by David Stout
But King knew that if anything in Winchell’s latest column was true, it was pure chance. The police did not expect to break the Grace Budd case in four weeks. There was no jailed cocaine addict who knew anything about her disappearance.
Winchell had not “checked on” the Budd case, as he claimed. He had simply been fed a fictional tidbit by King. The detective had learned that doling out morsels about the Budd case to select journalists, sometimes coinciding with the anniversary of Grace’s disappearance, always sparked letters and phone calls to the police. Some were from sincere people who thought they might have clues. Most were from screwballs.
King thought the filthy skunk who had stolen Grace probably looked at the papers now and then. Maybe he’d be tempted to get in touch, just to remind people he was still out there somewhere. You just never knew what might happen when you planted stuff in the papers.
King was willing to try just about anything. He was the very embodiment of tenacity, having traveled some fifty thousand miles by the autumn of 1934 to pursue possible clues, however far-fetched they seemed, to the fate of Grace Budd.
He had been the lead investigator in the Budd case early on and had seen how Grace’s parents had been broken by their daughter’s disappearance. He’d even postponed his retirement to pursue the case.
King figured that, if the creep who called himself Frank Howard did read the papers, he might have gotten a sick thrill over the false sighting of Grace over the Memorial Day weekend. Maybe the Winchell item would further stimulate him.
On the morning of Monday, November 12, a letter arrived at the Budds’ apartment. It had been mailed the night before from the Grand Central Annex post office in Manhattan. It was addressed to Delia Budd, who couldn’t read. She gave it to her son, Eddie, who had barely begun to read it before he bolted from the apartment and ran to a police station.
By midmorning, Detective King had the letter, which began “My dear Mrs. Budd.” The writer said he had taken Grace to an abandoned house in Westchester County, killed and dismembered her, then eaten her flesh over the next nine days. He rhapsodized about the joys of cannibalism in general. As if to prove he was not making up his story, he mentioned bringing a gift of strawberries and pot cheese on his 1928 visit to the Budd apartment.
The writer did not sign the letter. Instead, he closed by emphasizing that he had not violated the girl sexually, “tho I could have had I wished.”137
Hardened as he was by years of police work, Detective King realized he could still be shocked. Reading the letter was like bathing in sewage.
The strawberries and pot cheese? All right, those details had been in the newspapers, King recalled. But the letter writer had added a detail, declaring that around the time he took Grace away, he was living at 409 East One Hundredth Street in Manhattan. Why had he offered that clue? Or was it a clue? It could be that “Frank Howard” was playing games, that he had never lived at 409 East One Hundredth Street, just as he had never intended to take Grace to a birthday party at 137th Street and Columbus Avenue, a place that didn’t exist.
But 409 East One Hundredth Street was a real address. And the handwriting in the letter to the Budd apartment looked like the writing in the message “Frank Howard” had sent on June 2, 1928, telling the Budds he’d been delayed in New Jersey and would come the next day.
The envelope the letter had come in had a preprinted return address on the back flap. The address had been crossed out with ink, but there remained an odd hexagonal emblem with a capital letter in each of the six sides, spelling out “NYPCBA.”
What the hell is this? King wondered. Some kind of weird religious organization?
King looked more closely. Using a magnifying glass, he could see the return address the sender had crossed out but had not quite obliterated: 627 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Rushing to that address, he saw that it was not the home of a religious group; it was the headquarters of the New York Private Chauffeurs Benevolent Association.
King showed the organization’s president, Arthur Ennis, the envelope with the logo and asked if a Frank Howard had ever been a member of the NYPCBA. No, Ennis said after checking his files.
Then King asked to see the personnel forms filled out by all of the association’s active and retired members.
Ennis gave him a carton containing some four hundred forms. The detective took them back to his office to compare the handwriting on the forms to that on the revolting letter to the Budds. It wasn’t far-fetched to imagine that the little gray man who had taken Grace was or had been a chauffeur. Driving all over the city, gleaning personal details from his customers while remaining anonymous…
But King was unable to find a match in the handwriting. So the next day, Tuesday, November 13, he went back to the office of the NYPCBA and asked Ennis to convene an emergency meeting of the association.
When the session was held the next day, King reminded the members about the disappearance of Grace Budd. He told them about the letter to Grace’s mother in the envelope with the NYPCBA logo. He implored the chauffeurs: if anyone here knows who took some NYPCBA stationery from this office, come forward.
Just moments after the meeting adjourned, an embarrassed young man who was a part-time janitor and errand boy for the association came up to King and confessed to taking home some office stationery about six months before. The young man lived in a rooming house on Lexington Avenue, practically across the street from the office.
More optimistic than he had been in years, Detective King went at once to the rooming house—only to have his hopes dashed. There was no one living there who looked like “Frank Howard,” nor did any handwriting on the sign-in register resemble that of the letter writer.
Quickly, King again contacted the young man who had pilfered the office stationery. Better try harder with your memory, King said.
