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

  Fish had sprinkled the lime all around the basement floor. Apparently unsatisfied with this measure, however, he set about constructing an elaborate booby trap, which the younger Fish described to the jury as a wooden contraption resembling a “chicken coop or a fox trap. And he put a whole lot of boards across it, heavy beams and everything. He told me that when the cat goes in there it would hit a certain piece of wood that held the rest of the boards up, the entire weight, and when the board fell from underneath, this heavy timber would fall down and kill the cat.”

  “What did your father have to say about the cat while you were looking at this contraption?” Dempsey asked.

  “Well, we spoke together about ten minutes, and he suddenly turned around quick, and he said, ‘There it goes now! Did you see it? Look at the size of it!’ I said, ‘Pop, there is no cat in front of you.’”

  “Was there any cat there at all?” Dempsey asked.

  “No, sir. No black cat.”

  The part of Albert Jr.’s testimony that created the biggest splash in the tabloid press, however—and that gave rise to yet another lurid epithet for the old man—had to do with his father’s eating habits. The younger Fish testified that, whenever the moon was full, a wild look would come into the old man’s eyes, his face would grow flushed, and he would demand raw steak for dinner.

  “Tell us in your own words the discussion you had with your father about this raw meat business in July, 1934,” Dempsey said.

  “That was pay day,” Albert Jr. began, “and I came home with the intention of having a good supper. I got home and sat down to eat. As I did, I noticed a piece of raw steak and a box of Uneeda biscuits.”

  “What did you say to your father?”

  “I asked my father if that is all we had for our supper, and he said, ‘Yes. Why?’”

  “What was said by him with respect to the meat being raw?” Dempsey asked.

  “He told me, ‘That is the way I like my meat, and you eat it the way I eat it.’”

  That night, Albert Jr. testified, he went outside for a breath of air and noticed that the moon was full. Returning to the apartment, he saw his father resting on the couch. “His face was awful red,” Albert said, “and it seemed funny because he was not out in the sunshine that day.”

  “What else did you notice about your father at that time?” Dempsey asked.

  “The expression in his eyes.”

  “Tell us about that.”

  “It looked as though he had seen something and was frightened. Just like someone was chasing him.”

  Within twenty-four hours, writers for the Daily Mirror and the Daily News had checked the Weather Bureau records from 1928 and discovered, as Norma Abrams reported, “that the moon was at its fullest on June 3, 1928, when the Budd child was killed and her body dismembered.” And Fish, who had already been tagged with a string of sensational labels—the Thrill Vulture, Vampire Man, Ogre of Old Wisteria—was rechristened with a new tabloid nickname: The Moon Maniac.

  Albert Fish, Jr., was followed on the witness stand by Dr. Roy Duckworth, the roentgenologist who had supervised Fish’s pelvic X-rays at Grasslands Hospital in late December, 1934. Two months after that session, Duckworth had brought Fish in for an additional set of X-rays, which had revealed the presence of two more needles in the old man’s lower body, bringing the total up to twenty-nine.

  Using a shadow box set up at the front of the courtroom facing the jury, Duckworth pointed out the precise location of each of the needles—in the groin, close to the back wall of the rectum, slightly above the transverse section of the colon, near the bladder, clustered around the tip of the spine. Judging by their eroded condition, some of the needles had been in Fish’s body for “quite a number of years,” Duckworth explained. Others had apparently been inserted through the perineum as recently as six months before.

  The last witness of the day, Mrs. Gertrude DeMarco—Fish’s favorite child—wept sporadically as she testified to the old man’s paternal devotion.

  She began by recounting the details of her mother’s desertion. Mrs. DeMarco had been a girl of thirteen when, on the afternoon of January 19, 1917, Anna Fish had given each of her children some change and sent them off to the movies. When they had returned, their mother was gone, along with the boarder, John Straube, and every stick of furniture in the house.

  Searching through the empty rooms, they found a few pennies in the bathtub, and a note advising them to send a telegraph to their father, who was living in White Plains while he finished a painting job for the Second Presbyterian Church in Tarrytown.

