Deranged (33 page)

Albert himself, however, had not encountered any evidence of this weird practice until the summer of 1934, not long after the paddle incident, when he had come upon a collection of sewing needles tucked away on a shelf in the Amsterdam Avenue apartment. There were fourteen of them altogether, threaded through a packet of newspaper clippings dealing with subjects like nudism and enforced sterilization. Later, the young man found a small box containing ten more needles in a fishbowl on the mantelpiece.

Dempsey asked the young man if he had said anything to his father about the needles.

Albert Jr. nodded. “I asked my father who used the needles and he said, ‘ I did.’ I said, ‘Are they your needles?’ He said, ‘Yes, they are.’ I asked him what he used them for, and he told me he got certain feelings that came over him, and every time he did that, he would have to go into a bedroom or some place and stick those needles into his body.”

“Did your father say anything about sticking them in other people?”

“Yes, sir, he did,” the young man said in his soft but emphatic voice. “He told me, ‘When I can’t stick them in myself, I like to torture other people with them.’”

One of the most unusual stories related by the younger Fish involved a black cat that his father had developed an obsession with during those same, bizarre months in the summer of 1934. What was particularly strange about the old man’s obsession was that, as far as his son could tell, the animal was purely imaginary.

Sometime that August, the young man testified, his father had approached a man named Huffman, the owner of the buildings they had been hired to superintend, and asked him “if he would please get a bag of lime, that he needed it, and Mr. Hoffman asked him what he wanted it for. He told Mr. Hoffman that there was a great big black cat that used to run in front of him every now and then, and he wanted the lime to kill the cat with. Well, Mr. Hoffman thought it was curious, but he said, ‘All right.’”

Fish had sprinkled the lime all around the basement floor. Apparently unsatisfied with this measure, however, he set about constructing an elaborate booby trap, which the younger Fish described to the jury as a wooden contraption resembling a “chicken coop or a fox trap. And he put a whole lot of boards across it, heavy beams and everything. He told me that when the cat goes in there it would hit a certain piece of wood that held the rest of the boards up, the entire weight, and when the board fell from underneath, this heavy timber would fall down and kill the cat.”

“What did your father have to say about the cat while you were looking at this contraption?” Dempsey asked.

“Well, we spoke together about ten minutes, and he suddenly turned around quick, and he said, ‘There it goes now! Did you see it? Look at the size of it!’ I said, ‘Pop, there is no cat in front of you.’”

“Was there any cat there at all?” Dempsey asked.

“No, sir. No black cat.”

The part of Albert Jr.’s testimony that created the biggest splash in the tabloid press, however—and that gave rise to yet another lurid epithet for the old man—had to do with his father’s eating habits. The younger Fish testified that, whenever the moon was full, a wild look would come into the old man’s eyes, his face would grow flushed, and he would demand raw steak for dinner.

“Tell us in your own words the discussion you had with your father about this raw meat business in July, 1934,” Dempsey said.

“That was pay day,” Albert Jr. began, “and I came home with the intention of having a good supper. I got home and sat down to eat. As I did, I noticed a piece of raw steak and a box of Uneeda biscuits.”

“What did you say to your father?”

“I asked my father if that is all we had for our supper, and he said, ‘Yes. Why?’”

“What was said by him with respect to the meat being raw?” Dempsey asked.

“He told me, ‘That is the way I like my meat, and you eat it the way I eat it.’”

That night, Albert Jr. testified, he went outside for a breath of air and noticed that the moon was full. Returning to the apartment, he saw his father resting on the couch. “His face was awful red,” Albert said, “and it seemed funny because he was not out in the sunshine that day.”

“What else did you notice about your father at that time?” Dempsey asked.

“The expression in his eyes.”

“Tell us about that.”

“It looked as though he had seen something and was frightened. Just like someone was chasing him.”

Within twenty-four hours, writers for the Daily Mirror and the Daily News had checked the Weather Bureau records from 1928 and discovered, as Norma Abrams reported, “that the moon was at its fullest on June 3, 1928, when the Budd child was killed and her body dismembered.” And Fish, who had already been tagged with a string of sensational labels—the Thrill Vulture, Vampire Man, Ogre of Old Wisteria—was rechristened with a new tabloid nickname: The Moon Maniac.

Albert Fish, Jr., was followed on the witness stand by Dr. Roy Duckworth, the roentgenologist who had supervised Fish’s pelvic X-rays at Grasslands Hospital in late December, 1934. Two months after that session, Duckworth had brought Fish in for an additional set of X-rays, which had revealed the presence of two more needles in the old man’s lower body, bringing the total up to twenty-nine.

Using a shadow box set up at the front of the courtroom facing the jury, Duckworth pointed out the precise location of each of the needles—in the groin, close to the back wall of the rectum, slightly above the transverse section of the colon, near the bladder, clustered around the tip of the spine. Judging by their eroded condition, some of the needles had been in Fish’s body for “quite a number of years,” Duckworth explained. Others had apparently been inserted through the perineum as recently as six months before.

The last witness of the day, Mrs. Gertrude DeMarco—Fish’s favorite child—wept sporadically as she testified to the old man’s paternal devotion.

She began by recounting the details of her mother’s desertion. Mrs. DeMarco had been a girl of thirteen when, on the afternoon of January 19, 1917, Anna Fish had given each of her children some change and sent them off to the movies. When they had returned, their mother was gone, along with the boarder, John Straube, and every stick of furniture in the house.

Searching through the empty rooms, they found a few pennies in the bathtub, and a note advising them to send a telegraph to their father, who was living in White Plains while he finished a painting job for the Second Presbyterian Church in Tarrytown.

Fish had hurried home to Queens that very evening. He brought Gertrude and the others to their aunt’s house in Flushing for a few nights, then moved them up to Westchester, renting some rooms in Elmsford for himself and the children while he completed his job at the church.

