Serial Killers: Confessions of a Cannibal (5 page)

Fish was driven back to police headquarters, where he was taken to the office of Captain John G. Stein, head of the Missing Persons Bureau, for his initial interrogation. That interrogation was to be conducted by Detective King himself. King could hardly believe that the man seated before him now, five-and-a-half feet and perhaps 130 pounds of shrunken, wrinkled human being, was the criminal who had eluded him for over six years.

Albert Fish with his nemesis, Detective William King

He started off by producing the letter that had been sent to the Budds, showing it to Fish and asking if he had written it. Fish immediately acknowledged that he had. Then King showed Fish the telegram sent to the Budds in June 1928 by a man claiming to be Frank Howard. Was he the author of that too? Yes, Fish admitted.

Years as an interrogator had taught William King exactly how to pace his questions. Sensing that Fish might be willing to confess all, he went in for the kill. “Are you the man who kidnapped Grace Budd?” he asked Fish directly.

“I don’t know anything about that,” Fish shot back.

“You mean to tell me,” King said. “That although you admit posing as Frank Howard, and although Frank Howard removed Grace from her parent’s home, you know nothing about it?”

“I wasn’t there,” Fish insisted.

“But you were there, Mr. Fish. Albert and Delia Budd will be able to identify you, as will their son Edward and his friend Willie Korman, as will Reuben Rosoff, the vendor who sold you the pail you used to carry pot cheese to the Budds. How about I put you in a lineup and see if they can pick you out?”

Fish looked back at the detective, his runny eyes making it appear as if he was about to start crying. He said nothing.

“Fine,” King said eventually. “I’ll go see about that lineup.” He turned and started walking towards the door. He’d barely taken three steps when Fish stopped him.

“Wait,” Fish said. King turned around to face him. “I’m the man who took Grace Budd,” Fish said. “I took her from her home on June 3, 1928. I brought her to Westchester and I killed her that same afternoon.”

King walked back across the room and dropped himself into the chair behind his captain’s desk. He pulled up a notepad and dipped his pen into the ink well as Fish started talking, his matter-of-fact tone belying the horrendous tale he had to tell.

According to Fish he had never intended on killing Grace. His original target had been Edward Budd, whose classified advertisement had brought him to the Budd residence. The plan had been to lure Edward to an abandoned house in Westchester, where he would overpower and bind him. He would then slice off the boy’s penis before departing the scene, leaving him to bleed to death. Fish gave no explanation for why he intended carrying out this seemingly pointless crime and King didn’t ask. He was more interested in what had happened to Grace Budd.

Fish then spoke about his first visit to the Budd’s apartment. How disappointed he’d been when he’d seen how tall and strongly built Edward was. Still, he was determined to go through with his plan, confident that the element of surprise would give him the upper hand. But then Willie Korman had come into the equation and Fish had seriously considered backing out. He’d come so far, though, that it seemed a pity to walk away. He decided instead to go ahead as planned. All he had to do was separate the boys. He felt confident that he could do so. “I have some experience in these things,” he chuckled.

As he continued with his preparations, Fish had purchased the enamel pail from Rueben Rosoff and had also bought three items from Sobel’s pawnshop, a cleaver, a saw and a butcher’s knife.

On the morning of Sunday, June 3, 1928, Fish set off for the Budd residence with his butchering tools wrapped in a piece of red-and-white canvas. On route, he stopped off to buy the pot cheese and strawberries that he’d later gift to Delia Budd. He’d also stopped at a newsstand where he’d left the package for later retrieval. Then he’d walked the short distance to the Budd residence.

Edward had not been home when Fish arrived, but Mrs. Budd had invited him to stay to lunch. It was while enjoying that meal that Grace Budd had walked into the room and everything had changed. He decided there and then that it was she, and not her brother, that he wanted to kill. How though? How was he to lure her away?

With a cunning typical of the predator that he was, Fish quickly concocted a story. Sending Grace away to buy candy for her and her sister, he told her parents about the children’s party he was due to attend. Then, as though the idea had just occurred to him, he suggested that Grace might accompany him. The Budds had wavered for a moment and Fish had thought they might say no. But then Albert Budd had given his permission and Delia had buckled and said yes too. Fish was astounded at how easily they had allowed their daughter to go off with a total stranger.

After leaving the Budd residence Fish walked with Grace to the El station on 9
th
Avenue. There they boarded a train for Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, where they switched to a train bound for Van Cortlandt Park. Disembarking, Fish led the little girl to the Putnam Division ticket office. He bought a return to Westchester for himself. For Grace, he purchased a one-way ticket.

During the twenty-minute journey, Grace sat staring out of the window, seemingly entranced by the lush greenery of the countryside. As a city girl in 1920s New York, she would seldom have seen such openness. They disembarked in the town of Worthington in Westchester, where Fish was so wrapped up in what was to come that he left his package behind on the train. It was Grace who alerted him to the mistake, then quickly dashed back to retrieve the instruments of her own destruction.

