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

  Fish proceeded to describe his various preparations—the purchase of the enamel pail from Reuben Rosoff’s pushcart, the trip to Sobel’s hock shop to buy the necessary tools.

  He briefly related the episode involving the two neighborhood boys, Cyril Quinn and the son of the Italian coalman. Fish explained that he had been planning to murder the Quinn boy for a while. When King asked “Why?” Fish simply shrugged. In any event, the plan hadn’t worked out. Fish described how young Cyril and his friend had fled the apartment after discovering the cleaver, saw, and butcher knife stashed beneath the old man’s bed.

  Fish quickly sketched in the events of Sunday morning, June 2. How he had wrapped his three “implements of hell” in a piece of striped canvas tarp. How he had stopped on his way to the Budds to fill the enamel pail with pot cheese and to purchase a container of strawberries. How he had left the canvas-wrapped parcel at a newsstand on the corner of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street. How he’d joined the Budd family for a potluck lunch.

  And then he described his first glimpse of little Grace.

  As soon as he had seen her standing in the kitchen doorway, still dressed in the pretty outfit she had worn that morning to church, he knew that it was the girl, not her brother, that he wanted to kill. He told King how she had climbed upon his knee, and about the four bits he had given her to run out and buy candy. Before she returned, he had already thought up the imaginary birthday party at the fictitious address.

  When he proposed taking Grace along, even Fish was surprised at how readily her parents consented.

  Fish paused in his recitation. He asked King for some water, which the detective fetched from a cooler. The old man sipped for a moment from the glass.

  Then, speaking in the same low monotone, he summoned up the events of that sweltering afternoon when he had led Grace Budd away from her home and family under the pretext of taking her to his niece’s birthday party.

  After bidding goodbye to Mrs. Budd and retrieving his bundle from the newsstand, Fish had led the little girl to the Ninth Avenue El and up the long stairway to the subway platform, where they boarded a train to Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. They switched lines at that point and traveled to the Van Cortlandt Park Station.

  There, Fish, holding the little girl’s hand, made his way to the ticket booth of the Putnam Division of the New York Central Railroad. Handing the man behind the window ninety cents, he purchased a round-trip ticket for himself to the Westchester community of Worthington, less than twenty miles north of the city.

  For Grace Budd he purchased a one-way ticket.

  Inside the train, Fish let Grace sit next to the window so that she could look out at the scenery. Lowering himself slowly onto the seat beside her, he leaned across her lap and propped the canvas-wrapped bundle against the side of the car. Then they settled back for the forty-minute ride upstate, Fish occasionally turning to Grace to tell her how much fun his niece’s birthday party was going to be or reaching down to give her knee a gentle pat.

  Seated beside her grizzled companion, hands folded primly in her lap, Grace stared silently through the window at the landscape rushing by. She had only been outside of the city on two occasions in her life. If she wondered now why the train seemed to be carrying her off into the green, open countryside, she never said a word. Seeing the nicely dressed couple—Fish in his dark, three-piece suit and gray fedora, and Grace in her white silk communion dress and light summer coat—another passenger would have taken them for a dapper old gentleman and his pretty little granddaughter, headed upstate for a Sunday outing.

  When they disembarked at Worthington Station, Fish seemed slightly distracted. As they stepped onto the platform, Grace tugged at his sleeve. “You forgot your package,” she exclaimed. Turning on her heels, she dodged back into the car. Seconds later, she reappeared with the red-and-white-striped parcel cradled in her arms. Fish took it from her without a word.

  The sky had cleared, but even here, twenty miles north of the stifling city, the air seemed suffocatingly hot. As Fish led the little girl along the path that ran between the train tracks and the Saw Mill River Parkway, he asked if she felt hot. “Oh, yes,” she said, sighing. At Fish’s suggestion, she removed her hat and coat and handed them to the old man, who rolled the coat into a small bundle with the hat neatly folded inside.

