AN EMBELLISHED CONFESSION OF ALBERT FISH

By Ed Dazere

Disclaimer: the confession below is invented. It is not a quotation.

It is the author’s imagining of how this man might have spoken, not a quotation, not a statement he ever made, and not evidence of anything.

ALBERT HAMILTON FISH

DISCLAIMER: The following article is based on facts available to the author and is to an extent fictionalised and embellished. Any perceived permutation of prejudice is not representative of the author’s sentiments.

A somewhat sickly-looking middle-aged man, scruffy tawny herringbone double-breasted jacket tweed suit, tie black, off-white shirt, bulbous bowler hat. He is moustachioed, face taught, eyes raptor-like large and wary (en garde!), they are fixed on something unseen, something going on behind them that is mirror-horrid. He is seated in a trolley car headed for Irvington New York. Beside him sits a girl of ten, and she is his charge today, allowed to go with him by her parents under the pretence that she will be attending another young girl’s birthday party. There is what resembles an oversized lunch pail on his lap, and that is what it is, so to speak. He has ideas for her that even disturb him; but when your mind has decided ideas about these things what can you do. Some of the passengers think he is her Granddad, taking this little girl for a day out (he has a heavy hand on her shoulder), others don’t notice or care, but maybe one or two do wonder, but not too much, not in 1928, when social mores were quite different. By now, Albert Fish is capable of any form of depravity conceivable to modern man, some that only he could conceive, and sadly, the parents of the little girl lacked insight thereof. He will let them know about this jaunt in due course, in a missive to chill the marrow; likely to precipitate their demise.

Beginnings

There is howling coming from upstairs. It is his mother again. She fervently believes in Jesus, and thinks he lives somewhere within the parameters of her cranium. And today, she thinks he is angry with her. And she thinks she knows why, for she has committed carnal sins, things not mentioned in the good book, but mentioned elsewhere, in books she has surreptitiously read. She frequently calls out to Hamilton, when his siblings have fled the scene.

“Hammy Hammy! I need you now! Hammy…you come help your mumma. Jesus is hurting me. Hurting your mumma” “Shut your trap you crazy bitch!” Fish Snr hollers from another room.

Hamilton is quite terrified of her, wants to flee, like his siblings, but she has a hold on him, like the moon does with our water. He turns the corner of the room then looks up to see her at the head of the stairs. Now shouting wildly “Hammmeeeyyy….Hammmeeeyyy…”. She is threatening to throw herself down the stairs again (she has gone through with it three times, without breaking her body much – proof of Christ’s intervention). She is a scary thing. She is like a demented vaudeville actress, actress-manque. She will shout at shadows. She will expose herself and put her hands where they should not be seen to go before decent company. All that hullaballoo, much of it directed at him. Afraid of her antics, he goes back to the small parlour where he was playing with coloured wooden blocks. The screaming sounds are seemingly unending; just another one of her “epiphanies”, or maybe she is – as his father has postulated – “possessed”. He hopes for escape and wonders about death as an answer – his or hers.

Wishing the death of parents isn’t parricide. He wishes the death of his putatively insane mother and that she might just die as infants do - nothing gratuitous. But it seems she won’t go, not without intervention. If she would only throw herself down the stairs properly and fulfil those aims. No, she doesn’t really mean it, is just creating, instinctively knows how to avoid serious injury if she chooses to tumble. “Hammmeeeyyy! Jesus is hurting in my headddyyy!”.

“That Goddamn loony house, when Pa died it was a blessing, what a rank old buzzard. From the sounds in the bedroom, you’d have thought there was a bordello in there. And, I’ll tell you this much, I think he had his hands in the cookie jar with my siblings and might have had such ideas about me. He might have presented a nice picture of himself to outsiders, but he belonged in jail, Hell. But then he died of a heart attack, and that was our reprieve.

Mother couldn’t cope with the household situation so sent me off to the orphanage. The orphanage, that wonderful institution you go to when society has written you off as a child. So, I was going to be Oliver Twist, except, the management was not so compassionate, as ole Dickens would have told it, and he could never have let his pen stray into true descriptions of what went on in those places, here or over there no matter - the coward. I didn’t expect it to be much better than home, but, it was somewhere not too far from Dante’s centre of Hell, let me tell you. It was called St Johns Orphanage, Washington D.C.

You enter this intimidating building that looks like a prison. You are inducted, but not like at Harvard, etc. No, not that sort of matriculation; they give it to you straight up, with cuffs and slaps and blows, and hands where hands shouldn’t be. I was 9 years old. You can’t defend yourself, against a perverted thirty-odd-year old man, who out-weighs you three times, with that musculature. His dirty shrewdness, intense bullying powers. Him and the crew; the warden no better - worse. It was a coven of sadists. A seminary for the ministers of depravity to be. The stuff they got up to with us in there, encouraged us to do to each other, to them! If you knew, you might have a bit of sympathy for me. Well, with all that, it would be hard to believe in God’s love of his lambs. Maybe try the Devil.”

“I was deeply traumatized by my experiences at the orphanage, but that isn’t the whole story. I do not know what became of my fellow inmates, but I sincerely doubt they became model citizens (though I sincerely doubt any of them became someone quite like me, in that case, I was the star pupil). I have to admit here that apart from the inculcation, which children – especially urchins – are so susceptible to, I actually came to accept – even like – the abuse. Some discipline is always necessary with children, whaling, paddling them, even cat-whipping them if the crime is commensurate. Nothing comes from nothing, and I came from an institution whose governance might well have read the writings of a certain filthy-minded Marquis, or they were just that way anyhow, but how!

When I was removed from the orphanage at my mother’s behest, it must have been 1882. I was well equipped in the disgusting arts, my mind irretrievably lost in that direction. My mother had become saner it seemed (which seemed quite unbelievable given her former state) and she had a job with the Government (ditto). I was just a damaged child, free to wander, like those rascals from Missouri in those books the redhead wrote, except my mischiefs were unfit for publishing; your average person would not want to read about what I got up to when I met a ‘telegraph boy’, what he taught me and I taught him, and what we got caught doing behind a shed, chased by baying men and hounds.

