Brooklyn Vampire

Edward Budd was an enterprising 18-year-old. He was determined to make something of himself and escape the desperate poverty of his parents. On May 25, 1928, he put a classified ad in the Sunday edition of the New York World:

"Young man, 18, wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street."

He was a strapping young fellow who was eager to work and contribute to the well-being of his family. Trapped in the dirty, stinking, crowded city in a miserable tenement with his father, mother and four younger siblings, he longed to work in the country where the air was fresh and clean.

On the following Monday, May 28, Edward's mother, Delia, a huge mountain of a woman, answered the door to an elderly man. He introduced himself as Frank Howard, a farmer from Farmingdale, Long Island, who wanted to interview Edward about a job.

Delia told her five-year-old Beatrice to get her brother at his friend's apartment. The old man beamed at her and gave her a nickel.

While they waited for Edward, Delia had a chance to get a better look at the old man. He had a very kindly face, framed by gray hair and accented by a large droopy gray mustache. He explained to Mrs. Budd that he had earned his living for decades as an interior decorator in the city and then retired to a farm he had bought with his savings. He had six children that he raised by himself since his wife had abandoned them all over a decade ago.

With the help of his children, five farmhands and a Swedish cook, he had made the farm into a successful one with several hundred chickens and a half-dozen dairy cows. Now, one of his farmhands was moving on and he needed someone to replace him.

At that moment, Edward came in and met Mr. Howard, who remarked at the boy's size and strength. Edward assured the old man he was a hard worker. Mr. Howard offered him fifteen dollars a week, which Edward accepted joyfully. Howard even agreed to hire Willie, Edward's closest friend.

Mr. Howard had to leave for an appointment and promised to come back on Saturday to pick them up. The boys were thrilled and the Budds were happy that a good position with the kindly old gentleman had come so quickly from Edward's modest ad.

Saturday, June 2, was the supposed to be the big day, but Mr. Howard didn't show up. Instead they got a hand-written note from Mr. Howard saying that he had been delayed and would call in the morning.

The next morning around 11, Frank Howard came to the Budds' apartment bringing gifts of strawberries and fresh, creamy cheese. "These products come direct from my farm," he explained.

Delia persuaded the old man to stay for lunch. For the first time, Albert Budd, Sr. had an opportunity to talk with his son's new employer. It was the kind of talk that makes a father very happy. Here was this kindly, polite old gentleman rapturously describing his 20 acres of farmland, his friendly crew of farmhands and a simple, hearty country life. He knew it was what his son wanted.

Albert, Sr. was a porter for the Equitable Life Assurance Company and had the air of a man perpetually submissive. He was not very impressed with the way this Frank Howard looked in his rumpled blue suit, but the old man was credible and genteel.

Once they sat down to lunch, the door opened and a lovely ten-year-old girl appeared. Gracie was humming a song. Her huge brown eyes and dark brown hair contrasted with her very pale skin and pink lips. She would be a real heart breaker someday.

Coming right from church, she still wore her Sunday clothes: white silk confirmation dress, white silk stockings, and string of creamy pearls made her look older than her ten years.

Frank Howard, like most men who came face to face with the radiant Gracie, couldn't take his eyes off the beautiful girl. "Let's see how good a counter you are," he said as he handed her a huge wad of bills to count. The impoverished Budds were flabbergasted by the money the old man was carrying around with him.

"Ninety-two dollars and 50 cents," Gracie told him in short order.

"What a bright little girl," Mr. Howard said, giving her 50 cents to buy candy for herself and her little sister Beatrice.

Howard said that he would come back later in the evening to pick up Edward and Willie, but first he had to go to a birthday party that his sister was throwing for one of her children. He gave the boys two dollars to go to the movies.

Just as he was about to leave, he invited Gracie to go with him to his niece's birthday party. He would take good care of her and make sure that Gracie was home before nine o'clock that evening.

Delia asked where Mr. Howard's sister lived and he replied that she lived in an apartment house at Columbus and 137th Street.

Delia wasn't sure that she should let her go, but Albert Sr. convinced her that it would be good for Gracie. "Let the poor kid go. She don't see much good times."

So Delia helped Gracie on with her good coat and her gray hat with the streamers. She followed Gracie and Mr. Howard outside and watched them disappear down the street.

