Eat Thy Neighbour (15 page)

When Detective King interviewed Siscoski’s landlady, she said that of course she knew a man who fitted that description. It was Albert Fish, and he had been a tenant in her house until very recently. When King explained the situation, the woman was shocked to say the least, but said she expected to hear from Mr Fish again. It seemed that his son often sent money to him and Fish had asked her to hold any letters that might arrive for him. It took almost exactly a month, but on 13 December the landlady called Detective King to inform him that Albert Fish was in her parlour. When King arrived, Fish was calmly balancing a teacup on his knee.

As King stepped into the room and asked if he was Albert Fish, the Grey Man stood up and nodded yes. But before King could even announce his arrest, Fish whipped a straight razor
from his pocket and made a slash at the detective. King grabbed the old man’s arm, twisted it aside and handcuffed him.

It seemed only fair that after having cracked the case it was Detective William King who took Fish’s first statement. Amazingly, Fish seemed completely cooperative. He stated that young Edward Budd had been his intended victim right up until the minute he laid eyes on sweet little Gracie. He described where he took her and what he had done to her. Appalled, King asked him the most obvious question in the world. Why? Fish answered calmly, ‘I never could account for that.’ That cold, detached reply was to become typical of Albert Fish’s attitude throughout the remainder of his examination and trial – it was the same attitude he had when describing dozens of other murders he had committed.

The next day he led King and other officers to the abandoned house in Westchester County where they recovered the scant remains of Gracie Budd; and he did so without the slightest sign of emotion.

During their routine investigation into Fish’s background, police found that even though his most horrible crimes had gone undiscovered, Albert had been a very bad boy. His record began in 1903 with a conviction for grand theft. There had been six subsequent arrests including several for sending obscene letters, but each of them had been dismissed. Still, there had been several trips – some extended – to mental institutions. But each time he had been committed, Albert Fish, murderer and child eater, had been released as ‘cured’.

The only thing left to do before formally charging Fish with the murder of Gracie Budd was to call in the Budd family for a formal identification of the suspect. Gracie’s father and brother Edward agreed to undertake the nasty job themselves. When the Budds entered the room where Fish was being held, Ed launched himself towards the old man shouting, ‘You old bastard. You dirty son of a bitch!’ Only quick action by King and several
officers kept him from tearing Fish limb from limb. Amazingly, Fish hardly blinked during the fracas. Gracie’s father stared at the little man for a minute before he could ask, ‘Don’t you know me?’ Fish answered politely, ‘Oh, yes. You’re Mr Budd.’

With Fish safely in custody, the police sent out requests for anyone who might be able to tie him to any unsolved crimes regarding children. In a matter of days witnesses started bringing in their evidence. From Staten Island came a man who recognised Fish as the person who had tried to lure his son into the woods in July of 1924, only three days and a few hundred yards from the spot where Francis McDonnell was found beaten and murdered. A retired trolleybus driver from Brooklyn identified the man he had seen in 1927, dragging four-year-old Billy Gaffney on and off his trolleybus. Others led police to connect Fish to crimes in which the Grey Man had never even been a suspect. One tied him to fifteen-year-old Mary O’Connor who had been found mutilated in woods near her home in Far Rockaway in 1932. At this point, Fish’s approaching trial seemed to be no more than a formality. The only question was, was he sane enough to be held responsible for all the obscene things he had done?

The court ordered a mental examination which was carried out by the noted psychiatrist, or ‘alienist’ as they were then known, Dr Fredric Wertham. Wertham’s initial reaction to Fish was identical to everyone else’s: ‘If you wanted someone to entrust your child to, he would be the one you would choose.’ Fish was cooperative and chatty, never stinting on the details of his life and crimes, but almost as universal as his willingness to talk was his complete emotional detachment. He showed no more interest in what he was saying than someone reading the telephone directory. He told of his childhood and his feelings towards pain: ‘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.’ Knowing full well that he would be put on trial for his life, he talked about that, too, ‘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 that I am quite right.’ Jumping on this last statement, Wertham asked Fish if he thought he was insane. ‘Not exactly,’ he answered, ‘I could never understand myself.’ At no point did Fish seem to think he had done anything wrong and attached this belief to his religious delusions. ‘What I did must have been right or an angel would have stopped me, just as an angel stopped Abraham in the Bible [from offering his son as a sacrifice].’

