Serial Killers: Confessions of a Cannibal (8 page)

Defense counsel Dempsey had already hinted at the shape his defense would take and he wasted no time, calling a succession of Fish’s children to the stand to testify as to their father’s particular brand of madness. The stunned courtroom heard of Fish’s self-mutilation with whips, nail-studded paddles and sewing needles; it heard of his preference for eating raw meat, his religious mania, and his efforts to trap a non-existent black cat; it heard of the dreadful nightmares he suffered and how he often woke up screaming. It heard also of Fish the devoted parent, who had fulfilled the role of both father and mother in his children’s upbringing and who absolutely doted on his grandchildren.

The final witness on the first day of defense testimony was Dr. Roy Duckworth, who had X-rayed Fish at Grasslands hospital during December 1934. Those X-rays were now entered into evidence and clearly showed the harm Fish had inflicted on himself. Twenty-nine large needles were clearly visible in the groin area. Some had been inside Fish’s body for so long that they had begun to erode.

With Dr. Duckworth’s testimony concluded the judge called an end to the day’s proceedings, with the jury sequestered for the weekend.

X-Ray showing the needles that Fish inserted into his pelvis

Up until this point, the court had heard several references to Albert Fish’s love of writing obscene letters. No specifics had thus far been offered, but that was to change on Monday, March 18. An early hint as to the nature of the testimony to come was given by Judge Close when he ordered all female spectators to leave the courtroom. With that achieved, Dempsey called his first witness of the day, a middle-aged housewife from Queens named Grace Shaw.

Mrs. Shaw explained that she had first begun corresponding with Fish in September 1934, when he answered a classified ad she had placed in the New York Times, offering board and lodging. Fish had responded posing as Robert E. Hayden, a movie producer. He said that he needed someone to care for his mentally challenged 20-year-old son Bobby, who he claimed required frequent beatings. He was only prepared to proceed with the transaction if Mrs. Shaw was prepared to administer those beatings. Mrs. Shaw had agreed and the two had struck up a correspondence, with Fish’s missives becoming more and more perverse.

After exchanging letters back and forth for a month, Fish had indicated that he was ready to send Bobby to meet her. First though, he wanted to test her ability to discipline the boy. He said that he was sending an associate to her, a man named James Pell, who enjoyed being beaten. Mrs. Shaw was to show her abilities on him.

In late October, “Pell” (actually Albert Fish) arrived at the Shaw residence, bearing a letter of introduction from “Robert Hayden.” On seeing the frail old man, Mrs. Shaw refused to administer the beating he requested. She was afraid, she said, that she would kill him.

Now convinced that she had been the victim of a scam, Mrs. Shaw gathered up the letters Fish had sent her and went to the police. A postal inspector named Kemper was assigned to the case and encouraged Mrs. Shaw to continue her correspondence with Fish, in order to lure him out. Mrs. Shaw agreed. Under Kemper’s instruction, she started injecting a tone of intimacy into her letters. Encouraged, Fish responded with his own depraved brand of sexual fantasy including references to one of his favorite peccadilloes, eating feces.

Mrs. Shaw was quite understandably disgusted by this vile letter and wanted to end the correspondence. Kemper however convinced her to write one more letter, encouraging “Hayden” to visit her at her home. He wrote back, agreeing to the rendezvous. But with the police lying in wait, he failed to show.

Dempsey produced several other women who had fallen victim to Fish’s disgusting penmanship. He also called members of Fish’s family, including 17-year-old Mary Nicholas, Fish’s “stepdaughter” from a bigamous marriage he had entered into in 1930. Mary testified as to the games Fish liked to play with her and her younger sister, which were just a poorly disguised excuse to encourage the children to beat him with a paddle.

The testimony of Monday, March 18 had been sensational. But Dempsey still had his star witness up his sleeve, the alienist Dr. Frederic Wertheim. Dr. Wertheim had spent more time with Albert Fish than any other psychiatrist. Fish trusted Wertheim and had opened up to him about his deepest, darkest secrets. It was to Wertheim that Fish had first opened up about cannibalism. And he had told him much else besides. Anticipating the sensational nature of the evidence to come, Judge Close again ordered female spectators from the courtroom.