  They turned left at Mountain Road and proceeded up the steep, curving hillside for another half mile, past the house of a man named Frank Cudney. Directly across the road from Cudney’s place was a farm owned by his mother, an elderly widow who was standing beside the fence that bounded her property, replacing some wooden slats that had been knocked down by her livestock. As Fish and Gracie walked past, he tipped his hat to the old “cow-woman” (as Fish described her to King) and remarked on the heat.

  Then, taking Gracie by the hand, he continued up the road to his destination—an empty, two-story house known to the locals as Wisteria Cottage.

  The house was set back a few dozen feet from the road, up a small slope. It was surrounded on three sides by dense woods, which served to isolate it from the neighboring houses, the nearest of which was a hundred yards away. Behind the house, the land ascended steeply. A small wooden privy stood fifty feet up the hill.

  Fish led Grace up a half dozen log steps to a small grassy yard at the side of the house. The yard was blanketed with wildflowers. Fish told the child to play there while he went inside the house for a moment to fetch something. It was three in the afternoon and the lawn blazed in the sunlight. Grace had never seen such beautiful flowers. She crouched in the grass and began to pick a bouquet, humming softly to herself.

  Fish walked around to the rear of the house, where patches of bare soil had been furrowed by rainwater. A large flat stone lay across one of the ruts. Laying down his canvas-wrapped bundle, Fish lifted one end of the rock and stuffed Grace’s coat and hat underneath it. Then he picked up his package and headed for the side door of the house. Before he reached it, he caught sight of an empty five-gallon paint can lying in the grass. He walked over to it, lifted it by its wire handle, and carried it inside the house.

  The old low-ceilinged house had been uninhabited for many years and smelled heavily of must and mildew. The striped wallpaper in the living room was shredded and stained, and the floor was strewn with rodent droppings. Though the windows were bare, a passerby would have had trouble seeing into the house. The dirty panes blocked out everything but the daylight, which filtered into the empty rooms from every direction.

  Fish climbed the staircase to the second floor of the house and entered the corner bedroom that overlooked the yard where Grace was picking flowers. Squatting underneath the window, he unrolled the canvas bundle and removed his tools one by one—the saw, the cleaver, and the double-edged knife—laying them neatly on the floor to the left of the canvas. Then he removed his clothes and dropped them in a pile a few feet away from the canvas. His legs were skinny and slightly bowed, his lumpy chest matted with tufts of white hair. Opening the window a crack, he called down to the child, asking her to come up to the house.

  Carrying her bouquet of flowers, Grace walked up the porch steps and into the house. “Up here,” Fish called out when he heard her enter. She began to climb the stairs. As soon as she reached the second floor landing, Fish stepped out into the hallway.

  At the sight of the naked old man, the little girl began to scream. “I’ll tell my mama!” she yelled. Dropping her flowers, she turned and tried to run downstairs.

  With surprising speed, Fish grabbed Grace by the throat and pulled her into the empty bedroom. The little girl began to struggle wildly, kicking and scratching with her own surprising strength. Fish dug his fingers deep into her throat. He dragged her over to the canvas tarp, wrestled her to the floor, and knelt on her chest with his full weight while he continued to choke her. By then, he had become erect.

  When he was sure she was dead, he lifted her head and rested it on the rim of the five-gallon paint can. Then he re
ached over for his double-edged knife and cut off Grace’s head, taking care to catch as much blood as possible inside the empty can.

  * * *

  At this point, King interrupted the confession to ask if Fish had “used the girl’s body” in any way. Interpreting the phrase (as King apparently intended it) to refer to rape, Fish insisted that he had not violated Grace sexually—that she had “died a virgin,” as he’d stated in his letter to the Budds.

  In that letter, of course, he had described putting the girl’s body to a very different and even more unimaginable “use” by carrying it home and eating it. But for some reason, King did not question Fish explicitly about the matter of cannibalism. And Fish himself made no mention of it.

