Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer Page 22

  ALBERT FISH

  On the morning of Tuesday, March 12, the Daily News published the first of a five-part serialization of Albert Fish’s life story. The series was supposedly written by Fish himself, though its spirited style and dramatic structure were clearly the work of a professional.

  For the most part, this ostensible autobiography was simply a titillating, though highly bowdlerized, account of Fish’s adult life, with particular, prurient emphasis placed on his wife’s infidelity and Fish’s own geriatric sexual escapades. “The thing that started me on the real big things I have done in the last fifteen years was the trouble I had in 1917 with my wife and that man John Straube,” the author proclaimed in a typical passage. “Marriage is not all that it is cracked up to be, but it certainly serves one purpose. So long as the man and woman keep the bargain, they will both stay out of other trouble. It is a good safety valve. As long as Anna stuck to me, and the children kept coming one after the other until there were six, I might have had my outside fancies but would keep my end of the bargain.

  “But when I found out about Straube, my eyes were opened to the fact that no bargains hold and that only fools know any restraints. That freed me. It threw off my chains. I had a right after that to any fun I could find or grab.”

  Most of “KILLER FISH’S OWN STORY” (as it was advertised on page one) operated on the same crudely suggestive level. None of it was nearly as shocking as the disclosures that would be made at Fish’s trial in the coming days.

  There was one brief passage, however, which did succeed in capturing the intensely bizarre quality of Fish’s imagination, and that was the very start of the series, which recounted a story that Fish had told more than once. It was presumably a childhood recollection, though it may well have been a dream. In either case, it was revealing:

  I am a man of passion, [the passage began]. You don’t know what that means unless you are my kind. At the orphanage where they put me just before Garfield was assassinated, there were some older boys that caught a horse in a sloping field.

  They got the horse up against a fence down at the bottom of the field and tied him up. An old horse. They put kerosene on his tail and lit it and cut the rope. Away went that old horse, busting through fences to get away from the fire. But the fire went with him.

  That horse, that’s me. That’s the man of passion. The fire chases you and catches you and then it’s in your blood. And after that, it’s the fire that has control, not the man. Blame the fire of passion for what Albert H. Fish has done.

  It is impossible to say whether this episode was memory or fantasy. Perhaps even Fish could no longer tell. But given his particular method of torturing himself with alcohol-soaked cotton, there is no doubt that the story had symbolic meaning for him, that on some level he did indeed associate himself with the nightmarish image of the fiery-tailed horse—a creature propelled through the world by the searing ecstasies of pain.

  The selection of the three remaining jurors and one alternate occupied the morning of the trial’s second day. The court recessed for lunch at ten minutes before one and reconvened an hour later. Shortly after two P.M., prosecutor Gallagher cleared his throat and rose from his chair at the front of the hushed, crowded courtroom to present his opening statement.

  After a few preliminary remarks to the jury, Gallagher proceeded to lay out the state’s case against Fish. Speaking in a somber, modulated voice, Gallagher sketched out the details of the crime as though reciting a story he’d read in a pulp horror magazine—Weird Tales or Eerie Mysteries. His speech held the audience spellbound. The only person in the courtroom who seemed completely uninterested was Fish, who sat drowsing in his chair, head resting in one hand, fingers visoring his eyes.

  “In 1928, the People will prove, there lived in the city of New York the Budd family,” Gallagher intoned. “They lived at 406 West 15th Street. They lived in a small apartment in the rear of the apartment house. There was the father Albert, the mother Delia, there was Grace, there was Edward, and several other members of the family.

  “Edward Budd was looking for a job. And so he made application to the New York World to have them put an ad in their newspaper. That ad appeared on Sunday, May 27, 1928, under the classified ad section, situations wanted, and it read as follows in substance: ‘Youth 18 wishes position in country. Signed, Edward A. Budd, 406 West 15th Street.’