  Fish had hurried home to Queens that very evening. He brought Gertrude and the others to their aunt’s house in Flushing for a few nights, then moved them up to Westchester, renting some rooms in Elmsford for himself and the children while he completed his job at the church.

  “And from that time on until the children were married or grew up, what did your father do with respect to the children?” Dempsey asked.

  “He always went to work and provided for them. He was very good.”

  “Did your father ever strike you?”

  “Never.”

  “Did he ever strike any of the children?”

  “Never.”

  “What did your father say to the children, if anything, if they struck any animals? You always had a dog around, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, he would say, ‘Don’t do that. You will hurt the poor little dog.’”

  What his daughter described as Fish’s undeviating kindness even extended to his errant wife. About three months after Anna Fish ran off, Mrs. DeMarco’s older sister received a letter from their mother “saying that the man she went away with was beating her and starving her.”

  “What did your father do when he heard that?” asked Dempsey.

  “Well, my father said, ‘The poor creature. Send her a letter and tell her to come home.’”

  The letter was dispatched, and Anna Fish returned to her family, seemingly contrite. One week later, however, John Straube had shown up at the door, pleading with his paramour to take him back. Fish himself was away at work again. Mrs. Fish invited her lover inside and hid him in the attic, where he continued to live. “She used to bring food up to him, unbeknown to my father,” Mrs. DeMarco explained.

  Before long, however, Fish had found out about Straube. Though he was willing to forgive his wife, he insisted that Straube had to go. But Anna Fish refused to give up her lover and ran off again, this time for good.

  All this was not to say that her father, kind and forgiving as he was, did not have his small eccentricities. Mrs. DeMarco recalled the time in 1931 when Fish was living with her family in Astoria, Queens. They had just finished lunch when Fish began squirming in his chair. “And I says, ‘What’s the matter, pop, is your rupture bothering you again?’ Because he had a rupture and was operated on, and I thought maybe it had come back to him. He says, ‘Oh no, no. You see, not so long ago I put three more of those needles in me.’ I didn’t know what to think. I says, ‘Well, what did you do that for, pop?’ He says, ‘Well, you see, there is a mood that comes over me and I just can’t help myself.’”

  Dempsey nodded as he listened to this anecdote, then asked, “What can you say about your father’s habits generally?”

  “He never smoked, never drank.” Mrs. DeMarco sniffed back some tears. “He had very good habits.”

  At 4:45 P.M., Justice Close, after apologizing to the jury for having to “detain them over the weekend,” recessed court until 10 A.M. the following Monday. The murder trial of Albert Fish had reached its exact midpoint.

  33

  “We all thought Papa Fish was a funny kind of man, but we were all so young and countrified that we just assumed that men from New York were all like that.”

  MARY NICHOLAS

  Except for juror number nine, Louis S. Hirsch—who was granted a two-hour visit to his Scarsdale home on Saturday afternoon because of the death of his seventy-five-year-old mother-in
-law, Mrs. Anna Brainin—the Fish jury spent the weekend confined in the Roger Smith Hotel. Room windows open to the unseasonable warmth, which reached a record-breaking seventy-four degrees on Saturday, the men passed the time playing pinochle and bridge, reading novels, and poring over the newspapers. All the articles about the Fish trial had been scissored from the papers, but there was still plenty to read about, from the latest celebrity gossip to at least one event of genuinely world-shaking significance.

  From the Midwest came a report that aviator Wiley Post had failed in his second attempt to set a nonstop, coast-to-coast record when a sudden oxygen loss in his cockpit had forced him to bring down his weather-beaten plane, the Winnie Mae, at the Cleveland Airport. Down in St. Petersburg, Babe Ruth, wearing the uniform of the Boston Braves, made his debut against his former teammates. (The Braves beat the Yankees by a score of three to two, though the Bambino contributed little to the victory, having been held to a single hit.) In London, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton—whose personal fortune was estimated at $42,000,000—confirmed rumors of her impending divorce from Prince Alexis Mdivani.