It was about that time that I wondered what I was doing on this planet, since I was so at odds with society. I also wondered what it would be like to kill a person for fun. You know, how you hear about murder in the neighbourhood, or someplace else, and you read about some infamous villain who gets hanged or zapped in Sing Sing. So, the seed idea of unnatural death grows in you, in an awful, awful way.”

“I can’t really be bothered to tell you in detail all what happened in the years from, let’s say 12, to the ones that really count. Let’s just move things on. Lots of things happened. In fact, I think aged 14, I killed a kid on the tramway, except I must have blocked that one out of my memory for so long, as you might do. Don’t hold me to that though, I did make some awful stuff up (later in life, I would sometimes dream I had done that crime in great detail). O.k., so now, about 19, I was in New York. It seemed a fabulous place, the towering edifices, more on the way, their skeletal iron rising. The frenzy of it. It seemed beyond real, beyond one’s imagination. I went there, not to make something great of myself in the stormy sea of opportunities, as so many did – I became a prostitute. (You might think of prostitution as being a solely female occupation, but please open your mind – male prostitutes (homosexuality), it’s been going on since those toga-people, and before most like.) I won’t go into the details about what went on regarding that. But I was shamelessly whoring my body, so accustomed to painful discipline, and fond of it. I could give as well as take, and there was – as I’m sure there still is – a niche market for people who like to inflict and receive pain and degradation and will pay a prettier penny for that dirtiness. It was a dream job. But the authorities are decidedly disapproving of it, as is almost all everyone else.”

“Human flesh is not on the menu, except it is if there is nothing else to eat and you risk becoming dinner for bacteria and insect grubs, etc, exiting this mortal coil. But cannibalism wasn’t my primary purpose. It was an afterthought – dessert. But when that thought gets going, my it does; it is an idea you just can’t turn off. Mmmn…Human flesh. What might that taste like you wonder. My guess back then was that it was like sheep: lamb vs mutton, child vs adult. With that in mind, if I did decide to eat it, I resolved to eat ‘lamb’.

I was becoming more perverted, and in great strides. (How do you measure this!) I was getting up to things that would have instantly turned a respectable lady’s bones to stone. A person like my landlady, who, if alive, no doubt heard all the details about her former lodger. And the men – many of them – would have liked to have beaten me to death, merely because I was engaged in sexual congress forbidden in the ‘Good Book’, in which homosexuality, though not accurately described, appears to be quite definitely proscribed. And the other stuff most definitely it must be assumed. Despite my experiences with the perverts, I simply could not imagine anyone rivalled me in my ways, my ambitions. Nor did I want to. It would be me that wore the crown, the ‘King of Depravity’.”

“I was a painter and decorator. I got work throughout New York, much of it in the Irvington, Tarrytown area in Westchester County, which was quite prosperous, an area for those who could afford to move out of the teeming metropolis, with its never-ending demolition, construction, immigration. But though I had a paying job, lived in a boarding house, I wasn’t exactly content with my life, of being a workman, as I had envisioned greater things in life. I would see that gloopy paint on the surfaces, dripping, and it would make me think things grotesque, and I thought some people back in the Neanderthal period were just as perverted like that.

Anyway, I thought those things and I thought about what those people did to me in the orphanage. And I thought many things, about what I might like to do to other people, pass the baton on you might say, or the dark fire, you might not say. Anyhow, prospectively, Hell was my Harvard, say it again.”

“I had flesh on my mind, a thought smouldering in there fit to burst into flames. Human flesh, like the nipple you suckle as a baby, then you like to do it again when you find an amour, don’t you just – a circularity there perhaps. I was growing up and growing worse of mind. I’ll tell you about how I met my first unfortunate wife.

Mother – of religious derangement – she managed to find me this lady called Anna Mary Hoffman. It was an arranged marriage. She was a plump ole Hun, fertile heffer. You could do most what you wanted with her and she’d like it – or convincingly pretend to. There were these offspring: Albert, Anna, Gertrude, Eugene, John, and Henry Fish. (Somewhere out there, my hideous genes are floating about. I doubt anyone would own up to being a descendent of mine. I wonder, are they as wicked as myself; are they deranged? I would like to think so.) Well, I did like her carnally, her perverted bloom, and there was an instinctive appeal for the matrimonial partnership, but my mind was increasingly at other places, seeking mischief of the most heinous kind. I couldn’t be bound by her domestic, family ways, no, I wanted to prey on mankind.”

“Circa 1910, during my work as a painter and decorator, working mainly on those clapboard homes in Wilmington Delaware, you know, the neo-Gothic Queen Anne style places, I co-worked with a 19-year-old man named Thomas Kedden. Any censoriousness about that burgeoning relationship would have been water off a duck’s back for both of us. We were peas in a pod. I developed my interest in Kedden over a number of months, and he became a source of fascination. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with him, but that whatever it was, it would be fell.

I became increasingly obsessed with the notion that Kedden required a course of treatment…for no condition per se. I resolved to try and kill him, at least molest him, screw his mind and body up some for sure. I wanted him to know about pain and make him a treasure of suffering. I did not hate him, just humankind, and he was a good example, a lightning rod, such is life.

Around this time, I was frequently whipping myself with a homemade cat-o-nine-tails with tacks tied within the knots, made from the tatters of hobo leather I had found or stolen from passed out owners thereof. I was howling with the pain/pleasure mix from the nocturnal thrashings. These were the worse when the moon was visible, and at the very worst when it was at full. My ecstatic cries must have been a nuisance to the neighbors, whose dogs would join in, a chorus to curdle the blood, make you think some brutish animals were mating or killing each/others. And some of the humans would join in, kids, intoxicated capering young men I imagined, who had no idea about the nature of my ‘music’ (if there were any likeminded howlers, I did not want to meet them). Try as they might, none could match me for my haunting, beastly howling – the horrible quality of it. I was a ‘Soprano from Hell’

I tried to teach Kedden the bible, like a corrupt preacher, who wanted to bring him round to his way of thinking, as if I were a disciple of J, but it was as if I had in fact betrayed J to his killers and partook in the hammering of nails and torturing. But he wasn’t interested, so there was the Book of Numbers, and there was that his number was up. But before that, we got up to some serious mischief, that would not be mentioned in the ‘Good Book’, and I wouldn’t repeat it here.

