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

by Harold Schechter

  Eventually, Stone admitted that he had deliberately strangled the child. Investigators later ascertained that Stone had sexually assaulted the girl before he killed her, and that she had probably still been alive when he threw her into the furnace.

  Shut away in Eastview until his trial began, Stone passed his days pacing around his cell and cursing incessantly. Several months later, Fish had arrived and was placed in the adjoining cell. His delicate sensibilities offended by his neighbor’s profane ravings, Fish wrote a letter of complaint to Warden Casey, requesting that Stone be moved to a different cell. “The cell I am in now is nice and light but I can’t stand Stone. I can’t read my Bible with a mad man raving—cursing—snarling. Can’t you put him down at the other end in # 1?”

  Fish’s plea was ignored and Stone remained where he was. The old man was compelled to pursue his religious activities as best he could. It was hard for him, though, to practice his singular form of worship under the constraining circumstances of prison life.

  Every Sunday morning, for example, a Mass was held for the Catholic prisoners. During one of these occasions, several weeks before the start of Fish’s trial, the ceremony was in progress when a guard heard strange grunting noises coming from the old man’s cell. The guard walked over to investigate. There stood Fish, pants pulled down around his ankles, masturbating furiously to the rhythm of the prayers. Hastily unlocking the cell door, the guard stepped inside and forced him to stop.

  At the time, Albert Fish was just three months shy of his sixty-fifth birthday.

  30

  But the thing which in eminent instances signalizes so exceptional a nature is this: Though the man’s even temper and discreet bearing would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not the less in heart he would seem to riot in complete exemption from that law…. That is to say: Toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort….

  HERMAN MELVILLE, Billy Budd

  With Fish’s trial date set for March 12, James Dempsey had to move fast, and one of his first steps was to secure the services of two psychiatrists of his own. The men he engaged were an impressive pair. Smith Ely Jelliffe was one of the country’s most distinguished neurologists. A tireless champion of Freud’s revolutionary ideas, Jelliffe was a pioneering figure in the history of American psychoanalysis (though Freud himself had a somewhat disparaging view of him, as he did of the United States in general). Jelliffe had already served as a psychiatric expert in a number of sensational cases, including the trial of millionaire playboy Harry K. Thaw. (In June, 1906, Thaw shot and killed architect Stanford White on the roof of Madison Square Garden, a building that White himself had designed. Thaw committed the crime after discovering that his wife, former showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, had been White’s mistress. He was declared criminally insane and institutionalized for nine years.)

  The second psychiatrist Dempsey retained was Dr. Frederic Wertham. Born in Nuremberg in 1895, Wertham was educated in Germany, London, and Vienna (where he had a brief but memorable encounter with Freud). Emigrating to the United States in 1922, he joined the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins, authored a standard textbook on neuropathology called The Brain as an Organ, and began a long and at times controversial career that would make him one of the best-known psychiatrists of his day.

  Among Wertham’s proudest achievements was the establishment of the LaFargue Clinic in Harlem. Created with the support of such prominent figures as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Paul Robeson, the clinic offered psychological counseling to the disadvantaged for the nominal fee of twenty-five-cents per visit.

  A few years after the clinic was established, in the early 1950s, Wertham gained widespread renown (and undying notoriety in certain circles) for spearheading a national campaign against comic books, which he saw as a major cause of juvenile delinquency. His bestselling 1954 diatribe, Seduction of the Innocent, led to a Congressional investigation of the comic-book industry and the creation of the Comics Code Authority, a strict self-regulatory agency that remains in force to this day.

  Comic-book devotees still regard Wertham as a sort of boogey man and lump him together with more recent, right-wing proponents of media censorship. In fact, Wertham was a political liberal and humanitarian, whose anticomics crusade was only one manifestation of a lifelong obsession with the social roots of violence.

  At the time that Dempsey approached him, in midFebruary, 1934, Wertham had been senior psychiatrist at Bellevue for two years, as well as the director of the psychiatric clinic for the Court of General Sessions, a pioneering program which provided a complete psychiatric evaluation of every convicted felon in New York City.

  Of all the psychiatrists who interviewed Fish in the weeks leading up to the trial, Wertham came to know the old man best, partly because they spent the most time in each other’s company—more than twelve hours in all during Wertham’s three visits to Eastview (Vavasour and Lambert together had traveled to the prison only once and examined Fish for a total of three hours). Moreover, though Fish seemed indifferent to Wertham at first (“Some Doctor came … last night and asked about 1,000,000 questions,” he sneered in a letter to Anna on February 14), he warmed up to the psychiatrist when he realized that Wertham had a sincere, scientific interest in understanding the workings of Fish’s baroque psychology.

  As Wertham later wrote in a published reminiscence of the case, Fish began to show “a certain desire to make himself understood and even to try to understand himself.” The old man conceded that he might be suffering from some psychological problems. “I do not think I am altogether right,” he declared at one point in their conversation.

  “Do you mean to say that you are insane?” Wertham asked.

