On October 16, 1875 a seventy-five-year-old man collapsed of a heart attack on the platform of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington and died there. His name was Randall Fish. His youngest son was five years old and was called Hamilton.
His mother, born Ellen Howell, had no income and there was no child welfare system to go to. There was Sunday charity and there was the orphanage. She placed the boy at St. John's Orphanage in Washington and went to look for work, which is what working-class widows did.
He was there about five years. He began to stammer and to wet the bed, and he was beaten, and other boys were beaten in front of him. Sixty years later he told a psychiatrist that it was at St. John's that he got all wrong. He put it another way as well: I saw so many boys whipped, it ruined my mind. What he also said, and what matters more, is that at some point during those years the beatings stopped being only painful.
He took the name Albert, after a sibling who had died, and partly to be rid of the nickname the other boys gave him, Ham and Eggs. Around 1880 his mother found a government job and took him home.
At twelve he formed a relationship with a telegraph boy who introduced him to drinking urine and eating feces, and he began spending his weekends at the public baths watching boys undress. He arrived in New York at about twenty and worked as a house painter for the next four decades, in every borough. In 1903 he was convicted, of grand larceny by some accounts and of embezzlement by others, and served time at Sing Sing, which is a detail worth holding onto.
In 1898 his mother arranged a marriage to Anna Mary Hoffman, nine years his junior. They had six children, Albert, Anna, Gertrude, Eugene, John and Henry, and were married nineteen years.
His children said afterward that he never laid a hand on any of them. He worked, he came home, he was strange, and at home he kept it in. That is the part of this case people find hardest, and it is documented rather than inferred: the man was a functioning father for two decades while doing what he was doing outside the house.
In January 1917 Anna left him for John Straube, a handyman who had been lodging with the family. She took nearly everything they owned and left the six children behind.
After that the behavior stopped being private. He heard voices he attributed to John the Apostle and once wrapped himself in a carpet on their instruction. He beat himself with a paddle studded with nails. He soaked wool in lighter fluid, pushed it inside himself and set light to it. And over a period of years he pushed sewing needles into his groin and pelvis, deep enough that they could not be recovered, and left them there.
His eldest son eventually threw him out. He drifted after that, picking up arrests for vagrancy, petty theft and for sending obscene letters to women whose names he took from classified advertisements and marriage agencies, which he had been doing since his twenties. On February 6, 1930, at Waterloo, New York, he married Estella Wilcox. The marriage lasted about a week and was bigamous, because he and Anna had never divorced. In May 1930 he was arrested over an obscene letter to a woman who had answered an advertisement for a maid, and after that arrest and another in 1931 he was sent to Bellevue for observation.
Around 1910, working in Wilmington, Delaware, he met a nineteen-year-old named Thomas Bedden, whom his own later account described as intellectually disabled. He kept him first where he was lodging and, after about ten days, took him to an empty farmhouse and held him there for about two weeks, tying him up and torturing him, and finally cut off part of his genitals. He said later that he had intended to kill him and take the body home, and did not because the weather was hot and he was afraid of the smell.
What he did instead was pour peroxide into the wound, wrap it in a handkerchief smeared with Vaseline, leave a ten-dollar bill, kiss the man goodbye and catch the first train back to New York. His own account of it ends: never heard what become of him, or tried to find out.
Around 1919, in Georgetown, he stabbed an intellectually disabled boy.
On July 11, 1924 he approached eight-year-old Beatrice Kiel on her parents' farm on Staten Island and asked her to help him pick rhubarb. Her mother came out and chased him off the property. He came back later and tried to sleep in the Kiels' barn, until Beatrice's father, Hans Kiel, found him there and put him off the farm.
Within days he took Francis McDonnell from Port Richmond, a few miles away. The accounts differ on the detail: the boy is given as eight or nine, and as reported missing on the night of July 14 or taken on July 15. He was a police officer's son and had been playing catch with friends. He was sexually assaulted and strangled with his own suspenders, and his body was found in woodland not far from his home. Francis's mother, Anna McDonnell, had seen a man speaking to her son earlier that day and gave the police a description that the newspapers printed and kept printing: everything about him seemed faded and grey. That is where the Gray Man comes from. It was a mother's description of a man she had looked at for a few seconds.
On February 11, 1927 four-year-old Billy Gaffney disappeared from a hallway at 99 Fifteenth Street in Brooklyn, where he had been playing with a three-year-old neighbor, Billy Beaton, and Billy's twelve-year-old brother. The younger boy told the police that a boogey man had taken Billy away. He was never found. The press called whoever had done it the Brooklyn Vampire. Police first suspected another killer, Peter Kudzinowski.
Shortly before the Budd case, by his own account, he tried what he called his implements of Hell on Cyril Quinn, a ten-year-old boy he had been molesting.
On May 25, 1928 he saw a small advertisement in the Sunday edition of the New York World. Edward Budd, eighteen, of 406 West Fifteenth Street in Manhattan, wanted a position in the country. On May 28 a man who gave his name as Frank Howard came to the apartment to hire him. He said he would take on Edward and a friend and send for them in a few days, then failed to appear, telegraphed an apology and set a new date. He came back on June 3. He was mild, elderly and softly spoken, and the family liked him. He said his sister was giving a children's party that afternoon and asked whether Edward's little sister might come along.
