Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer

by Harold Schechter

  And then there was the story told by Albert H. Kilner, a Phoenicia, New York, radio mechanic. According to Kilner, he was called to the Pope farm to repair a radio in the late summer of 1928. “I happened to stop my car at some little distance from the house,” Kilner told police.

  I reached the front door without seeing anyone. I went around to the back and while there I heard the sound of wood splitting. I pushed the door open. Inside, to the right, I saw another closed door. I opened it. It was a bedroom. Pope was inside. I had a quick glance at what he had been doing. The floor boards were ripped up and I saw several piles of earth. Pope turned red in the face and snarled at me: “What do you mean by entering the house this way? Get out!” He forced me to leave without fixing the radio. Later I went back and did the job.

  Checking Kilner’s story, state troopers discovered that the ground beneath Pope’s bedroom did indeed show signs of digging. They announced plans to excavate the spot to a depth of five feet in an effort to unearth more evidence—perhaps even the remains of the missing girl herself.

  * * *

  Though the tabloid press had been doing its best to convict Pope without a trial, the preliminary hearing held on September 11 made it clear that there were still serious reasons to question his guilt.

  Jessie Pope—the suspect’s main accuser—proved to be a highly dubious witness. Under cross-examination by Pope’s lawyer, James A. Turley, she admitted that she had schemed to have her husband committed to an insane asylum in order to get her hands on the money willed to him by his father. And her recollection of the clothing worn by the little girl she had supposedly seen with Pope in Perth Amboy—a blue dress and a blue hat with a red band—didn’t gibe at all with the description of the confirmation outfit Grace had been wearing at the time of her disappearance.

  Mrs. Budd’s testimony was equally suspect. She admitted that the white stockings found on Pope’s farm were not, in fact, very much like her daughter’s (though she stoutly maintained that another item uncovered by the police—a clasp made of imitation pearl—was identical to an ornament on Grace’s handbag). And she acknowledged that, before she came down to view Pope in the lineup, his wife had already provided her with such a minutely detailed description of the old man that it would have been next to impossible not to recognize him.

  Pope himself had perfectly reasonable explanations for the pieces of evidence that had been made to seem so incriminating by the press. The stockings and other items of children’s clothing were hand-me-downs, passed along to Pope by tenants of the Madison Avenue apartment house he superintended. Pope collected them for his son, who had five young children of his own.

  As for the three mysterious curls (which, as Turley pointed out, were much longer and wavier than Grace Budd’s straight, bobbed hair), they were, according to Pope, family keepsakes—snipped from his son’s head many years before and stored away in the trunk as mementos.

  In spite of the questions that Turley had managed to cast on Jessie Pope’s motives and Delia Budd’s credibility, Magistrate George De Luca felt justified in holding Pope for the grand jury. Bail was continued at $25,000. Unable to raise that sum, the old man was returned to the Tombs.

  On Monday, September 15, 1930, the grand jury indicted Charles Edward Pope for the kidnapping of Grace Budd, and a trial was scheduled for December.

  In its excitement over Pope’s arrest, the press seemed to have forgotten all about the man who had been the primary suspect in the Budd case for two years—Albert E. Corthell. But Detective King, who was finding it increasingly difficult to believe in Pope’s guilt, hadn’t forgotten, and during the months that the old man languished in jail, awaiting his trial, King continued to pursue every lead.

  In early December, just two weeks before the start of Pope’s trial, King finally got his man. Corthell, going under the name of J. W. West, was arrested in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was trying to cash a certified check in the amount of $ 15,000 made out to the treasurer of the Park Board of Joliet, Illinois. Under questioning by police, he finally admitted his true identity.

  Extradition papers were quickly prepared, and on Wednesday, December 3, Detectives King and Maher set off for St. Louis. Four days later, on Sunday, December 7, they were back in New York City with Corthell in custody at last. The prisoner was booked at the East 51st Street station, then removed to Police Headquarters, where, early Monday morning, both Delia Budd and her husband picked him out of a lineup, acknowledging that Corthell “might be” the man who had stolen their daughter.