  “Not exactly,” answered Fish. “I compare myself a great deal to Harry Thaw in his ways and actions and desires. I don’t understand it myself. It is up to you to find out what is wrong with me.”

  Accepting Fish’s challenge, Wertham probed into every aspect of the old man’s sordid past, grotesque fantasy life, and appalling sexual history. So many of Fish’s assertions seemed incredible that, in an effort to verify them, Wertham spent hours checking the old man’s medical and psychiatric records, interviewing his family members, and studying criminological literature for comparable cases.

  In the end, Wertham was forced to conclude that there were no comparable cases. Fish’s life had been one “of unparalleled perversity,” Wertham later wrote. “There was no known perversion that he did not practice and practice frequently.” Wertham determined that all these depravities had been fueled by a single, monstrous need—an unappeasable lust for pain. “I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me,” Fish told Wertham. “I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt. The desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost.”

  Wertham was the first to learn another significant fact from Fish, too—a piece of information that the doctor promptly transmitted to James Dempsey, who saw it as a key to the insanity defense he was preparing. Fish told Wertham that, after decapitating Grace Budd, he had tried drinking her blood from the five-gallon paint can he had shoved under her neck. The warm blood had made him choke, however, and he had stopped drinking after three or four swallows.

  Then he had taken his double-edged knife and sliced about four pounds of flesh from her breast, buttocks, and abdomen. He also took her ears and nose. He had wrapped the body parts in a piece of old newspaper and carried them back to his rooms. Simply holding the package on his lap as he rode the train back to New York put him in a state of such acute excitation that, before he had traveled very far, he experienced a spontaneous ejaculation.

  Back in his rooms, Fish had cut the child’s flesh into smaller chunks and used them to make a stew, with carrots, onions and strips of bacon. He had consumed the stew over
a period of nine days, drawing out his pleasure for as long as he could. Later, Fish would tell Dempsey that the child’s flesh had tasted like veal, though he had found her ears and nose too gristly to eat.

  During all that time, he had remained in a state of absolute sexual arousal. He had masturbated constantly. At night he would lie in the darkness, savoring the lingering taste of the meat, and masturbate himself to sleep.

  The next morning he would awaken, hungry for more.

  31

  Perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE, “The Black Cat”

  When Fish wanted to smoke, he handed a cigarette to a guard, who lit it and then passed it back through the bars of the old man’s cell. On Monday, February 25, however—the day after Wertham’s last visit took place—Fish kept badgering the guards for matches. He wanted to light his own cigarettes, he said.

  Eventually, one of the guards grew suspicious, searched Fish’s cell, and discovered a box of absorbent cotton and a bottle of alcohol. No one knew how the old man had gotten hold of these items (apparently one of his children had smuggled them into the jail). But there was no doubt about the use to which he had intended to put them. Fish had already told both Wertham and Detective King that, in addition to shoving needles inside his body, he liked to soak pieces of cotton in alcohol, cram them up his rectum, and set fire to them.

  He had also told Wertham that, on a number of occasions, he had tortured children in the same manner. Sometimes, he had found it necessary to gag them, though he preferred to leave their mouths unobstructed since part of his pleasure came from hearing their screams.

  As the trial date drew nearer, Fish spent more and more time kneeling on the hard floor of his cell, begging God to save him from the chair. He also appealed to more proximate authorities. On Tuesday, March 5, James Dempsey conveyed a unique proposition to Westchester District Attorney Walter A. Ferris. Fish was willing to turn himself over to science as a “human guinea pig” in exchange for a life sentence. “Humanity will profit more by a study of my brain and body than by sending me to the electric chair,” he explained.

  Unsurprisingly, the D.A. did not leap at this opportunity. The law would not permit such a bargain, Ferris told newsmen. And even if it did, he would never consider striking a deal with the old man. “As long as Fish is alive,” the District Attorney declared, “he will be a menace.”

  Five days later, on the eve of his trial, Fish extracted a three-inch chicken bone from the bowl of soup he was served at lunch and sharpened it to a needle point on the concrete floor of his cell. After removing his shirt, he began ripping at the flesh of his chest and abdomen with the improvised weapon. Hearing his moans, Warden Casey hurried over to Fish’s cell and summoned a guard who unlocked the door, rushed inside, and wrestled the bone away from the old man, who had managed to inflict only minor flesh wounds on himself.

  That evening, the newspapers reported that Fish had been thwarted in a suicide attempt. But people like Dr. Wertham and James Dempsey, who were closely acquainted by now with the workings of the old man’s freakish psychology, knew that he hadn’t been trying to kill himself. He had simply been enjoying an act of autoeroticism—an ecstatic release after his long, enforced abstinence from pain.

  With Bruno Richard Hauptmann sentenced and sequestered on death row, the trial of Albert Howard Fish for the murder of Grace Budd became the biggest courtroom drama in town when it opened at the Westchester County Supreme Court Building in White Plains on Monday, March 11, 1935. More than three hundred people, most of them women, jammed the hallway outside the courtroom doors, pressing for admission. A dozen deputy sheriffs were posted at the entrance to keep the crowd orderly.

