Fish (so he maintained) would never have ended up in hot water. It was only because the old man had gone to Frieda Schneider’s rooming house to fetch the monthly paycheck from his son that he had been captured. As he wrote to John in a letter dated January 8: “I don’t blame you, my son, for my trouble but if you had not joined the C.C.C., I would not be in here. I waited for the check until Dec. 13. When I went to 200 E 52, I got caught.”

  The fact that Fish had been arrested because he had committed an unspeakable deed against a child—and then written an incriminating letter without bothering to obliterate the return address—seems never to have crossed his deeply disordered mind. Fish’s prison correspondence clearly revealed the true stripe of his contrition. For all his public professions of remorse, the only thing he confessed to feeling bad about, in the relative privacy of his letters, was having gotten caught. “It was that damn check that tripped me up,” he wrote his son, Gene.

  John took exception to the old man’s accusation and complained about it to his sister, Gertrude, who mildly reprimanded her father for assigning any blame at all to John. Fish wrote back, “I don’t blame poor John for what I done. I only said if he had not joined the C.C.C. then there would have been no checks to go after.”

  Fish’s resentment over John’s participation in the Civilian Conservation Corps, however, did not prevent him from maintaining a lively interest in the young man’s paychecks. Indeed, for a person facing the prospect of the electric chair, he displayed a striking concern with financial matters, worrying obsessively over the whereabouts of John’s monthly salary. “I don’t know where the money is going to,” he wrote to Gene on January 24. “All I got since John joined the C.C.C. was $18.00 from October. There is $25.00 due me from Nov—$25.00 from Dec and on Feb 1 there will be $25.00 from Jan. There is $75.00 tied up somewhere.” Fish fretted over these matters in virtually all of the letters he sent to his children during the weeks of his imprisonment.

  To a certain extent, Fish’s money cares reflected his concern for the well-being of his children, particularly his two daughters. In several letters, he promised to distribute the bulk of John’s C.C.C. money to Gertrude and Annie, whose families were subsisting on Home Relief. And he urged Annie not to “spend your 5 cents coming up here to see me. Not that I don’t want to see you.” (Detective King, who visited Annie’s flat shortly after Fish’s arrest, was so appalled by her poverty that he ended up leaving her a few dollars to buy food.)

  Improbable as it seemed, given the kind of creature he was, Fish had been a genuinely devoted if intensely bizarre father, who had, as he put it in one of his letters to Warden Casey, “done every honest thing a man could do in order to provide for my family.” According to his own testimony, which was confirmed by his children, he had “acted as both father and mother to them” after his wife had run off with her lover. He had worked steadily to support them and had never struck or beaten them when they had misbehaved. His daughters in particular treated him with affection and respect, dismissing his habits—self-flagellation, strolling around the house naked while declaring he was Christ—as more-or-less harmless eccentricities.

  At least one of Fish’s daughters knew about the needles. In a letter written to Gertrude shortly after he was taken to Grasslands, Fish wrote: “You remember the needles I suffered with when you were living at 529 Franklin St. They took an ex-ray of me in the Hospital up there. I am full of them.” The language in this passage is revealing. Apparently, Fish’s oldest daughter was so accustomed to his aberrations that she could no longer distinguish them from normalcy. In her eyes, her poor old father “suffered with” the problem of self-inserted sewing needles, the way other parents suffer from bad hearts or arthritis.

  Fish did appear capable of experiencing and expressing the normal sentiments of parenthood. He seemed genuinely concerned that thirty-one-year-old Gertrude, who had been treated for a coronary problem at Bellevue, not subject herself to unnecessary strain. “Now Gertie dear don’t you come up here to see me,” he wrote to her on January 17. “I am afraid of your heart and besides I really believe I would go all to pieces when I saw you.” He reminded her to enroll her children in Sunday school and reminisced warmly about “Christmas night 1933,” when he had stayed with her family and they had “all sat near the radio in the front room and listened to the music. We heard choir boys singing in England, Germany and all over.”

  In fact, Fish sounded like any other parent when he scolded John gently for his sloppy penmanship. “Your writing is very hard to read,” he complained. “It is all I can do to make out some of it. Take your time, write in ink, and as plain as you can. Don’t jumble your letters so close together.”

  Fish’s warmest feelings were reserved for his eleven-year-old granddaughter, Gloria, Gertrude’s oldest child, whom he claimed “to idolize.” Writing to Fish on January 28, Gertrude enclosed a little note from Gloria. Fish’s reply to his granddaughter showed him at his most human:

  My Dear little Gloria

  Your poor old grand pa got your sweet note you sent in Mamas letter. I am so glad to hear you still love me and always will. You know as a baby and at all times, I loved you…. There have been times when I was at Mamas that I was cross and cranky. But I had much on my mind. Since this has happened, Mama can tell you what that was. I am so happy to know that you … are doing so well at school. Stick to it and learn all you can. Some day before long now, you will be able to go to work and help poor Mama & Papa. They have struggled hard for each of you, as I have also struggled hard for each of them, in the years that have passed. I am well. Trust in God and have no fear as to what the result will be. You know I love each of you dearly and always will. Pray every night for your poor old grand pa—Write soon again.

