Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer Page 28

  “Don’t put any stock, gentlemen, in this divine command business. That is merely a smoke screen again.” Every step of Fish’s crime spoke of “premeditation and design,” directed toward the fulfillment of a clear-cut goal—“to satisfy his own sexual gratification.”

  “And so, gentlemen, the People leave this case in your hands, knowing that whatever you do, you will do the right thing by the People of this County, of this State, and by the defendant.”

  On that flat, even perfunctory note, Gallagher brought his summation to a close.

  Justice Close began his charge to the jury at precisely 1:50 P.M., immediately following the lunch recess. Standing beside his chair in accordance with local custom, he presented an orderly and lucid summary of the issues, explaining the six possible verdicts that might be rendered in the case, ranging from acquittal to first-degree murder as charged. He proposed a systematic way for the jurors to proceed in their deliberations and recited several relevant sections of the Penal Code, including the ones pertaining to the legal definition of insanity.

  One section in particular “may have some bearing upon the evidence in this case,” the judge explained, then read it aloud to the jury. “A morbid propensity to commit prohibited acts, existing in the mind of a person who is not shown to have been incapable of knowing the wrongfulness of such acts, forms no defense to a prosecution thereof.”

  It was a point that the judge clearly felt was worth repeating. “Well, now, gentlemen,” he stressed. “If you find that this man through his own perversion has so weakened his will that an irresistible impulse comes upon him to satisfy his sexual passions, that would not excuse him from the consequences of his act. He must have been suffering from such a defect of reason as not to know the nature and quality of his act or to know that it was wrong when he performed it, or he must answer for the consequences of his act.”

  At 3:01 P.M., the judge completed his charge, dismissing the alternate juror, Thomas Madden, with the thanks of the Court. As the jury retired to begin its deliberations, a flock of newsmen surrounded Madden, who created a stir by declaring that the psychiatric testimony had been completely confusing to him. Had he been called on to take part in the final deliberations, he would have simply disregarded the opinions of the alienists and relied on his own judgment. As far as he was concerned, Fish was insane.

  Taking an informal poll among themselves, the reporters came up with the same verdict.

  At 6:00 P.M., the jury recessed for dinner at the Roger Smith Hotel, resuming their deliberations at 7:30. Slightly less than one hour later, at precisely 8:27 P.M., the twelve men filed back into the courtroom, having agreed upon a verdict.

  John Partelow, the foreman, rose to deliver it.

  “And how do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty?” intoned the clerk.

  “We find the defendant guilty as charged in the indictment,” Partelow declared solemnly.

  The reporters hurried to the nearest phones to file the news. Albert Fish had been found guilty of murder in the first degree. The verdict carried a mandatory sentence of death in the electric chair at Sing Sing.

  Fish, sitting with his hands folded tightly in his lap, slumped at the news, though he stood with his shoulders squared and his back straight as two guards led him up to the clerk’s table, where he delivered his pedigree in a soft but steady voice.

  At Dempsey’s request, Justice Close deferred the formal sentencing until Monday morning at 10:00 A.M.

  Fish’s children, waiting tensely in the hallway, heard the news from a reporter. The old man’s sons flinched but said nothing. Fish’s two daughters broke into violent sobs and were led from the courthouse by their husbands.

  Mrs. Budds’s reaction was jubilant. “Good for him!” she exclaimed. “Just what I expected.”

  Her son Edward concurred. “I’m glad of the verdict. It won’t bring Gracie back. But it was what he deserved.”

  Only Mr. Budd seemed struck by the gravity of the verdict. “I had a funny feeling when I heard it,” he told reporters. “It hit the top of my head when I realized he would go to the electric chair. It put a tremor through me.” He paused for a moment, then echoed his wife and son. “But he deserves it. Insanity was the bunk!”

  As guards led the dazed-looking Fish past a crowd of reporters and photographers, several of the newsmen shouted out to him, asking how he felt about the verdict. “I feel bad,” he murmured. “I expected Matteawan.”

  Dempsey, too, was asked for his reaction. “The man is insane,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t conceive how twelve intelligent men in the face of this overwhelming evidence of perversion, which makes him an incredible pervert even among perverts, could decide he was sane.”

  As it happened, the majority of the jurors wouldn’t necessarily have disagreed with Dempsey. Buttonholed by reporters on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, one of the jurors revealed that most of them had, in fact, thought Fish was insane. But they felt he should be electrocuted anyway.

  Later that night, a report began to circulate that made its way into the next day’s papers. According to this story, Fish’s attitude toward the outcome of his trial had undergone a significant change once he’d had a chance to think it over. He still believed that the verdict “wasn’t right” and he felt especially sorry that “my family will have no one to guide them.”

  But the more he considered the prospect of his own execution, the less unhappy about it he felt. Indeed, as Norma Abrams wrote in the Daily News, “his watery eyes gleamed at the thought of being burned by a heat more intense than the flames with which he often seared his flesh to gratify his lust.”

