Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer Page 25

  By then, Mrs. Shaw had become convinced that she had been made the victim of a hoax, that there was no wealthy movie director named Robert Hayden—only this shriveled old deviant with his drooping moustache and painted ass. She allowed him to finish his coffee and then sent him on his way.

  The next day, she made copies of all the letters she had received from “Hayden” and mailed them to The New York Times. Within a week, the material had been passed along to the proper authorities and, in early November, a postal inspector named R. H. Kemper was assigned to the case.

  Acting under Kemper’s instructions, Mrs. Shaw continued to correspond with “Hayden.” Indeed, she made the tone of her letters markedly more personal, addressing him for the first time as “My dear Robert.” The increased intimacy of her letters sent Fish into rapturous flights of utterly degraded fantasy. “My Dearest Darling Sweetest Little Girlie Grace,” Fish wrote to her on November 9. “Just got your letter calling me dear Robert. Dear Honey Heart of mine, you have captured me. I am your Slave and everything I have is yours. Prick—Balls—Ass and all the money you want…. If you were my own sweet wife, you would not be afraid of me. O girlie of my heart would I love you—and how. Hug-Kiss-Squeeze you, spank you, then KISS where I spanked! Your nice-pretty-fat-sweet ass…. You won’t need toilet paper to wipe your sweet pretty fat Ass as I shall eat all of it, then Lick your sweet ass clean with my tongue….” And so on.

  Following Kemper’s directions, Mrs. Shaw answered these ravings by asking “Hayden” to her home for Thanksgiving dinner, an invitation which he immediately accepted. When the holiday arrived, several post-office inspectors plus a New York City police detective were waiting at her home to arrest the old man.

  But he never showed up.

  Helen Karlsen, the Brooklyn landlady who, in 1927, had been another recipient of Fish’s unwelcome attentions, also testified on Monday. Unlike the forthright Mrs. Shaw, she blushed at having to discuss such sordid business. No amount of coaxing by Dempsey could get her to describe the precise contents of the letters Fish had slipped under her bedroom door.

  “Do you recall the substance of the letters?” Dempsey asked.

  “Well, I do but I don’t want to say anything about it.”

  Dempsey finally prevailed on her to summarize one of the less unmentionable parts of Fish’s first letter. “He told me he was going to a lodge,” Mrs. Karlsen said, her voice barely above a whisper, “and he expected to have a lot of things done to him, and one of the principal things would be he would be tarred and feathered, and he wanted me to help him next day to remove all this. He said the lodge allowed him twenty dollars for this procedure and he would double it to forty dollars if I would help him.”

  “The other two letters,” asked Dempsey. “Were they of similar character?”

  “Yes, only worse than that.”

  Mrs. Karlsen went on to describe the bloody, nailstudded paddles she had discovered in the attic after Fish’s eviction, though she shied away from characterizing the “little mess” she had found on his bedroom floor.

  “What do you mean by a little mess?” asked Dempsey.

  “I don’t like to say just what it was,” Mrs. Karlsen replied. “He just made some dirt and left it behind the door.”

  “Can you say what kind of dirt it was?”

  “Human dirt.”

  “Number Two?” asked Dempsey, resorting to playground euphemism.

  “Yes.”

  Without doubt, the day’s weirdest testimony came from the person described by reporters as a “surprise defense witness.” This was Mary Nicholas, Fish’s seventeen-year-old “step kiddie” to whom he’d written from Eastview, promising her “18 good hard smacks” on her bare behind for her birthday and describing the voyeuristic opportunities available at the Y.M.C.A. Dempsey had brought her to White Plains from her home in Bartlett, Ohio, to testify on behalf of the old man she continued to refer to as “Papa.”

  A plain-featured high school freshman with a pug nose and round, wire frame glasses, Mary struck the streetsavvy newsmen at the press table as the epitome of Midwestern innocence. Reared in rural Ohio, the youngest of seven children of Mrs. Myrta Nicholas—one of the three women Fish had wed illegally in 1930—the darkhaired teenager seemed as naive as a nursery schooler as she told of the bizarre doings that had taken place in her home shortly after Fish’s arrival.