  “The following day or so there appeared this defendant at the Budd home. In the latter part of the afternoon there came a knock on the door. Mrs. Budd opened it, and this defendant was there. He said his name was Frank Howard, that he had seen the ad in the New York World, that he had come to see Edward about the job he had advertised for. He said he had a farm located down in Farmingdale, Long Island, a truck farm, and wanted to know if Edward could work on it. So Edward agreed to go down on the farm.

  “This defendant said, ‘I will come for you on Saturday.’ That was on June 2, 1928.”

  After explaining how “Howard” had failed to show up at the appointed time and describing the telegram he had sent to the Budds, Gallagher went on to recount the events of that fateful Sunday morning when Fish first laid eyes on little Grace.

  “She was a young girl at that time, approximately ten years and nine months of age. She had been to church that morning. She came in. She sat in this defendant’s lap, he stroked her head, and he allowed her to play with the money he had. While she was sitting there, he said to the Budd parents that his sister was giving a birthday party for her children, up at 135th Street in the city of New York, and he thought it would be nice if Grace would go along with him. He said he loved children, he would return early that night, they need not worry, it would be all right. They hesitated to let her go, but finally consented.

  “So she left home, that little flat, on Sunday afternoon shortly after the noon hour with this defendant.” Here Gallagher paused for effect.

  “The afternoon passed, the night went by, and she did not come back.”

  At this point, Dempsey cut in impatiently. “If your honor please, I am going to object to the dramatics on the part of the district attorney. He is supposed to outline what he intends to prove, sir. I submit that he has gone beyond that.”

  Justice Close concurred. “I think you are going into the evidence in too much detail, Mr. District Attorney,” he said to Gallagher.

  Gallagher nodded toward the bench. “I will slide over it as quickly as possible.”

  The prosecutor then sketched out the events of the ensuing years: Detective King’s untiring manhunt, the dead-end clues and fruitless leads, the misidentified suspects, the tragicomical episode involving Charles Edward Pope. And then, on the eleventh day of November, 1934, the Budd’s receipt of Fish’s vile, taunting letter.

  After summarizing—and somewhat expurgating—the contents of the letter (Gallagher substituted the phrase “I did not have connection with her” for Fish’s “I did not fuck her”), the prosecutor quickly reviewed the events leading up to the old man’s arrest, the discovery of the skeletal remains at Wisteria Cottage, and Fish’s various confessions of the crime. Far from “sliding over” the murder itself, Gallagher described it in vivid detail.

  “He said that he knew what he was doing,” the prosecutor stressed. “He said that he knew it was wrong to kill, and that after he had done so he felt guilty. He knew it was a Commandment that ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ That is what he says.”

  Gallagher’s voice rose as he moved toward his conclusion. “Now in this case, there is a presumption of sanity. The proof, briefly, will be that this defendant is legally sane and that he knows the difference between right and wrong and the nature and quality of his acts, that he is not defective mentally, that he had a wonderful memory for a man of his age, that he has complete orientation as to his immediate surroundings, that there is no mental deterioration, but that he is sexually abnormal, that he is known medically as a sex pervert or a sex psychopath, that his acts were abnormal, but that when he took
this girl from her home on the third day of June, 1928, and in doing that act and in procuring the tools with which he killed her, bringing her up here to Westchester County, and taking her into this empty house surrounded by woods in the back of it, he knew it was wrong to do that, and that he is legally sane and should answer for his acts.

  “That,” concluded Gallagher, “is a brief résumé of what the People will prove in this case.”

  Right from the start, it was clear that James Dempsey’s success in defending Fish would depend largely on his ability to remove the old man from the ranks of Gothic monsters, where the tabloids had relegated him, and present him in psychiatric as opposed to supernatural terms—as a human being in the grip of a raging psycho sis. Appealing for understanding and open-mindedness in the face of undisputed horror, Dempsey studiously avoided theatrics in his opening remarks.

  He began by pointing out the prime “consideration from the standpoint of the defense … namely, whether or not the man was sane.”