So here was the trap: I was going to prepare a picnic and we’d have it in a disused barn, where I’d placed weapons, a sharpened hatchet. I wanted to cut him into chunks fit for catfish fodder. We were a pair of sodomites, and I wanted him to die. I wanted him to die on my behalf, a course Jesus should have followed, and spared himself his terrible fate – the fool.

On that happy summer’s day, the plants lively, the animal life of all proportions zealous, a bounteous and glorious scenario, around 4pm, I spoke these words ‘Come on now dear Thom. I have some special fun for us’. I had my arm around his shoulders and had kissed him on the forehead. He was a shy fellow for sure, but he gave me the sweetest acceding smile, like your favorite doggy reared as a pup, and he said, ‘Sure. I think we might be forbidden lovers’. I did feel a bit guilty when he said that. ‘Lovers’ – no; I was incapable of any emotion that could be considered to be ‘love’ towards humans. (But I did love Mistress Moon.)

So, when we got in the barn, there were none of the delights I had promised. But there were the implements. I didn’t beat around the bush. I just beat his pate in. I had him then, stripped him naked, tied him up. And after the initial beating – the induction you might say – I kept him slave, and over some length of time, involving many visits, with sustenance, I believe I did the most awful things imaginable to poor Thom. I don’t want to recall them exactly, but I did cut his ‘Third Thumb’, in half, crosswise. He screamed and looked at me in the most horrible fashion the soul can possibly endure. I then put some healing powder on the bloody stump. I kissed him farewell and left him a $10 note, and cut his binds, left him forever. Fare thee well Thom. He looked like a complete ruin. On balance, given what I was capable of by then, I think I had treated him fairly well.”

“I have to say that I knew full well that I was not normal by any measure of mankind. I was like an isotope, an unstable one, fit to fission, in a fit of heat and blast, and species of emanation that could kill. I had heard about that. I heard that a lump of that special metal the size of a human skull smashed into another could wipe out New York, or London. How cruel nature is. I admire it enormously.

I never abused my children. I got them to abuse me though, paddle my backsides. Now there’s a turn up for the books. That plumpkin of a wife went off with another Hun, Straube, with those beasts I’d sired. I think she must have gotten fed up with my desires of her body, as prodigious, and increasingly ‘Inverted’ as they were. The stuff with the paddles and whips with the children, and then garnered that I was up to some extracurricular activities, which is bad enough, but when depravities are involved, and it is another chap, it is terrible for an ostensibly puritanical wife. I guessed she could glean it from my eyes, which were windows into Hell. So, farewell.” offm,anHH

“The mind has a mind of its own, as one of those split-minded people might prove. You may be talented at something, like the violin, or math, or stealing. Your mind doesn’t necessarily care what you want it to do, it just does as it pleases, or fights you if you do what doesn’t please it. I was a pervert, a bogeyman of old. You know how you notice the moon, you can’t fail to really. And you know how the tides function. Have you ever been in the sea when it turns and you feel that slight but alarming tug on your paddling tootsies, it trying to take you away from life! Mistress Moon controls tides. Tides in your mind. Magma and volcanoes also. And when Mistress Moon gets irate, by God can she demonstrate it down here.

“Mistress Moon, she was creating some havoc with the tides in my mind. It was spring tides, especially high ones I believe, since my skull plates seemed to be moving about, up and down, apart and together, and the grey stuff was getting extra lively, like the Bay of Fundy of a super-spring tide. I felt that there was something going on in there akin to genius (but antisocial for sure). It was a passel of pleasures that daren’t admit existence. The lust for it, growing by the day. Pain and pleasure can be two bedfellows, but ones that can fight like cats and dogs. So how do you get that started? Well, try whipping yourself, then like any discipline, things will develop, as careers progress, and after a while, you will be an expert. I had the weals and welts to show my devotion to it, like medalia, scout badges. Augmenting that, were the noises of ecstasy in pain. But that was junior level stuff, for the body has many other zones, pain centres to exploit, as any good torturer could advise you. I was my own torturer, so to speak. My imagination was burgeoning, finding new ways to ratchet up the pain and pleasure, in ways stranger and more deranged. What do I mean? Well, it is sticking needles into your noodles, and the pee-wee, and isn’t that about as painful as it gets? (I would remove them later, and sometimes re-insert them, before the wounds could heal). I would put many sharp objects into the other parts of my body; did myriad cruelties to my being, experimenting to find the best pain my body could conjure/endure. There seemed to me no pain I couldn’t endure, adore. I would howl in agony and pleasure in sync. I would remove my bloody hands from the wound area, lick them clean. I would rub my face and groin in my own blood and howl at Mistress Moon, especially when she was being shy; that sickle of her bosom in the dark sparkling negligee. The neighbours didn’t like that ruckus, as you can reckon. They never liked me at all. Neither did most of the dogs in retrospect.”

11.

“Hullabaloo, Hullaballoo. I was hearing voices in my mind, like echoes of another’s, like a madman hollering from within. At first, I wrote them off as tricks, because they weren’t those of Mistress Moon, whose voice was quite distinct, dulcet (unless she was on one of her ‘cycles’), commanding and profound. But as they became more persistent, beleaguering, convincing, I couldn’t ignore them, not for long.