  It had been in January, 1930, when Mary was twelve, that Fish had traveled to the Nicholases’ little house in Bartlett to meet Mary’s widowed mother, whose name he had gotten from a matrimonial agency. He spent the first night getting acquainted with the family and describing his train trip from New York.

  On the second night, he offered to teach the children some games.

  “What games?” Dempsey asked.

  “Buck-Buck, How Many Hands Up,” Mary said pleasantly.

  Speaking in the tone of voice grown-ups tend to use when conversing with very young children, Dempsey asked her to explain how the game was played.

  “He went into his room,” said Mary, “and he had a little pair of trunks, brown trunks, that he put on. He took everything else off but those. He put those on and came out into the front room, and he got down on his hands and knees, and he had a paint stick that he stirred paint with.”

  “About how big a stick was that?”

  “It was about that long,” Mary said, holding her hands approximately two feet apart. “And about that wide,” she said, moving her palms to within six inches of each other.

  Dempsey asked her to continue.

  “He would give the stick to one of us, and then he would get down on his hands and knees and we would sit on his back, one at a time, with our back facing him, and then we would put up so many fingers, and he was to tell how many fingers we had up, and if he guessed right, which he never did, why, we weren’t supposed to hit him. Sometimes he would even say more fingers than we really had. And if he never guessed right, why, we would hit him as many fingers as we would have up.”

  Justice Close leaned toward the witness. “Was your mother there when you played that?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How long would you play that game?” Dempsey asked. “For hours?”

  “Oh, no,” Mary said. “We wouldn’t play it very long, just about an hour at a time every evening.”

  Occasionally, Mary went on to explain, they played the game with a hairbrush instead of a stick. For variety’s sake.

  “Which end of the hairbrush would you hit him with?” Dempsey asked.

  Mary shrugged. “Sometimes the side with the bristles on, sometimes the other side, just whichever way we happened to pick it up.”

  “And all he had on was this little pair of trunks?”

  “Yes, and they were very thin.”

  When Dempsey asked if she and her siblings had played anything else with their elderly guest, Mary said, yes, a game called “Sack of Potatoes Over.” And how was that one played? inquired Dempsey.

  “He put on those little trunks, and then he would throw us up on his shoulder, and we would slide down his back, and we would scratch him with our nails. By the time we would get through playing, why, his back would be red.”

  Fish had also tried to introduce his new little friends to another of his favorite activities, but this time he had met with some resistance. “He brought a package of pins with him,” Mary explained, “and he told my sister and I one evening to see if we could stick those pins in our fingernails right up there just as far as they could get, and he gave my sister and I one, and before we even had any stuck into our fingers, he stuck a pin in his finger, too.”

  “In how many fingers did he stick it?”

  “All of them.”

  “How far up did he shove the pins?”

  “As far as it would go.”

  “What did you notice about his fingers after he had the pins stuck all the way in?”

  “They bled,” Mary said simply.

  Fish seem
ed disappointed that Mary and her sister weren’t as enthusiastic about this pastime as they had been about “Buck-Buck, How Many Hands Up” and “Sack of Potatoes Over.” “He asked us how come we didn’t stick the pins in our fingers, too.” But when the children explained the reason—“we told him it hurt”—he behaved very understandingly and “never said anything more.”

  Apparently, no one in the Nicholas household saw anything wrong with Fish’s little games. They couldn’t help noticing, however, that the old man did have a few habits that seemed peculiar even to them. “Every night after we would get through playing the games,” Mary continued, “why, he would go to the toilet, and he took all the paper off the roll and lit it, and he had a big fire. The first night we noticed it, I just happened to be outside and seen smoke coming out the door and I ran back and told my mother. We went down there, and there he was, he had a fire in the middle of the floor. She told him to put it out, and he wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t help put it out, so we got some water and put it out.”

  “Did the fire do much damage?” asked Dempsey.

  “No.”

  “Did it burn the floor?”

  “No. He done that every night.”