  Suddenly, after two fruitless years of searching for the Budd kidnapper, the New York City police found themselves with two suspects on their hands.

  But not for long.

  The trial of Charles Edward Pope, began on Monday, December 22, 1930, and lasted only long enough to qualify as farce. Delia Budd, the first witness called to the stand, retracted her identification of Pope, admitting that she had “made a mistake in saying he was the man.” She had only accused him, she confessed, because Pope’s wife had persuaded her of his guilt. Both her husband and Willie Korman were even more emphatic in denying that Pope was Frank Howard.

  Only Jessie Pope persisted in her denunciation, but Attorney Turley quickly undermined her testimony by establishing that she had been hounding her estranged husband for years. Judge William Allen put a few sharply worded questions to Mrs. Pope, then directed the jury to return a “not guilty” verdict.

  After three-and-a-half months of imprisonment, Charles Edward Pope was a free man.

  With Pope’s acquittal, Corthell resumed his status as the primary suspect in the Budd case. But—though he admitted to having spent some time in New York City during the summer of 1928—he fiercely maintained that he knew nothing at all about the kidnapping. And while Corthell was a thoroughgoing fraud and professional liar, it seemed as if he might actually be telling the truth.

  Over the course of the next few months, the police made every effort to connect Corthell to the Budd crime. But they couldn’t come up with a single shred of evidence. And after her humbling experience with the Pope episode, even Delia Budd was unprepared to make a positive identification.

  On Friday, February 6, 1931, following the recommendation of Assistant District Attorney John MacDonnell, Judge William Allen discharged Albert E. Corthell without a trial.

  Corthell’s release was a devastating setback for the detectives involved in the Budd case. Not only had they wasted two years searching for the wrong man, but they were now left with no leads at all—not a single clue to the fate of little Grace Budd or to the identity of her kidnapper. Detective King, who had devoted the most time and energy to the hunt for Corthell, felt especially embitterred by the outcome of the affair. But for all his frustration, he remained undeterred. Holed up somewhere in the world was the cunning old fox who had made off with Grace Budd. And King was determined to sniff him out, no matter how long it took.

  11

  from the testimony of Dr. Menas S. Gregory, Head of the Psychiatric Department, Bellevue Hospital

  On December 15, 1930, exactly one week before the Pope travesty finally fizzled to an end in court, another elderly man—who bore such a strong resemblance to the forlorn janitor that they could have been fraternal twins—was committed to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital for a ten-day observation period. Withered and frail-looking, with watery eyes and a drooping gray moustache, the old man had been arrested earlier that fall for sending “non-mailable matter” through the U.S. Post Office—specifically (in the words of his indictment) a “letter of such a vile, obscene, and filthy nature that to set forth the contents thereof would defile the records of the court.”

  This was not the first time that the old man had gotten into trouble for sending obscene material through the mails. Nor would it be the last.

  His name, though he conducted his rank correspondence under many different aliases, was Albert Fish.

  He was a member—or so he believed—of one of A
merica’s most eminent families. Indeed, “Albert” itself was an assumed name, adopted many years before, during his adolescence. His parents had christened him “Hamilton,” in honor of his putative ancestor, who had been the Governor of New York in the early 185Os, and later, during the eight years of the Grant Administration, the U.S. Secretary of State. At the time of the old man’s commitment in late 1930, another Hamilton Fish—the grandson of the illustrious statesman—was serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, utterly unaware of the gray-headed reprobate in Bellevue who shared his name and claimed a distant kinship.

  There is reason to doubt the validity of that claim. But, if true, it can confidently be stated that, of all the black sheep ever to tarnish the names of old and distinguished American families, the blackest of all was Albert Fish.

  Fish had been arrested before. His criminal record dated back to 1903. And during a brief, frenzied period in the summer of 1928, he had been arrested three times for larceny in a span of six weeks. Since that time, he had been making an effort to steer clear of the police. He had compelling reasons to avoid them, besides his growing arrest record. But he was subject to demons beyond his control, and among his many aberrations, he was a habitual—indeed, compulsive—writer of obscene letters.