  These stories, however, were trivia compared to the stunning news from Berlin, where Adolph Hitler effectively tore up the Versailles Treaty over the weekend by announcing the reinstitution of military conscription in the Reich. A few days later, at a rally in Cologne, Nazi propagandist Jules Steicher made an impassioned speech comparing Hitler to Christ.

  As shocking as the testimony had been so far, it wasn’t until day six of Albert Fish’s trial—Monday, March 18—that Justice Close found it necessary to ban female spectators from the courtroom. Up to then, the jurors had heard various references to the extravagant perversity of Fish’s obscene correspondence. On Monday, they finally began hearing the fulsome details of the old man’s sexual pathology from witnesses who knew about it firsthand.

  Grace Shaw was a married, middle-aged wife and mother, who, in September, 1934, had placed a classified ad in The New York Times Sunday edition offering to care for elderly or invalid boarders at her home in Little Neck, Queens. Several days after the ad appeared, she received a letter supposedly written by a movie director named Robert E. Hayden—one of Fish’s favorite masquerades—who claimed that he was due back in Hollywood and needed a place to board his disabled son Bobby. The letter, which Dempsey read to the jury as soon as the courtroom was cleared of women, was one of Fish’s standard sadomasochistic concoctions. “Here is the case,” he had written.

  When 5, Bobby fell down the cellar stairs. Sustained a brain concussion. Has never been really normal since. Though going on 20, good looking, well built, fully developed, he has the mentality of the age when he fell. Every part of his body has grown but the brain. He is harmless and just as easy to spank or switch as a child of 5 … He gets cross & cranky at times and don’t always mind. I am now trying out European treatment in such cases. Prof. Cairo of Vienna Austria recommends it. He says when he gets a spell he must be whipped. They are having great success with it over there in such cases. So you see, as his own father I would sooner have him whipped than have him lose his reason entirely…. Should you take him in charge, on the first occasion he shows temper spank him same as you would a small boy and don’t hesitate to use the cat-o-nine tails on his bare behind.

  When Mrs. Shaw wrote back to say that she had consulted her twenty-year-old daughter and both of them were willing to care for Bobby in the style “Hayden” had described, she received a warm response by return mail. “Just got home and found your letter,” Fish had written. “Am so glad you are interested. Before I call on you, will you kindly advise me—Are you a widow? And if so would you consider another marriage?”

  Mrs. Shaw replied that she was indeed married, though her husband’s presence, she hastened to add, would not in any way interfere with the regimen recommended by the eminent Professor Cairo of Vienna. Apparently, Fish was somewhat crestfallen by the news of Mrs. Shaw’s marital status. Clearly, she was a woman after his own heart. But he was happy to have lucked upon her nevertheless and immediately sent a reply:

  My Dear Mrs. Shaw

  Just got your very nice letter. I am much pleased to know that you are not one bit ashamed to strip Bobby naked and bathe him. Am also glad you spoke to your daughter and she is willing to aid you in taking care of him. There is no good reason why either of you should be ashamed. You know times have changed and so have the people. What in times past was considered immodest is now very commonplace. Then again look at what young girls training to become nurses see and touch in hospitals. Now with so many brothers and sisters, you should be highly proficient in bathing. Not to speak of the fine art of spanking. You know in Bobby’s case whipping is to be your pass word. In your efforts to earn a living for yourself and daughter, you are fortunate in having a girl old enough to assist her mother in using a paddle or the cat-o-nine-tails on Bobby’s bare behind. You say she gives her OK and is willing to do her part. I shall be very glad to compensate her for spanking or switching him. Bear this in mind, both of you. It is for his own good that he is to be whipped. So don’t let your heart stay your hand. Do you know that I feel that in part I am to blame for the condition Bobby is in. My conscience says that for being careless I should be well whipped in the same manner (and place) both of you will whip Bobby. Some day I hope you will accommodate me. I would give a nice new $100 bill for a good old fashioned spanking and a taste of the switch. There is a place on 42 St., Fleishman’s Baths, where naked men are rubbed all over by women. White, Black—Chinese. I could go there and be well whipped. Most women would get a kick out spanking a naked man. But I prefer some privacy—a home. Let your daughter read this letter. I am a man of the world and she can get knowledge of the world through it.