That evening there was no word from Mr. Howard and no sign of Gracie. A terrible sleepless night with no message from their beautiful daughter. The next morning, young Edward was sent down to the police station to report his sister's disappearance.

The worst thing that Police Lieutenant Samuel Dribben said to the Budds was that the address that "Frank Howard" had given them for his sister's apartment was fictitious. The kindly old man was a fraud. There was no Frank Howard, no farm in Farmingdale, Long Island. None of it was true.

Police began the normal investigative activities. They checked out everything "Frank Howard" had told the Budds. They also had the Budds go through their "rogue's gallery" of photos and checked on all the known child molesters, mental patients, etc. It came to nothing. No trace of Gracie.

On June 7, New York police mailed out 1,000 fliers to police stations throughout the country with a photo of Gracie and a description of Mr. "Howard." This activity, along with all the local publicity, guaranteed an epidemic of Gracie sightings and crank letters, each of which had to be thoroughly investigated by the 20-plus detectives who had been assigned to the case.

There were a couple of solid clues. Police found the Western Union office in Manhattan from which "Frank Howard" had sent his message to the Budds, plus the original handwritten message. From the writing and grammar, it was clear that "Howard" had some education and refinement. Police also located the pushcart where "Howard" had bought the pot cheese that he had given to the Budds. Both addresses were in East Harlem, which then became a focal point of intense search and investigation.

The New York police were not strangers to child kidnapping. In fact, there was an oddly similar case just the year before. On February 11, 1927, four-year-old Billy Gaffney played in the hallway outside his apartment with his three-year-old neighbor who was also named Billy. A 12-year-old neighbor who was babysitting his sleeping baby sister went to join the boys, but went back to his apartment quickly after hearing his sister cry.

A few minutes later, the older boy noticed that the two Billys were gone and told the younger Billy's father. After a desperate search, the father found his three-year-old son alone on the top floor of the building. His son had been up on the roof.

"Where's Billy Gaffney?" the man asked his son.

"The boogey man took him," the little boy replied.

The next day when a platoon of detectives came to investigate the disappearance of the Gaffney boy, they ignored the three-year-old witness, who stuck to his simple explanation. At first the police thought the boy had wandered outside into some of the factory buildings in the neighborhood or, worse, had fallen into the Gowanus canal a few blocks away. People in the community organized a search and the canal was dredged, but there was no sign of little Billy.

Eventually, someone listened to the three-year-old witness who gave them a description of the "boogey man." He was a slender old man with gray hair and a gray moustache. The police paid no attention to the description and did not connect it to a crime that had been committed by the "Gray Man" a few years earlier.

In July 1924, eight-year-old Francis McDonnell played on the front porch of his home in the pastoral Charlton Woods section of Staten Island. His mother sat nearby, nursing her infant daughter when she saw a gaunt elderly man with gray hair and moustache in the middle of the street. She stared at the strange shabby old man who constantly clenched and unclenched his fists and mumbled to himself. The man tipped his dusty hat to her and disappeared down the street.

Later that afternoon, the old man was seen again watching Francis and four other boys play ball. The old man called Francis over to him. The other boys continued to play ball. A few minutes later, both the old man and Francis had disappeared. A neighbor noticed a boy that looked like Francis walking that afternoon into a wooded area with an elderly gray-haired tramp behind him.

The disappearance of Francis was not noticed until he missed dinner. His father, a policeman, organized a search. They found the boy in the woods under some branches. He had been horribly assaulted. His clothes had been torn from his body and he had been strangled with his suspenders. Francis had been beaten so badly that police doubted that the "old" tramp could have really been as old and frail as he looked. The beating was so severe that perhaps the old tramp had an accomplice who had the strength to maul the child.

In a short period of time, Manhattan fingerprint experts and police photographers were enlisted in the case as well as some 250 plainclothesman. The huge manhunt yielded several promising suspects, except that none of them looked like the grey-haired, moustached old tramp. His face was burned forever in the memory of Anna McDonnell: "He came shuffling down the street, mumbling to himself, making queer motions with his hands. I'll never forget those hands. I shuddered when I looked at them... how they opened and shut, opened and shut, opened and shut. I saw him look toward Francis and the others. I saw his thick grey hair, his drooping gray moustache. Everything about him seemed faded and gray."