  “He set a fire every night?” Dempsey asked, his tone tinged with incredulity.

  “Yes, every night.”

  “In the center of the floor there?”

  “Yes.”

  Apparently, however, Fish’s virtues—whatever they were—outweighed his shortcomings in the eyes of Mary’s mother. Ten days after the old man showed up in Bartlett with his paint stick and matches and package of pins, he and the widow Nicholas were married.

  Several members of Fish’s immediate family added their contributions to the never-ending catalogue of Fish’s eccentricities. His son Henry described the time the old man had spent three days trying to fill some cracks in the front stoop of their house by pouring several sackfuls of uncooked oatmeal down them.

  Mrs. Anna Collins, Fish’s oldest daughter, recalled a night in 1917 when Henry—then a child of three—had asked her for a glass of water. Walking downstairs to fetch it, she had found her father lying on the floor, completely rolled up in the living-room carpet. Only his head was visible, from the nose up. “Pop,” she had admonished him. “Go on up to bed. You will never get any rest that way.” The next morning, when Anna came downstairs to fix breakfast, Fish was just unrolling himself from the carpet. When the girl asked him why he had chosen to sleep that way instead of upstairs in his bed, Fish had replied, “St. John the Apostle told me to.”

  Fish’s pretty, eleven-year-old granddaughter Gloria—the apple of the old man’s eye—recalled a summer day, four years earlier, when she had come inside her house for a glass of water and found her grandfather bent over the living-room sofa, spanking himself with a stick.

  Eugene Fish, the last of Fish’s children to testify, told of the time he had discovered his father standing nude by the front window of an apartment the old man had been hired to paint, running a dry brush over the window casing. A particularly poignant moment in the trial occurred toward the end of Gene’s testimony, when he was asked about an incident that had taken place in April, 1928, when he, his brother John, and their father were sharing an apartment on East 81st Street in Manhattan.

  “One night,” Gene began, “I returned home from work about 5:15 or 5:30. We lived on the top floor. The kitchen was in between the front room and the back bedroom. As I came into the kitchen, I noticed a light in the bedroom. The kitchen was dark. So I walked into the bedroom”—here, Gene’s voice cracked slightly—“and I saw my father sticking needles into himself.”

  “What happened at that time?” Dempsey asked gently.

  “I asked him why he was doing it,” Gene answered, his lower lip beginning to tremble, “And he said he had a message from Christ.” With that, the young man buried his face in his hands and broke into sobs.

  The psychiatric testimony began early on Tuesday, March 19, when Fredric Wertham took the stand. He remained there for the rest of the day and was back the following morning.

  Of all Dempsey’s witnesses, Dr. Wertham was by far the most important. His testimony cast far-reaching light on Fish’s psychopathology, illuminating for the first time the terrible depths of his madness. To be sure, there were large, shadowy areas of the old man’s life and mind whose dark secrets Wertham had not been able to penetrate. Fish’s sexual history stretched back over half a century and was so steeped in iniquity that even he had lost track of his crimes.

  Still, the story Wertham told that day—the seventh of the trial—provided the most shockingly detailed picture of Albert Howard Fish that the world would ever get. Once again, Justice Close ordered all women spectators from the courtroom. The twelve male jurors, who had begun to seem slightly numbed by the week-long barrage of horror, were jolted to life by Wertham’s testimony, looking visibly dismayed throughout much of the day. Fish’s children, sitting on the bench behind their father, repeatedly covered their eyes and wept.

  Wertham began by sketching Fish’s family history. In two generations (meaning, Wertham explained, Fish’s “brothers and sisters and the brothers and sisters” of his parents), the doctor had discovered no less than seven cases of extreme psychopathology, including a paternal uncle who suffered from a religious psychosis, a half brother who was confined to a state hospital for the insane, a younger brother who died of hydrocephalus (“water on the brain,” as Fish called it), and a sister who, in Fish’s words, “had some sort of mental affliction.” Fish’s mother, too, was regarded by her neighbors as “very queer, inasmuch as she heard noises on the street and saw things.”