Sheepishly, the young man recalled that when he took the stationery home, he was living in another rooming house, at 200 East Fifty-Second Street. Apartment 7. His memory refreshed, the young man recalled something else: he had only used one, maybe two, of the envelopes. The rest he had put on a shelf above his bed. He’d left them there when he moved out.
The detective hurried to the Fifty-Second Street rooming house and showed the landlady an old circular about Grace Budd’s disappearance. The circular included a detailed description of “Frank Howard,” and it drew an instant reaction. “My goodness, this sounds like the quiet little old man with a gray mustache who used to live in Apartment 7,” she said. “He was here for only a couple of months. Left three days ago.”*
King’s heart sank.
She showed King the man’s signature from when he’d moved in. King looked at the name: Albert H. Fish. A glance told him the signature and the handwriting on the letter to Delia Budd were a match. Had the snake managed to slither away?
“Tell me all you can about Mr. Fish,” King pressed.
“Not much to tell,” the landlady said. Then she uttered a matter-of-fact remark that stunned King. Mr. Fish had promised to return soon to get a check from his son in North Carolina, where he was working for the Civil Conservation Corps. Each month, the son sent his $25 check to his father to help support him. In fact, the landlady had cashed some of the checks for Mr. Fish. She knew the old man was expecting another one, which she had promised to hold for him.
By the end of that day, November 14, King had set his traps. He arranged for twenty-four-hour surveillance of the Fifty-Second Street rooming house. He called the headquarters of the North Carolina CCC camp and arranged for the finance officer to notify him when the next checks were sent out. He asked postal inspectors in New York City to be alert for any letters addressed to Albert Fish. And he asked Arthur Ennis of the chauffeurs association to notify him of any letters in association envelopes that were returned to his office as undeliverable.
In the third week of November, Ennis notified King that a letter mailed in a chauffeurs association envelope had been returned to the offic
e because the addressee, a man in a Manhattan hotel, could not be located. The letter was in the same handwriting as the missive to Delia Budd. The writer said he was interested in joining a nudist club. He signed his name “James W. Pell.”
King noted that the letter was dated November 11, as the note to Delia Budd had been. So, King reflected, the creep was in a writing mood that day.
More days passed. Thanksgiving went by. Still, King and his men kept the vigil.
A light rain was falling on New York City on Tuesday, December 4. The newspapers were full of Christmas shopping ads, at least for New Yorkers with money. On that day, King got a call from a postal inspector. A letter addressed to Albert Fish had just been intercepted at the Grand Central Annex post office.
King’s hopes soared, then plummeted as more days ticked off and the weird old man failed to appear at the Fifty-Second Street rooming house.
On Wednesday, December 12, a cold spell hit its nadir with a low of eleven degrees in New York, a record for the date. Thursday dawned cloudy and much warmer. That afternoon, Detective King was at his desk when his phone rang.
“He’s here,” the landlady at the Fifty-Second Street rooming house said. “Albert Fish just came in and asked about his check.”**
“Stall him,” King said. “Anything to stall him. Offer him tea. Anything. I’m on my way.”
The detective hopped into a squad car and raced uptown, praying that Albert Fish would still be there. He was, sipping tea at a wooden table in a furnished room. King entered and closed the door. “Albert Fish?” he said.138
The man looked up from his tea and nodded.
“I’ve got you now,” King said.
“I’ll tell you all about it,” Fish said at police headquarters after some initial stalling. “I’m the man you want.” The shabby-but-harmless-looking old man was ready to tell about killing Grace Budd.139
Early on, Fish was shown the chauffeurs association envelope that had contained the vile letter to the Budds. He acknowledged sending the letter (and the one expressing interest in a nudist camp) and explained that he had run out of regular envelopes.
But what had prompted him to use envelopes with the NYPCBA label?
A cockroach, Fish said. “I was sitting in a chair…and there was a roach on the wall, and I got up on the chair to kill the roach and saw the envelopes.” He recalled seeing “a dozen or more” on a shelf where the mildly larcenous office assistant had left them.140
No doubt, King had acquired a sense of the bizarre in his years as a detective. Here was a moment to savor. For more than six years, he had spent endless hours investigating the disappearance of Grace Budd. He had drawn not only on his own bottomless patience but on all the investigative tools and techniques available to the police at the time.
Yet in the end, King had gotten his big break after planting a fictitious item in Walter Winchell’s column. And he’d been given the priceless clue of the NYPCBA envelope thanks to a simple creature whose ancestors had dwelled among dinosaurs, eons before the birth of mankind. A cockroach.
It is difficult to describe Albert Fish without using superlatives. Hardened police officers, psychiatrists, and even Fish’s own lawyer said the actions and words of the frail-looking little man were the most vile they had ever come across.***
Fish said he had taken Grace Budd on a train ride to Westchester County on June 3, 1928, after leaving the Budd family’s apartment. Alighting from the train, the old man and young girl had walked to a deserted cottage. Seeing no one else in the vicinity, let alone the throng of happy children she had expected at a birthday party, Grace no doubt became frightened. Her fear did not last long, for Fish quickly strangled the girl—because of “my lust for blood,” he explained.141 Then he desecrated her body, carving it up and saving some pieces to indulge his cannibalistic obsessions. He scattered what was left around the grounds of the cottage.