  Beginning in the spring of 1929, Fish mailed a series of such letters to women whose names he had gotten from various sources. Some names were secured from matrimonial agencies. Others came from newspaper classifieds, which Fish studied raptly in his constant search for innocent prey.

  Indeed, it was a classified ad that had led the old man to one of his most memorable experiences. But that had been several years before.

  In his letters, Fish often presented himself as a successful Hollywood producer, ready to offer large sums of money (as well as his undying affection) to women willing to perform certain services either for himself or, at times, for a fictitious teenage son, generally identified as “Bobby.” The letters were a delirium of violent, sadomasochistic fantasies, involving some (but by no means all) of Fish’s favorite activities—bondage, flagellation, and coprophagy.

  “I wish you could see me now,” Fish wrote in a typical passage. “I am sitting in a chair naked. The pain is across my back, just over my behind. When you strip me naked, you will see a most perfect form. Yours, yours, sweet honey of my heart. I can taste your sweet piss, your sweet shit. You must pee-pee in a glass and I shall drink every drop of it as you watch me. Tell me when you want to do #2. I will take you over my knees, pull up your clothes, take down your drawers and hold my mouth to your sweet honey fat ass and eat your sweet peanut butter as it comes out fresh and hot. That is how they do it in Hollywood.”

  To another woman, he explained that his “only son” Bobby—who had been crippled at nine by “an attack of infantile paralysis”—required frequent spankings with a cat-o’-nine tails “for his own good.” Bobby, Fish assured his correspondent, “does not wet or muss his clothes or the bed. He will tell you when he has to use the toilet, #1 or #2. For #1 his pants must be unbuttoned at the crotch and his monkey taken out. His pants and drawers are all made with a drop seat. All you have to do is loose three buttons in the back and down they come. Saves a lot of undressing. Handy when you want to spank him, just drop the seat of his pants and drawers. You don’t have to strip him except at night for bed, or to give him a bath (or a switching). The Doctor says three or four good spankings a day on his bare behind will do him good as he is nice and fat in that spot. It will be an aid to him. When he don’t mind you, then you must strip him and use the Cat-o-nine tails. Say you won’t hesitate to use the Paddle or Cat-o-nine tails on him when he needs it.”

  In September, 1930, Fish mailed one of these scatological ravings to a professional housekeeper, whose name he had found in the “Situations Wanted” section of the New York World. The woman—a Mrs. E. Solarid of 245 East 40th Street—promptly turned the letter over to the police. Though Fish had signed it with a pseudonym—“Robert Fiske”—he had included a return address in the hope that the recipient would warm to his advances and respond in kind. It was a routine matter, therefore, for the police to locate and arrest him. He was picked up shortly before Thanksgiving, and—after an examination by a court social worker, who diagnosed the old man’s mental condition as “questionable”—Fish was delivered to Bellevue for psychiatric observation.

  Fish had been on the ward for just over a week when he was interviewed by Dr. Attilio La Guardia, a young physician on Bellevue’s psychiatric staff. La Guardia began by asking the wizened old man when he had first started writing obscene letters.

  “Last year, about June,” Fish replied, keeping his eyes averted and picking at a sore spot on his scalp, just above the hairline.

  “How did you come to write these letters?”

  Fish explained that, during the summer of 1929, he had been working as a handyman and painter at a Harlem sanitarium run by one Dr. Robert B. Lamb. One day, according to Fish, Dr. Lamb’s chauffeur discovered a cache of dirty letters in the sanitarium garage and, that night, read them aloud to a group of men—Fish among them—who had gathered for their evening card game in the chauffeur’s room. Hearing them had put the idea into Fish’s head.

  “Before that,” asked Dr. La Guardia “you never had any desire for anything of this sort?”

  Fish shook his head emphatically. “No, sir, not at all.”

  La Guardia jotted down something on his notepad. “When you wrote these obscene letters,” he asked, “how did you feel?”