  “What a thrill it will be to die in the electric chair!” Fish was quoted as saying. “It will be the supreme thrill—the only one I haven’t tried!”

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  “We do not even know if, when animals tear each other to pieces, they do not experience a certain sensual pleasure, so that when the wolf strangles the lamb, one can say equally well, ‘he loves lambs’ as that ‘he hates lambs.’”

  THEODOR LESSING

  The tabloid headlines trumpeting the news of Fish’s sentence seemed to be the fitting climax of the long, lurid affair. But there were more shocks to come.

  In the days following the end of the trial, Fish was back on the front pages as a result of several new confessions. To be sure, these confessions merely confirmed what the authorities had believed for months. But they were no less sensational for that.

  The first took place on Sunday evening, March 24, in Warden Casey’s office, where—to a group that included Elbert Gallagher and his boss, District Attorney Walter Ferns—Fish admitted that he had, in fact, kidnapped and slain four-year-old Billy Gaffney in February, 1927.

  The old man had already written out the details of that killing in a letter to James Dempsey—and if the atrocities Fish described in that letter were true, then, for sheer ghastliness and depravity, the Gaffney crime had surpassed even the Budd outrage.

  “There is a public dumping ground in Riker Ave., Astoria,” the letter began. “All kinds of junk has been thrown there for years … I will admit the motorman who positively identified me as getting off his car with a small boy was correct. I can tell you at that time I was looking for a suitable place to do the job.” Then he proceeded to the specifics:

  Not satisfied there, I brought him to the Riker Ave. dumps. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took him. A few yrs. ago I painted this house for the man who owns it. He is in the auto wrecking business. I forget his name but my son Henry can tell you, because he bought a car from him. This man’s father lives in the house. Gene, John, Henry helped me paint the house. There were at that time a number of old autos along the road.

  I took the G boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took trolley to 59 St. at 2 A.M. and
walked from there home.

  Next day about 2 P.M., I took tools, a good heavy cat-o-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these half in six strips about 8 in. long.

  I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears—nose—slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood.

  I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in grip. Then I cut him thru the middle of his body. Just below his belly button. Then thru his legs about 2 in. below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head—feet—arms—hands and the legs below the knee.

  This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along road going to North Beach. Water is 3 to 4 ft. deep. They sank at once.

  I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee wees and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears—nose—pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good.

  Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when meat had roasted about 1/4 hr., I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy.

  In about 2 hr. it was nice and brown, cooked thru. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I eat every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was as sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet.

  While the police announced plans to search the Riker Avenue dump on the chance of turning up evidence of Fish’s professed butchery, newsmen traveled to Brooklyn to get Mrs. Gaffney’s reaction.

  Eight years after her son’s disappearance, Elizabeth Gaffney still refused to believe that her boy was gone for good. On Christmas days, she continued to set a place for him at the family table. Somewhere, she insisted, her son was alive and well.

  “I know in my heart and soul that Billy will come back to me,” she told the reporters. “I have never felt he is dead. I cannot get it out of my head that a woman took Billy away. He was nice-looking and well-liked.”

  As for Fish’s confession, Mrs. Gaffney declared that she would not believe it until she had heard the details from the old man’s own lips and satisfied herself that he was telling the truth.

  Inspector John Lagrene, in charge of Brooklyn detectives, promptly announced that Mrs. Gaffney would have her chance to confront her son’s confessed murderer as soon as Fish was transferred to his new accommodations in Sing Sing.

  On the morning of Monday, March 25, Albert Fish was brought before Justice Close, who sentenced him to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing during the week of April 29.

  Dressed in dark trousers and a gray coat, his sunken cheeks stubbled with white, the old man heard the sentence in silence, then gave a friendly little wave and piped, “Thank you, judge!”

  Elsewhere in the courthouse, Lawrence Clinton Stone—the so-called furnace killer of five-year-old Nancy Jean Costigan—was receiving his sentence at the same time. After pleading guilty to a charge of second-degree murder, Stone was given a sentence of fifty years to life by Justice William Bleakley.

  Fish and Stone were manacled together. Then, guarded by Warden Casey and Chief Deputy Sheriff Frederick Ruscoe, the two prisoners were driven off to Sing Sing, which, in the words of one reporter, “opened its gates to receive both scions of Revolutionary families at the same time.”

  Inside the prison, the paths of the two men—who had not exchanged a word during the entire ride—diverged. Stone was given convict number 90,273 and taken to the cell he would occupy for the next half century, while Fish—number 90,272—was led off to the death house.

  Before the day was over, the old man would drop another bombshell, admitting that, in 1924, he had murdered eight-year-old Francis McDonnell, the Staten Island policeman’s son. Fish confessed that he had lured the little boy into the woods, strangled him with the child’s own suspenders, and was about to dismember the body when he thought he heard someone approaching and fled.