Thus, even before her parents became alarmed enough to contact the police and certainly well before the police began canvassing the neighborhood around the Budds’ apartment, Grace was dead.
At first, Fish said, he had intended to make Eddie Budd his victim. But he changed his mind when he saw the sweet-featured Grace, the flower of the family.
Eddie was brought to the New York City missing persons bureau by Detective William King. “Go in there, Eddie,” the detective said. “See if you can find the man who took your sister away—if he’s in there.”
A score or more of police officials and detectives were in the room, along with Albert Fish. At once, Eddie recognized Fish. “That’s the man that took my sister away!” he screamed. The strapping young man in his midtwenties lunged at the little old man before he was restrained by detectives.
“That’s Eddie,” Fish said mildly.
Grace’s father was brought in. “Don’t you know me?” Albert Budd said, shaking with emotion.
“Yes, you’re Mr. Budd,” Fish said.
“And you’re the man who came to my home as a guest and took my girl away,” the father said before detectives gently led him away.
Willie Korman, the friend of Eddie Budd who had looked forward to joining Eddie in healthy work on a Long Island farm, also identified Fish.
The police took Fish to the abandoned cottage in Westchester. He pointed out the spots where he had disposed of some of Grace’s remains. Officers dug, turning up bones and the young girl’s skull.
“It makes my conscience feel better now that you have found her,” Fish remarked to a police official. “I’m glad I told everything.”
The abduction and slaying of Grace Budd was no isolated, spur-of-the-moment deed in the life of Albert Fish. Soon, he confessed to killing a seven-year-old boy on Staten Island in 1924 and a four-year-old boy in Queens in 1927. He also recalled abducting and torturing a young man in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1910 and torturing a boy near Washington, DC, although he didn’t remember when. He cut them with knives, then fled, not knowing if his victims had died. He was also a prolific child molester.
The monster that thrived within Albert Fish was nurtured in an orphanage in Washington, DC, where he spent much of his childhood after he was abandoned by his parents. He recalled the institution as a place of sadistic discipline where whippings were routine. There, he learned not just to endure pain but to enjoy it—whether inflicting it on others or on himself.
The adult Albert Fish became a house painter and handyman. He married and had six children before his wife ran off with a boarder. He seems to have had mixed success as a parent. At least one daughter remained loyal to him even after he was arrested, while a son referred to him as “that old skunk.”
While trying to preside over a household, Fish sometimes dined on raw meat, occasionally howled at the moon, and liked to spank himself with a nail-studded paddle. He was also given to shoving needles into his groin area for pleasure, self-punishment, or both.
Since there was no doubt about Fish’s actual, factual guilt, his only chance to escape the electric chair was to plead insanity.
“This man is undoubtedly an abnormal individual,” one psychiatrist concluded with remarkable understatement. Two other psychiatrists, or “alienists,” as they were sometimes called at the time, ventured that Fish suffered from some “limited abnormalities.”142 Indeed.
But no, the two psychiatrists conceded, he was not “insane” in a legal sense. That is, he did not lack the capacity to understand that his actions were wrong.
So Detective William King had added to his understanding of the depths of human depravity, not that he needed any more insight. Even as he was stalking the killer of Grace Budd, he was following another ugly case, the disappearance of a six-year-old girl.
On September 19, 1934, Dorothy Ann Distelhurst vanished in Nashville, Tennessee, while walking home from kindergarten. Two days later, her father, Alfred E. Distelhurst, sales manager for a religious-book publisher, got a postcard saying information about her would follow. In another two days, he got a l
etter—mailed at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan—demanding $5,000 and promising that instructions for delivery of the ransom would arrive soon.
A few days later, he got another letter from Manhattan, ordering him to come to New York and register in a hotel on Eighth Avenue. There, presumably, he would be contacted.
Instead of traveling to New York himself, Distelhurst sent a “friend” who registered in his name, the New York Times reported. After ten days in the hotel and with no contact from a kidnapper, the friend returned to Nashville. The friend was really an FBI agent. Distelhurst had informed the Department of Justice of his daughter’s disappearance early on.
Meanwhile, the Nashville police learned that on the afternoon that Dorothy Ann vanished, a car with New York State license plates was seen near the Distelhurst home. The last two digits on the plates were 76. Plates with those digits were generally issued in Ulster County, north of New York City. But New York police were unable to find a car with 76 plates that had recently been in Nashville.
On October 12, Distelhurst got a third letter, also from New York City. The sender told Distelhurst to travel to Manhattan himself if he wanted his daughter back alive and to check into the hotel where he had been told to stay before. He was told to pace the hotel lobby at frequent intervals, day and night, to periodically stroll the streets near the hotel, and finally to take out a newspaper ad saying in part, “Dorothy, come home. Father in New York at same place…”
It seemed that the author of the ransom letters had not been fooled by the ruse of an FBI agent posing as a friend of Distelhurst. Perhaps Hoover’s sober-dressing, unsmiling men still had not learned how to blend in.
