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

  Shortly afterward, the old man got his wish. On January 16, Fish was discharged from Bellevue. Several days later, Judge Coleman put the aged defendant on probation and released him into the custody of his daughter Anna.

  Once again, Albert Fish was on the loose.

  12

  You all know his father, he flew across the sea. You all know his mother, she’s famous as can be. They all lived together in a big white house, But now the baby’s gone. Oh sorrow! sorrow!

  ANONYMOUS, “Ballad of the Lindbergh Baby”

  During the early years of the Depression, kidnapping became such a common criminal enterprise that, in July, 1933, The New York Times began running a regular front-page feature covering the latest developments in what had come to be known as the “snatch racket.” The column, called “The Kidnapping Situation,” provided readers with periodic updates on recent abductions—identities of victims, ransom demands, and so on—as well as on the progress of the government’s all-out war against kidnappers, which President Roosevelt had declared earlier that month.

  The appearance of this column—which resembled nothing so much as the capsule summary of weekend sports results that appeared on page one every Sunday—was a striking sign of the sudden, shocking prevalence of the crime. By the summer of 1933, kidnappings were occurring so frequently that news readers required a scorecard to keep track of them.

  In July alone, The New York Times reported on over a dozen cases, including the actual or attempted abductions of John J. O’Connell, Jr., scion of one of New York State’s most powerful political families; August Luer, a seventy-eight-year-old banker from Alton, Illinois; John “Jake the Barber” Factor, a Chicago “stock promoter” wanted in England on swindling charges; Dr. Walter Hedberg, a prominent Minnesota chiropractor; two well-to-do Brooklyn residents, Dr. Jacob Wachsman and bakery owner Harry Pechter; Charles F. Urschel, millionaire oil man from Oklahama City; William Hamm, Jr., St. Paul brewer; Miss Edia Neumoegen of Mahopac, New York; Miss Mary McElroy, daughter of City Manager H. F. McElroy of Kansas City, Missouri; two infant grandchildren of Park Avenue attorney Henry W. Taft; and an unnamed motion picture actress targeted for abduction by the Oklahoma gangster, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd.

  Though all of these were highly publicized cases, the attention they received was negligible compared to the notoriety of a 1932 crime that had first brought the “kidnapping situation” to the forefront of the national news. This was, of course, the abduction and murder of twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr. Though public concern with kidnapping had been growing since the late 1920s, it was the tragedy which had befallen America’s golden couple—“Lucky Lindy” and his lovely young wife, Anne—that transformed concern into national obsession.

  On the evening of March 1, 1932, Colonel Lindbergh was chatting with his wife in the living room of their sprawling new house near Hopewell, New Jersey, when he heard a sudden crack, like the snapping of a tree branch, outside the window. His wife had heard nothing except the ordinary noises of a gusty night. They listened a moment longer, then returned to their conversation.

  Sometime later, at around ten o’clock, Betty Gow, the nursemaid, entered the baby’s second-story bedroom to take him on his nightly trip to the toilet. Bending over the crib, she discovered that he was missing. The blankets, affixed to the mattress by a pair of large safety pins, were undisturbed, as if the child had been carefully extracted from his bedding.

  The Lindberghs and their help made a frantic search of the premises. On the radiator grill in the nursery, beneath the corner window, lay a white envelope. Lindbergh ordered the servants not to touch it.

  The Hopewell police were notified and arrived minutes later. Outside the house, directly beneath the nursery window, Police Chief Harry Wolfe discovered two holes in the dirt, evidently formed by a ladder. About sixty feet away, he came upon the ladder itself, a crude homemade affair with a single splintered rung—the source of the snapping sound Lindbergh had heard several hours earlier.

  The white envelope was opened. Inside was a ransom note, badly misspelled and ungrammatical, as if its author had only a rudimentary command of English. The note demanded $50,000 in cash for the safe return of the baby.

