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

  It took over an hour for the cars to reach White Plains, where they switched positions at a stoplight on Central Avenue. Then, with Fish providing directions, they proceeded to the Saw Mill River Road, following it until they reached the village of Irvington in the Westchester town of Greenburgh.

  Turning right at Mountain Road, they ascended the steep, winding hillside and pulled up at Frank Cudney’s house, a few hundred yards east of Wisteria Cottage. While the others waited in the cars, King went up to the front door, knocked, and after identifying himself to the owner, disappeared inside. A few moments later, King emerged again accompanied by Cudney, who walked around to the side of his house where he fetched a shovel and pick from his tool shed. Meanwhile, Sergeant Hammill had unlocked the trunk of his car and removed an electric emergency lamp—a portable device resembling an automobile headlight attached to a large battery.

  With Hammill’s beam lighting the way in the blackness of the country night, the party of men, Cudney included, marched up the road to Wisteria Cottage.

  “Over here,” said Fish, leading the others up the little rise toward the yard. Then, while Hammill trained his light on the frozen ground, Fish pointed out the grim landmarks of his crime.

  Here was the place where he had left Gracie picking wildflowers. Here was the spot where he had found the old five-gallon paint can. Back there, he said pointing, was the tumbledown outhouse where he had stashed the girl’s shoes and (until he had returned to move it to a different location) concealed her blood-drenched head beneath some old newspapers.

  It was nearing seven by now, fully dark and very cold. The old man’s breath frosted as he spoke, and in the dead silence of the remote, rural neighborhood, his voice—as whispery as the rustle of dry leaves—carried clearly.

  Fish led the men along the wraparound porch to the front entrance, then up the stairs to the second-story bedroom, where the actual atrocity had taken place. There, he continued with his grim guided tour, moving around the room as he re-created the murder in all its details.

  He pointed to the spot where he had unwrapped his bundle and neatly laid out his cleaver, saw, and knife. He stood beside the window, just as he had six years earlier when he had called out to Gracie, telling her to come upstairs. He assumed the position he had taken behind the bedroom door as he waited, naked, for the little girl to reach the landing. He indicated the dark corner where he had stowed her butchered body before deciding to dispose of it outside.

  The house was without electricity, and as Fish moved about the abandoned room, reenacting the crime, Hammill kept his emergency beam fixed on him like a theatrical spotlight. In the bright yellow glare, the little man’s shadow loomed behind him, sliding along the decaying walls.

  It took only a few minutes for Fish to complete the macabre performance. Then it was time to go back outside. Time to show the police the final resting place of Grace Budd’s dismembered—and crudely reassembled—corpse.

  Fish led the others up the hill behind the house, where an old stone wall, about three feet high, marked off the eastern boundary line of the property. In the darkness, Fish couldn’t say precisely where he’d deposited the remains, though he indicated a general area that seemed about the right distance from the house.

  Carrying the pick and shovel supplied by Frank Cudney, King and Stein stepped over the wall along with Sergeant Hammill, who kept his light directed downward while his colleagues began turning over the top layer of soil with their tools.

  A few minutes later, Stein scraped up a faded piece of fabric. Examining it in the light, he saw that it was an old scrap of canvas, badly weatherworn. Even so, it was easy to tell that at one point it had been striped.

  Fish, meanwhile, had been making his way back down along the wall, squinting in the darkness for any recognizable landmarks. King, Stein and Hammill were still inspecting the tattered piece of fabric, when Fish’s voice came drifting up to them. “Come down further,” he was calling. “You’re too far uphill.”

  The three men walked downhill about fifty feet, where they found Fish and the others standing by a big tree stump.

  “This looks like the place,” Fish said. “I recall the stump.”

  Once again, Hammill turned the beam on the ground while Stein and King scraped at the surface of the rocky soil. And once again, it took only a few minutes before the diggers came upon something. This time, it was King who turned it up—a smooth, rounded object which he recognized at once. Stooping, he lifted it gently out of the earth and raised it to the light.

