Hamilton Howard Fish was born in Washington DC on May 19, 1870, into a family with a history of mental illness, and was raised largely in an orphanage where he was regularly beaten and where, he said, he learned to associate pain with pleasure. He married, had six children, worked as a house painter, and was by all appearances a mild, elderly, unremarkable man. He was a self-harmer on an extraordinary scale; an X-ray after his arrest showed twenty-nine sewing needles embedded in his pelvis, which he had inserted himself.
He killed Francis McDonnell in Staten Island in 1924 and Billy Gaffney in Brooklyn in 1927. On May 27, 1928, he called at the Budd family's apartment in Manhattan answering an advertisement placed by their son, presented himself as a farmer named Frank Howard, was welcomed for lunch, and asked whether ten-year-old Grace might come with him to a children's birthday party. Her parents let her go. He took her to an empty house at Worthington in Westchester County, killed her, and over nine days ate parts of her. He was called the Gray Man and the Werewolf of Wysteria.
The case stayed open for six years. In November 1934 Delia Budd received an anonymous letter describing in detail what had been done to her daughter. The stationery carried the faint monogram of a chauffeurs' benevolent association, and a detective, William King, traced it to a discarded stock a former employee had taken to a rooming house on East 52nd Street. Fish was arrested there in December 1934.
He confessed to the three killings, described attacks on many more children over decades, and gave figures as high as a hundred. He was tried at White Plains in March 1935 for Grace Budd's murder. The defence was insanity, and the prosecution's own alienist agreed that Fish's practices were extraordinary but argued he was legally sane. The jury said afterwards that they had believed him insane and convicted him anyway because they thought he should die. He was electrocuted at Sing Sing on January 16, 1936, aged sixty-five.