Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer Page 15

  By that time, Fish’s police record had been dug out of the files. As it turned out, he had been in trouble with the law before. His record went all the way back to 1903, when he’d spent sixteen months in Sing Sing on a grand larceny charge. That the old reprobate had a long criminal history came as no surprise to his captors. What did surprise and dismay them was the discovery that Fish had been arrested no less than six times since the Budd abduction on charges ranging from petty larceny to vagrancy to sending obscene literature through the mail.

  Three of those arrests had occurred within twelve weeks of the kidnapping. The first, for trying to pass a bad $250 check, had taken place only six weeks after Fish had taken Grace Budd from her home. And in each case, the charges against Fish had been dismissed.

  King could only shake his head in wonderment. He’d spent six and a half years tracking a shadowy criminal all across America. And in the meantime, the man he was hunting had been in the hands of the New York City police no less than half a dozen times. And then simply let go.

  Fish was booked and placed in the detention pen at police headquarters to await his arraignment on kidnapping and murder charges, scheduled for the next afternoon at the Jefferson Market Court. By this time, the events of the day seemed to have gotten to the old man. Though he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, he kept circling his cell, tapping his forehead with his fingertips and mumbling incoherently. At around 4:30 A.M., a sandwich was passed through the bars of his cell, but Fish seemed not to notice it and left it untouched.

  In the meantime, the newsmen covering the case had managed to track down several members of Fish’s family, including his thirty-five-year-old son, Albert Jr., who had shared an apartment with his father the previous summer until the old man’s behavior had grown intolerably bizarre.

  At daybreak, the younger Albert, who was living in Astoria, Queens, was awakened by a bunch of reporters who informed him of his father’s arrest. The son’s response was striking. “The old skunk,” he said bitterly. “I knew something like this would happen sooner or later.”

  When the reporters pressed him to elaborate, he explained that, during the months he and his father lived together, the old man had shown signs of extremely disturbed behavior. Often he would wake up in the middle of the night “screaming terribly.” At other times “he would take off his clothes and whip himself.” “Once,” the younger Fish went on, “a woman said he had taken her little girl into an empty apartment and removed his clothes.” Albert Jr. made a disgusted gesture with his hand. “I want nothing to do with him, and I won’t do anything to help him.”

  While the reporters scribbled frantically, the younger Fish thought for a moment, then asked, “Say, what was the name of the girl he murdered?”

  Several voices answered at the same time. “Budd. Grace Budd.”

  Albert Fish, Jr., gaped. “My God,” he exclaimed, shaking his head. “My God. That’s the name he used to scream out in his sleep.”

  24

  With these words the wicked Wolf leaped upon Little Red Riding Hood and gobbled her up.

  CHARLES PERRAULT, “Little Red Riding Hood”

  Early Friday morning, December 14, Sergeant Jerome Hogan of the Greenburgh Police Department, along with fellow officers Theodore Newman and William Moore, set out for Wisteria Cottage, the trunk of their squad car loaded with shovels and picks. By the time they pulled up at the house at around 8:30 A.M., a large crowd of townspeople, mostly male, had already assembled.

  There were schoolboys in beanies, teens in woolen caps, middle-aged men wearing topcoats and fedoras. Some were gathered in clusters, shoulders hunched against the cold. Others roamed the property in search of clues and souvenirs. A group of newsmen, some from local papers, others from the big-city dailies, were milling about, notebooks and cameras at the ready.

  Tools in hand, Hogan, Moore and Newman strode uphill about a hundred feet north of the house and began digging behind the stone wall. Within a short time, they were joined by Sergeants Hammill and Sheridan of the Missing Persons Bureau, who had just driven up from Manhattan. Dr. Amos Squire, the Westchester County medical examiner, arrived a little after 9:00. By then, Hogan and the others had already turned up a substantial pile of bones.

  Squire inspected each of them carefully, taking measurements and making notes. By 9:30, the diggers had uncovered eleven vertebrae, plus assorted bones from the pelvis, thighs, lower legs, upper arms, and hands.