  The weeks that followed were a nightmare of false leads, dashed hopes, wild rumors, and cruel hoaxes. In the course of that time, the distraught parents received over one hundred thousand letters offering comfort, advice, and a staggering quantity of well-intentioned but thoroughly useless information.

  President Hoover issued a statement deploring the crime. Will Rogers wrote columns conveying the shock of the nation. William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, called on his entire membership to help track down the perpetrator. From a holding cell in the Cook County jail, where he was awaiting transfer to the Atlanta penitentiary to begin an eleven-year sentence for income-tax evasion, Al Capone offered a reward of $10,000 for the return of the child. “It’s the most outrageous thing I ever heard of,” Capone declared. “I know how Mrs. Capone and I would feel if our son were kidnapped, and I sympathize with the Lindberghs. If I were out of jail, I could be of real assistance. I have friends all over the country who could help in running this thing down.”

  While Mrs. Lindbergh issued heartbreaking bulletins to the kidnappers, detailing the baby’s dietary needs, her husband broadcast a fervent appeal over the radio, offering not only the ransom money but full immunity from prosecution in exchange for his unharmed child. In desperation, he enlisted two notorious bootleggers to serve as go-betweens with the underworld.

  Finally, through another intermediary, a retired Bronx schoolteacher named John Condon who had managed to make contact with the abductor, the ransom was paid in $50,000 worth of marked bills. But the kidnapper’s claim that the child would be found safe onboard a sailing boat lying off Martha’s Vineyard proved to be a vicious hoax. Five weeks after the snatching, the whereabouts of the Lindbergh baby remained an agonizing mystery.

  Its terrible resolution, a month later, sent the country into a paroxysm of outrage and grief. On the afternoon of May 12, a gray, drizzly Thursday, a forty-six-year-old laborer named William Allen was driving down a deserted stretch of road a mile from the village of Hopewell. Pulling his truck off to one side, he slid out of the cab and entered the woods to empty his bladder. Fifty feet from the roadside, in a thicket of maple and locust, he suddenly came upon the half-buried remains of what he took, at first, to be an animal. Peering closer, he saw a tiny human foot protruding from the shallow grave.

  The drama of the hunt for the missing Lindbergh baby, which had kept the American public spellbound for seventy-two days, had come to a devastating climax in a dreary clump of woods less than five miles away from the slain child’s home.

  The snatching and murder of the Lindbergh baby (for which a German-born carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann would eventually be arrested, convicted, and electrocuted) made the magnitude of America’s kidnapping crisis stunningly clear. Kidnapping—once a crime so uncommon that the legal codes of many states (including New Jersey) did not define it as a felony—had spread through the land like a plague, a full-blown epidemic from which no one, no matter how revered or lucky, was immune.

  As a reporter for The New York Times named R. L. Duffus put it, “No conceivable event, unless it were an invasion of the White House itself, could have so dramatized the crime of kidnapping as did the carrying off of the infant son of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.” Appearing just a few days after the abduction, Duffus’s article, “Kidnapping: A Rising Menace to the Nation,” traced the recent evolution of the crime from a practice largely confined to members of the underworld—gangsters snatching other gangsters for extortion or revenge—to a highly professional operation “organized on an unprecedented scale and with unheard-of extremes of cruelty and audacity.”

  True, abductors had been plying their trade since the days of Joseph and his brethren. And famous kidnappings had occurred throughout American histo
ry. But in terms of cunning and sophistication, Duffus wrote, present-day kidnappers were as far removed from their predecessors as “the airplane from the one-horse shay.”

  Because of legal loopholes (soon to be sewn up in the wake of the Lindbergh outrage), it was virtually impossible to prosecute a criminal who transported a kidnap victim across state lines. As an activity involving minimal risks and potentially great rewards, kidnapping had become the crime of choice for the “best brains” in the business. In 1932 alone, there were 282 reported kidnappings in twenty-eight states. And all but sixty-five of the perpetrators had gotten away scot-free with their crimes.

