Albert Fish, the Brooklyn Vampire

Albert Fish is one of the most brutal serial killers in American history. Also known as the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire and the Boogey Man, he murdered at least three children between 1924 and 1928 and confessed to eating their bodies. He was suspected of at least ten murders, and he himself boasted of having committed many more.

He was arrested on 13 December 1934 and sentenced to the electric chair for the murder of Grace Budd, a ten-year-old girl.

In this article I describe his crimes without going into the details of the sexual violence against children or of his acts of self-harm, which fall outside this site’s rules.

Albert Fish’s childhood

As with almost every serial killer, his childhood is a key stage in understanding how his deviance developed.

Albert was born in Washington on 19 May 1870 as Hamilton Howard Fish. He was the youngest child and had three siblings. His father, a former riverboat captain, was 43 years older than his mother: he was 75 when Albert was born. He died of a heart attack in 1875, and his mother, unable to support the children alone, sent the boy to Saint John’s Orphanage in Washington.

There Albert was teased about his name: they called him “Ham and Eggs”. That is why he chose to be called Albert, after a dead sibling. At the orphanage he was often physically punished, and it was then that he discovered he took pleasure in physical pain.

His family had many cases of mental illness: an uncle had mania, a brother had been committed to a psychiatric hospital, a half-brother had schizophrenia, a sister had a “mental affliction” and his mother had hallucinations. In 1880 his mother found a government job and was able to take her son back, but by then it was too late.

Adulthood

Even as a teenager Albert developed extreme sexual perversions, including coprophagia. In 1890 he moved to New York, where he worked as a male prostitute and began abusing boys. All his life he wrote obscene letters to women whose names he found in classified ads and matrimonial agencies.

In 1898 his mother arranged his marriage to Anna Mary Hoffman, nine years his junior. They had six children. In 1903 Fish was arrested for embezzlement and locked up in Sing Sing. In January 1917 his wife left him for John Straube, a handyman who boarded with them, and Albert had to raise the children alone.

In those years he began hearing voices and developed an ever deeper religious obsession. He inflicted severe injuries on himself and involved his children and their friends in violent games in which he was the one being struck. After his arrest, X-rays showed the marks of years of self-harm in his body. Working as a house painter he travelled across the United States, and in that period he abused countless children. He said he chose mainly African American children or children with disabilities, believing the police would not investigate thoroughly.

The murder of Francis McDonnell

On 14 July 1924 Francis McDonnell, a police officer’s son, failed to come home after playing with friends in Port Richmond, on Staten Island. He was eight or nine years old. His body was found in woods near his home, hanging from a tree. Only after Fish’s arrest was it discovered that he was the killer.

The murder of Billy Gaffney

On 11 February 1927, in Brooklyn, three-year-old Billy Beaton and his twelve-year-old brother were playing in their building’s hallway with four-year-old William “Billy” Gaffney. When the older boy went home, the two little ones disappeared. Billy Beaton was found on the roof, and when asked where his friend was, he said “the bogeyman” had taken him. Billy Gaffney’s body was never found.

At first another serial killer, Peter Kudzinowski, was suspected. Then a Brooklyn trolley driver, Joseph Meehan, recognised Fish from a newspaper photo: he was the old man he had seen on his trolley the day of the disappearance, with a little boy crying for his mother. After his arrest Fish confessed to taking the child to an isolated area, torturing him at length, killing and dismembering him, and eating part of his body over the following days.

The murder of Grace Budd

On 25 May 1928 Fish read in the New York World an ad by an 18-year-old, Edward Budd, looking for work in the country. Three days later he turned up at the family’s home in Manhattan using the false name Frank Howard, a farmer from Farmingdale. He said he wanted to hire Edward and a friend and promised to come back in a few days. In reality, as he later confessed, he intended to tie the young man up, mutilate him and leave him to bleed to death.

When he returned, on 3 June, he met Edward’s little sister, ten-year-old Grace, and changed his plan. He claimed he had to attend a niece’s birthday party and asked her parents, Delia and Albert Budd, for permission to take Grace along. The parents agreed. It was the last time they saw her.

Fish took the girl to an abandoned house he had picked out long before, Wisteria Cottage, in Irvington, New York. There he strangled her, then dismembered her body and over the following days ate most of it.

For years the case remained unsolved. In 1930 a 66-year-old man, Charles Edward Pope, was arrested after being accused by his estranged wife: he spent 108 days in jail before being acquitted.

The letter to Grace’s mother

In November 1934, more than six years after the murder, Grace’s mother received an anonymous letter. She could not read, so her son read it to her. It was a horrifying account. The writer said that in 1894 a friend of his, who had shipped as a deck hand on the steamer Tacoma, had seen children sold as food in China during a famine, and that back in New York he had killed and eaten two children. Curious, the writer had wanted to try it himself. He then described, in atrocious detail, the day he took Grace away and killed her, and claimed he had not raped her.

The capture

It was that very letter that gave him away. On the envelope was a small hexagonal emblem with the letters “N.Y.P.C.B.A.”, the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association. A chauffeur told police he had taken some of that stationery home and left it in a rooming house at 200 East 52nd Street. The landlady recognised the description: the lodger was Albert Fish, who had moved out a few days earlier but had asked her to hold a cheque his son would send him.

Detective William King waited outside the room. When Fish arrived, on 13 December 1934, he agreed to go to headquarters, then pulled out a razor blade. King disarmed him and took him in. Fish denied nothing and led officers to Wisteria Cottage, where Grace’s remains were found.

Trial and execution

The trial for the murder of Grace Budd began on 11 March 1935 in White Plains and lasted ten days. Fish pleaded insanity and said he had heard the voice of God ordering him to kill children. Several psychiatrists described a staggering list of perversions, including sadism, masochism, paedophilia, cannibalism and necrophilia. The defence’s chief expert, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, explained his obsession with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac: Fish believed that “sacrificing” a child would cleanse him of his sins, and he associated cannibalism with communion. Asked about his mental state, Wertham simply replied that he was insane.

None of the jurors doubted that Fish was insane, but, as one later explained, they felt he should be executed anyway. They found him sane and guilty, and the judge sentenced him to the electric chair. Albert Fish was executed at Sing Sing on 16 January 1936, aged 65.

The victims

Albert Fish’s confirmed victims are three: Francis McDonnell, 8, killed in July 1924 on Staten Island; Billy Gaffney, 4, killed on 11 February 1927 in New York; Grace Budd, 10, killed on 3 June 1928. Fish was also suspected in the death of Yetta Abramowitz, 12, killed in the Bronx in May 1927, and of Mary Ellen O’Connor, 16, found dead in 1932 near a house he was painting in Queens. But the real number of his victims, we will probably never know.

Sources

• Wikipedia – Albert Fish