It was like an echo from the preachings of a biblical character, an apostle, maybe even the big J. It would come at random times and wherever I was. I recall being in a shop buying pork chops when it came. I just stood there staring into oblivion whilst in the queue. I didn’t really know what was happening, what the others thought of me. I recall that I started to shake all through, like I was in a fever, like some biblical plague creatures were making their infernal progress through my being, like a disease through a tree sped up into a rattling. I had a bottle I had found by a hobo nest, the pills I’d fed to the river, replaced with gravel. I shook that pill bottle like a rattle fit for a bedlam variety show. I started up, making sounds that were not language, at best you could say they were religious, speaking in tongues it might have sounded. That voice, it sounded like the madness of my mother, and probably hers, those in her line, it was shouting abuse in some language I later thought was Aramaic, which I had translated into that terrible rant. I was given a window into those ancient times and saw the apostles, and J. I saw the scene of the Last Supper, and in it, someone who looked like they could have been the ancestor of our dire lineage. And the main event here was a hog-tied child, and a fire to roast it, and my, did that look like a banquet I wanted to have. I do recall that I started speaking English, though this did not help my cause, as harm already done by my alarming behavior, I was talking things people do not want to hear – obscene I am sure in retrospect. The Shop keeper showed me the door, much to the succor of everyone else, who booed and hissed and murmured their disgust and relief. The development of my madness was moving along.“

“I had consumed a certain amount of laudanum and some bourbon and gone wandering at night. I believe I was adequately attired for the jaunt, but I will admit that my senses were mostly in disarray. I was walking down Clark St, Brooklyn when three yahoos accosted me. I had for some time pre-guessed such a scenario, so common in lawless parts. They were no more than teens, but felt they had the key to the city, so to speak. They buffeted me with their hulking shoulders, laughter, then the menacing verbal transactions began. But I was not to be had in this way, not a victim at all. Here’s how it went: ‘You take your sorry asses out of here or I’ll eat them for breakfast’ I said. They burst into fits of laughter, fleetingly joked amongst themselves (muttered something about ‘The Howling Man’), but their menace was undiminished, coming to the fore. They intended to beat me to a pulp, likely to death. The boldest of them, tall, Irish, he said ‘You made me laugh then. But I’ll kick your ass anyhow, ‘less you give it up’. Then he put his right arm around my neck in a menacing cuddle. Then, I drew my blunt and rusty knife, held it near his groin, prodding, and staring into his eyes with my windows into Hell, like furnace-lenses, I said ‘Oh really? give it up! Why my beauty that will cost you a pretty penny. Unhand me now, or I’ll take your peewees with me to Hell’. He looked fit to scream, I spanked his ass. And by dint of that performance, the others were scared so much so that they fled at a tremendous pace, my accoster the frontrunner of the triumvirate, and I howled after them and sped them (ahwooo…!). Then I looked up at the night sky, and Mistress Moon was nowhere to be seen. In fact, it was just about raining, ranting thunder here and there in the distance, in my head. I felt high but deflated.”

Beatrice Kiel

“1924. I had firmly decided that I was a despicable human being and that this was fine. I had decided that I would behave thus, so I assembled my ‘Implements of Hell’, which consisted of myriad work tools fit to torture and dismember anyone unfortunate enough to fall under my heinous gaze and become prey. I was set to do whatever I could, to sate my depraved desires, desires that could be genius in their depravity I hoped. It was July 11, I was rambling around the wider vicinity looking for prey, always looking, like a creature more in tune to nature for its dietary requirements. The Mistress was watching me shyly from without the inner blue, not all of her, just a partly worn orb. Sometimes I wouldn’t know where I was, or how to get back to home, and then, for a while, I had no home, lest it be where I lay my dirty head. So, I had been trudging around a great deal, scouting my potential prey, and it was so much footfall to find a morsel at all. But I found eight-year-old Beatrice Kiel playing alone on her parents' farm in Staten Island. What I saw was a meat toy, that should be edible. I enticed her over the picket fence, offered her money to come and help me look for rhubarb. It was a feeble ploy by adult standards, but she was sold on the idea, and we were about to leave the farm for the prospective terrible adventure, when her mother came out and came at me as only a parent can when they sense there is someone like me after their most important asset. And so, I ran away. It was humiliating. But there were plenty more fish in the sea. The sting of that would be avenged with the next one. I would get all my revenges on society, whatever they might turn out to be in my warped mind. I did not think I would fail, in the long run. I think that the diminished state of the Mistress, so veiled by the day, so raggedy was a factor in the failure in question but did not think she ought to know my sentiments thus. But she must have done, for as I thought ill of her influence, I suffered a tremendous head pang, like you might get after a night on some bath tub gin. She was saying, ‘say that again, and I’ll do it again, for I am in charge here buster’. Quite.”

Francis McDonnell

“My fear from the previous attempt had abated and I was ready to strike again. Children were endlessly fascinating to me, and there seemed no shortage of them. But you could not just grab one of them like an apple off a tree; you had to stalk, and work out advantages of attack, that would defeat detection of your intents, and your person. In this case, it was the early part of the night of July 14, 1924, and it was 9-year-old Francis McDonnell. He must have been some sort of rascal, or his parents didn’t care about his welfare much. I saw him loitering by a tree in a small park, approached him and after some childish small-talk, pounced. And so, he failed to return home after playing catch with friends in the Port Richmond neighborhood of Staten Island. I believe a search was organized and his body was found hanging from a tree in a wooded area near his home. I had sexually assaulted him, then strangled him with his suspenders was the record. I’m sure it was true, my memory of the incident not so much.

By accounts, I was now seen as some sort of elderly boogerman, ‘The Grey Man’ I was. And I had much more work to do before I earnt my place in Hell though. Having committed that crime above, I could not stop any more than an engine dragging three hundred tons of lead could descending an incline, with defective brakes. Given that, I guessed my time was coming to an end on this mortal coil, that Hell awaited, the final prize for my depraved offerings to Mistress Moon and her dearly wedded Lucifer, of whom, a special guest I was sure I would become.”

Billy Gaffney

“It was February 1927 and warm for the month. I saw some little rascals playing in the apartment hallway of their Brooklyn homestead. There were three of them, two around three years old, the other no more than twelve. I don’t really remember much of what else happened for reasons I conclude were some form of mind trick, though I am perfectly happy to admit that I had committed the crime even - as unlikely that it is – that I didn’t, and as such, I was largely informed by what I read, what was later explained to me, that I had accosted one of the younger kids, then I killed him. If so, where I placed the body I do not know; but there is a sensation in my mind that is alike a corpse digesting in there, and by dint of that, I feel an association with that of Billy Gaffney. And according to records, I violently molested another of the children, and he scampered with the others. It was reported that this escapee from my clutches said I was ‘the boogeyman’ who took the other. Yes, that must have been me alright. But it initially made me laugh to think that they blamed another, a Mr. Peter Kudzinowski for it. I didn’t mind him taking the blame for it, as it would allow me to continue my mission from, and to Hell, but woe-betide he took the credit for any of my works of Glory. (You may wonder whether people like us have anything in common, some sense of camaraderie. I don’t know and doubt it).

