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

by Harold Schechter

  After committing one of his outrages, Fish would promptly pick up and move, sometimes to a different neighborhood, sometimes to a different city. And sometimes, “after a particularly brutal episode,” to a different state. Fish had been “in no less than twenty-three states, from New York to Montana,” said Wertham. “And in every state he has had something to do with children.”

  Here Wertham glanced over at Justice Close. “The story becomes a little more repugnant as we go along.” This remark turned out to be a significant understatement.

  Though many details of Fish’s past remained hazy, Wertham had learned that, in his teens, Fish “had been a homosexual prostitute, a boy who stood around on corners and went with other men for money.” As a young man in his twenties, he had also made a trip overseas to Brussels, where he had visited brothels specializing in flagellation and other sadomasochistic acts. There, Fish had “practiced oral perversions on the rectums of men and women. He was also extremely interested in urine.” After his return to America, Fish began to “do all of these things” to his child victims.

  “The terrible thing of it all,” Wertham continued, “is that his interest was not so much to have sexual relations with these children as to inflict pain on them.”

  Wertham explained Fish’s method. He would entice his little victims into a basement with small bribes of candy or pocket change. Once there, he would bind them, rape them, and beat them—or worse. Sometimes he would gag them, “although he preferred not to gag them, circumstances permitting, for he liked to hear their cries.”

  Many of his victims, Wertham explained, “came from poorer classes. He told me he selected colored children, especially because the authorities didn’t pay much attention when they were hurt or missing.”

  The doctor went on to describe an instance in which Fish had “kept a colored boy in a shack by the Potomac in Washington for a number of weeks. He undressed this boy, took his clothes away, and kept him as a captive. He told me that he intended to kill this boy, but somehow or other it didn’t work out.”

  In another instance, Fish had taken a young boy, bound him, and whipped him violently “on both sides of his body.” Fish had eventually let this little victim go, but the boy’s genitals were bleeding so badly that Fish became frightened and fled the city.

  The most appalling incident of all the atrocities that Wertham recounted that day was the so-called Kedden episode, which had taken place in 1911. At the time, Fish was forty-one and living in St. Louis.

  Kedden, a handsome but slow-witted nineteen-year old who looked even younger, had “bummed his way from the South on a banana train.” There had been five black men in the boxcar along with him, and the six of them had spent the trip engaging in “all kinds of sexual activities, mostly fellatio and homosexuality.”

  Fish “picked the boy up somehow” and brought him to his room. Kedden was covered with lice. Fish bought a patent hair remover and “stripped all the hair off his body, including the hair off his pubis.” Then, for a period of two to three weeks, “they carried on all kinds of mutual sadistic and masochistic activities.”

  “He had this boy whip him and he played all sorts of games—one was the father and one was the child, one was the teacher and one was the child. He forced the boy to urinate on him.” Fish drank the boy’s urine and ate his feces, then “forced the other one to eat and drink these things, too.”

  Their games began to grow more frenzied. At one point, Fish “cut the boy’s buttocks with a razor blade and attempted to drink the blood.” Eventually, Fish tied the boy up, stimulated him to erection, and began to cut off his penis with a pair of scissors. Before he could finish the job, however, he experienced a sudden change of heart. “The boy had such an agonized look that Fish couldn’t stand it,” Wertham explained. Binding the bleeding wound, Fish left a ten dollar bill on the bed for the mutilated boy and ran away to another city.

  Wertham paused while the jurors, some of whom looked seriously shaken, readjusted themselves in their seats.

  “All right, go ahead, sir,” Dempsey said after a moment.

  “I might mention here some other very strange abnormality in his sex life,” Wertham said, and proceeded to describe a perversion that was not simply “very strange” but apparently unique in the annals of psychopathia sexualis.

  “He has on a number of occasions taken flowers, taken roses, and inserted these roses into his penis. Then he would stand before the mirror and look at himself. He would get sexual gratification from that. In the end, he would eat the roses.”

  Next, Dempsey asked Wertham about Fish’s relationships with women. After all, the man had been married for many years and had fathered six children. Wouldn’t that seem to indicate a capacity for “normal relationships”?

  Wertham shook his head. “All his relationships with women were just as abnormal as his relationships with men. In all his marriages he practiced these things with his wives. In fact, he selected them for that particular purpose. He married his wife when she was nineteen years old and he was in his thirties. He made sure before he married her that she was interested at least to some extent in the things he was doing, and his relations with her were entirely abnormal.”

