Deranged (23 page)

The Mirror also tried to take as much credit as it could for Fish’s capture. In a sidebar headlined “FIRST AGAIN!” it quoted Walter Winchell’s fortuitous prediction of November 2. It also reprinted the June 4 fleet photograph of the two sailors and their dates, claiming (with some justification) that the picture had ultimately led to Fish’s arrest.

The Daily News, though less melodramatic than its competitor, also tricked out the truth for the sake of added color. It was the News, for example, which first promulgated the fiction that Fish—whose creative aptitude consisted of an ability to slap several coats of paint on an apartment wall—had been known in his younger days as “a pleasant, affable artist struggling to support his wife and five children. Cubism was an enthusiasm of his at the time and he often asked friends to admire the products of his queer artistic fetish.” Clearly, as far as the News was concerned, a taste for cubism was itself a symptom of incipient madness and a possible precursor of child-murder.

Though the News avoided the horror-movie metaphors favored by the Mirror, it lost no time in suggesting that Fish was very probably a mass murderer of historic dimensions, who had slain untold victims in the deserted precincts of “Old Wisteria House.” The paper was also the first to disclose the cannibalistic content of Fish’s letter to the Budds. The old man, reported the News, had been driven to kidnap the little girl by a sudden “yearning for the thrill of eating human flesh and drinking human blood,” a desire which had come over him “as a result of reading of cannibalistic practices in the Orient.”

In one instance, however, the News did demonstrate an unusual degree of self-restraint. Though the paper was the first to draw a connection between Fish and the illustrious family he claimed to be part of, it never made specific mention of the old man’s namesake—U.S. Congressman Hamilton Fish. Instead, the paper simply asserted that Fish was “descended of Revolutionary stock.”

Like the Mirror, the News tried to find parallels for Fish among the “most bestial” criminals in history. The Mirror came up with Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper. But the association made by Jack Alexander of the News was much more interesting—and, as it turned out, apt. Ranking Fish with “the worst human monsters of mod ern times,” Alexander could think of only one comparable case: that of the German psychopath Fritz Haarmann, the notorious “Vampire of Hanover.”

Born to a working-class couple in 1879, Haarmann was a sullen and slow-witted child whose favorite pastime was dressing up as a girl. At seventeen, he was committed to the Hildesheim asylum after being arrested for child-molesting. The examining doctor declared him “incurably feeble-minded.” Six months later, he escaped to Switzerland and gradually made his way back to Hanover.

For a while, he attempted to lead a more settled life, working with his father in a cigar factory, getting engaged to a young woman he had impregnated. This period of relative normalcy didn’t last. Haarmann’s ill-tempered father detested his son. And Haarmann’s baby was stillborn. Haarmann deserted his fiancé and ran off to join the Jäger regiment in Alsace. His commanding officer declared him a “born soldier.”

Back in Hanover in 1903, Haarmann launched into a life of petty crime. Throughout his early twenties, he was in and out of jail for various offenses, ranging from pocket-picking to burglary. He spent World War I locked up in prison.

Released in 1918, he returned to Hanover and joined a postwar smuggling ring that trafficked in black-market meat, among other commodities. Haarmann also functioned as a police stool pigeon, a sideline which afforded him protection for his illicit activities. In 1919, however, after being caught by police in flagrante delicto with a young boy, Haarmann was shipped off to prison again.

After his release nine months later, Haarmann commenced his career of unparalleled depravity. Living in Hanover’s seamy Old Quarter, he fell under the sexual thrall of a handsome male prostitute and petty thief named Hans Grans. Together, the two systematically set about preying on the young male refugees that were flooding into the war-ravaged city. Though Haarmann was ultimately charged with twenty-seven murders, it seems likely that he was responsible for at least fifty. The method he employed to kill his victims was always the same.

After luring a hungry boy to his rooms, Haarmann would feed him a meal, then overpower him (often with Grans’s assistance) and fall upon his throat, chewing through the flesh until he had nearly separated the head from the body. Generally, he would experience a sexual climax while battening on the boy.

Afterward, Haarmann and Gans would butcher the body and dispose of the flesh by peddling it as steak at the Schieber Market, across from the Hanover railway station. During the five years that he engaged in these atrocities, Haarmann himself subsisted largely oh the meat of his victims. The victim’s clothes would also be sold and the inedible portions of his body dumped in the Leine canal.

Gradually, Haarmann fell under suspicion. A woman who had purchased one of his black market “steaks” became convinced that it was human flesh and turned it over to the authorities. After inspecting it closely, a police analyst declared that it was pork. But as the number of missing boys mounted, the police suspected Haarmann and began to investigate. In May 1924, several skulls were found on the banks of the canal. Several weeks later, some boys playing near the spot stumbled upon a whole sackful of human bones. Two detectives from Berlin were called in on the case. Searching Haarmann’s rooms, they discovered bundles of boys’ clothing. The young son of Haarmann’s landlady was wearing a coat that belonged to one of the missing boys.

In the end, Haarmann confessed. He was tried at the Hanover Assizes in early December, 1924, found guilty, and condemned to death. Gans received a life sentence that was later commuted to twelve years. At Haarmann’s trial, one of his neighbors, an elderly lady, testified that he had once given her some bones and suggested she make soup with them. She did as he proposed, but dumped out the soup without tasting it because the bones looked “too white.” Her suspicions saved her from unwitting cannibalism.

While awaiting execution, the forty-six-year-old Haarmann produced a written confession in which he recounted, with undisguised relish, the details of his killings and the pleasure he derived from committing them. At his own request, he was beheaded with a sword in the city marketplace. After the decapitation, his brain was removed from his skull and shipped to Goettingen University for study.