  “We do not have to prove that he is insane,” Dempsey stressed. Rather, it was up to the “the State to prove that he is sane.” Nevertheless, Dempsey declared, the defense would offer “proof, overwhelming proof, to demonstrate conclusively, beyond any doubt, that that man was insane in 1928 and is insane today.”

  Whereas Gallagher’s statement was essentially a dramatic account of the Budd killing, Dempsey barely mentioned the crime at all, concentrating instead on Fish’s bizarre life history. After summarizing the old man’s brutalized childhood, Dempsey described his “progressive state of mental depreciation,” detailing the tortures Fish had inflicted on himself with needles and nail-studded paddles and his compulsive habit of sending “unspeakable letters through the mail to people that he had never seen.”

  Making good on his promise to cast blame on the Bellevue psychiatrists who had diagnosed Fish as harmless, he lost no time in attacking them for having “turned this man out on the street” in 1931. “In that year that Bellevue turned him out as not being a criminal he married three other women outside of his own wife without ever getting a divorce, three different marriages in that year after Bellevue let him go. At the end of that year he was again apprehended for sending obscene letters through the mail. Bellevue has a lot to account for here, I submit,” Dempsey charged.

  By way of humanizing Fish as well as underscoring his erratic nature, Dempsey went on to describe the old man’s paradoxical devotion to his children. “In spite of all these brutal, criminal and vicious proclivities, there is this other side of the defendant. He has been a very fine father. He never once in his life laid a hand on one of his children. He says grace at every meal in his house. In 1917, when the youngest one of his six children was thre years of age, his wife left him. And from that time down until shortly before the Grace Budd murder in 1928 he was a mother and father to those children.

  “We will show you, gentlemen, that in addition to the complex sex side of the man’s makeup, which is something that is almost incomprehensible, he has this other side. It is nature’s compensation.”

  Dempsey concluded by repeating the point he had made at the beginning of his statement: “And so I frankly say to you I have only scratched the surface. The defense is going to raise the question as to whether, in June, 1928, Albert Fish was sane. We will have lay witnesses and we will have very competent and learned medical witnesses to address that point, although I repeat as I close my brief remarks that it is incumbent upon the Prosecution to show that this murder where this little girl, they say, was killed and cut up and eaten was committed by a sane man.”

  Apart from a single gripping incident, the rest of the afternoon proceeded uneventfully. Delia Budd, looking more massive than ever, took the stand first. Dressed in black, with a gilt necklace quivering on her bosom as she spoke, Mrs. Budd recalled the events of June 3, 1928, and—when asked by Gallagher whether she saw “in the courtroom the man who came to your place” on that date-pointed calmly at Fish. “There he is, sitting at the end of the table.”

  “You mean the man with the hand up to his face?” asked Justice Close.

  “Yes, that’s him,” Mrs. Budd said flatly.

  Her face remained fixed in a look of absolute impassivity as Dempsey cross-examined her about the earlier suspects she had identified with equal certainty. “On the witness stand on a number of occasions,” he asked, “you identified Charles A. Pope as Frank Howard, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, well I made a mistake.”

  “Now altogether, how many different people have you identified as Frank Howard?”

  “Only Mr. Pope.”

  “Didn’t you identify the head of the Missing Persons Bureau?”

  “Not as I remember of,” said Mrs. Budd.

  “Don’t you remember a lineup one day down at the police station when you picked out one of the New York detectives and said he was Frank Howard?”

  “No. I don’t remember.”

  “Don’t you remember, Mrs. Budd, identifying a man by the name of Albert E. Corthell?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t identify him?”

  “No.”

  When Dempsey continued to press her on the matter, Mrs. Budd simply gazed away from him and refused to reply.

  By then, however, Dempsey had made his point. “May I ask you one more question, Mrs. Budd, before you leave? You objected to your daughter going with Frank Howard, did you?”

  “No,” Mrs. Budd replied, her voice, like her face, betraying not the slightest trace of emotion. “We trusted the old man. We thought he was all right.”

  “Who was the one that consented, your husband or yourself?”