Wertheim’s testimony began mildly enough, with a description of Fish’s family and early life. Then he got on to Fish’s time at the St. John’s Orphanage in Washington D.C. and to the regular beatings that lay at the heart of both Fish’s sadism and masochism. He described Fish as a homosexual whose primary interest was in boys aged between four and sixteen. “He is a sadist of incredible cruelty,” Wertheim said. “All his mind is bent on eliciting pain in someone else.”

Continuing his narrative, Wertheim told of how Fish had begun working as a painter and how this trade offered him easy access to young children. “This man has roamed around in basements and cellars for fifty years,” he said. “During that time, he has raped at least 100 children. And the terrible thing of it all is that his interest was not so much to have sexual relations with these children, but to inflict pain on them.”

By way of example, Wertheim related a story that Fish had told him about a slow-witted 19-year-old named Kedden, a runaway who had made his way from the South to New Jersey riding the freights. Kedden, who looked much younger than his years, had been frequently raped during his journey but that was nothing compared to what he suffered at the hands of Albert Fish. During the three weeks that they were together, Fish introduced the boy to his many perversions, including drinking urine and eating feces. He also beat Kedden with whips and deeply scored his buttocks with a razor and lapped at his blood. Eventually, he tried to cut off the boy’s penis with a pair of scissors but Kedden screamed so loudly that Fish fled the scene. Fearful that he’d be arrested, he left town that same night.

With the gentlemen of the jury looking slightly green around the gills, Wertheim continued, describing Fish’s religious mania and his growing obsession with the idea of castrating a boy. That had been his plan when he had initially responded to Edward Budd’s advertisement. But then he’d spotted Grace and his plan had changed.

Dempsey had now brought his star witness to the issue on which his case rested. The D.A. had already explored the abduction and murder in great depth and Dempsey had no intention on going over that ground again. What he wanted to explore was the part that the prosecution had so conveniently skirted - the issue of cannibalism.

Wertheim had no doubt that Fish had cannibalized Grace Budd. Fish had told him that he had, and Wertheim believed him. According to Wertheim, Fish had admitted to him that he made a stew of Grace’s flesh and had enjoyed “absolute sexual excitement” while consuming it.

The following morning, Wertheim was back on the stand, ready to face the question that Dempsey hoped would establish once and for all the fact of Albert Fish’s insanity. This single question ran to over 15,000 words and 45 pages.

“Suppose doctor, that on May 19, 1870, a male child was born in Washington DC,” Dempsey began, continuing on for an hour and fifteen minutes, framing Fish’s entire history as a hypothesis rather than a fact, eventually terminating with the question: “What in your opinion is the medical condition of that man today?”

Wertheim’s answer was somewhat more succinct. “He is insane,” he said simply.

Dempsey’s other expert witnesses, Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe and Dr. Henry Riley, both backed up Wertheim’s diagnosis.

On Thursday, March 21, A.D.A. Gallagher called his own expert witnesses to rebuff those of the defense. First up was Dr. Menas S. Gregory, former head of the Psychiatric Department at Bellevue. Gregory, who had examined Fish in 1930, when he was an inmate at the hospital, contended that Fish was “abnormal but sane,” a diagnosis that clearly annoyed Dempsey.

“Is it a common thing, Doctor,” he asked on cross-examination, “for a man to drink urine and eat human feces?”

“Its not as uncommon as you think,” Gregory countered. “I know of successful people, artists, teachers, financiers, who have the same perversion.”

Dr. Charles Lambert answered the same question in similar vein. “I know individuals prominent in society, one individual in particular that we all know…”

“Who actually ate human feces?” Dempsey cut in.

“Who regularly uses it as a side dish in his salad,” Lambert said.

Dempsey had no more success trying to press the remaining two defense experts into an admission that Albert Fish might be insane. He eventually retired having done all he could. Moments later the State rested its case and the judge adjourned proceedings. Summations were scheduled for the following day. After that, the matter was going to the jury.

Closing arguments began at 9:15 on Friday, March 22. First up was James Dempsey.

It is not often that you hear a defense attorney describe the crime committed by his client as “fiendish, brutal and inexcusable.” But these were exactly the adjectives that Dempsey used to characterize the murder of Grace Budd. The crux of his case was that no man in his right mind could have committed such an atrocity, much less dined on the flesh of his young victim after he had killed her.

Dempsey then went on the attack, accusing the police of covering up the cannibalism angle, accusing Mr. and Mrs. Budd of negligence in allowing their ten-year-old daughter to go off with a total stranger. He then returned to his central theme. How could a sane man have committed the crime of which Albert Fish stood accused?

