SERIAL KILLER OF THE WEEK: Albert Fish
Known equally as the Werewolf of Wysteria and the Brooklyn Vampire, Albert Fish is one of America’s most terrifying serial killers. The child rapist and cannibal claimed to have “children in every state” and boasted that he had killed, raped or eaten around 100 people.
The Early Years
Hamilton Howard ‘Albert’ Fish was born on May 19th 1870. He was the youngest of three children to a father who was 75 years old at the time of his birth and a mother who was 32.
There was a long history of mental illness in his family, though the unreliable and primitive nature of mental healthcare at the time makes this information vague. As well as an uncle who suffered from mania and a brother confined to a state mental institution, Fish had a number of relatives who were diagnosed with mental illnesses. These included his mother, who suffered from hallucinations, and his sister, who was diagnosed with an uninformative ‘mental affliction’. Later on in life, Fish would have auditory hallucinations similar to his mother’s. His childhood was, to say the least, troubled.
When Fish was just five years old, his father died of a heart attack. Afterwards, his mother put him into Saint John’s Orphanage in Washington. It was while he was in the orphanage that he adopted the name Albert, chosen as tribute to a dead sibling, to escape the nickname ‘Ham and Eggs’. The place is now famous for the physical abuse inflicted on the children who lived there. He was there for five years before his mother got a government job and was able to support him again.
Fish’s deviant behaviour began at an early age. He began eating faeces and drinking urine at the age of twelve, when he was encouraged by another boy. He would go to public baths at the weekends to watch other children undress. It was around this age that he began writing obscene letters to women whose contact information he found in classified ads. He continued this habit his entire life.
The Murder Years
Although Fish’s first confirmed murder was committed as late as 1919, his crimes began much, much sooner. He moved to New York in 1880 at the age of 15, where he earned a living as a sex worker. Being away from his family, he had the freedom to explore his darker urges, which manifested in both violent sadomasochistic relationships and the molestation of young boys.
In 1898, when he was 33, his mother arranged for him to marry a woman nine years younger than he was.
He took on a job as a house painter to support his family, as he and his young wife had six children together. Despite the evident activity in the marital bed, Fish had numerous affairs with men during his marriage and continued to prey on children, mostly boys under the age of six.
It was around this time when he became obsessed with sexual mutilation after seeing a bisection of a penis in a waxworks museum.
Thomas Kedden
No one knows what became of Thomas Kedden.
In 1910, at the age of 19, Kedden met Fish in Delaware and the two became involved in a sadomasochistic sexual relationship. It is not clear whether or not it began consensually. By Fish’s own testimony, it is suggested that Kedden had learning disabilities to the extent that even if he was convinced him to agree, he may not have been able to truly consent. After just ten days together, Fish took Kedden to what he described as “an old farm house” and tortured him for two weeks.
In his confession many years later, Fish claimed that his original plan was to kill him, cut up his body and take it home. He changed his mind when he worried that the hot weather would speed up the decomposition process and the smell would give him away. Instead, Fish tied Kedden up and cut his penis in half. He poured peroxide on the wound and wrapped it in a handkerchief, then abandoned him in the farm house, leaving behind a ten dollar bill and goodbye kiss.
He made no attempt to find out what happened to Redden.
He returned to his family life, still punctuated by sadomasochistic affairs and child rape, for seven years before his wife left him. She took almost everything the family owned and fled with another man, leaving Fish to raise their six children alone.
At this point, his mental health deteriorated rapidly. He suffered from auditory hallucinations and believed he was being instructed by St John the Apostle to harm children and himself. He developed a habit of embedding needles in his groin and abdomen. By the time he was arrested and X-rayed, he had at least 29 needles in his pelvis. He would also burn his anus by filling it with wool soaked in lighter fluid and setting it alight.
Although it is believed that he never abused or attacked his own children, he did involve them and their friends in his self-flagellation. He had a nail-studded paddle that he would beat himself with and encouraged them to use it him on too.
Beatrice Kiel and Francis McDonnell
As his deviations escalated, so did his crimes.
He became obsessed with cannibalism and filled his diet with raw meat, occasionally also feeding it to his children. He believed that he was being instructed by God to torture, murder and sexually mutilate children. He used what he called his “implements of Hell” – a meat cleaver, a butcher knife and a small handsaw. He targeted people that he believed would not be missed if they disappeared, choosing to primarily attack African-Americans and the disabled. At least one of Fish’s potential victims managed to evade his grasp: eight-year-old Beatrice Kiel.
In 1924, Fish offered Beatrice Kiel money to help him look for rhubarb in an attempt to lure her away from her parents’ farm where she playing alone. She was on her way to join him, and may have never returned, when her mother saw her and chased Fish away.
Fish returned to the farm later, where he tried to sleep in the barn, perhaps in a renewed attempt to abduct the girl. Again, he was chased away, this time by Beatrice’s father Hans Kiel. In the same year, a nine-year-old boy called Francis McDonnell was reported missing after he didn’t come home from a game of catch with his friends.