  Spectators were admitted by ones and twos until the benches were full. No standees were allowed, which caused a good deal of grumbling among the scores of curiosity seekers who didn’t manage to get seats. But Justice Frederick P. Close was determined to avoid the circus atmosphere that had prevailed at the Hauptmann trial. “I intend to conduct a quiet, orderly trial,” he announced.

  At the front of the courtroom, the big press table was packed with representatives from newspapers throughout the metropolitan region. For weeks, the city’s tabloids, basing their information on leaks from various officials involved in the case, had offered previews of coming attractions, hinting at the horror-show sensations the trial held in store. “From the witness stand,” wrote a reporter for the Daily Mirror, “Fish will recite the story of his life, admitting atrocities not surpassed by even that story of terror and bloodlust, Dracula. He will make his hair-raising confessions to save his own, miserable life.” By opening day, New Yorkers were primed for the most lurid revelations—tales of sexual depravity, cannibalism, human sacrifice and ritual torture.

  They were not disappointed.

  At around ten A.M. Fish, dressed in a shabby gray coat, dark dusty trousers, rumpled blue shirt, and badly knotted striped tie, shuffled into the courtroom on the arms of two deputy sheriffs. His head was bowed and his face hidden behind the fingers of one bony hand. As he was led to the defense table, where James Dempsey sat waiting with his assistant, Frank J. Mahoney, a dozen news photographers leapt to their feet and began shooting pictures. Even with his eyes covered, Fish winced at the exploding bulbs, and the cameramen were promptly banished from the courtroom by Justice Close.

  The first day’s business, the impaneling of the jury, proceeded smoothly. By 5:30 in the afternoon, seventy talesman had been examined by Dempsey and his opponent, Elbert F. Gallagher, Chief Assistant District Attorney, who (along with another Assistant D.A. named Thomas Scoble) was in charge of the prosecution.

  Many of the talesmen were dismissed for personal reasons—family illness or jobs they couldn’t neglect. The first person questioned, a Peekskill laborer named William A. Waite, was unwilling to serve unless he could go home every night. His wife couldn’t tend the furnace by herself, he explained. Waite was promptly excused. Other talesmen were dismissed because they had already decided that Fish was guilty or insane.

  In questioning the potential jurors, Dempsey gave a strong indication of the strategy he planned to follow during the trial itself. Each of the talesman was asked whether he, a family member, or any acquaintance had ever been treated at Bellevue Hospital. It was clear that Dempsey intended to attack the competence of the Bellevue psychiatrists who had examined Fish in 1930 and declared him sane. Dempsey’s references to Bellevue were so contemptuous that, at one point, Gallagher bitterly objected to his “snide remarks.”

  “Oh, you’ll hear plenty about Bellevue before this trial is finished,” Dempsey snorted in reply.

  During a later, angry exchange with Gallagher, Dempsey revealed another part of his defense plan. He intended to establish that Fish was suffering from lead colic, an occupational disease of housepainters, which was believed to cause dementia.

  The defense lawyer also warned of the “gruesome details” that jurors would be exposed to, including “obscene testimony” about cannibalism. “Would the fact that there is evidence that Fish, like yourself the father of six children, killed a little girl and ate her body so shock you that you could not weigh the evidence?” he demanded of one of the talesmen, an elderly farmer. The old man blanched visibly, admitted that it might, and was excused.

  “This trial will be sordid, to put it mildly,” Dempsey emphasized to each prospective juror, “Will that affect you and if you find, after hearing the evidence, that the defendant is insane, will you agree to send him to Matteawan Asylum for the criminally insane?”

  Gallagher—a large, imposing man who would later become a State Supreme Court Justice—required less time with each talesman. The gist of his examination could be summed up in two questions: First, “If you find that Fish knew the difference between right and wrong, will you vote him guilty?” And second, “Have you any prejudice against the death penalty?”

  The first juror accepted—and automatical
ly made foreman—was John Partelow of Mount Pleasant, New York, a forty-eight-year-old carpenter and father of three children. By the end of the day, eight more jurors had been selected. Except for one, all of them, like Partelow, were middle-aged family men. Among them, they had eighteen children. The only bachelor in the group, a steamship agent from Yonkers named Gilbert Nee, was engaged to be married after Lent.

  Throughout the day’s proceedings, Fish—“the benign-looking Bluebeard,” as the tabloids had taken to calling him—sat slumped in his chair at the defense table, right elbow resting on the arm of his chair, head propped in his hand, eyes closed. He displayed no interest at all in the proceedings. Indeed, he showed few signs of life, though he did stiffen slightly at Gallagher’s first mention of the death penalty.

  For the rest of his trial, Fish would maintain the same indifferent pose. To one observer, Arthur James Pegler of the Daily Mirror, he resembled “a corpse insecurely propped in a chair.” To others he appeared to be dozing.

  Much of the time, he was.

  32

  “Sometimes I myself am not sure what is real and what is not, what I’ve really done and what are things I want to do and thought about doing so long that it got to be as if I had done them, so that I remember them just as clearly as the real things.”