  The following morning, the Daily Mirror declared that Fish’s latest disclosures certified his status as “the most vicious child-slayer in criminal history.” Occupying the center of the front page was a large photograph of Fish as he was being led off to Sing Sing. Above it, the caption read, “PARENTS WILL BREATHE EASIER.”

  In the end, no one would ever know the precise number of murders the old man had committed, though one reliable source—a Supreme Court justice who had gotten the information from police investigators—told Frederic Wertham that Fish had probably been responsible for the torture-killings of at least fifteen children.

  Three days after his transfer to Sing Sing, on Thursday, March 28, Albert Fish was served a pork chop dinner in his cell on death row. When the tray was removed, the guard failed to notice that one of the pork bones was missing from the plate.

  During the night, Fish—repeating the procedure he had employed in Eastview—sharpened the bone against the floor of his cell. The next day, he used it to carve an eight-inch cross on his abdomen.

  Keeper Daniel Maloney spotted Fish as he was in the act of mutilating himself, entered the cell, and took the bone away from the old man. When Warden Lewis Lawes asked Fish why he had wounded himself, the old man explained that he was “in pain” from the needles inside his body, and “I thought maybe I could relieve it that way.”

  On a mild Sunday afternoon in early spring, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaffney traveled to Sing Sing prison to have her face-to-face meeting with Albert Fish. Accompanying her were Inspector John Lagarene, Sergeant Thomas Hammill, and Detective William King (who, just a few months later, would receive the Rhinelander Medal for outstanding detective work from Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia during a gala ceremony at City Hall).

  Fish was led from his cell to the counsel room in the death house by his lawyer, James Dempsey, and Principal Keeper John Sheehy.

  Once inside the room, however, the old man announced that he would not see or speak to Mrs. Gaffney. He began to weep bitterly and demanded to be left alone.

  Standing in the doorway, Mrs. Gaffney attempted to put various questions to Fish through Dempsey—questions about the clothing Billy had been wearing on the day of his disappearance and other details that only his abductor would be likely to know. But Fish refused to answer.

  Two hours later, Mrs. Gaffney finally gave up and headed back to Brooklyn, still unpersuaded that Albert Fish was the person who had stolen her son.

  It was April 3 when Mrs. Gaffney made her visit. By then, Dempsey had already filed his appeal and Fish’s execution had been stayed.

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  The memory of the just is blessed; but the name of the wicked shall rot.

  PROVERBS 10:7

  Dempsey pleaded for a reversal of Fish’s conviction on several grounds, including the prosecutor’s literally bone-rattling display of the corpus delecti and the judge’s “definite hostility towards the defense.” Primarily, however, Dempsey based his appeal on the seemingly self-evident argument that there was “reasonable doubt … as to Albert H. Fish’s sanity.”

  Among the evidence he cited to support his case was the list of Fish’s “abnormalities” that Dr. Wertham had prepared for the trial. This list, Dempsey asserted, included “every known sexual perversion and some perversions never heard of before”:

  Sadism.

  Masochism.

  Active and passive flagellation.

  Castration and self-castration.

  Exhibitionism.

/>   Voyeur Acts.

  Piqueur Acts (jabbing sharp implements into oneself or others for sexual gratification).

  Pedophilia.

  Homosexuality.

  Fellatio.

  Cunnilingus.

  Anilingus (oral stimulation of the anus).

  Coprophagia (eating feces).

  Undinism (sexual preoccupation with urine).

  Fetishism.

  Cannibalism.

  Hypererotism (abnormal intensification of the sexual instinct).

  Fish was a “psychiatric phenomenon,” Dempsey declared. “It is noteworthy that no single case-history report, either in legal or medical annals, contains a record of one individual who possessed all of these sexual abnormalities.”

  Dempsey ended his appeal on a characteristically fervent note. “Albert H. Fish’s insanity was disregarded by the jury, undoubtedly through passion and prejudice. His conviction proves merely that we still burn witches in America.”

  On November 26, 1935, the Court of Appeals unanimously decided to uphold Fish’s death sentence. The execution was rescheduled for the week of January 13, 1936.

  On a bitterly cold day in early January, Dempsey—accompanied by several of his associates, five of Fish’s children, and Dr. Fredric Wertham—traveled to Albany in a last-ditch attempt to save Albert Fish from the chair. The lawyer had arranged a hearing with Governor Herbert Lehman to plead for a commutation of the death sentence.

  Wertham made the lengthiest and most impassioned speech, appealing to the governor “not on behalf of Mr. Fish—who doesn’t mind the electric chair anyway, in his distorted ideas of atonement. He is, in my opinion, a man not only incurable and unreformable but also unpunishable. I am appealing on behalf of the many victims, past and future, of men such as Fish.”

  Fish was manifestly a sick man, and to execute him, Wertham argued (resorting to the same analogy Dempsey had employed) was “like burning witches. The time will come when psychiatrists will be as little proud of their role in these procedures as the theologians of the past.”