  The size and state of the bones left no doubt in Squire’s mind that they were the remains of a prepubescent. And it was equally clear to him that the child had been the victim of a savage act of violence. One of the lumbar vertebrae—a piece of the lower spine—was scored with a deep groove, as though it had been hacked with a sharp implement.

  Sergeant Hogan was dispatched to a nearby bungalow belonging to a woman named Thornton. A short while later, he returned with a wooden picnic basket. Squire carefully laid the bones in the basket, then handed it to Officer Moore, who carried it by the handle while the rest of the men continued their search.

  Standing there in the woods, holding the picnic basket packed with the little girl’s bones, the grim-faced policeman made a weirdly incongruous sight. A child coming upon the scene might well have imagined that he was witnessing the recovery of Little Red Riding Hood’s remains after the Big Bad Wolf had finished with her.

  And after all, he wouldn’t have been so far from the truth.

  While the digging continued in Westchester, Albert Fish was being grilled once again, this time under the hot glare of klieg lights.

  Shortly after 9:00 A.M., the withered old man—looking even more haggard and shabby than usual after his long, sleepless night—was taken from the detention pen to the lineup room and led onto the brightly lit platform. The room was packed with police and other law enforcement officials, including Captain McQuillan of the Greenburgh Police Department and Westchester District Attorney Frank Coyne, who had driven down to Manhattan together first thing that morning. Also jamming the room were a mob of reporters and even a scattering of celebrities who had risen early so as not to miss the show.

  Among the notables in the audience were Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe—the simple country doctor who had been catapulted to international fame as the caretaker of Canada’s Dionne quintuplets—and Mrs. Alfred E. Smith, wife of the former New York governor. Their presence was a sign of the sensational interest that Fish had already begun to generate less than twenty-four hours after his arrest. Before long, as the full extent of the old man’s monstrosity was revealed in the press, his notoriety would spread nationwide.

  This time Captain Thomas Dugan of the Homicide Division did the questioning. “Why did you take the Budd girl away and murder her?” he began by asking.

  Blinking his watery blue eyes under the blazing lights, Fish stood on his tiptoes and spoke into the microphone. “I don’t know,” he said. “It just occurred to me.” Even amplified, his voice was so soft that the audience had to strain to hear his answer.

  “Why did you kill her?” Dugan repeated.

  “I didn’t intend to kill her. I intended to take her brother, Edward.”

  “Did you have any trouble with the Budd family?” The crowded room was hushed. In the brief pauses between Dugan’s questions, the scratch of the reporters’ pens was clearly audible.

  “I never had any trouble with the Budd family, nor did I ever hear of the Budd family before this.”

  After having Fish run through the details of the kidnapping, Dugan asked him if he’d ever had “anything to do with any other children.”

  “I never had anything to do with another child,” said Fish without hesitation.

  Dugan asked him once again why he had killed Grace Budd. Fish gave a small, almost imperceptible shrug. “The temptation just came over me. That’s all I can say. I can’t account for it. I don’t understand it.”

  The interrogation went on for another few minutes, then Detective King escorted Fish off the
little stage and hurried him out of the room.

  As the spectators headed for the exit, the newsmen swarmed around the luminaries, asking for their responses. They were particularly interested in Dr. Dafoe’s professional opinion of the mousy-looking little killer. Dafoe thought for a moment, then pronounced Fish “a study.” He declined to offer any further diagnosis, explaining that psychology was outside his domain.

  Fish was led directly from the lineup to Captain Stein’s office, where, at 9:45 A.M., he made his fifth and final confession. His interrogators on this occassion were Captain McQuillan and District Attorney Coyne. A stenographer named Monroe Block transcribed the statement.

  For the most part, Fish added nothing new to the story he had been telling since his capture. He did reveal that his familiarity with Westchester County, and specifically with the area around Irvington, dated back to 1917, when he had been hired to do a painting job for the Second Presbyterian Church in Tarrytown. Though he was strictly a journeyman painter, not an artist, he had been permitted to paint some angels on the church ceiling. The memory of that accomplishment seemed to fill Fish with pride.