Despite the massive efforts of the police and the community, the "Grey Man" had vanished into thin air.

In November 1934, the Budd case was officially still open although nobody ever expected it to be solved. Only one man, William F. King, continued to pursue the case. Every once in awhile, King would plant a phony item about a break in the case with Walter Winchell. On November 2, 1934, Winchell took the bait once again:

"I checked on the Grace Budd mystery," Winchell wrote in his column. "She was eight when she was kidnapped about six years ago. And it is safe to tell you that the Dept. of Missing Persons will break the case, or they expect to, in four weeks."

Ten days later, Delia Budd received a letter that her lack of education fortunately prevented her from reading. Her son Edward read it instead and ran out the door to get Det. King.

The letter was singularly barbarous.

Nobody wanted to believe that this letter was true. It had to be the ravings of some perverted, sadistic crank. But, Detective King realized that the details of his meeting with the Budds and Grace were accurate. Also, the handwriting on this horrible letter was identical to the letter the elderly kidnapper had written for the Western Union messenger six years earlier.

The envelope had an important clue: a small hexagonal emblem had the letters N.Y.P.C.B.A. which stood for the New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association.

With the cooperation of the president of the association, an emergency meeting of the members was held. In the meantime, police checked out the handwritten membership forms looking for handwriting similar to "Frank Howard's." Detective King then asked the members  to report anybody who had taken the association's stationery.

A young janitor came forward, admitting that he had taken a couple of sheets of paper and a few envelopes. He had left the stationery in his old rooming house at 200 East 52nd Street. The landlady was shocked when she was given "Frank Howard's" description. He sounded just like the old man who had lived there for two months.

The old man who had checked out of her rooming house just a couple of days earlier.

The former tenant had called himself Albert H. Fish. The landlady mentioned that Fish had told her to hold a letter that he was expecting from his son who worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps in North Carolina. The son regularly sent money to his old dad.

Finally, the post office told Det. King that it had intercepted a letter for Albert Fish. Detective King was becoming worried that Fish had not contacted his former landlady. The police worried that something had scared him away.

On December 13, 1934, the landlady called Det. King. Albert Fish was at the rooming house looking for his letter. The old man was sitting with a teacup when King opened the door. Fish stood up and nodded when King asked him if he was Albert Fish.

Suddenly, Fish reached into his pocket and produced a razor blade which he held in front of him. Infuriated, King grabbed the old man's hand and twisted it sharply. "I've got you now," he said triumphantly.

The confession of Albert Fish would be heard by many law enforcement officials and psychiatrists. A severely edited version of it would appear in the newspapers. It was an odyssey of perversion and unspeakable depravity which seemed unbelievable until detail after detail was corroborated. It was all the more amazing considering how decrepit and harmless Fish appeared. He was a stooped, frail-looking old man about 130 pounds and five-feet, five-inches tall.

Detective King took the initial confession. Fish told him that in the summer of 1928 he had been overcome by what he called his "blood thirst", his need to kill. When he answered Edward Budd's ad for employment, it was the young man, not his sister Gracie, that he intended to lure to a remote location, restrain him and cut off his penis, leaving him to bleed to death.

After he left the Budd house the first time, Fish had purchased the tools he would need to murder and mutilate the boys: a cleaver, saw and butcher knife. He wrapped up these implements of destruction into a bundle which he left at a newsstand before he went to the Budd home for the second and last time.

When Fish saw the strapping young Edward, the size of a full-grown man, and his friend Willie, he convinced himself he could overpower the two of them. But then Fish had a lot of experience in that regard.

It was only after seeing Gracie that he changed his mind and his plans. It was she he desperately wanted to kill.

With the unsuspecting Gracie in tow, he stopped back at the newsstand to pick up his bundle before taking a train to the Bronx and then to the village of Worthington in Westchester. For Grace, he only bought a one-way ticket.

Grace was enthralled with the 40-minute ride into the countryside. Only twice in her life had she been out of the city. This was a wonderful treat for her.

At the station in Worthington, Fish was so absorbed in his monstrous plan that he left his bundle of tools on the train. Ironically, Grace noticed and reminded him to bring his package.

They walked along a remote road until they reached an abandoned two-story building called Wisteria Cottage in the midst of a wooded area. While Grace entertained herself outside with the various wildflowers, Fish went up to the second floor bedroom, opened up his bundle of tools, and took off his clothes.

