Deranged (39 page)

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”:

1. Sadism.
   
2. Masochism.
   
3. Active and passive flagellation.
   
4. Castration and self-castration.
   
5. Exhibitionism.
   
6. Voyeur Acts.
   
7. Piqueur Acts (jabbing sharp implements into oneself or others for sexual gratification).
   
8. Pedophilia.
   
9. Homosexuality.
   
10. Fellatio.
    
11. Cunnilingus.
    
12. Anilingus (oral stimulation of the anus).
    
13. Coprophagia (eating feces).
    
14. Undinism (sexual preoccupation with urine).
    
15. Fetishism.
    
16. Cannibalism.
    
17. 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.”

On the other hand, with Fish committed to an institution, science would have a chance to study the man’s psychology and learn something that might help prevent future crimes against children. “Science is prediction,” Wertham asserted. “The science of psychiatry is advanced enough that with proper examination such a man as Fish can be detected and confined before the perpetration of these outrages, instead of inflicting extreme penalties afterwards.”

Throughout Wertham’s speech, Governor Lehman remained perfectly impassive, though his counsel, sitting directly to the governor’s left, seemed responsive to the psychiatrist’s arguments, smiling and nodding in approval and even, on several occasions, looking seriously moved. Wertham was encouraged to believe that his appeal was getting through.

He was wrong. The moment Wertham finished speaking, Governor Lehman rose from the table, nodded slightly, and left, unimpressed by the arguments and unwilling to reverse the court’s judgment.

On the morning of their final days, condemned men at Sing Sing were transferred from their cells to a wing of the death house that the inmates called “the dance hall.” It was there, on Thursday, January 16, 1936, that Albert Fish ate his last meals. For lunch, he had a T-bone steak from which the bone had been removed. The same precaution was taken with the roast chicken he requested for dinner. By the time his dinner arrived, however, he had largely lost his appetite and ate only a few mouthfuls. Sometime around 10:30 P.M., the Reverend Anthony Petersen, Protestant chaplain of the prison, arrived to pray with Fish, who had spent much of his time during the preceding weeks poring over his Bible. Shortly before 11:00, two guards entered the cell. One of them knelt before Fish with a knife and deftly slit the old man’s right trouser leg.

Then, flanked by the guards and followed by Reverend Petersen, the old man shambled down the corridor toward the execution chamber. The time was 11:06 P.M.

Throughout the day, Warden Lawes—one of America’s most distinguished criminologists and a staunch opponent of capital punishment—had waited close to his phone, hoping for a reprieve. But it never came. When a reporter asked Lawes how he felt about Fish’s imminent execution, he replied, “I am not supposed to feel. I am just part of the apparatus.”

At the sight of the electric chair, Fish did not quail, as even the hardest men often did, though he did not seem like someone who was looking forward to the “supreme thrill” of his life, either. Hands clasped in prayer, he lowered himself into the chair and allowed the straps to be adjusted around his arms, legs and torso.

His face looked very pale in the instant before Robert Elliott, the gaunt, gray-haired executioner, slipped the black death mask over it. The leather cap with its electrode was fitted to the old man’s close-shaven head. After fastening the chin-strap, Elliott stooped to secure the second electrode to Fish’s right leg beneath the trouser-slit. Then he stepped to the control panel.

Afterward, stories circulated that the needles in the old man’s body had produced a burst of blue sparks when the electricity was activated. But this was simply part of the folklore that grew up around Fish in the following years. There were no pyrotechnics. Fish died like other men.

When the current hit, his body surged, his neck cords bulged, his clenched fists turned a fiery red. Eventually, the body subsided.

At precisely 11:09 P.M., the attending physician stepped up to the body, cupped his stethoscope against the motionless chest, and declared that Albert Fish—the oldest man ever executed at Sing Sing—was dead.

For the Budds, the end was like the beginning—a stranger came knocking at the door.

This time, it was a reporter for the Daily News, who showed up at the Budds’ 24th Street apartment shortly after midnight. He rapped on the door, waited, then rapped again. It was a full ten minutes before Mrs. Budd trudged from her bedroom, opened the door, and peered outside.

Albert Fish was dead, the reporter informed her. He paused expectantly, pen and notepad at the ready.

But if he was hoping for a juicy quote or dramatic response, he was disappointed. Mrs. Budd heard the news in silence, without a flicker of emotion on her face.

A few moments later, her husband’s thin voice came drifting through the apartment, calling her back to sleep. Without a word to the reporter, Mrs. Budd pushed the door closed and returned to her bedroom, shuffling heavily through the familiar darkness.

Acknowledgments

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Deviant about the Wisconsin ghoul Edward Gein, who served as the model for Psycho’s Norman Bates. While researching the book, I wrote to Robert Bloch, author of the novel upon which Hitchcock’s classic terror film was based, to ask, among other things, why he thought so many people continued to be fascinated by Gein. Bloch replied, “Because they are ignorant of the activities of … Albert Fish.”

Intrigued by the answer, I began digging into Fish’s incredible case, and the result is the present book. My acknowledgments, then, must begin with a word of thanks to Robert Bloch for his initial (if unwitting) inspiration.