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

by Harold Schechter

  King was back on the stand first thing the next morning, Wednesday, March 14, and remained there for most of the day. He began by reciting the confession Fish had made immediately after his arrest—a far more graphic account of the crime than the one Gallagher had given during his opening statement. The detective then described in equally vivid detail the initial trip to Wisteria Cottage, when Fish had re-created the killing and led King and his fellow officers to the spot behind the stone wall where the child’s skull lay half-buried in dead leaves and dirt.

  This third day of the trial had its dramatic high point, too, and it occurred precisely at this juncture, when—over the loud protests of Defense Counsel Dempsey—two bailiffs carried a grocery carton full of human bones to the front of the courtroom.

  “If your Honor please,” shouted Dempsey. “I submit that there is enough gruesome evidence in this case without putting any skeleton in evidence.”

  Justice Close was unimpressed by the objection. “He has to establish the corpus delecti.”

  “I submit that doesn’t have to be done by putting bones in evidence.”

  “Objection overruled,” declared the judge.

  “Exception,” Dempsey said angrily. “May I note on the record that the defense objects to putting in evidence any bones or any skulls upon the ground that they are of little probative value here in this case, sir, and upon the further ground that the introduction of that evidence would be highly prejudicial to this defendant, and it would undoubtedly tend to arouse and inflame the minds of the men on the jury. I submit it is only offered for that purpose.”

  “Objection overruled.”

  “Exception,” said Dempsey. “I further state that I don’t recall a murder case in this county where they have ever put in evidence any bones.”

  “This county has not any different rules than any other county,” Justice Close replied.

  “I would like to see the authority as the right of the district attorney to put the bones in evidence,” Dempsey continued.

  “I will assume the responsibility,” Justice Close said calmly.

  At that point, Dempsey called for a mistrial, a motion which Justice Close promptly denied.

  With that, Gallagher reached into the cardboard carton, lifted out Grace Budd’s skull, and held it aloft for a moment before handing it to Detective King. At the sight of the small, weather-stained skull, the spectators gasped audibly. One well-dressed matron began crying noisily and had to be led from the room.

  Once again, Dempsey offered strenuous objection, insisting that “I am entitled to the declaration of a mistrial by the very exhibition of this skull before the jury.” Once again, Justice Close denied the motion.

  Dempsey’s cross-examination of King, which began shortly after the controversy over the bones, occupied the remainder of the morning session and continued after the lunch recess. For a significant part of that time, Dempsey zeroed in on an issue that was clearly central to his insanity defense—the question of cannibalism. It was obvious that the lawyer wanted to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that Fish had indeed cut off and consumed portions of the little girl’s body—an atrocity that no sane human being could possibly have performed.

  Dempsey began by asking King about the anecdote that Fish had related in his letter to the Budds: the story about the famine in China which had driven the starving populace to cannibalize young children.

  “Did you have a talk with Mr. Fish about that reference in that particular letter, sir?” Dempsey asked Detective King.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what did he tell you about that?”

  “He said that he had a brother who was in the Navy. That when he was a young boy this brother would come home on his leaves of absence and recite these tales to him of famines in the Far East and various things he had witnessed as the result of these famines.”

  “In other words,” Dempsey continued, “he said to you, substantially, that he had heard that children in China were sold for food?”

  “Yes, his brother told him.”

  “Did he tell you, sir, that ever since 1894 or so when he heard about this human flesh in China that that had been on his mind?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did he tell you, sir, that he wanted to eat human flesh and it had been an obsession with him for years and years?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did he tell you that he had talked about it any number of times, sir?”

  King admitted that Fish had.

  “Did he tell you it was a frequent subject of his conversation?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did he tell you that he had read other books with respect to cannibalism and other things?”

  “He said he had read books on this.”

  At this point, Dempsey seemed to shift gears. He abruptly dropped the subject of cannibalism and began questioning King about the rest of the letter—Fish’s detailed descriptions of his visit to the Budds’ apartment, his first glimpse of little Grace, the lie he had invented to lure her from her home, their trip to Westchester, her awful death at his hands in the silence of Old Wisteria. Dempsey proceeded methodically through each of these points, asking King whether or not they had all been “corroborated by other evidence.”

  King acknowledged that they had.

  By this time, Dempsey’s strategy had become clear. If every one of Fish’s statements in the letter had been substantiated, wasn’t it reasonable to assume that he had also been telling the truth, hard as it was to believe, about making Grace’s “meat” into a stew?

  King, however, refused to give ground. Unflappable as ever, he continued to maintain that, to the best of his knowledge, Fish had not committed cannibalism on the dead child’s body.

  “Didn’t you ask him why it was that he took the head of this little girl, upon which there is no flesh, and put it outside and retained the torso and the limbs, upon which there would possibly be edible flesh, if you can conceive of such a thing?”

  “I didn’t ask him that question in just that way. I did ask him, ‘Wasn’t it a fact that you used this body?’ And he said, ‘No, I did not.’”