  Anyone reading this note might have momentarily forgotten that the little old man who composed it was the confessed butcher of a young girl roughly his granddaughter’s age. And that this same individual, who could sound so
human and who could claim, with apparent sincerity, that he “loved children and was always softhearted” had spent the better part of his lifetime performing unimaginable cruelties on them.

  But Fish couldn’t keep his true nature concealed for very long even from his young relatives. A few weeks after writing to his granddaughter, he sent a letter to his teenage stepdaughter Mary Nichols, the child of one of the three widows he had married between 1930 and 1931 (bigamously, since he was still legally wed to his first wife, Anna). With its chaotic mixture of paternal tenderness and pornographic fantasy, this document is far more characteristic of Fish’s extravagantly perverse psychology than his sentimental note to little Gloria:

  Dearest Sweetest Mary—Daddys Step Kiddie

  I got your dear loving sweet letter. I would have answered you long before this. But between ex rays, doctors and my lawyer I have been busy. Then you know I am 65 and my eyes are not so good as they were when you saw me last…. So my sweet little big girlie will be 18 on the 28th. I wish I could be there, you know what you would get from your daddy. I would wait until you were in bed, then give you 18 good hard smacks on your bare behind…. Now Mary dear, I will get a check from the U.S. Government in a few days. As soon as it comes I will send you $20.00. I am not able to get you a watch, but you can get one that you like. I hope dear Mama who I loved and still love and all of you are well. You speak of being at the big games. Here in N.Y. City there is nearly always some kind of a game going on. In the Public Schools and all of the Y.M.C.A.s they have large swimming pools. If a man or boy wants to use this pool he must take all his clothes off and go in bare naked. There is one of the largest pools in the U.S. in the West Side Y.M.C.A. 8th Ave & 57 St. The water varies from 3 to 8 ft deep. Sometimes there are over 200 men and boys, all of them naked. Any boy or man can go in and see them for 25¢. Now you know well sweet honey bunch that most all girls like to see a boy naked. Especially the big boys. Do you know, my dear Mary, what the girls do to get in and see the show? Many of them have boyish bobs. They dress up in their brothers clothes, put on a cap, then go to the Y. Quite often a boy will come out of the water and stand so close to a girl dressed in boys clothes, she can and does touch his naked body. Many of the men and boys know the girls are there and see them naked, but they don’t care…. Be careful all of you my sweet kiddies. Don’t go out doors in the snow unless you have on rubbers. Now listen my little miss, don’t you keep me waiting so long for another of your sweet dear letters. If you do some day I shall come out there again and give you another sound spanking—you know where!

  For a man who continued to insist that he had “nothing to live for” and was “better off dead” (as he wrote to Warden Casey on January 15), Fish showed remarkable concern for his personal welfare and devoted considerable energy during his first few weeks at Eastview to securing the services of the best defense lawyer he could find.

  For a short while, Fish was represented by a lawyer named Carl Heyser of Port Jefferson, Long Island. Heyser was related by marriage to a young woman named Alice Woods, a childhood friend of Fish’s daughters, Gertrude and Annie. It was through their old acquaintance that the Fish children were put in touch with Heyser, who volunteered to take the old man’s case.

  Heyser’s first step was to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity when Fish appeared before Justice William Bleakley in Supreme Court on Monday, January 7. Heyser asked the court to appoint an insanity commission to examine Fish, a request which Justice Bleakley took under advisement. Two days later, he denied the request, explaining that the two alienists retained by the District Attorney’s office had already declared Fish legally sane. Fish would have the opportunity to offer evidence of his insanity at his trial.

  Even before Justice Bleakley issued his decision, however, Fish had grown unhappy with Heyser, largely because the old man believed that he would be better served by a local attorney, someone known and respected in the courtrooms of Westchester. The name he heard mentioned most often by his fellow inmates at Eastview was James Dempsey.

  Born in Peekskill, New York, in 1901, Dempsey, the son of a prominent Westchester attorney, had graduated from Colgate University at nineteen and earned his law degree at twenty-three from New York University Law School. He spent three years as Assistant District Attorney of Westchester, and between 1932 and 1933 also served as Mayor of Peekskill. When the elder Dempsey died in 1933, James quit public office to take control of his father’s extensive practice.

  Impressed by Dempsey’s reputation, Fish immediately launched an epistolary campaign to get rid of Heyser. He fired off letter after letter to the Port Jefferson lawyer, informing him that his services were no longer required. At the same time, he petitioned both Justice Bleakley and D.A. Ferris to assign his case to Dempsey.