When Fish began to recount his history of self-inflicted torture, Wertham simply could not believe what he was hearing. He ordered X-rays to be taken to verify Fish’s claims that he had shoved needles so far into his groin they could not be removed. To the surprise of everyone but Fish, the X-rays showed 29 needles embedded deep in his pelvic region. Wertham’s notes catalogued Fish’s bizarre history of tortures. ‘[He described] experiences with excreta of every imaginable kind [both] active and passive. He took bits of cotton, saturated them with alcohol, inserted them in his rectum and set fire to them. He also did this with his child victims.’ It would seem that Albert Fish, the mild little man with the droopy moustache, had more sexual fetishes than the psychiatry of the day had names to describe.

Fish’s recounting of his innumerable murders led Wertham to conclude that while claiming to have killed – and sometimes eaten – more than 100 children in 23 states, he had, in fact, been guilty of at least fifteen murders and responsible for over a hundred mutilations from which the victims survived. Fish credited his long run to having satisfied himself primarily with black children. The police, he said, were never as interested in finding them as they were when it was white children who disappeared. Tragically, he was all too right.

Although the degree, and amount, of Fish’s ghoulish fetishes were unique, Wertham unearthed records showing that Albert was the predictable product of a family with a history
of problems. ‘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 [water on the brain]. A paternal aunt was considered “completely crazy”. A brother suffered from chronic alcoholism. A sister had some sort of “mental affliction”.’

Wertham’s conclusion was that Albert Fish suffered from ‘sadomasochism directed against children, particularly boys [and had a] sexually regressive development.’ In an elaboration of that conclusion, Wertham wrote:

I characterized his personality as introverted and extremely infantilistic . . . which I diagnosed as paranoid psychosis. Because Fish suffered from delusions and particularly was so mixed up about questions of punishment, sin, atonement, religion, torture [and] self-punishment, he had a perverted, a distorted – if you want, an insane – knowledge of right and wrong.

Charged with the first-degree murder of Gracie Budd, Albert Fish was brought to trial on Monday 11 March 1935 in White Plains, New York. Appearing for the defence was James Dempsey; the prosecution was presented by Assistant District Attorney Elbert Gallagher.

Dempsey’s strategy was simple. He would not refute the charges against his client, but would try to prevent his execution by pleading insanity. To accomplish this he would rely on the findings of Dr Wertham and two additional defence psychiatrists and, in the process, discredit the testimony of the four psychiatrists the prosecution was planning to call to the stand.

Dr Fredric Wertham recounted his findings, closing with, ‘However you define the medical and legal borders of sanity, this is certainly beyond that border.’ The other defence psychiatrists, as expected, gave similar opinions.

The prosecution psychiatrists were harder for Dempsey to deal with, particularly Dr Charles Lambert from Belleview Hospital who had declared Fish ‘both harmless and sane’ after a stay there in 1930. With his reputation on the line, Lambert was not about to give Dempsey anything to work with. In a masterstroke of obfuscation Lambert declared Fish to be a ‘psychopathic personality without a psychosis’.

In his cross-examination of Lambert, Dempsey asked, ‘Assume that this man not only killed this girl but took her flesh to eat it. Will you not state that that man could, for nine days, eat that flesh and still not have a psychosis?’ As though he had been asked to comment on the colour of Fish’s necktie, Lambert flippantly answered, ‘There is no accounting for taste, Mr Dempsey.’

Dempsey also put several of Fish’s children on the stand to testify to his kindness towards them even while exhibiting perverse forms of personal torture and religious delusions. Although they all agreed he had been kind and gentle in his treatment of them, they refused to visit their father in prison.