  It was a human skull, minus the jawbone. Its condition made it clear, even to an untrained eye, that it had been lying out in the woods for a long time. And its size made it equally clear that it was the skull of a young child.

  Without a word, King passed it over to Stein, who examined it for a moment before showing it to the others. Then he knelt and replaced it precisely where it had been found.

  The tiny circle of men remained silent as the diggers returned to their work.

  Back in the city, the press had gotten wind of a major break in the Budd case. By 7:30 P.M., a crowd of reporters had assembled at police headquarters and were clamoring for more information. Finally, sometime around 8:00, Police Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine appeared to confirm that a suspect in the Budd case had, indeed, been arrested and had made a full confession to the police. He then passed out copies of a typed transcript of Fish’s statement to Captain Stein. Immediately, the reporters began shouting out questions. Had the Budds been notified? Had they identified the suspect? Where was the prisoner now?

  Valentine had just begun to answer the barrage of questions when a sergeant stepped up to notify him that word had just come down from Westchester County. Fish’s story had been confirmed. Grace Budd’s head had been found in the woods behind Wisteria Cottage.

  By now, Stein and King had uncovered enough bones, including the missing jaw, to satisfy themselves that they had located the corpus delecti. It was time to notify the local authorities.

  Sergeant Sheridan was dispatched to Frank Cudney’s house to place the necessary calls. In the meantime, Stein and Hammill agreed that Fish should be returned to Manhattan and booked. Hammill would stay behind with Sheridan to advise and assist the Greenburgh police.

  The old man—who had stood by impassively during the exhumation of the Budd girl’s remains—was handcuffed to Detective King and led back to the squad car, with Stein and Inspector Ryan following close behind. The four men resumed their former positions, Stein up front beside the driver, Fish in the rear sandwiched between Ryan and King.

  A moment later, the car had disappeared down the dark, winding steepness of Mountain Road, carrying the benign-looking child-butcher back to the city.

  By the time Greenburgh Police Chief Phillip J. McQuillan arrived at Wisteria Cottage around 8:40 P.M. a handful of his men were already on the scene, along with Westchester District Attorney Frank H. Coyne. By nine, a dozen more had arrived, bringing the total up to twenty. Under McQuillan’s supervision, the Greenburgh officers began scouring the woods behind the house, their search illuminated by flares, oil lamps, and electric torches.

  Drawn by the strange lights and uncustomary noises, a small crowd of curiosity-seekers began to gather on the front lawn of Wisteria. Within an hour, their number had swelled to more than a hundred as news of the grisly discovery of the little girl’s skeleton spread through the tightly knit community. By then, several carloads of reporters from the New York City dailies had also found their way to the scene.

  Hammill, Coyne, and McQuillan were conferring near the spot where Grace’s skull had been found when a car carrying New York City Police photographer Joseph Prefer pulled up in front of the property. Following Hammill’s instructions, Prefer (who had been summoned from Manhattan by a phone call from Sergeant Sheridan) began taking flashbulb shots of the crime scene and evidence. He had just finished photographing the eroded skull lying in the dirt beside the stone wall when another car arr
ived, this one driven by Dr. Amos O. Squire, the Westchester County Medical Examiner.

  Squire was quickly ushered over to the exhumation site. Kneeling, he inspected the skull in the flickering light of an oil lantern, paying particular attention to the condition of the teeth and the size and shape of the cranium. Examining the other bones that were scattered around, some of them still half-sunk into the soil, he recognized them instantly as the remains of a child—vertebrae, shoulder blades, ribs, finger bones, and the lower jaw, which was split in two.

  Squire jotted some notes in a pad he removed from his coat pocket. When he was finished, all of the exposed bones, the skull included, were piled into a grocery carton that Frank Cudney had fetched from his house. Taking the box, Hammill returned to his car along with Sergeant Sheridan.