  Finally, on February 6, the old man got his wish when Heyser withdrew and Dempsey was appointed as his replacement. Fish was jubilant. “I am very glad that [Heyser] dropped out,” he wrote to his son Gene that afternoon, “for now I have a real lawyer. I heard of him when I got here. He was over 3 years Assistant Dist. Attorney in White Plains and everybody here knows him well.” In letter after letter, he described Dempsey in the most glowing terms—as a “high-grade man,” “one of the best,” “a great lawyer” who “knows every trick there is.” “Heyser is not in the same class with him,” he wrote to Gertie. “He is only a country lawyer and would have been very little use to me.”

  With Dempsey now in charge of his case, Fish seemed filled with new confidence. “I have a good ground to stand on and with a lawyer like Mr. Dempsey I still have hopes,” he wrote to John. “He has been up here to see me nearly every day this week. He was here last night and is coming again tonight. Just before he went he said to me cheer up Pop. Things are shaping up fine.”

  Confident in the skills of his new lawyer, Fish settled back to await his trial, scheduled to begin in early March. He whiled away the time with his newspapers and letters and also with his Bible, which he read devotedly every day, dwelling on those passages that were most meaningful to him. Fish knew various Scriptural passages by heart. One of his favorites, which he could cite from memory, was Isaiah 36:12: “But Rab-shákeh said, ‘Hath not my master sent me to thy master and to thee to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men that sit upon the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?’”

  As the days passed, however, the old man found it increasingly hard to concentrate on his Bible studies. He was distracted by a constant disturbance emanating from the adjoining cell, whose inhabitant was a young man named Lawrence Clinton Stone.

  Whereas Fish liked to believe that he stemmed from “Revolutionary stock,” Stone truly was the descendant of an old and distinguished American family that had settled in Litchfield County, Connecticut, in the early seventeenth century. Stone, however—a burly, somewhat feeble-minded twenty-four-year-old, who had done several terms in reformatories during his teens—had been estranged from most of his family for years.

  On Sunday afternoon, October 14, 1934, Stone was loitering on East Third Street in Mount Vernon, New York, where he had once been employed as a worker on a street-widening project. Across from where he stood, a five-year-old girl named Nancy Jean Costigan was happily playing with a small rubber ball on the terrace of the Pelhutchinson Apartments, one of the most exclusive apartment buildings in Mount Vernon. Nancy Jean’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Costigan of Forest Hills, New York, were upstairs visiting friends.

  At around five P.M., the building hallman, Carl Hutchinson, decided to go down to the basement to adjust the oil-burning furnace. Walking around to the basement entrance, which opened onto a side street called Warwick Avenue, Hutchinson was surprised to discover that the door was locked. He returned to the lobby and rode the elevator down to the basement, a dimly lit labyrinth of corridors, storage rooms, and locker space.

  As he proceeded toward the steep metal staircase that descended into the sub-basement where t
he furnace was located, he noticed an erratic trail of red splotches that led from the Warwick Avenue entranceway across the basement floor, through the Ping-Pong room and toward the sub-basement.

  Later, Nancy Jean’s little rubber ball would be found in the Ping-Pong room, where it had rolled into a corner.

  As soon as Hutchinson stepped inside the sub-basement, he saw a puddle of blood on the cement floor directly beneath the white hot firebox of the furnace. He turned and ran to call the police. As he rushed for the stairway, he thought he glimpsed the shadowy figure of a thickset young man crouched in a dark corner of the basement.

  A short time later, Detective Frank Springer arrived. The two men returned to the sub-basement. Springer opened the furnace door. Inside were the charred remains of a young child.

  Springer immediately telephoned police headquarters, and a patrol wagon, carrying two more detectives and a patrolman, was dispatched to the scene. As the wagon neared the apartment house, however, it collided with an automobile. The three police officers were slightly injured. It took only a few minutes for an ambulance to arrive from Mount Vernon Hospital. As the attendants were seeing to the injured officers, a powerfully built young man in blood-spattered clothing stumbled up to the ambulance and clambered inside, insisting that he was badly hurt. He was driven to the hospital along with the officers. When physicians examined him, however, they discovered that he had sustained no injuries at all. At that point, the doctors couldn’t say where all the blood on his clothing had come from. But it certainly wasn’t his own.

  The young man—Lawrence Clinton Stone—was taken to police headquarters for questioning. That night, he confessed to the murder of Nancy Jean Costigan, though the story he stuck to at first was that the little girl’s death had been accidental. According to Stone, he had taken the child down into the basement to play catch with her. At one point, he had carelessly tossed the small rubber ball too hard and hit her on the brow. The child “toppled to the floor,” struck her head on the cement, and began bleeding from her mouth. Stone took her limp body into his arms, began carrying her upstairs and then—believing that she was dead—panicked and decided to dispose of her body in the furnace.