Serial Killers: Confessions of a Cannibal (9 page)

In the aftermath of the Budd case, much was made of Albert Fish’s desire to be executed. This is simply not true. Fish, in fact, was desperate to escape the punishment that he so richly deserved. Why else would he have fired his original attorney? Why else would he have tearfully entreated the jury to show mercy? Why else would he have been so dejected at the guilty verdict?

What
is
true is that, even before sentence of death was officially pronounced upon him, Fish had accepted his fate. Asked by a reporter how he felt about being executed, Fish is said to have replied: “What a thrill it will be to die in the electric chair. It will be the supreme thrill, the only one I haven’t tried.”

Whether or not this was just bravado, we shall never know, but within a day of being found guilty of killing Grace Budd, Fish decided to come clean about the other murders of which he was suspected.

On Sunday evening, March 24, Fish was brought to the warden’s office, where a delegation – including New York District Attorney Walter Ferris – awaited him. The previous day, in a letter to his attorney James Dempsey, Fish had admitted to killing 4-year-old Billy Gaffney. Now he was required to provide details of the crime. If his version of events is to be believed, Billy’s murder had been even more horrific than that of Grace Budd.

“I took him to the public dumping ground in Riker Avenue in Astoria,” Fish told the assembled lawmen. “There is a house near there that I painted for the man that owns it. I took the boy there and stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a rag I picked up at the dump. Then I burned his clothes and threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took the trolley at 59
th
Street at 2 a.m. and walked from there home.

“The next day about 2 p.m., I took tools and a homemade cat-o-nine-tails. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears and nose, slit his mouth from ear to ear. I 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 through the middle of his body, just below the belly button, then through his legs about two inches 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. The water is three to four feet deep. They sank at once.

“I came home with my meat. His monkey and pee wees and nice little fat behind I roasted in the oven to eat. I made a stew out of his ears, nose, pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, 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. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put it in the oven. Then I picked four onions and when the meat had roasted for about a quarter hour 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 two hours it was nice and brown, cooked through. 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 a sweet as a nut but his pee wees I could not chew. I threw them in the toilet.”

On the morning of Monday, March 25, Albert Fish was brought before Justice Close who sentenced him to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing. The execution date was set for a little over a month later, on April 29. Before that could happen, Fish would confess to another infamous murder, that of eight-year-old Francis McDonnell. Fish admitted that he was the man Anna McDonnell had seen walking along the road on that fateful July afternoon in 1924. He confessed that he had lured young Francis into the woods and had strangled him to death with his own suspenders. He had been about to butcher the corpse when he’d thought that he heard someone approaching and had fled.

As details of Fish’s latest confessions became public knowledge, the Daily Mirror declared Fish the “most vicious child-slayer in criminal history.” Going purely by numbers this is probably an exaggeration. We shall never know the exact number of victims who died at Albert Fish’s hands, although Fish reportedly admitted to his psychiatrist, Frederic Wertheim, that he was responsible for the torture slayings of at least fifteen children.

Directly after his death sentence, Albert Fish was sent to Sing Sing to await execution. On April 3, 1935, his attorney James Dempsey filed an appeal, citing among other things the judge’s “definite hostility towards the defense” and the jury’s failure to consider that there might be a reasonable doubt as to Albert Fish’s sanity.

“Albert Fish is a psychiatric phenomenon,” Dempsey’s petition declared. “It is noteworthy than no single case history, either in legal or medical annals, contains a record of one individual who possessed all of these abnormalities. The jury, undoubtedly through passion and prejudice, disregarded evidence of Albert H. Fish’s insanity. His conviction proves merely that we still burn witches in America.”

It was a valid argument, well made. On November 26, 1935, the New York Court of Appeals rejected it, leaving Dempsey with just one more chance of saving his client, an appeal to the governor.

So it was that on a frigid morning in early January 1936, Dempsey set off for Albany and a meeting with Governor Herbert Lehman. Accompanying him on this last desperate journey, were Dr. Frederic Wertheim and five of Fish’s six children.

Dempsey’s plea to Governor Lehman was impassioned. He was not asking for mercy on behalf of Albert Fish, he said, Fish did not care one way or another whether he lived or died. Nothing, however, would be gained by putting the old man to death. On the other hand, placing Fish in an institution, where psychiatrists would have the opportunity to study him, might save countless victims of men like Fish in the future.

Frederic Wertheim backed up Dempsey’s statement. “The science of psychiatry is advanced enough so that with proper examination, a man like Fish can he detected and confined before committing such outrages,” he declared.

If this argument had any impact on the Governor it did not show in his expression. After listening impassively to the arguments, he rose from his seat, nodded slightly and left the room without saying a word. It was left to Lehman’s counsel to usher Dempsey and Wertheim out. Their appeal had failed. Albert Fish was going to the chair.

On the morning of January 16, 1936, Fish was moved to a cell in the death house at Sing Sing, an area referred to by inmates as the “dance hall.” He ate a hearty lunch of T-bone steak that day and ordered a chicken dinner, although by evening he appeared to have lost his appetite. He barely picked at his final repast.

At around 10:30 p.m., the Protestant chaplain of the prison, Reverend Anthony Peterson, arrived to pray with Fish. At 11, a couple of guards entered the cell. One of them knelt before Fish and slit open his right trouser leg. Then, with the guards flanking him, and the priest behind, Albert Fish was escorted from the cell and walked along the short corridor towards the death chamber.

Fish showed no emotion as he caught his first glimpse of the electric chair. He simply allowed himself to be led towards the apparatus and slumped himself down in it, bringing his hands together in a praying gesture while the attendants busied themselves with strapping his legs, torso and finally his arms into place. His face appeared drawn and gaunt in the moment before the executioner, Robert Elliott, dropped the black hood over his head.

The leather cap with its attached electrode was then placed on Fish’s closely cropped pate with the chinstrap fastened to hold it in place. Elliott then dropped onto one knee and secured the second electrode to Fish’s right leg. All was now ready. Elliott stepped away and positioned himself at the control panel.

Albert Fish in the electric chair

There had been suggestions in the press prior to the execution that the needles Fish had inserted into his pelvis might short out the chair. Afterwards, there would be rumors that they had generated a cascade of sparks in the moment that Fish was put to death.

Neither of these things happened. The execution proceeded like any other. Elliott threw the switch sending a surge of electricity through Fish’s body. As the current flowed, Fish became rigid, his slight frame straining against the bonds, his fists tightly clenched. The current was switched off causing him to slump in the chair, then activated for a second time.

At precisely 11:09 the attending physician stepped forward and placed his stethoscope to Fish’s chest. Moments later he announced that Albert Fish, the slayer of Grace Budd, Billy Gaffney, Francis McDonnell, and perhaps countless other children, was dead.

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