  Then, while the Greenburgh police set up barricades around the murder site, the two investigators returned to their car and headed back to Manhattan. On the car seat between them, the weatherworn bones—the meager remains of the child they had sought for so long—rattled softly in their cardboard container.

  23

  “None of us are saints.”

  ALBERT FISH

  It had taken about an hour for the car carrying King, Stein, Ryan and Fish to arrive back at police headquarters. To avoid the reporters clustered around the front entrance, the officers hustled Fish through a side door and up to Stein’s office. It was after 9:00 by now—still just the beginning of what already had been a long, grueling night—and Stein and his men were feeling wrung out and cold to the bone. Besides everything else, none of them had eaten a bite since early afternoon.

  While one of his men fetched coffee and sandwiches from an all-night restaurant across the street, Stein put in a call to the D.A.’s office. By the time Assistant District Attorney P. Francis Marro showed up, around twenty minutes later, the three officers and their prisoner had polished off their suppers.

  It took another half-hour for Marro’s stenographer, Detective Thomas Luddy, to make it downtown to headquarters. Stein and King spent that time filling in Marro on the facts of the case, on Fish’s earlier confessions, and on the grisly discoveries they had made up in Westchester, which had confirmed every detail of the old man’s story.

  Then, at exactly 10:00 P.M., Marro turned to his interrogation of Fish. The questioning lasted about forty minutes. Once again, Fish was the soul of cooperation, patiently rehashing every detail of the crime and even adding a few particulars. He described how much blood Grace’s hair had soaked up when he’d cut off her head, and how hard it had been to chop through her spine because his cleaver was dull. “I had to do a lot of work,” he explained.

  When Marro asked Fish why he’d done such a dreadful thing, Fish repeated that he had no explanation other than that “a sort of blood thirst” had come over him. Once that terrible need had subsided, he was overwhelmed with remorse. “I would have given my life within a half-hour after I done it to restore it to her,” he swore.

  “Did you commit any rape on her?” Marro asked.

  “Never entered my head,” Fish insisted.

  Marro returned to the question of the old man’s motivation. “What made you kill her, choke her and kill her?”

  This time, Fish’s answer was slightly more involved. He began by explaining that he’d been reading “a lot of cases of children being kidnapped.” Abruptly, however, the old man began to talk about something entirely different. “I had a brother who served five years in the United States Navy,” he said. “And he used to relate to me when I was quite small—he was the oldest of my mother’s seven children. Walter H. Fish his name is. He had been to China when there was a famine, when they were using human flesh for food. He used to tell us a lot of these things and that got into my head.” Fish paused, then added, “I was in Bellevue twice for mental observation and Kings County.”

  Apparently, Marro was satisfied by this explanation. In any event, he abruptly dropped the question of Fish’s motivation and moved on to a few other matters. The interrogation lasted only a few minutes longer. Captain Stein put the final question to Fish. “Will you tell us how you feel now, how your conscience feels?”

  Fish glanced around the room at his captors. “Much better,” he said, smiling pleasantly.

  Fish had now been questioned three times since his arrest earlier that day for a total of over two hours. Each of his interrogators had asked him dozens of questions about the smallest details of the crime, from the price of the train ticket he had purchased for Grace to the exact size of the paint can he had placed under her neck to catch her blood in.

  Remarkably, however, not one of them had asked Fish directly about the single most appalling claim in his letter to the Budds. Though the old man had admitted at several points to a morbid fascination with cannibalism, he had never been asked to confirm or deny his assertion that he had performed that very atrocity on the flesh of Grace Budd.

  Perhaps the claim simply seemed too insane to credit. Whatever the case, no one—not King, not Stein, not Marro—had ever asked Fish whether it was true, as he had written, that he had taken parts of the girl’s body back to his rooms, cooked them in the oven, and consumed them over a span of nine days.

  And on that subject, Fish himself volunteered no information.