Such activities are like to result in the attention of the authorities and some comeuppance. I was a victim of my description, and the Police came to establish who I was, located me in my apartment, arrested me. In the end, there was no mistaking me for anyone else for long. I guess I was a little proud of my uniqueness, as I gauged it. I was charged with molestation of the other little rascal, and I ended up in Sing Sing, like an aged caged canary behind some wicked bars. Hullabaloo! You wouldn’t believe the racket in there. That, and the perversion (when you put bad men together in a center of sin, congress unmentionable in the good book occurs, to a great extent). In there I realized how much my former neighbors must have disliked me, since, my latterly night time howling reprised would result in threats of extreme violence, some of which were partially enacted. I had my two cell mates under my thumb, though they had tried to have me under theirs; I simply enunciated my insanity lustily, and projected my deranged mind into theirs, by dint of Mistress Moon. And they were educated in insanity true, and truly broken I hope.

It was an irony that would have sincerely displeased the Governor, but the screws were good news: they were amateurish sadists, whom I could teach a thing or two, but their beatings were well received by me, to the horror of the other inmates, and I offered to take other lags’ behalf. The screws would beat me, and I was in highly voluble raptures, now a ‘Baritone from Hell’. I wanted - even begged – for more, more of their sadistic ministrations, and the more I wanted, the less they were inclined to give, because this was not some pleasure palace where you were pampered, and because I truly disturbed them. They must have wanted rid of me, but I was in a sort of Hell-Heaven and could have stayed there till the Fallen one came to retake his Kingdom. But only lazily could I indulge that place, for there was much work to do. Because true depravity involves innocents.

This is what I wrote to my counsel concerning the Gaffney business:

*I brought him to the Riker Ave. dumps. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took him ... I took the G boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took trolley to 59 St. at 2 A.M. and walked home from there. Next day about 2 P.M., I took tools, a good heavy cat-of-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these half in six strips about 8 in. long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears – nose – slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood. I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in the grip. Then I cut him thru the middle of his body. Just below his belly button. Then thru his legs about 2 in. below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head – feet – arms – hands and the legs below the knee. This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to North Beach. Water is 3 to 4 ft. deep. They sank at once. I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee wees and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears – nose – pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when meat had roasted about 1/4 hr., I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about 2 hr., it was nice and brown, cooked thru. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was as sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet.

I guess you couldn’t have made that letter up really. Anyhow, they couldn’t prove a thing back then. Even the mother didn’t think it was me. I was released and free to kill again.”

“I guess you think I devoted all my time to my terrible career - not so. I also think you assumed I was a homosexual – not so. No, I was just a beast, an ‘omnisexual’, driven by heinous lust, devoid of any form of love and affection for mankind. I was also a working man, and enjoyed my painting work, transforming corrupted surfaces into something new and prettier, knowing full well that corruption would return, that my inner desires were the exact reverse of my reparations. I also wanted to get my hands on a lady, to be my wife, just some good ole noodles with her when desires were oriented in that particular way. Yes, I certainly did want some good ole noodles in the way nature had intended when my mother was great with me. With her, whomever she might be, I could also kill her. I had patterns in my mind that you’d find in pornographic material, and I did genuinely appreciate the aesthetics of a female face and figure, the scent, and my noodles might swell up at the sight or thought of such a delightful creature. But as you must have devised, I was not fit for any kind of normal relationship…The thought of me and a woman in a truly respectable relationship, that could only be fantasy. No love, no infidelity unto Mistress Moon.

It was a warm day for March, about 75. I had finished a painting job for some rich old lady, a Carpenter Gothic, up in Red Hook. I caught the trolley bus downtown about seven. I looked for prey, children, but there were only three, and they were well kept. I went to this secret bar called ‘Dee-Dee’s’, which was quite popular with minor-league monied men, crooks, mobster juniors. And where the money goes so do the whores, like lobos to a camp fire, not that they would admit to being such specie, but a few drinks and a handful of dollars would seal the truth – Q.E.D.

I sat at the bar, away from the others whom I found unsavory, and ordered beer, peanuts, just minding my B-s, except a part of my mind was always prowling around, walleyeing for some kind of prey, like an addict or a tope, their poison always on the mind, if not in it. So, on that went, just wetting my whistle with beer, while some of the other patrons were making more progress. But there came this youngish woman, who was somewhat drunk I surmised. I didn’t have any particular standards so I was all ears and eyes, and fingers where they shouldn’t be in public. Yes, I wanted to ravish a woman.

There is a prehensile energy alike the arrival of an electric storm, when your sexual appetite is aroused and coincides with something you want on the menu. It is like giving a child an ice-cone, after two weeks without. Or a famished man a piece of bread. Or a parched man a gulp. How they cherish!

She sidled up to me, drunk, at least for a lady, drunker than me for sure. She was a mess in progress. Slurring, she ordered a ‘Sundog’, a cocktail I’d never heard of but wanted to know about (a finger of Bourbon, as much of lime juice, some coconut milk, Tabasco sauce). I wanted one too. The bartend gave the woman a horrible look, as if to say, ‘beat it whore or share your sugar!’.

In my proximity, so close, I felt compelled to say something. She tried to pay for her ‘Sundog’, but, scratching around in her handbag, like a chicken scrabbling for grain, it was clear that she either had insufficient funds, or could not get her sauced noggin to find them. And the repulsive barman seemed to be about to throw her out, so I thought, and decided to rescue her, the gallant man that I was in my estimation. So, I paid for hers and ordered one myself (quite an odd drink I have to say).

Though I was fairly sober, I didn’t really know how to talk to a lady I really desired. I was determined to secure her. I wanted to scalp the barman on account of his dirty looks towards the lady and by association me. And because he was pug-faced ugly, which was reason enough in my book.

Her reception of my generosity was a slurry affair. ‘You’re a good one you… Better than that thing over thurre’ she said, pointing to the barman, who clearly wanted her/us to leave.