  Indeed, it had already become clear to the investigators that, incredible as it seemed, religion occupied an important place in the old man’s life. Coyne in particular appeared deeply troubled by the disparity between Fish’s beliefs and the monstrous criminality of his behavior. He kept pressing Fish on the matter of contrition. Didn’t the old man realize that what he had done to the Budd girl was “against the Commandments?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Fish.

  “What are the exact words?”

  “Don’t kill.”

  Coyne corrected him. “Thou shalt not kill.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fish agreed. “That’s it.”

  “Do you know the others?” Coyne asked.

  “Yes, sir. Thou shall not commit adultery or steal.”

  “So you knew you sinned when you did it?”

  “Yes,” said Fish earnestly. “I did.” Fish’s expressions of remorse were palpably unconvincing. But his tone of voice—flatly indifferent when he spoke of Grace Budd—took on a solemn, even reverential, quality whenever he referred to Scripture.

  “And yet you went there prepared to kill?” Coyne continued.

  “Yes, sir. I was prepared.”

  “You had intentions of doing it on the boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But when you could not get the boy, you took the girl?”

  “Yes, sir,” Fish replied. Then he said something surprising. “I thought it was a boy for the moment.”

  This was a striking—even startling—response. But for some reason, neither Coyne nor any of the other investigators seemed to think it worth pursuing. No one asked the bizarre old man to explain what he meant.

  Instead, Coyne asked if Fish had “derived a sex pleasure from that?”

  Fish was emphatic in his denial. “No, sir. No, sir. No sex at all. I did not outrage her.”

  It was another jarring remark. Apparently, from Albert Fish’s point of view, luring the little girl to an abandoned house in the country, choking her to death, and then dismembering her body with a carving knife and cleaver did not constitute an outrage.

  About the dismemberment itself, Coyne pressed Fish for specific details. “Did you have to keep hacking away to get the head off?” he asked at one point.

  “Yes”

  “Did much blood fall?”

  “Yes.”

  “After you got the head off, what did you do?”

  “I cut her through the navel.” Fish reached out and pointed to Coyne’s belly, just above his belt.

  “You noticed the intestines?”

  “Yes. It looked like one thing wrapped around another.”

  The interrogation was over by 10:30 A.M. Emerging from the office, Coyne and the other investigators were besieged by reporters, who pelted them with questions.

  In spite of Fish’s insistence that he had not raped the little girl, Coyne declared that “this is a sex case, clear and simple. The authorities are working on the theory that this man has committed many sex crimes, although he denies sex was a motive in the killing of the Budd girl”

  The reporters then turned to Captain Stein. For the first time, he divulged the details of Fish’s murderous designs on the Quinn boy and his friend. One reporter asked if there was any news from Wisteria. In fact, there was. Only minutes before, just as the interrogation was drawing to a close, Stein had received a phone call from Sergeant Hammill, informing him of the morning’s developments. Dozens of human bones had already been found. The searchers were well on the way to recovering the complete skeleton of the little girl.

  Whether any of the bones belonged to other victims as well was a question that no one was yet prepared to answer.

  Even as Stein was conferring with the press, more discoveries were being made at Wisteria.

  Shortly before eleven, Sergeant Hogan was lifting a bone from the ground when he noticed a small bead embedded in the soil. Digging it out with his fingers, he uncovered sixteen more. They were imitation pearls. Their position made it clear that they had once been strung together into a necklace. Grace Budd had been wearing just such a necklace on the morning of her disappearance.

  Shortly afterward, police officers searching through the woods behind Wisteria Cottage came upon several pairs of shoes. At first, the discovery seemed to confirm the growing suspicion that Fish had used the isolated house as a murder farm. Only after a neighbor came forward and identified the shoes as discarded trash did investigators learn that, for many years, the property had served as a local dump.

  By that time, however, the ramshackle outhouse had been torn down and the fetid pit beneath it excavated by Officer Newman. There, half-buried in the muck, lay two moldering shoes, exactly matching the description of the ones worn by Grace on the day of her murder.