The other children Francis had been playing with told the police that he left with an elderly man with a grey moustache. The story was corroborated by a neighbour who had seen the two of them heading into the woods. Francis’s mother also recognised the description of the man as she had noticed him hanging around the area earlier in the day, “mumbling to himself and making queer motions with his hands”.
A search party found Francis hanging from a tree in the woodland not far from his home. His legs and abdomen were covered with cuts, to the extent that his left hamstring was almost entirely stripped away. He had been sexually assaulted and then strangled with his own suspenders.
Due to the way many people described the abductor, including Mrs McDonnell’s description of him as “faded and grey”, he became almost a legendary figure in the area: The Grey Man.
Francis McDonnell’s death remained a mystery, until Fish was arrested years later, when eye witnesses, including Hans Kiel, identified him as The Grey Man. Initially, Fish denied the charges and it was not until 1935 – more than a decade after Francis’s death – that he finally confessed. He claimed that, on top of everything else, he had planned to castrate Francis, but fled when he heard people nearby.
Billy Gaffney
Another legend sprung up around Fish in 1927 when he abducted a four-year-old boy called Billy Gaffney in Brooklyn. Billy had been playing with another little boy when Fish led him away. When he spoke to the police, the boy said that “the bogeyman” took Billy.
Billy was last seen by a motorman called Joseph Meehan, who reported seeing a boy who matched Billy’s description crying on a Brooklyn trolley while being dragged around by an old man he later identified as Fish.
The story of Billy’s death was described in gruesome detail in a letter that Fish wrote to his attorney.
He had been working in the area when he took Billy to an empty house. There, he stripped the boy naked and left him bound and gagged with dirty rags. He burned Billy’s clothes and left him there overnight. Fish returned the next afternoon with his tools, including a cat-of-nine tails he had made out of his own belt. He whipped Billy until he was freely bleeding then mutilated his face. He slit the boy’s mouth from ear to ear and cut off his ears and nose. By this time, Billy was dead. Fish cut open the boy’s stomach and drank blood from the wound. Along with Billy’s ears and nose, Fish butchered and collected strips of his belly and buttocks in a bag. He chopped up the rest of Billy’s body and threw the pieces, in old potato sacks, into shallow pools of water near the North Beach. He took the fleshy chunks of the boy’s body home and later ate them.
The letter to Fish’s attorney included details about how Billy had been cooked, including the vegetables he put into the stew and how often Fish basted the meat.
Grace Budd
The mother of Grace Budd received a similar letter after Fish took her daughter.
Fish was introduced to the Budd family after responding to a classified ad posted by the 18-year-old Edward Budd looking for work in the countryside. Under a false identity, Fish interviewed Edward, later explaining that his plan was to tie him up, mutilate him and leave him to bleed to death.
Before Edward was due to start his anticipated employment, Fish went to visited the Budd family, where he met Edward’s younger sister, the ten-year-old Grace. He convinced Grace’s parents to allow him to take the girl to the fictional birthday party of his niece that evening.
Grace Budd (far right)
In reality, he took her to an abandoned house, where he stripped her naked and throttled her to death. Although he did not sexually assault her, he later told his attorney that he involuntarily ejaculated twice while kneeling on her chest with his hands around her throat. He cut her body up into little pieces and took the meat home to eat. In the letter to Grace’s mother, he wrote: “How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body.”
Fish was arrested in 1930 for sending obscene letters to women. Following a second arrest in 1931, he was sent to the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital. He was there for only ten days before he was declared abnormal but sane and released.
The Aftermath
It was the letter to Mrs Budd, sent in 1934, more than six years after Grace’s death, that led to Fish’s capture. It was delivered in an envelope with the logo of the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association emblazoned on it.
The police used this to launch their investigation, following its origins to a janitor who worked at the NYPCBA. The janitor had indeed owned the stationery, but had left it in a rooming house that was subsequently rented by Fish.
The chief investigator, William F King, waited there. When Fish returned, he agreed to come in for questioning, but then brandished a razor blade. After being quickly disarmed, Fish confessed to the murder of Grace Budd.
Fish’s trial began in March 1935 and latest for ten days. Fish pleaded insanity, citing the voices that he believed to belong to God and the saints telling him to kill, mutilate and molest children. It was argued that Fish believed that if God did not approve of his child “sacrifices” that they would be prevented by angels, similarly to the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Bible. Fish was found to be sane and guilty.
Some of the jurors later explained that they did not doubt that Fish was insane, but that by declaring him as such they would allow him to live. Instead, he was given the death sentence. He spent the rest of the year in Sing Sing Prison and was executed via the electric chair on January 16 1936.
Upon his death, his lawyer was given Fish’s “final statement”, but refused to show it to anyone, describing it as “the most filthy string of obscenities” he had ever read.
When he died, Fish had three confirmed and five suspected murder victims, and he claimed to have assaulted around 100 children. He was described by the New York Daily Mirror as “the most vicious child-slayer in criminal history”.