She actually wasn’t pretty by any standards - Hell, some boys are prettier than some girls. (Beauty is cruelty, a knife to the heart.) Anyhow, she was really just a cheap ole hussy; a carbuncle compared to some of those ritzy New York diamond girls. But we got along that night. I won’t bore you further with any perceived romance. We got together and married (bigamously on my part. We married and divorced after one week!). It was around that time that I had sent an obscene letter to a maid in the vicinity. I had been writing many and deliberating who should receive one. Each was tailored to the recipient as I perceived them. Each was vile. It was a tremendously gratifying process. Though I was no Shakespeare, I did make an effort at the style and structure of the prose/poetry, and the one in question was quite a work of art I assure you; something his Highness’s bard, de Sade might have conjured up, a hugely imaginative perverted valentine. I got arrested. I was sent to Bellevue for observation, such a nice hostel for the screaming mad and my did I do some howling back at those fellow inmates, fit to shut them up at times. I would chant ‘Hell is Heaven, Heaven is Hell’, for hours on end, and I got a good number of the fellows in there to join in. I think they were glad to have seen the back of me, a return to the more normal hullabaloo.”

“In my terrible dream it was a dance. We – maybe a dozen - were all in a circle, naked men, young except for me. We were circling anti-clockwise, the pee wees and bawballs were jumping and swaying around. There was this terribly gaudy man in the centre. Hell was what I thought. That dancing of us transformed from one ring to several, as more people appeared from behind, jostling. Concentric were the rings of us and the man in the middle he was becoming a furious thing, commanding, like an orchestra conductor enraged or insane. We danced as if on his puppet strings, that was the power he held over us. And the man was getting taller, his suit ripping apart, and changing into something inhuman, but not of any animal I had ever seen. The rings, they got bigger, further apart. And then we were dancing and bowing, chanting in an insane display, impossible in life. It was his Highness, but Mistress was absent. When I woke I was screaming, there were animal noises as well, as if to serenade. I had to drink nearly half a bottle of bourbon to drown out my distemper. But overall it was a pleasant night.”

“Next day. When I woke at around two o’clock in the morning, I was buzzing with murderous energy. I went to the window and Mistress Moon was staring at me like the inner sphere of boiled cod eye. I was decided on killing children in the Negro part of town. I doubted I would be caught for that.

Hunting, I went around those neighborhoods, thinking that no one would really miss the odd Negro child enough to call on the Police, and that they wouldn’t spare much attention anyhow. I found an imbecile of about ten years, who I lured into a park with the promise of sweets. I tried to molest him, but he squirmed and tried to run away, so I stabbed him and left him for dead. I never knew what became of him thereafter.

I was becoming more and more insane, I realize in retrospect. I did things that I cannot quite remember when it comes to my victims, the numbers I couldn’t say. I was howling at the Mistress Moon, sometimes naked, whipping myself till my back bled, then bruised till I resembled a huckleberry, my behind a rainbow of pain. The dogs howled back, in concert, the neighbors were mostly either unaware my cries were human or were too scared to confront me in the night time; though some did shout obscenities at me and threatened to call on the police, though they either never did, or the police took no interest. I had my needles in my muscles, in my noodles; and when I walked, they would move around in there, as if I were a mechanical man, and cause all the more stimulus. I would light matches and burn my nipples, put that stuff under my nails and light it; I would do anything, anything that would give me my ‘pain’, things so vile I won’t even reveal them here. Read good ole de Sade if you want to, for his tome might as well have been my ‘Manual of Depravity’.

When I and Mistress Moon were in sync, I would set out to find my victims here and there in the general area, in a state of the utmost ecstatic disarray. I was getting those cannibal urges. I was hearing verses, (like Isaiah 41:10) clearly, but echoing. I was increasingly sure that I was John the Apostle, or that he was once me. I don’t think I killed during that period of distemper and religious ecstasy, just invented it. But I had to kill; and I had to do that thing so forbidden, as well as myriad other acts untoward.“

“I had refined my ‘Implements of Hell’. They were essentially keys to get into that desired place, ‘Palace of Suffering’. Knives, saws, screwdrivers, a hammer or two, and various another tool fit for purpose. I had decided that now was my debut as a proper protégé of the Devil. The Devil was Lucifer and his name meant some permutation of light. He was an angel fallen. I was no angel, from the start. I was designed by his Evil Highness to help complete his mission on earth, quit the mortal coil, then join him. I had seen the light. He spoke to me through Mistress Moon, and she was his relay mind and her cataract eye, their combined scope looking down on me. Her celestial body had a satellite moon within my own mind, and we were in a ballet of communication and understanding. The bauble of her was like a Witch’s Egg in the sky, and in the recesses of my mind. You cannot defy the tides, they are lunatic”

“Now it was May 1928. I saw the ad in the Sunday edition of the New York World that read, ‘Young man, 18, wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street.’ Now that aroused my interest. I wanted to meet this young man for sure and wondered what I might get up to with him, and Mistress Moon gave me the go ahead. So I had some mighty hopes then. I was cannibalistic, a taste for the human flesh like a sick, neglected, starving hound, and I assumed that I must have indulged in that most heinous act, lest I made my fetish up. I believe I did not.

I turned up at the address, and paltry it was, clapboard, like some I’d painted. The woman was quite plump. I introduced myself in a most smarmy and solicitous manner, as a farmer not far out, a lie that I pulled off well, my scruffy attire in my favour. So, I chatted with that plump housewife, and her man showed himself in time, his neck scraggy, like a chicken’s. And then came the boy in question. Yes, I did want to do wicked things to him, no less than a hyena would devour a baby of its prey species. But it was the daughter that caught my fancy, and I was sold.

So, after some sundry chat, I gained their trust. The boy was keen. Her name was Grace. I agreed to hire young Budd, and his friend Willie, for work on my fictitious farm. I agreed to come pick them up two weeks hence (I would not show then).

I came back with an extraordinary offer, relayed to young Grace. You see, I had devised a scenario, a birthday party for my niece, and wouldn’t it be swell if Grace came along and met some nice kids about her own age. I didn’t have high hopes her parents would allow it, but maybe the Mistress did some magic and made it happen. Anyhow, it was arranged, went to plan.

I won’t go into the details of what happened - they are pretty much all on record (read the letter).”