  After a few moments, Fish said, he undressed the headless corpse and tossed the spattered clothing into an empty walk-in closet a few feet away. Getting stiffly to his feet, he shoved open the window, picked up the paint bucket, and dumped the blood out into the yard.

  Returning to the body, Fish knelt beside it and, using the knife again, began to slice through the midsection, just below the navel. When he reached the spine, he switched to his cleaver. Before very long, the body lay chopped in two.

  Carrying Grace’s white shoes in one hand and her head in the other, Fish went downstairs, out the side door, and up the hill to the wooden outhouse. He thought about disposing of the head down the toilet hole, but the idea of dropping it into “the muss” seemed wrong to him, so he set it in a corner and covered it with some old newspapers that were lying on the floor. He did, however, stick the shoes into the hole, placing them on a small rock ledge just below the opening.

  Back inside the house, he picked up the upper and lower halves of Grace’s body and propped them in a corner of the room beside the closet. Then he swung open the closet door so that the body was hidden from view.

  By the time he was finished, his hands were coated with blood. There was no water in the house, so he walked back outside and spent some time scrubbing himself clean with fistfuls of grass. Then he returned to the second-story bedroom and got dressed. He carefully rewrapped his tools in the canvas tarp and placed the bundle behind the closet door, next to the dismembered corpse.

  It was 4:10 P.M. when he left the house and headed back down Mountain Road toward the railroad station—just slightly more than an hour since he and Grace Budd had arrived at Wisteria Cottage. Under his arm, Fish carried a small newspaper-wrapped bundle.

  But this was a detail that he neglected to mention to Detective King.

  King paused to refill his fountain pen, then flipped to a fresh page of his notebook. “What time was it when you arrived at your home?” he asked.

  “About 6:30.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “I returned about four days later. I took the body and the legs out from behind the door. The legs were so stiff, they were as stiff as a board. I threw them out the window onto the lawn and carried the torso out, picking up the legs as I passed over the lawn, and went to the stone wall in back of the house. I laid the body and the legs as they would be in life behind this stone wall. I then went to the outhouse and got the head. It was all stiff, the hair was all clotted. I brought the head up and placed the head with the body just as it would be in life, the head, the torso, and the legs”

  “Did you bury it?” asked King.

  “No, I left it on top of the ground. Then I went back into the house, took the tools and threw them over the wall.”

  “Have you been there since?”

  “Yes, I have been up there four or five times with my son.”

  “Have you seen the body?”

  Fish shook his head. “No. I didn’t go to see the body.”

  By now, it was nearly 2:45 in the afternoon. King had been questioning Fish for nearly an hour. There was only one more question he wanted to ask. What had made the old man do it?

  Fish scratched one end of his moustache and looked thoughtful. “You know,” he replied after a moment. “I never could account for it”

  21

  He that walketh upright walketh surely; but he that perverteth his ways shall be known.

  PROVERBS 10:9

  By that time, Captain Stein had returned from lunch and was waiting outside his office, conferring with several of his men, who had heard the news of Fish’s arrest. At a few minutes before three, King emerged from the office and, after receiving the congratulations of his colleagues, filled them in on the details of the old man’s confession.

  Summoning a stenographer, Stein, King, and three other members of the Missing Persons Bureau—Lieutenant Scanlon, Sergeant Hammill, and Detective Von Weisenstein—entered the captain’s office, where Fish sat fiddling with his moustache. He looked up at the officers and smiled pleasantly.

  Stein introduced himself and asked if Fish was willing to make an official statement regarding Grace Budd’s disappearance.

  “Positively,” said Fish.

  “Anything you say can be used against you. Do you realize that?” said Stein.

  “Yes.”

  Then, while the stenographer—Detective Thomas F. Murphy of the Main Office Division—wrote out a short-hand transcription, Stein commenced his interrogation. The time was 3:15 P.M.