  “I had no particular feeling,” Fish replied in his whispery voice.

  “Did you feel that you had to write these letters?”

  The old man shrugged and said, “It was just sort of a habit.”

  La Guardia went on to question Fish about his marital status, his previous troubles with the law, and his memory, asking him at one point to count backwards from one hundred by deducting seven each time. Fish rattled off the sequence without a mistake.

  La Guardia made more notes. There were just a few more questions he wanted to ask. “When was the last time you had intercourse?”

  Fish seemed to ponder for a moment before responding. “Two years ago,” he said.

  “Have you had any desire since that time?”

  “No,” said Fish, his eyes still downcast.

  “Have you been a steady churchgoer?” La Guardia asked.

  Fish smiled, his front teeth protruding slightly through his tightly drawn lips. For the first time during the interview he looked directly at his questioner. “Yes, sir,” he said proudly. “Episcopal church.”

  “How can you reconcile the things you do with the church?”

  Fish’s smile evaporated and was replaced by a solemn frown. “There is no comparison,” he said.

  The examination was over. Dr. La Guardia shook the old man’s hand and left.

  Later, after senior members of the staff had met to evaluate Fish’s case, La Guardia’s handwritten notes were assembled into a formal report by Dr. Menas S. Gregory, head of the hospital’s psychiatric department. The report was forwarded to Judge Frank J. Coleman of the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.

  During Fish’s observation period in Bellevue, Gregory noted, the inmate had been “quiet and cooperative” and had “conducted himself in an orderly and normal manner.” There had been “no evidence of delusional notions or hallucinatory experiences. It is true that he shows some evidence of early senile changes; this condition, however, is quite slight at the present time and has not impaired his mentality. His memory, particularly for a man of his years, is excellent.”

  The old man was certainly suffering from some sort of “sexual psychopathy.” The contents of the letters Fish had mailed to Mrs. Solarid and others offered sufficient proof of that. “Such conduct,” Gregory explained, “frequently is the result of Senile Dementia and is observed in men of advanced years, but in this particular case we believe it has not the same significance, for
the reason that this man, according to the history as well as our examination, has manifested sex perversion from early life.”

  In short, Dr. Gregory wrote, though Fish might be a sexual pervert, he showed no signs of “mental deterioration or dementia.”

  “As a result of our psychiatric examination,” he concluded, “we are of the opinion that this man at the present time is not insane.”

  Though Gregory’s report would come back to haunt him, he wasn’t the first—and wouldn’t be the last—to misjudge the depths of Fish’s derangement. For one thing, Fish looked so harmless—a shriveled and decrepit old-timer, as menacing as Whistler’s mother—that it was hard for anyone, even experienced mental health specialists, to conceive of him as dangerously insane. And in spite of his tenuous hold on reality, he retained enough cunning to conceal his true nature.

  At the time of his arrest he had recently turned sixty (though he looked so infirm that Gregory had taken him for a much older man). For close to fifty years, he had engaged in the most appalling deeds, committed crimes of such an atrocious nature that they were nearly impossible to credit, even after Fish made a full confession and provided incontrovertible proof.

  But those disclosures were still several years away.

  In the end, Fish remained in Bellevue for close to thirty days. To the nurses who observed him on the ward, he seemed polite and cooperative—though as the weeks wore on, Fish felt increasingly desperate for freedom. On January 5, he mailed a letter to his eldest daughter, Mrs. Anna Collins of Astoria, Queens. “Why do none of you write to me,” the letter began in the whiny, self-pitying tone he often took with his children.

  I am the only one here who does not receive a letter or a visitor. I have written to you, to Gertrude, Gene, Henry—none of you answer. I am three weeks here today. Now Annie, do this for your poor old father. Write a letter to Dr. Gregory, Bellevue Hospital, as soon as you get this. Ask him in God’s Name to send me back to court. You know the sooner I get my sentence, the sooner I am back home …. Don’t fail me now. Love to you all from Papa.