  “We both consented.”

  Edward Budd was next on the stand. After recounting his version of the circumstances that had led to his little sister’s abduction, he pointed out Fish as the gray-haired deceiver who had shown up at his door six years earlier in the guise of a benefactor. Willie Korman, also called as a witness, seconded Edward’s story. The testimony of the two young men was brief and to the point, almost perfunctory.

  The one truly dramatic moment of the day occurred during Albert Budd’s testimony. In contrast to his wife and oldest son, Mr. Budd was visibly distraught during his time on the stand and spoke with a tremulous voice as he conjured up that long-ago day when the soft-spoken old man, who seemed so generous and kind, had come into his home as a guest and taken his child away.

  “He asked me would I give my permission, consent, me and Mrs. Budd, to let the child go and attend that party, and that he would take very good care of her, and he would return her no later than nine o’clock.”

  Speaking in gentle tones, Gallagher asked, “What did you say to that?”

  “Well, I judged his appearance and his personality and everything about him—”

  At this point, Dempsey cut in. “I move to strike that out as not responsive.”

  Justice Close leaned toward the witness. “What did you say? Did you consent?”

  Budd gave a deep, ragged sigh. “I gave my consent. Yes.”

  A few moments later, it was time for Albert Budd to identify Fish. “How is your eyesight?” asked the prosecutor.

  “Well, my eyesight is not very good. I can’t see very far because I have one glass eye and the other has a cataract in it. I can’t see very far away, just about as far as you are there. I can’t see back of that so good.”

  “I ask you to step down from the stand and see if you can locate the defendant in this court,” said Gallagher.

  As Arthur James Pegler wrote in that evening’s edition of the Mirror, “a pin could have been heard to fall in the courtroom” as Albert Budd rose from his seat and moved gropingly toward the defense table. Stopping beside Fish’s chair, Budd bent over the old man, who peered up through the cracks between his fingers.

  Suddenly, Budd snapped erect. “This is Frank Howard,” he rasped. “That is the man that took my child away. This man right here.” His right hand jerked
toward Fish, who shrank back in his seat—the single sign of life he had shown all afternoon. Whether the overwrought father was simply pointing at the old man or getting ready to strike him no one could say. But Deputy Sheriff John Toucher took a quick step forward and interposed himself between Fish and the trembling witness.

  By then, however, Albert Budd had turned away. Shoulders slumped, he covered his face with both hands and began to sob loudly as Gallagher led him by an elbow back to the witness stand.

  Once Budd was seated, Gallagher fetched a glass of water from the prosecutor’s table. As he carried it over to Budd, James Dempsey half-rose to his feet, saying, “I will consent to have a few minutes’ rest here, and excuse Mr. Budd.”

  Gallagher held out the glass, but Albert Budd, his face wet with tears, shook his head and whispered, “Just a minute. I can’t drink the water for a minute.” A few silent moments passed as he struggled for control. The only sounds in the courtroom were his spasmodic breaths and the scratching of pens as reporters rapidly transcribed the details of the heartbreaking scene.

  Finally, Budd accepted the water from Gallagher, emptied the glass, and, after wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, turned his face in the direction of the defense table.

  “That sight,” he said bitterly. “That is enough to make anybody shiver.”

  William King was the last witness called to the stand that afternoon. Under direct examination by Gallagher, he described precisely how he had traced Fish to his former address—Frieda Schneider’s rooming house at 200 East 52nd Street—and arrested him there on the afternoon December 13, 1934.

  Afterward, Dempsey tried to force King to admit that Fish’s confession had been beaten out of him with a rubber hose, but the detective placidly denied that any coercion had been used on the old man.

  At that point—a few minutes before five P.M.—Justice Close recessed the court for the day, informing the jury members that they would be put up at the Roger Smith Hotel and admonishing them not to “discuss this case among yourselves, express any opinion about it, or permit anyone to speak to you about it. You will be permitted to have newspapers, but all references to this trial will be clipped from them before the papers are given to you.”