  Shortly after midnight, the Budds were awakened by a loud knock on their apartment door. Pulling on his bathrobe, Mr. Budd hurried to the door, opened it a crack, and peered out into the dimly lit hallway. There stood a young man, notepad in hand, who identified himself as a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune. He was wondering if the Budds had heard the news.

  “What news?” replied Mr. Budd.

  “They’ve arrested the man who kidnapped your daughter. He’s confessed to the crime.” By then, the rest of the family had gathered around the doorway. Mr. Budd invited the reporter inside. Removing his hat, the young man stepped into the apartment and—in response to the question that the missing girl’s parents were almost too afraid to ask—broke the bad news.

  Within half an hour, the Budds’ cramped apartment was crowded with reporters and photographers. Mrs. Budd, massive in a shapeless housedress, sat torpidly at her kitchen table, sipping tea and doing her best to sound the way the mother of a murdered child should. But after six and a half years, her sorrow had turned to dull acceptance. At the request of the cameramen, she stared mournfully at a framed portrait of Grace and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. But her eyes remained dry.

  Even her outrage seemed strangely perfunctory. When a reporter showed her an old police photograph of Fish, she glanced at it briefly before saying mechanically, “That dirty bum. I wish I had him here so I could get my hands on him.”

  Meanwhile, in the living room, her spindly, softspoken husband leaned forward in a fake-leather armchair and described the day of Grace’s abduction again and again, as though it were a story that he couldn’t quite get himself to believe. He, too, displayed no strong emotions, though he seemed less like a person who had passed beyond grief than one who had been stunned into a permanent state of bewilderment by it.

  While the reporters scribbled and the flashbulbs popped, he kept repeating the same words. “It seemed all right to let her go,” he said in a voice only slightly louder than a whisper. “He seemed like such a decent man.”

  Sometime around 1:00 A.M., Detective King showed up to drive Mr. Budd and Edward (by now a powerfully built young man of twenty-four) down to police headquarters to identify the suspect. On their way back downtown, King stopped to pick up Willie Korman. King wanted Edward’s friend there as an additional eyewitness.

  Mrs. Budd, who had proven herself unreliable at providing a positive identification, was left behind with her youngest daughter Beatrice, now eleven years old.

  At headquarters, King and the others—accompanied by the throng of reporters who had followed them there from the Budds’ place—proceeded upstairs to the Missing Persons Bureau. There, before the closed door of C
aptain Stein’s office, King took Edward by the arm. “Go in there, Eddie. See if you can find the man that took your sister.”

  Eddie opened the door and stepped inside the room. As many as a score of police officers were milling around (including Sergeants Hammill and Sheridan, who had arrived from Westchester with their cartonful of evidence shortly after midnight). A few of the officers were standing beside a desk, examining the contents of a small leather satchel, which—as far as Eddie could see—seemed to be stuffed with old magazine and newspaper clippings.

  Spotting the young man, several of the officers moved away from a desk they were blocking from Edward’s view. There, sitting in a straight-backed chair behind the desk, was a hollow-cheeked old man with a drooping gray moustache and melancholy eyes. Edward’s own eyes blazed.

  “It’s him!” he cried. Shoving past several of the police officers, he lunged at the old man, shouting, “You old bastard! Dirty son of a bitch!”

  Fish gazed up impassively while several of the officers grabbed Edward by the arms and wrestled him out of the room.

  A few moments later, Grace Budd’s father entered the room.

  He stood in the doorway for a moment, glancing around. Then he walked straight over to the old man and stood before him.

  The hat in his hands trembled slightly, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. Fish looked up at him expressionlessly.

  “Don’t you know me?” Albert Budd finally asked in a quivering voice.

  “Yes,” Fish said mildly. “You’re Mr. Budd.”

  “And you’re the man who came to my home as a guest and took my little girl away,” said Mr. Budd. His voice broke and, for the first time that evening, his eyes filled with tears. He put a hand over his eyes and began to cry silently. Detective King, who had followed him into the office, placed an arm around his shoulder and led him from the room.