“My life since that incident had been mostly mundane, but there were incidents for sure. November 1934, I wrote this letter to the unfortunate parents, the mother. Though you might not believe it, I did actually want to apologise in a roundabout way. But I couldn’t help taunting her.

And so:

*My dear Mrs Budd,

In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the steamer Tacoma, Capt John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco to Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was a famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1 to 3 Dollars a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold to the Butchers to be cut up and sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak – chops – or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys one 7 one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them – tortured them – to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 yr old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was cooked and eaten except Head – bones and guts. He was roasted in the oven, (all of his ass) boiled, broiled, fried, stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time I was living at 409 E 100 St, rear – right side. He told me so often how good human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3 – 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese – strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her, on the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wild flowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mama. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick – bite and scratch. I choked her to death then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her, though, I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.”

Capture

“It wasn’t a great feat of detective work, I would have thought I was a candidate for crimes I hadn’t committed, even if I wished I had. Ultimately with my description, and the gathering interest in someone like me, my time was up. And so, it was soon my time to meet the agency of my transport to my maker and Mistress Moon. And though I greatly looked forward to the acquaintance, I was apprehensive of the interim, and ornery concerning the whole process, which I perceived as a form of abuse I did not trust or like, appetite for pain and degradation notwithstanding. I would fight captivity as best I could if only to commit more depravity for the greater cause.

I have no doubt that the Detective who wanted me as a collar had the utmost desire to get his reward as much as I did my prey. It was this fanaticism that led him to me, for reasons only he could know for sure, but I suspect he wanted to get the equivalent of a specimen. Here’s how they caught me: the taunting letter sent to the mother of the unfortunate victim of mine was delivered in an envelope that had a small hexagonal emblem including the letters ‘N.Y.P.C.B.A.’ representing ‘New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association’. It turned out that a janitor at that company – who was a fellow boarder in the then hostel – had stolen some of the stationary. After the appeals for evidence, and the inquiries of the police, finally someone worked out something about their quarry enough to come to me. I was accosted by an inspector named William F. King. Knowing his intent, I tried to cut him up, but he disarmed me adeptly. I wondered where Mistress Moon was.

I was in prison awaiting trial. Execution was no doubt the subsequence of a conviction of an indictment for my crimes. In there, I was examined. A Doctor, who had noticed my discomfort when sitting down, asked me for any possible cause, and I explained about the needles and pins in my body and my pee wees and general noodle area, and he was shocked. There was an x-ray, showing the extent of that line of self-torture. The physical abuse and degradation in there was quite disappointing compared to Sing Sing. I was considerably better at it than my warders, although the instruments available to me were limited to cutlery. I tried to advise some of the guards about ways to inflict greater suffering, me in that constant state due to the metal in me, but they weren’t interested, not even the most brutal and sadistic seeming ones. Of that latter category, I had to intimate my desires about eating their children, foul recipes, to earn some good blows. “

My Trial for the Murder of Grace Budd.

“Now the trial, and don’t you just want to know all about that, I think you do. It was on March 11, 1935, in White Plains, New York. Frederick P. Close would be the judge and prosecuting attorney (a white-whiskered hoary harumph, who reminded me of my dirty ole Pa). He had his authority, and by God was he going to exercise it and boomingly, on the utterly depraved subject before him, and then send me off to Hell. Well, the case against me was likely without doubt, given the letter; it was whether I was a cold-blooded murderer or a helpless madman that was in play, and play I wanted to, for the transfer of me to his Highness’ custody could come about – in freedom - whenever, through natural death, suicide, there was no hurry. So, even though I was quite happy to admit to my crimes under certain circumstances, there was no chance I was going to just fess up without a fight, which would be much more fun. And so, I had my counsel and was prepared for defense.

You might have thought that back then, justice was perfunctory, and swift. Well, I had rights and was to be defended by James Dempsey, a former prosecutor and the one-time mayor of Peekskill, New York. My nemesis was Westchester County Chief Assistant District Attorney Elbert F. Gallagher. I pleaded insanity, and claimed to have heard voices from God telling me to kill those children (not so!). Several psychiatrists testified about my sexual fetishes, the whole gamut of them (they might have wanted to have woken ole de Sade as an expert witness on that matter).

My chief expert witness was Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist who knew a thing or two about child development who conducted psychiatric examinations for the New York criminal courts. During two days of testimony, he explained that I was obsessed with religion and specifically a preoccupation with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22:1–24). (Didn’t I tell you I told some awful lies!). He said that I had thought and had said, similarly ‘sacrificing’ a boy would be penance for my own sins. Well, that was a queer gambit, one which I didn’t think would keep me from the ‘Faraday Throne’. He detailed my cannibalism, which he associated with communion (really!). Then this last question Dempsey asked Wertham was 15,000 words long, such was the extent of his fascination with me, and getting me convicted. It was a gimcrack analysis of my life, his vague theories thereof, with a sinister desire to see me zapped dead. Then there were the witnesses from that lovely hostelry Bellevue.

The first of the four rebuttal witnesses was Menas Gregory, and he testified that I was abnormal but sane. Under cross examination, Dempsey asked if myriad perversions were of a sane or insane person. Gregory replied that such a person was not ‘mentally sick’ and that these were common perversions that were ‘socially perfectly alright’ and that I was ‘no different from millions of other people’, some of whom very prominent and successful. Which was balderdash. The next witness was the resident physician at The Tombs, Perry Lichtenstein. Dempsey objected to a doctor with no training in psychiatry testifying on the issue of sanity, but Justice Close overruled on the basis that the jury could decide what weight to give a prison doctor. When asked whether my causing myself pain indicated a mental condition, Lichtenstein replied, ‘That is not masochism’, I was only ‘punishing myself to get sexual gratification’. The next witness, Charles Lambert, testified that coprophilia was a common practice and that religious cannibalism may be psychopathic but ‘was a matter of taste’ and not evidence of a psychosis. Also balderdash. The last rebuttal witness, James Vavasour, repeated Lambert's opinion. Another defense witness was Mary Nicholas - and look what the cat brought in – it was my 17-year-old daughter, who described how I ‘taught’ – along with the others – perverted games. The tattling, fat, ugly hussy, she was disowned there and then and no doubt the feeling was mutual. (Though much of her testimony was true, I felt betrayed. I also felt that I was going to be persecuted for crimes in the wider sphere, ones I hadn’t committed, but might as well have done.)