  Fish’s father, Randall, had been seventy-five-years old when the boy was born. Fish claimed to have distinct memories of how the old man looked. Beyond that, he recalled only one detail, the nickname his father had given him—“Stick in the Mud.”

  Randall Fish died when his youngest son was five, and the boy was shipped off to St. John’s Orphanage in Washington, D.C. The years he spent in that institution were the stuff of nightmares, a brutal induction into a life of petty crime and routine depravity. It was there that he first learned to associate pleasure with pain.

  “Now the experience in the orphanage is very important,” Wertham explained.

  Because he dates his earliest sexual abnormalities to this time. He described to me very vividly that in that place not only did the inmates commit all sorts of sensory acts with each other, in which he joined, but it made the greatest impression on him. One of the guardians there, a sister or teacher, had the habit of frequently whipping the boys and taking six at a time and having them strip and having one see what happened to the others. And he remembers very vividly seeing the other boys whipped, and he recalls that before the age of seven, he had his first sexual feeling.

  “And what did he get that feeling from?” asked Dempsey.

  “From being whipped himself and from seeing other boys whipped and screaming.”

  As a young child, Wertham continued, Fish had displayed “a number of early neurotic traits,” including enuresis—bedwetting—which he experienced until he was eleven. He was also a high-strung and inordinately “sensitive” child. “I can give you one example of that,” said Wertham, going on to explain that Fish’s real first name was Hamilton. He had changed it as a teenager, however, because his schoolmates used to tease him by calling him “Ham-and-Eggs,” and “he couldn’t stand it.” The name he adopted, Albert, had originally belonged to his younger brother, the one who had died of brain disease.

  At this point, Wertham proceeded directly to what he called “the outstanding fact” of Fish’s life, a fact, he said, which could be summed up in a single sentence. “I can tell you that, to the best of my medical knowledge, every sexual abnormality that I have ever heard of this man has practiced—not only has he thought about it, not only has he daydreamed about it, but he has practiced it.”

  To begin with, said Wertham, Fi
sh was a sadist of “incredible cruelty … All his mind was bent on eliciting responses of pain in someone else.” In addition, he was a homosexual. “All through his life, women were just a substitute,” said Wertham. “An entirely secondary choice and secondary pleasure.”

  Fish’s third “outstanding” abnormality, Wertham went on, was what was known technically as pedophilia. His “prime sexual interest,” the doctor explained, “has only been children from the age of about five to fourteen or sixteen.”

  There were more abnormalities, of course. Indeed, Wertham had provided Dempsey with a list of no less than seventeen perversions or paraphilias that Fish had practiced throughout his life. For the moment, however, Wertham was only interested in focusing on Fish’s three “main abnormalities” and the strategies he had relied on to satisfy them:

  He started his sexual career, so to say, at the age of seventeen, at the time he became a painter. Now, that profession of painter this man has used as a convenience. He worked in many different institutions. He worked in Y.M.C.A.’s, he worked in homes for the tubercular, he worked in any kind of home where there were children, where he thought he could get children. In all these places, he made his headquarters the basement or the cellar. And he had the habit of wearing a painter’s overalls over his nude body, which gave him two advantages. First of all, he was nude in a moment. And secondly, he would be seen by his victims only in his painter’s clothes, and if they later met him on the streets or in his other clothes, they wouldn’t recognize him.

  There was another benefit to the painter’s trade, too. It allowed Fish to move easily from one locality to another. His basic equipment was highly portable. All he needed to do was pack up his brushes and tarps and leave, though sometimes, Wertham explained, Fish had found it necessary to depart in such a hurry that he had simply abandoned his belongings and disappeared.

  As Wertham spoke, a terrifying picture came into focus of Fish as a creature of fiendish cunning, a prowler in the darkness, emerging from his netherworld to snare his young prey. “Now this man has roamed around in basements and cellars for fifty years,” said Wertham. “There were so many innumerable instances that I can’t begin to give you how many there are. But I believe to the best of my knowledge that he has raped one hundred children. At least.”