  As noon approached, the hunt for more evidence moved into the house itself. Searching the upstairs bedroom where Grace had been strangled and butchered, Dr. Gilbert Dalldorf, chief toxicologist at nearby Grasslands Hospital, discovered a large splotch of brown on the floorboards and a spray of suspicious brown clots on the wall nearby. While Dalldorf scraped a sample of the clotted matter into a test tube, officers ripped up a section of the discolored floor. Later that afternoon, the boards were shipped off to Dalldorf’s lab for analysis.

  Meanwhile, two levels below, a second party of police officers was busily tearing up the basement floor. Earlier, Dr. Amos Squire had ordered a single board removed at random, on the theory that—as he explained to reporters—“a man such as Fish would be apt to commit more murders.” And what better place to stash the bodies than underneath the basement floor? Sure enough, when the floorboard was pried up and a flashlight beamed into the darkness, Squire saw a bone.

  Armed with crowbars and picks, the officers immediately set about ripping up the rest of the floor. No one could say, of course, how many corpses might be down there. But Squire was convinced that more human remains would be found. It seemed too coincidental that—as he told reporters—he would “casually lift one floorboard and find a bone.”

  “We will take no chances,” Dr. Squire declared. “In view of Fish’s confession, there is no telling what else he has done of a criminal nature to which he has not confessed. That he wanted to kill others is evident in the fact that he intended to slay Edward Budd, the child’s brother, and changed his mind only when he saw the little girl.”

  The possibility of Fish’s involvement in other crimes was being explored back in Manhattan, too. Right after his questioning by McQuillan and Coyne, Fish had been taken to the Jefferson Market Court and arraigned before Magistrate Adolph Stern, who ordered him held without bail. Since Grace Budd had been kidnapped in Manhattan and murdered in Westchester, the question of where—and for which crime—Fish would be tried remained temporarily unresolved.

  As soon as Fish stepped out of the courtroom, he was mobbed
by reporters and cameramen. Handcuffed to Detective King, the old man obligingly posed for pictures, while the newsmen bombarded him with questions about other unsolved child-snatchings. “Well boys,” the old man said mildly. “You might as well accuse me of all of them. You can’t do me any more damage.”

  It wasn’t much of an answer, and the newspapermen kept at him, calling out the names of the missing. One name in particular kept coming up again and again—that of Billy Gaffney, the four-year-old boy who had vanished from his Brooklyn tenement the year before Grace Budd’s abduction.

  After a few minutes, King cut the impromptu press conference short and led Fish back to headquarters. Meanwhile, attorneys from the Manhattan D.A.’s office were conferring with their counterparts from Westchester about the jurisdiction issue. Shortly before noon, Assistant D.A. James Neary met with reporters to announce the decision.

  Fish would be moved to the Tombs and held there until a murder indictment was returned against him—probably on the following Tuesday, December 18, when the Westchester Grand Jury was expected to reconvene. At that point, Fish would be surrendered to Westchester authorities. Neary expected that Fish would probably go on trial sometime around the first of the year, though the date might be delayed by the mental examinations which the old man would clearly have to undergo.

  Several reporters wanted to know if Fish had ever been seen by psychiatrists before. Neary confirmed that the old man had spent several brief periods under observation following previous arrests. On each of those occasions, Neary explained, Fish had been judged sane—perverted but sane.

  By then, Fish was back in his cell in the detention pen, awaiting transfer to the Tombs. Shortly before noon, a Nassau County police inspector named Harold King (no relation to Fish’s nemesis) arrived to question the prisoner about a pair of sensational, unsolved murder cases on Long Island.

  The first was the kidnapping and killing of a sixteen-year-old high school girl named Mary O’Connell, whose bludgeoned body had been discovered in a lonely stretch of woods near her Far Rockaway home in February, 1932. The second was the murder of a man named Benjamin B. Collings, who had been slain onboard his yacht on Long Island Sound in 1931. King interviewed Fish for nearly an hour, but all he got from the old man was a string of increasingly sullen denials.