Her parents, Delia Budd, born Flanagan, and Albert Budd Sr., said yes. Grace Budd was ten years old. He took her to an empty house called Wisteria Cottage, at 359 Mountain Road at Worthington, near Irvington in Westchester County, and strangled her there.
He had gone to that apartment for Edward. He said later that he had meant to tie the young man up, mutilate him and leave him to bleed to death, and that Edward had turned out bigger than he expected.
The Budd case ran cold. On September 5, 1930 police arrested Charles Edward Pope, a sixty-six-year-old building superintendent accused by his estranged wife, and he spent 108 days in jail before his trial on December 22 cleared him. After that nothing happened for years; from the day Grace left with Frank Howard to the day her killer was arrested was six years, five months and eight days.
In November 1934 Delia Budd received an anonymous letter. It described what had been done to her daughter and what had been eaten of her, and it ended with a sentence saying the child had not been sexually assaulted, which the writer appeared to think mitigated something. Delia Budd could not read, and her son read it to her.
The envelope carried a small emblem from a private chauffeurs' benevolent association. Detective William F. King, the chief investigator, traced it to a Manhattan rooming house, learned that a former tenant had taken some of the stationery when he left, and found the address he had moved to. King waited for him, disarmed him and took him to headquarters on December 13, 1934. He was sixty-four.
He confessed almost at once, and made no attempt to deny it. He said he had gone to the house to kill her brother. He led investigators to Wisteria Cottage, and Grace Budd's remains were recovered from the grounds and identified by dental comparison.
The trial opened in White Plains on March 11, 1935 before Justice Frederick P. Close, with Elbert Gallagher and Thomas Scoble prosecuting and James Dempsey, a former prosecutor and a one-time mayor of Peekskill, and Frank Mahony defending. Fish did not contest that he had written the letter or killed the child. The only question put to the jury was whether he was legally sane.
Dempsey called Dr. Fredric Wertham, who had examined him at length. Close ordered the women out of the courtroom before allowing the testimony. Over two days Wertham described a man who believed he was acting on instructions from God, who had fixed on the story of Abraham and Isaac and thought that sacrificing a boy would atone for his sins, who associated the eating of flesh with communion, who had been eating human flesh, and who had told him directly that he had eaten Grace Budd. Wertham said he had wondered at first whether any of it might be fantasy, and then gave the answer that has outlived everything else said in that courtroom: I have never seen fancies which showed up on an X-ray.
Dempsey's last question to him ran to some fifteen thousand words and took the court through Fish's whole life. Wertham's answer was three words: "He is insane."
The X-ray showed twenty-nine needles in his pelvis.
Dempsey also argued lead colic, a dementia associated with house painters, and attacked the competence of the Bellevue doctors who had held Fish for observation in 1930 and discharged him as harmless and sane. Two more defense psychiatrists called him insane. Four prosecution psychiatrists called him sane, and the first of those four was Menas Gregory, the former head of the Bellevue hospital that had let him go.
The jury took less than an hour. It convicted him of murder in the first degree on March 22, 1935.
Several jurors said afterward that they had believed he was insane and had voted to convict anyway, because they wanted him executed.
He thanked the judge for the sentence.
While he was awaiting trial he signed an eleven-page statement for the Westchester County grand jury covering the Budd killing and acknowledging the other two. The original survives among the state's court records as Exhibit 12 of People v. Fish, Indictment 15-1935.
That document did a particular job. It gave the Brooklyn and Staten Island district attorneys the evidentiary basis to close the Gaffney and McDonnell files without bringing indictments of their own, because the man was already under sentence of death and there was nothing a second or third trial could add. Detectives had established that on the day Billy Gaffney disappeared Fish was painting for a Brooklyn real estate company a few miles away. In 1935 he wrote to Elizabeth Gaffney and told her what had happened to her son, and she went to see him at Sing Sing with Detective King. On Staten Island, witnesses including Hans Kiel identified him as the stranger seen around Port Richmond the day Francis McDonnell vanished, and District Attorney Thomas Walsh announced he would seek an indictment. By one account Fish confirmed the McDonnell killing to investigators only in March 1935, after the Budd trial; the Daily Mirror then called him "the most vicious child-slayer in criminal history."
So the legal record is one conviction and three deaths, and the reason for the gap is not doubt. It is that two prosecutions were made pointless by the first one.
He claimed a hundred victims. The Westchester district attorney's office did not believe him and read the number as a man trying to look mad enough to escape the chair. Detectives in New York, Washington and New Jersey privately connected him to perhaps five or six other disappearances between 1910 and 1932. None was ever charged, for the ordinary reasons: the evidence was thin, the statute had run, or the jurisdiction saw no point once the death sentence existed.
What can be said with confidence is narrower and still very bad. He chose children who were poor, or disabled, or Black, and he said as much: he thought they would not be looked for as hard.
The appeals failed and clemency was refused. He was electrocuted on the night of January 16, 1936, at six minutes past eleven, in the prison he had served a larceny sentence in thirty-three years earlier. He was sixty-five, and the oldest man ever put to death in that chair. The executioner was Robert G. Elliott.
In the hours before it he wrote several pages by hand and gave them to Dempsey. Dempsey read them and refused to make them public, and said afterward that he would not, because they were the most filthy string of obscenities he had ever read.
Nobody has seen them since. They are the last thing Albert Fish wrote and they no longer exist as far as anyone can establish.