Comparing Fish to Haarmann, the Daily News pronounced that, of the two “lust slayers,” Fish was the more “baffling” case. Haarmann, after all, had come from a disadvantaged background, whereas Fish was (supposedly) descended from an old and distinguished American family. Moreover, Haarmann was not only an epileptic but also a homosexual—a trait which, the News implied, went a long way toward explaining his penchant for mass murder and cannibalism. Fish, on the other hand, was “the father of six children and the grandfather of many more.”

Nevertheless, according to the reporter for the News, the “mousy soft-spoken” Fish and “the postwar German werewolf” were two of a kind. And in fact there was a connection between Haarmann and Fish, more of a connection than the News reporter could have possibly known about, since no one was aware of it at the time besides a handful of investigators from the Missing Persons Bureau.

Fish was an inveterate clipper of newspaper and magazine articles dealing with subjects that excited his diseased imagination. Searching his rooms immediately after his arrest, detectives had discovered a large cache of these clippings, some stored in an old leather satchel, others squirreled away in various hiding places around the apartment—under his mattress, on cupboard shelves, beneath the rugs. Carrying this bizarre collection back to headquarters, the investigators had made a careful examination of it and had catalogued each of the items.

There was a newspaper clipping about the marriage of two nudist couples in Chicago and another, datelined Hamden, Connecticut, about the arrest of several nude sunbathers on a disorderly conduct charge. There was a story about the forced sterilization of 325 people in Berlin. Another article from Europe, datelined Lille, France, dealt with a scientific operation that had transformed a woman into a man. One small packet of articles, all of them reports of various kidnappings, was held together by fourteen sewing needles threaded through the paper.

And then there was another, much larger sheath of clippings, carefully scissored from various newspapers and neatly bound together with a piece of twine. When investigators undid the string and began reading these articles, they discovered that Fish had cut out and saved every news story he could find containing details of Fritz Haarmann’s enormities.

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I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued…. Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them together with the entrails into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body, piecemeal…. EDGAR ALLAN POE, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

For the next few days, investigators in both New York City and Westchester continued to probe a possibility which the tabloids were already trumpeting as established fact—that Albert Fish, the “Ogre of Old Wisteria,” had murdered untold victims in the “charnel chambers” of the abandoned house and buried their remains around the premises.

By the time the first carloads of Greenburgh police arrived at Wisteria Cottage early Saturday morning, the property was already aswarm with sightseers, eager for a close-up glimpse of the notorious Westchester “death lodge.” Before very long, traffic along Mountain Road and the nearby Sawmill River Parkway had become so snarled that a special squad of officers was dispatched from White Plains to keep the cars moving and prevent everyone except neighborhood residents from parking near the crime scene.

Meanwhile, under Dr. Squire’s supervision, Sergeant Hogan and several of his fellow officers spent the morning tearing up the rest of the basement floor and digging in the hard-packed earth underneath. By lunchtime, they had managed to exhume an additional thirty bones, ranging in size from one to eight inches. Suspecting that more might be hidden behind the cellar’s big log-burning fireplace, the officers began dismantling it brick by brick. Outside, another group of officers worked steadily at pumping out a pair of wells, each eight feet deep, under the theory that they were a perfect place for Fish to dispose of corpses.

Interviewed by reporters late in the morning, Dr. Squire admitted that he could not be sure whether the remains found in the cellar came from humans or animals. If the bones did turn out to be human, they would represent incontestable proof that Fish had slain other victims besides Grace Budd, since the little girl’s entire skeleton had already been recovered. The morning’s finds, Squire explained, would be shipped off immediately to professors of comparative anatomy at Columbia University for classification.

The Mirror, however, deemed it unnecessary to wait for an expert opinion before announcing, on the front page of its weekend edition, that evidence of “new ogre deaths” had been unearthed in the “haunted charnel house” in Westchester. The thirty bones “dug out of two shallow graves” in the cellar “represented an almost complete pelvic frame, hip joint, three shattered shin bones, innumerable sections of vertebrae, and a miscellaneous assortment of other sections of human anatomy”—clear-cut proof, the Mirror proclaimed, that the “wizened housepainter” had used Wisteria Cottage as a site for “weird torture rites” and “cannibalistic orgies.”

Squire’s expressions of uncertainty underwent a significant alteration in the tabloid, which neglected to mention the possibility that the bones might have come from animals. The only question in the medical examiner’s mind, according to the Mirror, was “whether the skeletons were those of men, women, or children.”

The photographs accompanying the story were every bit as sensationalistic as the text. One shot, of several investigators examining a length of cord dangling limply from a ceiling pipe in the basement, was headlined, “DID HANGING FIGURE IN FISH’S PLAN?”

Another, more unsettling picture showed the skeletal remains of a young child, half-buried in weeds. This was a police photograph of an unidentified victim, four to six years old, whose corpse had been discovered the previous summer in Darien, Connecticut. A laborer working in an overgrown field about a thousand feet from the Boston Post Road, not far from a bus stop, had stumbled upon the bones.

The child’s head, which was lying a few feet away from the rest of the body, appeared to have been severed with a sharp instrument. No clothing had been recovered at the scene. The remains had been submitted to specialists at the Yale University medical lab, who had been able to determine the approximate age of the victim but not the sex.

The caption explained that Fish had become the prime suspect in this case, too. The headline above the photograph conveyed the same information in a far shriller and more characteristic form: “WAS THIS ANOTHER WEREWOLF VICTIM?”