Dempsey also introduced evidence to indicate that his client could be suffering from ‘lead colic’, a term then used for the nerve and brain cell destroying lead poisoning that sometimes afflicted painters in the days of lead-based paint. In his closing remarks, Dempsey reminded the jury that the question was not whether or not Albert Fish had murdered and defiled Gracie Budd, but whether a man could chop up and eat children and still be considered sane.

After ten days of testimony, cross-examination and exhibits that included the shattered skull of little Gracie Budd, the judge gave the jury their instructions and sent them to ponder their verdict. Less than one hour later they returned. In a clear voice, the foreman announced, ‘We find the defendant guilty as charged.’ The insanity plea had been rejected; Albert Fish, aged sixty-four, would be put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing Penitentiary.

Amazingly, Fish thanked the judge profusely for the sentence. Later, he admitted to Dr Wertham, ‘What a thrill it will be if I have to die in the electric chair. It will be the supreme thrill. The only one I haven’t tried.’ On 16 January 1936, Albert Fish experienced the supreme thrill. He was so excited that he even helped the guards fasten the straps to his legs. His children did not step forward to claim the body and Albert Fish was buried in the prison cemetery at Sing Sing.

As an odd footnote to this story, and a comment on the public’s perception of the psychiatric system in general, several of the jurors later stated that they believed Fish to have been insane. Because he had been institutionalised and released on more than one occasion, however, they felt it their duty to do the only thing they could to guarantee that the monstrous Grey Man would never be let loose on society again.

Ten

The Shallow End of the Gene Pool: Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas (1951–83)

W
hen 29-year-old Ottis Toole and his future associate, Henry Lee Lucas, forty-two, first met in the soup kitchen of a Jacksonville, Florida, homeless shelter, it was a marriage made in hell. As alike as two peas in a very rotten pod, they took to each other like bluebottles to a dung-heap. Not only were they kindred spirits in a greater variety of depravity than can be imagined but they had already carved out individual careers as killers. As is so often the case in life, their combined talents would produce far more gruesome results than the sum of their individual parts. The politically correct might have described Ottis and Henry Lee as ‘economically deprived practitioners of an alternative lifestyle’. Everyone else in America would have been more likely to describe them as ‘white trash’.

What makes Ottis and Henry Lee unique among their ilk is the question: how many of the crimes they claim to have committed are real, and how many are either completely fictitious or a case of their taking credit for someone else’s handiwork? It is a question which has never been satisfactorily answered. Consequently, at least some of what you will find in the following tale is open to question and controversy; it is, however, no less than what Henry Lee and Ottis claimed to be the truth, at least some of the time.

Henry Lee Lucas was born at the end of the Great Depression in the backwater village of Blacksburgh, Virginia. The year 1936 was not a good one anywhere, but in Blacksburgh no year was good. The Lucas clan lived in a dirt-floored shanty beyond the edge of town – beyond the point where electricity, telephone and running water stopped. Sharing the shack with the infant Henry Lee was his vicious prostitute mother Viola, his moonshine-making father Anderson, generally known as ‘No Legs’ ever since he stumbled, dead drunk, under a freight train, Viola’s pimp Bernie and Henry’s eight brothers and sisters, at least some of whom were Anderson’s.

While Viola terrorised both her children and husband with an endless string of invective and savage beatings, she seemed to take a particular delight in abusing Henry Lee. While No Legs hid from Viola, drinking as much of his homemade whiskey as possible, Henry Lee was forced to watch his mother entertain an endless string of paying customers. If he turned away, she beat him. On at least one occasion she beat him so severely that he lay semi-conscious for three days before Bernie the pimp took him to the hospital. Thanks to the constant abuse Henry Lee began hearing ‘voices’ and noises in his head. His papa tried to shelter the child from Viola by making him the full-time guardian of the family still. Consequently, by the time he was ten years old Henry Lee was already an alcoholic. Once Henry was old enough to attend school his mother delighted in sending him off in a dress just to see what the reaction would be. Years later, a former teacher would recall him as being dirty, malnourished and seriously disturbed. Not surprisingly Henry dropped out of school after the fifth grade.