Would a sane man have just decided to kill someone, without consideration for who the victim was? Would a sane man have kidnapped his victim “in the broad light of a mid-afternoon in June?” Would a sane man have killed his victim in front of a window overlooking the neighboring house? Would he then have gone out and cleaned the blood from his hands in the front yard? How could any man who would eat the flesh of another human being be deemed sane?

These were all questions that Dempsey posed to the jury. He acknowledged that Fish had employed cunning to abduct Grace and to avoid detection thereafter. However, he insisted that these were not indicative of a reasoning mind, but rather of the animalistic survival instinct inherent in all criminals. “The fact that a man can connive and plan an outrageous, dastardly, fiendish crime like this is no indication of the fact that a man is in his right mind,” he said.

Finally, Dempsey impressed upon the jury the gravity of the decision they had been asked to make. His plea was for mercy and he ended by reminding them that the day would come when they too would be judged. “And if you say ‘Let him die,’ may he who breathed life into your nostrils judge you more mercifully than you judged this maniac,” he concluded.

Dempsey’s summation had lasted two hours. But if he hoped for some indication from the jurors as to which way they were going to lean he got none. The twelve men of the jury remained impassive, even when Fish brought his hands together in a praying gesture and looked towards them in a pathetic plea for mercy. Then, the old man’s eyes filled with tears and he began weeping silently. It was one of the few times during the trial that he expressed any emotion at all.

Assistant District Attorney Gallagher took a different approach to his summing up, sticking strictly to the fact of the case. His businesslike manner suggested that the jury should have little problem in reaching the right conclusion. Albert Fish had committed a brutal, cold-blooded murder and should be made to bear the consequences of his actions.

“Mr. Dempsey has asked you to remember certain things about the defenseless Mr. Fish,” he said. “Gentlemen, I want you to remember poor, defenseless little Grace Budd as she kicked and screamed in the springtime of her life and said that she would tell her mama.”

Gallagher then went on to address the main pillar of the defense case, Fish’s sanity. He reminded the jury of the testimony offered by the three alienists presented by the prosecution. All of these had declared Fish legally sane. “The defendant is undoubtedly a conniving and scheming sexual pervert,” Gallagher said. “He undoubtedly has engaged in revolting practices with women and children. But that does not make him insane.”

Like his opponent, Gallagher took nigh on two hours to present his summary of the case. Now he wrapped it up with an appeal to the jurors. “And so gentlemen, the People leave this case in your hands, knowing that whatever you do, you will do the right thing by the people of this county, of this state, and by the defendant.”

The lawyers had said their piece. Albert Fish’s fate now rested with the twelve men called upon to weigh up the evidence.

Justice Close began his brief to the jury after the lunch recess, explaining the six possible outcomes they could deliver, ranging from an acquittal, to guilty of first-degree murder. Pointedly, he stressed that a propensity to commit horrific acts without care for the consequences of those acts does not make a person incapable of understanding that what he is doing is wrong. At 3 p.m. he sent the jurors to consider their verdict. An informal poll, taken among reporters covering the case, concluded that Fish would likely be found insane.

Jury deliberations were expected by many to be concluded quickly but by 6 p.m., when the jurors recessed for dinner, the matter was still undecided. At around 8:20, word came that a decision had been reached and a short while later the twelve men filed back in and took their places in the courtroom. Jury foreman, John Partelow, was asked to rise.

“Has the jury reached a verdict?” the clerk asked. Partelow acknowledged that it had. “And how do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty?”

“We find the defendant guilty as charged,” Partelow intoned somberly.

Albert Fish, sitting at the defense table, slumped visibly at the news. The rest of the courtroom observed a respectful silence although outside there was pandemonium. As reporters rushed to telephones to file their stories, the news began to ripple through the gathered crowd. Fish’s children, waiting in the corridor, heard the verdict from a reporter. His two daughters immediately broke into uncontrollable sobs. The Budd family’s response was contented, yet muted. As Edward Budd observed, “It won’t bring Gracie back, but at least he got what he deserved.”

The verdict, of course, carried a mandatory death sentence, but Dempsey asked that sentencing be delayed until Monday and the judge agreed. As Fish was being led from the courtroom, a reporter asked him how he felt about the verdict. “I feel bad,” he said. “I was expecting Matteawan.” Matteawan is the New York State hospital for the criminally insane.