  “In other words, he denied having any relations with it?”

  “Any relations at all.”

  “But weren’t you interested in the course of your investigation to find out why, after this little girl was dead and after her body was dismembered, why the head was put outside in the privy, and why the fleshy parts of the body were kept in the house?” Dempsey pressed.

  King stared levelly at Dempsey. “I did ask the defendant, ‘Why did you do that?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’”

  Dempsey allowed a note of impatience to enter his voice. “Didn’t he tell you, sir, that the reason why he put the pail under the girl’s head when he cut off the little girl’s head was to get the blood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t he say that after he caught the blood, he took some swallows of it, and he didn’t like it?”

  “No, he didn’t. He said he threw the pail out of the window onto the lawn. He made no mention of having used the blood himself.”

  Dempsey tried a different tack, asking King if he had interviewed any of Fish’s children following the old man’s arrest.

  Yes he had, King answered. Four of them.

  “Did you find out from any of his children about any unusual tendencies of this defendant with respect to the meat that he ate?”

  Immediately, prosecutor Gallagher objected to the question “as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.” His objection was sustained by Justice Close.

  Dempsey rephrased the question. “Did you find out that he liked to eat raw meat,” he asked King.

  Gallagher again made objection, which was sustained by the court, and Dempsey, after protesting the ruling, moved on to other matters.

  Following Detective King’s testimony, his colleague, Sergeant Thomas Hammill, was called to the stand to corroborate King’s account of Fi
sh’s arrest and the expedition to Wisteria Cottage. The rest of the afternoon was given over to a miscellany of witnesses, including Frieda Schneider, Fish’s former landlady, who gave her own version of the stakeout of her premises; Joseph Prefer, the police photographer who had taken the first pictures of the crime scene; and several staff members of the dental clinic in New York City where Grace Budd had been treated in 1927.

  At 5:30 P.M., court was recessed for the day. As Dempsey was departing, several reporters approached him to ask how Fish felt about the possibility of dying in the chair.

  “He is indifferent,” Dempsey said, then immediately amended the statement. Though it was true that Fish often seemed unconcerned about his fate, Dempsey had recently received a note from the old man in which he had expressed a desire to live because, as Fish had written and as Dempsey now repeated with a poker face, “God still has work for me to do.”

  The fourth day of Fish’s trial—Thursday, May 14—began with the testimony of two more dentists as the state continued its efforts to establish the corpus delecti. After describing their examination of the victim’s jawbone and teeth, Doctors Harry Strusser and Abraham Weil both agreed that the skull found at Wisteria Cottage was undoubtedly Grace Budd’s. Their conclusion was based partly on the pattern of molar development, which was consistent with that of a girl approximately eleven years old, and partly on the location of the fillings, which matched the ones marked on the dental chart that had been admitted into evidence the previous afternoon.

  Several members of the Greenburgh police department who had been involved in the search of the Wisteria premises described the discovery of the skeletal remains, and Medical Examiner Amos Squire bolstered the state’s case by testifying that the bones were those of a preadolescent girl approximately fifty-two inches tall.

  The rest of the day was taken up with the presentation of three more of Fish’s confessions—the ones he had made to Acting Captain John Stein, head of the Missing Persons Bureau; to P. Francis Marro, Assistant District Attorney of New York County; and to Frank Coyne, the former Westchester D.A.

  Prosecutor Gallagher read each of the statements to the jury over the vehement objections of James Dempsey, who called for a mistrial on the ground that the recitation of four separate confessions (including the one Detective King had read the previous day) was “of a prejudicial nature” and had been done for no other purpose than “to inflame and arouse the jury against this defendant.” Like all of Dempsey’s motions for a mistrial, this one was denied.

  At one point, Dempsey and Justice Close engaged in a heated exchange. “I object at this time to four different witnesses testifying to the same confession,” Dempsey declared.

  “Object to them when they are offered,” said Justice Close.

  “I object to four confessions going in. I don’t object to any proper evidence.”

  Justice Close’s voice grew stern. “I am the judge of what is proper.”

  “I have the right to protect this defendant,” Dempsey protested. “His life is at stake.”

  “I am not objecting to your objections, but I object to your speeches.”

  “I am making my objection.”

  “You don’t make objections,” said the judge. “That is the trouble. You make speeches.”

  “I object to your Honor’s remarks in that respect.”

  Justice Close leaned back in his seat and made a little waving motion with one hand. “All right. Now, go on.”

  But Dempsey wasn’t ready to drop the subject. “I submit that I have to protect my client’s interests here.”

  “He will be protected,” answered the judge.

  Dempsey had good reason to be concerned. By the time Gallagher had completed the confessions, more than one reporter felt that Fish’s insanity case had suffered, as one of them put it, a devastating “body blow.” At several places in the statements—when he told Captain Stein, for example, that he “would have given anything to have her back again” five minutes after murdering Grace Budd—Fish had professed to feelings of remorse. Other admissions, too—that he had done his best to avoid the police after the killing, for instance—seemed to reveal very clearly that Fish knew the difference between right and wrong.