  Duffus’s article was illustrated with photographic portraits of four well-known kidnap victims, all of them children. There was Jackie Thomas of Detroit, looking glum in his little boy’s sailor suit. There was Edward Cudahy of Omaha, posing stiffly in a starched, highcollar shirt. There was Marion Clarke of Manhattan, a curly-haired two-year-old sporting a big floppy bow.

  But the most arresting image of all was the first in the series. It was a picture of Grace Budd, smiling winsomely at the camera, her big dark eyes alight with intelligence and pleasure.

  The four innocent faces made a poignant group. But though Duffus didn’t stress it, there were significant differences between Grace Budd and the rest. In contrast to the other cases, no ransom demand had ever been made in the Budd kidnapping. Moreover, whereas Clarke, Cudahy, and Thomas had all been restored to their parents in fairly short order, no trace of Grace Budd had so far been found.

  And on the day Duffus’s article was published, March 6, 1932, Grace Budd had been missing for close to four years.

  13

  “I am not insane. I am just queer.”

  ALBERT FISH

  Late one muggy afternoon in midsummer 1934, Albert Fish, Jr., then thirty-five years old, returned unexpectedly to the four-room apartment he snared with his father. The two men were living together at 1883 Amsterdam Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, one of three buildings on the block that they had been hired to superintend.

  Because of his age and infirmity, the elder Fish—a prematurely decrepit sixty-four-year-old at the time—took responsibility for the lighter chores, such as sweeping the rear alley and keeping the vermin in check, while his son handled the more strenuous ones like painting, plumbing repairs and carpentry work.

  On this particular afternoon, sometime around four, the younger man was painting the lobby of 1887 Amsterdam when a tenant in one of the top-floor apartments ran downstairs to tell him that a pipe in the bathroom sink had burst and the room was flooding with water. Albert dropped what he was doing and hurried to his apartment to fetch his tools.

  His father was often home during the day, so Albert wasn’t surprised to hear noises from inside the apartment as he opened the front door. What did surprise him was the source of the sounds. They were coming, not from his father’s bedroom, but from his own. And the sounds themselves were very strange—thuds, slaps, and muffled cries.

  He walked quietly down the corridor and peered inside his room.

  The window shades had been drawn, but enough light filtered through the fabric for Albert Jr. to see clearly. The old man was standing in the center of the room, completely nude, stroking his swollen member with one hand while, with the other, he reached behind and smacked himself with a nail-studded wooden paddle. Wild-eyed and panting, he jumped and cried out with every blow. His skin was soaked with sweat, and his face looked almost as red as his raw and bloody buttocks.

  Lost in some unimaginable ecstasy of voluptuousness and pain, the old man continued his self-flagellation, completely oblivious to his son’s presence. For a few moments, Albert simply stood there and stared, too paralyzed by embarrassment and dismay to say or do anything. Then, shaken and confused, he backed away from the doorway, retrieved his toolbox from the hallway closet, and crept out of the apartment.

  As disconcerting as this episode was to Albert Fish, Jr., it was not the first time that he had come upon evidence of his father’s weird proclivities. For as long as he could remember, his father had displayed certain extreme peculiarities of behavior.

  He clearly recalled the time back in 1922, for instance, when he and his brothers, Henry and Gene, had been kicking around a football outside the old cottage they used to rent up in Worthington. Albert had just bent down to catch a low kick, and as he straightened up to boot the ball back to Henry, he caught sight of his father standing in the apple orchard on the little hill behind the bungalow. The old man had his right hand raised high in the air and was shouting something over and over. Albert had strained to listen. The old man was shouting, “I am Christ.”

  And as for this paddle business, Albert had known about it for at least five years—since an evening in 1929, when he was living with his father in a little flat on 74th Street. The old man had gone off for the day, leaving his son with a few dollars to buy food. Albert—who was unemployed at the time—had spent most of the afternoon at the movies, returning home around six to prepare supper.

  He was standing at the kitchen sink when his foot struck something concealed in the shadowy corner behind the pipes, something that made an odd-sounding clatter. Albert crouched to take a closer look.