Then he called to Gracie to come upstairs.

With the wildflowers she had gathered arranged in a bouquet, Gracie came into the house and up to the bedroom. When she saw the old man naked, she screamed for her mother and tried to escape. But Fish had grabbed her by her throat and choked her to death. He was sexually aroused by the act of strangling her.

He propped up her head on an old paint can and decapitated her, catching most of the blood in the paint can. Afterwards he threw the bucket of blood out into the yard. He undressed the headless child, then he went back to her body and cut it in two with the butcher knife and cleaver.

Parts of her body he took with him wrapped in newspaper. The rest he left there until he returned several days later when he threw the portions of her body over a stone wall in the back of the house. He disposed of his tools in the same fashion. After his confession, Det. King had a final question: What caused him to do this horrible thing?

"You know," Fish answered. "I never could account for it."

Captain John Stein asked him why he had written the letter to the Budds and Fish responded that he didn't know why. "I just had a mania for writing."

That day, the police went to Wisteria Cottage and recovered the remains of Gracie. Albert Fish stood nearby, completely without emotion of any kind.

That night at 10 P.M. Fish was interrogated by Asst. District Attorney P. Francis Marro. When Marro asked Fish why he had murdered Gracie, he explained that "a sort of blood thirst" had overwhelmed him. Once it was done, he was overcome with sorrow. "I would have given my life within a half-hour after I done it to restore it to her."

Marro asked if he had raped Gracie and Fish was adamant: "It never entered my head."

Nothing was asked at that time nor was anything volunteered about the cannibalism mentioned in Fish's letter to the Budds. The police may have considered it too insane to be true. Or, perhaps, they were already thinking that including horrible details about cannibalism would bolster the inevitable defense case for insanity.

That night the capture of Albert Fish had leaked to the newspapers and reporters descended on the Budd apartment with the news. Shortly afterwards, Det. King drove Mr. Budd and his son Edward to the police station to identify Fish.

Marro asked if he had raped Gracie and Fish was adamant: "It never entered my head."

Nothing was asked at that time nor was anything volunteered about the cannibalism mentioned in Fish's letter to the Budds. The police may have considered it too insane to be true. Or, perhaps, they were already thinking that including horrible details about cannibalism would bolster the inevitable defense case for insanity.

That night the capture of Albert Fish had leaked to the newspapers and reporters descended on the Budd apartment with the news. Shortly afterwards, Det. King drove Mr. Budd and his son Edward to the police station to identify Fish.

Edward did more than identify Fish. He threw himself at the old man. "You old bastard! Dirty son of a bitch!"

Mr. Budd was surprised at Fish's lack of emotion. "Don't you know me?" he asked the old man.

"Yes," Fish answered politely. "You're Mr. Budd."

"And you're the man who came to my home as a guest and took my little girl away," he said in tears.

Albert Fish, not surprisingly, was no stranger to police. His record stretched back to 1903 when he had been jailed for grand larceny. Since then, he had been arrested six times for various petty crimes, such as sending obscene letters and petty theft. Half of those arrests occurred around the time of Gracie's abduction. Each time, the charges were dismissed. He had been in mental institutions more than once.

When asked about his background, Fish said: "I was born May 19, 1870, in Washington, D.C. We lived on B Street, N.E., between Second and Third. My father was Captain Randall Fish, 32nd-degree Mason, and he is buried in the Grand Lodge grounds of the Congressional cemetery. He was a Potomac River boat captain, running from D.C. to Marshall Hall, Virginia."

"My father dropped dead October 15, 1875, in the old Pennsylvania Station where President Garfield was shot, and I was placed in St. John's Orphanage in Washington. I was there till I was nearly nine, and that's where I got started wrong. We were unmercifully whipped. I saw boys doing many things they should not have done. I sang in the choir from 1880 to 1884  at St. John's. I came to New York. I was a good painter, interiors or anything.

I got an apartment and brought my mother up from Washington. We lived at 76 West 101st Street, and that's where I met my wife. After our six children were born, she left me. She took all the furniture and didn't even leave a mattress for the children to sleep on."

"I'm still worried about my children," he sniffled. His six children ranged from age 21 to 35. "You'd think they'd come to visit their old dad in jail, but they haven't."