  In spite of the damage that had been done to his defense, the bizarre old man seemed to perk up for the first time while the statements were being read. He lowered his left hand from his eyes, nodded appreciatively, and chuckled to himself every now and again, as though his confessions were filled with the most delightful bons mots.

  The State rested its case at 11:34 on Friday morning after a few final witnesses had been called to the stand, including Professor Dudley Morton, the anatomist who had made a thorough examination of the victim’s remains in his lab at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. As The New York Times reported, Professor Morton “clinched the State’s proof of the corpus delecti” by testifying that the bones were those of a “female individual” approximately eleven years old and just over four feet tall—the same age and height as Grace Budd had been at the time she had disappeared forever.

  It was time for the defense to begin its case. After asking for a directed verdict of insanity “on the ground that the People by their own evidence have repudiated the presumption of sanity” and having his motion promptly denied, James Dempsey called his first witness to the stand—Fish’s despised and estranged oldest son, Albert Fish, Jr.

  Until this point, the evidence in the trial had focused exclusively on the specifics of the Budd crime. The State’s case had been a relatively uncomplicated affair, a matter of establishing that the bones recovered at Wisteria Cottage were Grace Budd’s remains and of proving, largely through Fish’s various confessions, that the killing had been the coldly premeditated act of a man who was fully aware of the heinous nature of his crime. In effect, Gallagher had spent the past four days leading the jury on a systematic, step-by-step re-creation of the murder, from Fish’s initial visit to the Budds’ apartment to Grace’s awful final moments and the disposal of her butchered corpse in the woods behind Wisteria.

  During the next few days of the trial, Dempsey would take his audience on a journey, too, though it would be a far less straightforward one: not a tracing of the path leading from the Budds’ doorway to Grace’s death site, but an expedition into the dizzying blackness of Albert Fish’s mind—a trip that was truly (in the language of the old man’s favorite author, Edgar Allan Poe) a descent into the maelstrom.

  A slight, delicately featured man who looked much younger than his thirty-five years, Albert Fish, Jr. delivered his testimony without so much as glancing at his father. His voice, though soft, was full of bitterness.

  At Dempsey’s prompting, he began by recalling the time he had spotted his father standing on the hilltop behind their rented bungalow, shouting “I am Christ!” That had been in 1922, when Fish was fifty-two years old, five years after Anna Fish had abandoned her family and run off with her lover, John Straube. By then, Gertrude was married and settled in Queens, and Fish had taken the rest of his children and moved to the bungalow in the Westchester town of Greenburgh, where he had been hired to paint the exterior of a church. Just a few hundred yards down the road from the rented bungalow stood the house that the locals called Wisteria Cottage.

  Next, the young man gave a graphic account of the episode that had occurred the summer before his father’s arrest, when he had returned unexpectedly to the apartment on Amsterdam Avenue he shared with his father and discovered the old man beating himself with a nail-studded paddle. He also described the time in 1929 when he had stumbled upon the two bloody paddles stashed behind the kitchen sink of the Brooklyn apartment he and his father were occupying at the time.

  And then there were the needles. Albert Jr. testified that he had known about his father’s habit of shoving needles into himself for many years. He had first learned about it from his younger brother John, who had spied their father performing this grotesque ritual on himself as earl
y as 1925.

  Albert himself, however, had not encountered any evidence of this weird practice until the summer of 1934, not long after the paddle incident, when he had come upon a collection of sewing needles tucked away on a shelf in the Amsterdam Avenue apartment. There were fourteen of them altogether, threaded through a packet of newspaper clippings dealing with subjects like nudism and enforced sterilization. Later, the young man found a small box containing ten more needles in a fishbowl on the mantelpiece.

  Dempsey asked the young man if he had said anything to his father about the needles.

  Albert Jr. nodded. “I asked my father who used the needles and he said, ‘ I did.’ I said, ‘Are they your needles?’ He said, ‘Yes, they are.’ I asked him what he used them for, and he told me he got certain feelings that came over him, and every time he did that, he would have to go into a bedroom or some place and stick those needles into his body.”

  “Did your father say anything about sticking them in other people?”

  “Yes, sir, he did,” the young man said in his soft but emphatic voice. “He told me, ‘When I can’t stick them in myself, I like to torture other people with them.’”

  One of the most unusual stories related by the younger Fish involved a black cat that his father had developed an obsession with during those same, bizarre months in the summer of 1934. What was particularly strange about the old man’s obsession was that, as far as his son could tell, the animal was purely imaginary.

  Sometime that August, the young man testified, his father had approached a man named Huffman, the owner of the buildings they had been hired to superintend, and asked him “if he would please get a bag of lime, that he needed it, and Mr. Hoffman asked him what he wanted it for. He told Mr. Hoffman that there was a great big black cat that used to run in front of him every now and then, and he wanted the lime to kill the cat with. Well, Mr. Hoffman thought it was curious, but he said, ‘All right.’”