Dempsey in his summation noted that I was a ‘psychiatric phenomenon’ and that nowhere in legal or medical records was there another individual who possessed so many sexual abnormalities (what did he know!).

I doubt any of the jurors doubted that I was insane, but ultimately, they felt I should be executed anyway. So they found me both sane and guilty (obviating the M'Naghten rules, given their apprehensions), and the judge ordered the death sentence.

The judge pronounced, and it went like this:

‘Hamilton Howard Fish, you have been convicted of the most heinous of crimes in our Godly society. You are a cold-blooded murderer of children. Not only did you commit that crime but driven by some form of depravity known only to you, you chose to engage in cannibalism. I accept that your life was likely a hard one, in which you were, early on, inculcated with your perversions, that led you down this sordid road to perdition, but you wilfully chose to engage in these acts. You did not resist your fell compulsions. I hereby sentence you to death, by electrocution. I…’

At this point I interjected. ‘Your honour, did you know that in medieval Hungary, they had a form of execution…’

‘Order, order’, he said, his bushy white eyebrows beetling on his stern, heavily wrinkled countenance, his eyes fierce and condemnatory, like an enraged Zeus. The jury looked on both disgusted and intrigued.

“In which a regicide was placed on a metal throne that was…

‘I said “ORDER!”’. He brought the gavel down in a gunshot.

‘Red hot, and the victim was roasted alive.’

Three more gavel blows, then, ‘Order! Take this monster away’.

I was removed to the holding cells, the remaining jury and other random observers seething with their outrage, articulating it anyway possible, a good hullaballoo. As a final insult I shouted ‘the electric chair is my rightful throne. It will be the greatest thrill of my life’, and that increased the hullabaloo somewhat. “

Deathwing

“The prison guards treated me as if I were some ghoul that was too foul for them to handle, as if mere murderers were more to their delectation, and wouldn’t it be better if they could just deal with them. And, they delighted in the fact that I was going to get the lightning. I was looking forward to meeting his Highness, oh yes, a great deal, but being caged was a terrible time. My howlings were a pastime, their cadence and volume new and confused, and the other inmates on ‘deathwing’, and beyond, and the guards did hate them much. I sounded like a pig being slaughtered combined with a lusty choirboy, as odd as that sounds.

The days passed towards my appointed time. Mistress Moon was nowhere to be seen because there was no window or grate. But I could feel her in my mind, tugging tidwise. She was a tease, and like earthly women, she had her moods, or phases if you please, and I’d feel her so much the more when she was full and potent, and questing after me. We were in full sync, but her beauty was something I was determined to see.

In prison, those condemned to death are accorded – inter alia – a last meal before it is curtains. I did not think it possible for them to get me what I wanted, I didn’t even ask, though I was tempted to, just for one last gas and a complimentary clout (no, I had standard prison mush). But, in lieu of that perquisite, I asked to see the night sky in the hope that Mistress Moon was out there looking to me. It was granted.

I was taken out to the yard at just before 11pm. It was a clear night sky, and the Mistress was just over the roof of the building, not in full view. I stared at her, as the two prison guards waited bemused and scathing, joking together.

What I saw was this: her body seemed to rise into full view, a perfect circle, then, I started shaking, shivering, like a junkhead on the downward slope. I was making some pretty odd noises, not far off those I’d made in the meat shop and articulating like a puppet. The guards did not interfere. I saw a bosom, teat and aureole, and it all shimmered. Then I saw a face, it was mother, then came that of Pa, then the two faces as if in portrait. And I was seriously puzzled, scared. Then I heard this from mother: ‘Hammeeey. Hammeeey’ ‘yes’ I called ‘we didn’t love you. Never. And now you know that your siblings and children don’t either. But Jesus does love you, and he’s forgiven you your crimes. You’re going to him now.’ Then it was Pa, ‘Hamilton, your mother’s words are true. You were never going to get to Hell, no more than Harvard. What a fool you were to think so. There was no Mistress Moon. His Highness up here deceived you, and he’s laughing fit to burst. Jesus loves you like a moonbeam.’ Then they both started laughing, tauntingly. And I screamed fit to chill the blood. Other inmates pitched in in concert, all manner of it, in a terrible racket fit to ruin tough minds. I was removed by the guards.”

END

“The fateful day came, I met my maker, but where am I now except in your mind?”

*Author’s note: the letters are verbatim reproductions of those written by Albert Fish.

Editor's note: this piece ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written, disclaimer and all. It is an imagined first person account, not anything Albert Fish said, and the author states that in his own opening line. It is published here in the same form as his embellished Gacy, Bobby Joe Long, Dahmer and Tommy Lynn Sells pieces. The record: this archive holds Albert Fish at three to ten and more. He was convicted of the 1928 murder of ten year old Grace Budd, and it was his own letter to her mother six years later that led police to him. He was executed at Sing Sing on 16 January 1936. He claimed a great many more killings and almost none of them was ever tested. The archive also carries a sourced Fish article, CANNIBAL SERIAL KILLER ALBERT FISH, for readers who want the record rather than the imagining. Nothing in this monologue should be read as evidence.

Editor's note added Aug 2026: this is one of six pieces in the archive in which this author writes an invented monologue in a killer's voice. Four are titled as embellished confessions; the other two are his reconstructions of H. H. Holmes and Aileen Wuornos. On two of the four, including this one, the caution line at the head of the page has been supplied by the archive because the manuscript carried no disclaimer of its own. Nothing else in the article has been altered.

The point is worth stating once and plainly, since these pieces are written to be read as if the man were speaking. No words in any of them were said by the person named in the title. They are not confessions, they were not given to anybody, and they are not evidence. Where a reader wants what these men actually said, the archive holds real documents: Gacy's 1993 telephone interview with Ken Hackney, Dahmer's final court statement, the Bundy confession transcript and the Lucas and Toole phone call, all of them verbatim and all of them labelled as such.