Albert Fish was facing indictments in Manhattan and Westchester County. First Westchester County indicted him on a charge of first degree murder, while Manhattan was preparing an indictment for kidnapping.

Meanwhile police got a really major break. The motorman on the Brooklyn trolley line saw a picture of Fish in the newspaper and came forward to identify Fish as the nervous old man that he saw February 11, 1927, who was trying to quiet the little boy sitting with him on the trolley.

Joseph Meehan, the retired motorman, watched the two carefully. The little boy, who didn't have a jacket or coat, was crying for his mother continuously and had to be dragged by the old man on and off the trolley. The little boy, as it turned out, was the kidnapped Billy Gaffney.

Ultimately, Fish did confess the unspeakable things he did to Billy Gaffney: "I brought him to the Riker Ave. dumps. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took him.

I took the boy there. I sttripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took the 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. It's home made, with a short handle. I cut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six strips about eight inches long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears and nose and I 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 the grip. Then I cut him through the middle of his body. Just below the belly button. Then through his legs about two inches 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 the road going to North Beach."

During his interviews with police Fish further confessed, "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 them in the oven. Then I picked four onions and when the meat had roasted about 1/4 hour, 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 two hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was a sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet."

Days later, a man from Staten Island came forward to identify Fish as the man who had tried to lure his then eight-year-old daughter into the woods not far from where Francis O'Donnell was murdered three days later in 1924. The girl, in her late teens, saw him in his cell and recognized him. The "Gray Man" was found.

Fish was also tied to the 1932 murder of a 15-year-old girl named Mary O'Connor in Far Rockaway. The girl's mauled body was found in some woods close to a house that Fish had been painting.

With all of those indictments in different counties there was very little chance that Albert Fish was going to be acquitted. His only opportunity to beat the death penalty was to have the alienists or forensic psychiatrists declare him insane.

Dr. Fredric Wertham in his book The Show of Violence describes his first meeting with Albert Fish in his jail cell. He was shocked at how "meek, gentle, benevolent and polite" Fish was. "If you wanted someone to entrust your children to, he would be the one you would choose."

Fish's attitude towards his situation was one of complete detachment. "I have no particular desire to live. I have no particular desire to be killed. It is a matter of indifference to me. I do not think I am altogether right."

When Dr. Wertham asked if he meant that he was insane. Fish answered, "Not exactly... I never could understand myself."

Psychosis seemed to have galloped through Fish's family history from what Dr. Wertham could ascertain: "One paternal uncle suffered from a religious psychosis and died in a state hospital. A half brother also died in a state hospital. A younger brother was feeble-minded and died of hydrocephalus. His mother was said to hear and see things. A paternal aunt was considered 'completely crazy.' A brother suffered from chronic alcoholism. A sister had some sort of 'mental affliction.'"

He claimed that his real name was Hamilton Fish, named after a distant relative who was President Grant's Secretary of State. Tired of being teased about that name, he took the name of Albert instead.

When he was 26, he married a young woman of nineteen and had six children. When the youngest was three, she ran off with another man, leaving Fish to raise the children. Subsequently, he "married" three other times, although they were not legal since he had never been divorced from his first wife.

Dr. Wertham considered Fish's unparalleled perversity unique in the annals of psychiatric and criminal literature. "Sado-masochism directed against children, particularly boys, took the lead in his sexually regressive development."

Fish told him: "I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me. I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt."

Wertham told "experiences with excreta of every imaginable kind were practiced by him, actively and passively. He took bits of cotton, saturated them with alcohol, inserted them into his rectum, and set fire to them. He also did that with his child victims."

Fish confided in Dr. Wertham a long history of preying on children — "at least 100." Fish would bribe them with money or candy. He usually chose African-American children because he believed that the police did not pay much attention when they were hurt or missing.

He never went back to the same neighborhood. He said that he had lived in at least 23 states and in each one he had killed at least one child. Sometimes, he lost his job as a painter because he was suspiciously connected to these dead or mutilated children.

He had a compulsion to write obscene letters and did so frequently. According to Dr. Wertham, "they were not the typical obscene letters based on fantasies and daydreams to supply a vicarious thrill. They were offers to practice his inclinations with the people he wrote his graphic suggestions to."