  Stein began by eliciting some basic information—Fish’s age, place of birth, current address, and occupa tion. In response to the last question, Fish identified himself as a “painter” (an answer which, as the Fish case entered the folklore of crime, underwent significant distortions, until the old housepainter was transformed, in certain accounts, into “a failed cubist artist”).

  Fish explained that he had been married since 1898, though he and his wife had not lived together for many years. He was the father of six children, ranging in age from twenty-one to thirty-five, and was particularly close to his two married daughters, Mrs. Anna Collins and Mrs. Gertrude DeMarco, both housewives in Astoria, Queens. Neither woman was well-to-do—indeed their families were both on Home Relief. Still, Fish was always welcome in their households and, from time to time during the past several years, had lived with each. The rest of the time, he had resided in various boarding houses, sometimes renting a room by himself, at other times, sharing it with one or another of his sons.

  Stein then turned to the details of the crime itself. Coolly and concisely, Fish repeated the story he had told Detective King only a short while before, beginning with his discovery of Edward Budd’s classified ad in the World and concluding with his disposal of the dismembered sections of Grace Budd’s corpse behind the stone wall bounding Wisteria Cottage.

  “After the child was killed,” Stein asked, “did you tell anyone about this occurrence”

  Fish shook his head. “Not a living soul. My own children had no idea. They read about the case in the paper like everyone else.”

  At that point, Stein opened the file on the Budd case and removed the anonymous letter Fish had mailed to Mrs. Budd. Stein, wanting a sample of Fish’s handwriting, asked him to sign his full name on the back of the letter, and the old man complied without hesitation.

  “What was your purpose in writing this letter?” Stein wanted to know.

  The old man shrugged his rounded shoulders. ’“I don’t know. Just reading some books on things such as that. I just had a mania for writing.”

  “In substance, do you remember what you wrote in that letter?”

  “That there was a famine in China and that human bodies had been consumed for food purposes,” Fish answer matter-of-factly. There was a satchel in his room, he explained, containing various newspaper clippings that he liked to save. One of them dealt with some “fellows who used human bodies for food after the war was over.” If the police went up to his room, they would find that clipping in the satchel.

  Captain Stein whispered something to one of his men, who immediately stepped out of the office to dispatch a couple of detectives to Fish’s current address, 55 East 128th Street. Then Stein turned back to Fish.
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  Showing him the N.Y.P.C.B.A. envelope that the Budd letter had been mailed in, Stein asked Fish where he had obtained it. The old man replied that he had found a “dozen or more” of them on a shelf in his room at Frieda Schneider’s boarding house. “I had some paper but just run short of envelopes,” Fish explained. “I wouldn’t have known there was any there, only I was sitting in a chair one night and there was a roach on the wall, and I got up on the chair to kill the roach and saw the envelopes.”

  At 3:45 A.M., a half-hour after it began, the interrogation was over. Captain Stein, like the others, was struck by Fish’s complete lack of emotion. Judging strictly by his tone, anyone would have thought that he had done nothing worse than bring Gracie home late from the party instead of leading her to a ghastly death in the silence of Old Wisteria.

  Perhaps the most sobering detail of all, however—at least from the police’s point of view—was the one about the roach. For six years, Grace Budd’s abductor had been the object of one of the most intensive manhunts in New York City history. The full resources of the Missing Persons Bureau had been applied to the pursuit. Detective King alone had devoted countless hours to the case. Ultimately, of course, Fish had been apprehended. But as it turned out, his capture had as much to do with pure chance as with the skill and dedication of the police.

  In a very real sense, a cockroach had led to the capture of Albert Fish.

  22

  That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once.

  SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

  It was nearly five P.M. when a pair of squad cars pulled away from police headquarters and headed north in the thickening darkness toward Westchester County. In addition to the driver, the lead car carried two members of the Missing Persons Bureau, Sergeants Thomas J. Hammill and Hugh Sheridan. Bureau Chief John Stein occupied the front passenger seat of the second car. Behind him, flanked by Detective King and Deputy Chief Inspector John Ryan, sat Albert Fish.