His parcel now safely tucked under his arm, Fish took Grace by the hand and set off on foot along Saw Mill River Parkway. The day was stiflingly hot and when Fish asked whether Grace wanted to take off her hat and coat she said yes. Taking these items from her, he folded the coat and placed it and the hat atop his bundle. Up ahead the road branched and Fish veered left. The path bent and became steeper. A half mile up it passed the Cudney farm, where old Mrs. Cudney stood tinkering with a fence post. Fish tipped his hat to her.

Eventually, their destination loomed before them, a place pre-selected by Fish, who knew the area well. The two-storey clapboard house sat on a small incline, some thirty feet back from the road. It was surrounded on three sides by dense woodland, on the fourth by a steep hill. A small wooden outhouse stood some fifty feet up that hill. The place could not have been more isolated. Locals called it Wisteria Cottage.

Wisteria Cottage

It was now three o’clock in the afternoon. Leaving Grace to play among the wildflowers in the garden, Fish walked towards the house then skirted around the back of it. He found a large flat stone and lifted it, placed Grace’s hat and coat under it and allowed the stone to drop back into place. Then he spotted an empty paint can lying in the grass and walked over to retrieve it, carrying it into the house with him.

Inside, the place was musty and damp, the bare floorboards strewn with mouse droppings. Wallpaper peeled from the walls like fetid streamers while the windowpanes were encrusted with so much grime that the sun’s power was considerably muted, throwing the rooms into a sort of twilight.

Fish climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked to a bedroom that overlooked the front yard. Through the window he could see Grace playing in the yard, picking wildflowers and arranging them into a bouquet.

Crouching beside the window, Fish placed his parcel on the floor and undid the string securing it. Then he rolled out the canvas and removed the iems held within – a butcher’s knife, a meat cleaver and a saw, his so-called “implements of hell.” These he arranged neatly on the bare floorboards. Then he began removing his clothes, dropping them in a pile. The body beneath was grizzled and skeletal, with white tufts of hair on his slightly concave chest and semi-erect penis. He stood naked and breathless in the room for a moment, before opening the window a crack and calling out to Grace, summoning her to the upper floor.

Moments later, Fish heard the front door creak open and the sound of the child’s footsteps clip-clopping up the stairs. At the second floor landing she paused, gaining her bearings. It was then that Fish stepped naked into the passage.

At the sight of the naked old man, Grace froze, her eyes widening in surprise and terror. Then she started screaming. “I’ll tell momma!” she yelled as she dropped the bouquet of flowers and turned back towards the stairs. Fish, though, was faster. Grabbing the screaming girl by the throat, he squeezed down hard, cutting off her air supply, dragging her into the empty room.

Grace kicked and scratched, tried to wriggle free. But the old man was surprisingly strong. His bony fingers tightened their grip on the girl’s throat. He pulled her to the floor and got on top of her, digging his knees into her chest. Both of his hands had now found a grip on Grace’s throat and he squeezed down hard even as the child’s struggles subsided and her eyes bulged open and then glazed over. A final breath escaped her as he relaxed his grip. Grace Budd was dead. Albert Fish squatted over her, his breaths coming in short, sharp inhalations, his erect penis pushing against his lower belly.

Fish remained only a moment in that position. He had work to do. Fetching the paint bucket he’d earlier found in the yard, he positioned it under Grace’s head. Then he used his butchering instruments to decapitate the child, using the paint bucket to catch the blood that gushed from her neck.

At this point, King interrupted the story to ask Fish whether he had “used the girl’s body.” Fish insisted that he had not, that Grace had “died a virgin” as he’d stated in his letter to her family.

Continuing his harrowing testimony, Fish said that he had undressed Grace’s headless corpse and thrown her blood-spattered clothes into a closet. He’d then emptied the bucket of blood out of the window before returning to the corpse. He’d begun cutting, slicing through the midriff just below the belly button. After using the cleaver to hack through the spinal column, the body lay in two pieces.

Fish’s bloodlust was now abating, but he still had the issue of disposal to deal with. His initial intention was to carry Grace’s head up to the outhouse and drop it into the latrine. But after reaching the privy, he decided that he could not disrespect her in that way (as though murdering the girl and rending her body in three was not disrespectful). Instead, he placed the head on the privy floor and covered it with old newspapers.

Back at the house, Fish threw the two sections of Grace’s body into the closet and closed the door. Then he went back outside and cleaned the blood from his hands, using clumps of grass. Finally, he got dressed and left. In all, he had spent just over an hour at Wisteria Cottage. Four days later he’d return to carry out a more thorough disposal of the body parts. This amounted to tossing the two sections over a wall into the bushes. His knife, saw, and cleaver went the same way.