“And from that time on until the children were married or grew up, what did your father do with respect to the children?” Dempsey asked.

“He always went to work and provided for them. He was very good.”

“Did your father ever strike you?”

“Never.”

“Did he ever strike any of the children?”

“Never.”

“What did your father say to the children, if anything, if they struck any animals? You always had a dog around, didn’t you?”

“Oh, he would say, ‘Don’t do that. You will hurt the poor little dog.’”

What his daughter described as Fish’s undeviating kindness even extended to his errant wife. About three months after Anna Fish ran off, Mrs. DeMarco’s older sister received a letter from their mother “saying that the man she went away with was beating her and starving her.”

“What did your father do when he heard that?” asked Dempsey.

“Well, my father said, ‘The poor creature. Send her a letter and tell her to come home.’”

The letter was dispatched, and Anna Fish returned to her family, seemingly contrite. One week later, however, John Straube had shown up at the door, pleading with his paramour to take him back. Fish himself was away at work again. Mrs. Fish invited her lover inside and hid him in the attic, where he continued to live. “She used to bring food up to him, unbeknown to my father,” Mrs. DeMarco explained.

Before long, however, Fish had found out about Straube. Though he was willing to forgive his wife, he insisted that Straube had to go. But Anna Fish refused to give up her lover and ran off again, this time for good.

All this was not to say that her father, kind and forgiving as he was, did not have his small eccentricities. Mrs. DeMarco recalled the time in 1931 when Fish was living with her family in Astoria, Queens. They had just finished lunch when Fish began squirming in his chair. “And I says, ‘What’s the matter, pop, is your rupture bothering you again?’ Because he had a rupture and was operated on, and I thought maybe it had come back to him. He says, ‘Oh no, no. You see, not so long ago I put three more of those needles in me.’ I didn’t know what to think. I says, ‘Well, what did you do that for, pop?’ He says, ‘Well, you see, there is a mood that comes over me and I just can’t help myself.’”

Dempsey nodded as he listened to this anecdote, then asked, “What can you say about your father’s habits generally?”

“He never smoked, never drank.” Mrs. DeMarco sniffed back some tears. “He had very good habits.”

At 4:45 P.M., Justice Close, after apologizing to the jury for having to “detain them over the weekend,” recessed court until 10 A.M. the following Monday. The murder trial of Albert Fish had reached its exact midpoint.

33

“We all thought Papa Fish was a funny kind of man, but we were all so young and countrified that we just assumed that men from New York were all like that.” MARY NICHOLAS

Except for juror number nine, Louis S. Hirsch—who was granted a two-hour visit to his Scarsdale home on Saturday afternoon because of the death of his seventy-five-year-old mother-in-law, Mrs. Anna Brainin—the Fish jury spent the weekend confined in the Roger Smith Hotel. Room windows open to the unseasonable warmth, which reached a record-breaking seventy-four degrees on Saturday, the men passed the time playing pinochle and bridge, reading novels, and poring over the newspapers. All the articles about the Fish trial had been scissored from the papers, but there was still plenty to read about, from the latest celebrity gossip to at least one event of genuinely world-shaking significance.

From the Midwest came a report that aviator Wiley Post had failed in his second attempt to set a nonstop, coast-to-coast record when a sudden oxygen loss in his cockpit had forced him to bring down his weather-beaten plane, the Winnie Mae, at the Cleveland Airport. Down in St. Petersburg, Babe Ruth, wearing the uniform of the Boston Braves, made his debut against his former teammates. (The Braves beat the Yankees by a score of three to two, though the Bambino contributed little to the victory, having been held to a single hit.) In London, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton—whose personal fortune was estimated at $42,000,000—confirmed rumors of her impending divorce from Prince Alexis Mdivani.

These stories, however, were trivia compared to the stunning news from Berlin, where Adolph Hitler effectively tore up the Versailles Treaty over the weekend by announcing the reinstitution of military conscription in the Reich. A few days later, at a rally in Cologne, Nazi propagandist Jules Steicher made an impassioned speech comparing Hitler to Christ.

As shocking as the testimony had been so far, it wasn’t until day six of Albert Fish’s trial—Monday, March 18—that Justice Close found it necessary to ban female spectators from the courtroom. Up to then, the jurors had heard various references to the extravagant perversity of Fish’s obscene correspondence. On Monday, they finally began hearing the fulsome details of the old man’s sexual pathology from witnesses who knew about it firsthand.

Grace Shaw was a married, middle-aged wife and mother, who, in September, 1934, had placed a classified ad in The New York Times Sunday edition offering to care for elderly or invalid boarders at her home in Little Neck, Queens. Several days after the ad appeared, she received a letter supposedly written by a movie director named Robert E. Hayden—one of Fish’s favorite masquerades—who claimed that he was due back in Hollywood and needed a place to board his disabled son Bobby. The letter, which Dempsey read to the jury as soon as the courtroom was cleared of women, was one of Fish’s standard sadomasochistic concoctions. “Here is the case,” he had written.

When 5, Bobby fell down the cellar stairs. Sustained a brain concussion. Has never been really normal since. Though going on 20, good looking, well built, fully developed, he has the mentality of the age when he fell. Every part of his body has grown but the brain. He is harmless and just as easy to spank or switch as a child of 5 … He gets cross & cranky at times and don’t always mind. I am now trying out European treatment in such cases. Prof. Cairo of Vienna Austria recommends it. He says when he gets a spell he must be whipped. They are having great success with it over there in such cases. So you see, as his own father I would sooner have him whipped than have him lose his reason entirely…. Should you take him in charge, on the first occasion he shows temper spank him same as you would a small boy and don’t hesitate to use the cat-o-nine tails on his bare behind.