  There, leaning against the wall, were a pair of crude, homemade paddles, each about two feet in length and bristling with finishing nails, which protruded about one and a half inches from the wood. The nails seemed stained with dark paint. Reaching under the sink, Albert removed one of these strange instruments and looked at it closely in the light. He was taken aback to see that the nails were covered, not with paint, but with blood.

  A short time later, at around six thirty, the old man returned to the flat. No sooner had he walked through the door than his son confronted him with the paddles. What was the idea of these damned things? he demanded.

  At first the old man was flustered and refused to speak, but when Albert persisted, his father—eyes flicking nervously from side to side—finally responded. Albert would never forget the old man’s words. “I use them on myself,” he had said in his soft, raspy voice. “I get these feelings that come over me, and every time they do, I have to torture myself with those paddles.”

  That was the last word the two ever exchanged on the subject. Albert Jr. couldn’t think of a single thing to say, and he was too ashamed to confide in anyone else, even his brothers and sisters. Throughout his life, he had seen his father do many strange things. And he had learned long ago that it was best just to shut up about them.

  Given the old man’s increasingly strange behavior, it had embarrassed but not surprised Albert when his father had ended up in Bellevue the following year. Even the old man’s subsequent run-in with the law hadn’t come as much of a shock.

  That one had happened in the summer of 1931, just six months after his father had been discharged from Bellevue. Fish, who was working at the time as a dishwasher and handyman at the Steeplechase Hotel in Rockaway Beach, Queens, had been picked up by the police for sending obscene mail to the proprietor of a local boarding school.

  Searching the old man’s room, the officers had discovered additional letters stuck under his mattress. They also found a homemade cat-o’-nine-tails and, tucked inside a dresser drawer, a frankfurter and a carrot, both fetid with decay—and with something worse.

  One of the arresting officers, John P. Smith, picked up the little wood-handled whip and asked Fish what he used it for. The old man shrugged. He liked to whip himself with it, he replied, though he didn’t suppose that was anybody’s goddamned business but his own.

  Using his thumb and his forefinger as a pincers, Smith gingerly lifted the frankfurter by one end and held it at arm’s length. And what the hell did the old man use the carrot and this damned thing for? he demanded—though the feculence of the two objects made the answer revoltingly clear.

  The old man’s sneering reply confirmed what Smith already knew. “I stick ’em up my ass,” said Albert Fish.


  Fish was arrested and shipped off to King’s County Hospital, where he underwent another period of observation. This time, he was held for just ten days. He was interviewed only once by a staff psychiatrist, who never bothered to ask him about the whip, carrot, or frankfurter and who concluded his written report by describing the patient as “quiet, cooperative, and oriented.” On the fifth of September, 1931, Fish was set free.

  Since then, he had stayed out of trouble with the law. For a long time—at least as far as Albert Jr. could see—the old man had acted almost normal. Maybe those ten days in the mental ward had done him some good after all. Or maybe he was just mellowing with age. Albert had allowed himself to hope that, at close to sixty-five years old, his father had finally managed to lay his demons to rest.

  And then, beginning in June, 1934, the craziness had flared up again. This latest scene with the nail-studded paddle was by no means the first indication that his father was getting worse. There had been the business with the black cat, for example. And those needles Albert had found hidden inside that book by Edgar Allan Poe. And the odd newspaper clippings.

  And then there was his father’s ferocious craving for raw meat, which seemed to come upon him only at certain times of the month, when the moon was full.

  Something bad was going on inside the old man’s head. And Albert Jr. didn’t know how much longer he could take it. He was already thinking of splitting with the old man when the summer was over, of finding his own place and letting his father manage by himself.

  It was even becoming hard for him to get a decent night’s sleep, what with all the nightmares the old man suddenly seemed to be having. Just a few nights ago, Albert had been awakened by fearful sounds—violent thrashing and terrified gasps—coming from his father’s bedroom. He had gone in and shaken the old man awake.