Initially, Dr. Wertham had some concerns about whether Fish was lying to him, especially when he told the psychiatrist that he had been sticking needles into his body for years in the area between the rectum and the scrotum: "He told of doing it to other people too, especially children.

At first, he said, he had only stuck these needles in and pulled them out again. Then he had stuck others in so far that he was unable to get them out, and they stayed there." The doctor had him X-rayed and sure enough, there were at least 29 needles in his pelvic region.

About the age of 55, Fish started to experience hallucinations and delusions. "He had visions of Christ and His angels... he began to be engrossed in religious speculations about purging himself of iniquities and sins, atonement by physical suffering and self-torture, human sacrifices... He would go on endlessly with quotations from the Bible all mixed up with his own sentences, such as 'Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones and dasheth their heads against the stones."

Fish believed that God had ordered him to torment and castrate little boys. He had actually done so a number of times.

Wertham was amazed as Fish described the horrible cannibalism of Billy Gaffney's body. "His state of mind while he described these things in minute detail was a peculiar mixture. He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, like a housewife describing her favorite methods of cooking... But at times his voice and facial expression indicated a kind of satisfaction and ecstatic thrill. I said to myself: However you define the medical and legal borders of sanity, this certainly is beyond that border."

That Fish was suffering from some religious psychosis was a given as far as Dr. Wertham was concerned. Fish's children had seen him "hitting himself on his nude body with a nail-studded paddle until he was covered with blood. They also saw him stand alone on a hill with his hands raised, shouting: 'I am Christ!'

Fish told him: "What I did must have been right or an angel would have stopped me, just as an angel stopped Abraham in the Bible."

Dr. Wertham, the defense alienist, believed that Fish was legally insane: "I characterized his personality as introverted and extremely infantilistic. I outlined his abnormal mental make-up, and his mental disease, which I diagnosed as paranoid psychosis... Because Fish suffered from delusions and particularly was so mixed up about the questions of punishment, sin, atonement, religion, torture, self-punishment, he had a perverted, distorted knowledge of right and wrong. His test was that if it had been wrong he would have been stopped, as Abraham was stopped, by an angel."

Wertham believed that Fish had actually killed 15 children and mutilated about a 100 others. "That figure was verified many times to me by police officials in later years."

Two other defense alienists testified that Fish was insane. The four alienists who were called by the prosecution testified that Fish was sane. One of those prosecution alienists was the head of the psychiatric hospital where Fish had been detailed for observation a couple of years after the Budd and other murders and where he had been judged "both harmless and sane."

The trial of Albert Fish for the premeditated murder of Grace Budd began on Monday, March 11, 1935, in White Plains, N.Y. in Justice Frederick P. Close's court. Chief Asst. District Attorney Elbert F. Gallagher was in charge of the prosecution and James Dempsey was the defense attorney.

Dempsey planned to attack the competence of the Bellevue Hospital alienists who had observed Fish in 1930 and declared him sane. He also planned to establish that Fish was suffering from "lead colic," a dementia often suffered by house painters.

Gallagher's key strategy was summarized early in the trial:

"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."

Defense attorney Dempsey focused on Fish's strange life and the self-flagellation with nail-studded paddles and needles. Then he brought up Fish's competence as a father and his love for his children: "In spite of all these brutal, criminal and vicious proclivities, there is another side to this 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 three, 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." He closed his remarks by reminding the jury that it was up to the prosecution to prove that a man who killed and ate children was sane.

To further demonstrate Fish's strange behavior, Dempsey called to the stand a woman who had received several obscene letters from Albert Fish. The courtroom was cleared of women as Dempsey read the obscene correspondence.

Another defense witness was Mary Nicholas, Fish's 17-year-old stepdaughter. She described how Fish taught her and her brothers and sisters a game. "He went into his room and he had a little pair of trunks, brown trunks, that he put on. 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.

"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."

Sometimes a hairbrush was used instead of the paint stick. He also stuck pins under his fingernails in front of the children.

The trial lasted ten days and the jury took less than an hour to reach its verdict.

"We find the defendant guilty as charged," the foreman said.

Fish was not happy with the verdict, but the prospect of being electrocuted had its appeal to him. A Daily News reporter wrote, "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."

Fish thanked the judge for his sentence of death by electrocution.

On January 16, 1936, Albert Fish was executed.