  I feel that we shall be fast friends.

  Again, Mrs. Shaw conveyed her willingness to perform the prescribed services. With that, Fish commenced a month-long relationship with the Queens housewife, conducted mostly by mail, that grew progressively more perverse. Fish wrote to her regularly, sometimes twice a day, describing in ever more graphic detail the corporal punishments Bobby’s mental health required. At one point, he even enclosed a helpful little diagram, representing the ideal position for a spanking—belly-down, spread-eagle, ankles and wrists secured to the corner bedposts, bare buttocks ready for the whip. And to all these proposals Mrs. Shaw gave her unqualified consent.

  According to her courtroom testimony, Mrs. Shaw was simply stringing her correspondent along until she had gathered enough evidence to bring to the postal authorities—though under cross-examination, she admitted that she had, in fact, been willing to perform the proposed “duties” on Bobby for the substantial sums “Hayden” had promised.

  In any event, she did a good job of convincing Fish that he had found the dominatrix of his dreams. Eventually he contrived to meet Mrs. Shaw in person, hoping to receive, as he put it in another letter, “some good home cooking with a good spanking thrown in.”

  But—though he had been paving the way for this possibility from the very start (“some day I hope you will accommodate me”)—the old man decided, for whatever reason, not to show up in the guise of Hayden. Instead, he invented another identity for himself, a “friend and ward” of Hayden’s named James Pell, whom he introduced in a letter dated October 7, 1934. “Last night,” Fish had written:

  I thought of a good way to test your ability at Spanking. Now Mr. James W. Pell is a friend & ward of mine. He has been declared incompetent and I have $32,500 of his money in trust. He is without a living relation and I don’t see why you can’t earn some of his money. Two of his sons were blown to pieces in the War. At times he imagines he is a boy at school, has been naughty and must be spanked for it … The least I have in mind is this. You have told me that I need not worry about you being ashamed to strip Bobby naked and spank his bare behind. If you are not ashamed of Bobby, you won’t be of Jimmy. So when you meet him, take him upstairs, undress him, give him a bath, then spank him g
ood. He will say teacher whip me. You might as well let your daughter acquire the art of spanking by beginning on Jimmy.

  The very next day, Fish sent Mrs. Shaw another letter containing additional details about Pell. “In 1928 he was operated on for a hernia. When you have him stripped you will see the mark of the incision. Look on his left groin, from his penis to his hipbone. He was prepared for another operation ten days ago. All hair shaved off. That is why he looks like a picked chicken…. Jimmy has a habit of painting his behind red or gold. When you strip him you will see.”

  Mrs. Shaw agreed to meet Pell. And so, on a Sunday afternoon in late October, Fish—carrying a letter of introduction, supposedly written by Hayden, plus a small, newspaper-wrapped package—rode the bus to Glenwood Avenue and Northern Boulevard, where he was met by Mrs. Shaw. Surprised at the shabby appearance of the withered old man, Mrs. Shaw led him along the quiet suburban streets to her home. In response to his question, she explained that her husband was away on an errand and not expected back for at least one hour.

  Ushering him into the living room, she introduced him to her daughter, who offered him a cup of coffee. While the young woman went off to prepare it, Fish handed Mrs. Shaw the paper-wrapped package and letter. She carried them into another room and tore each of them open in turn.

  Inside the package was a length of rope that been soaked in brine. The letter, as she testified at the trial, contained detailed instructions for whipping the old man with the rope. The language of the letter, said Mrs. Shaw, “was of such a nature that I could not go through with it.”

  Shaken, Mrs. Shaw returned to the living room and pulled up a chair in front of the old man. “Mr. Pell,” she said, “there is no reason why I should have to whip you. There is no need for it. You are not a patient of mine. Were I to do such a thing and you dropped dead, I would be held for murder.”