  As for the other women he had married, “he made sure first, from the letters, that they would fall in with all these things.”

  Very simply, Fish was incapable of experiencing “love for any mature person. He never had any feelings of friendship for any mature person.” Wertham sketched a picture of Fish as a hopelessly stunted personality. “I might say I have never seen a man who was so interested in merely infantile and childish desires. After all, a child would be cruel to an insect, and a child does not know the difference between man and woman, and a child would play with urine and feces without knowing what that means. But I have never seen a man who did all these things up to the age of sixty-five, as this man has.”

  As pathological as Fish’s entire life had been, it took an even darker turn sometime in his mid-fifties. It was then that he began to manifest the signs of full-blown psychosis. Among other things, he became obsessed with the notion of castrating and killing a young boy as a form of penance for his own sins.

  “He had always been very much interested in religion,” Wertham explained. “He told me very proudly that religion was his great point.” Indeed, as a young boy Fish had dreamed of becoming a minister.

  His religious preoccupations became markedly more intense—and dangerous—during his mid-fifties. “At that time he became interested in ideas of atonement or punishment,” said Wertham. In his deranged imagination, Fish dwelled obsessively on the story of Abraham and Isaac, persuaded that he, too, should attempt to sacrifice a young boy, “and if it wasn’t right, then an angel would stop him at the last moment.”

  At other times, he had visions of Christ and heard mumbled words—“stripes,” “rewardeth,” “delighteth,” “chastiseth”—that he interpreted as divine commandments to torment and kill. Fish would organize the words into quasi-Biblical messages: “Blessed is the man who correcteth his son in whom he delighteth with stripes, for great shall be his reward.” or “Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones and dasheth their heads against the stones.”

  On at least one occasion prior to the Budd incident, he had tried to carry out his sacrificial plan. He had lured a fourteen-year-old boy to a preselected spot in the country, where he intended to bind him, castrate him, whip him until he was unconscious, and then leave him to bleed to death. But “at the last moment, an automobile came by, so he saw this was too dangerous and gave it up.”

  Originally, he had lined up Edward Budd for the same purpose but had been discouraged both by the boy’s size and the presence of his friend, Willie Korman. And so Fish had settled for Edward’s little sister. Grace, of course, was a girl, but a prepubescent one, her body lithe and boyish. In the frenzied moments of the murder, Fish had actually perceived her as a young boy (as he had mentioned during one of his confessions). C
iting Freud, Wertham later explained that, in beheading Grace, Fish was performing a symbolic castration.

  Fish’s religious mania also accounted, at least in part, for his practice of inserting needles into his body. Though he obtained masochistic gratification from torturing himself in this way—he invariably achieved a sexual climax during each of these episodes—he also “did it in response to his idea that God wanted him to punish himself so as to atone for all these sins he had committed.”

  Wertham also explained that, in addition to shoving needles so far inside himself that they couldn’t be extracted, Fish had on countless occasions stuck them only part way in and then removed them. As a result, the X-rays revealed only “a very small part of what this man has suffered.”

  Many times, Fish had “tried to insert them into his testicles.” But the pain had been unbearable—even for him—and he had ceased trying.

  By now, it was late afternoon. Before the day ended, Dempsey wanted to make sure that Wertham had a chance to testify on one last, critical matter. “Now, was anything said about cannibalism or eating human flesh?”

  “He told me that for a long time, many, many years, he had been interested in the subject of cannibalism,” Wertham replied.

  He told me that he had read with great pleasure all sorts of accounts where this was supposed to have happened. For instance, he claims he read about the Perry expedition, that on a ship they had to kill three sailors and eat them, something that was discussed in the newspapers. He read other incidents of that sort, where explorers in Africa or somewhere had killed somebody. He said his brother had told him certain stories, how in China during a famine people had eaten human flesh and that he himself was consumed with the desire to eat human flesh. He definitely told me that he ate the flesh of Grace Budd.

  Wertham went on to describe the stew Fish had made from the little girl’s body and the “absolute sexual excitement” he had known while consuming it. But there was another dimension to the experience, too, for even here, Fish’s religious mania had played a part.

  Unbelievable as it seemed, this ultimate outrage had been a sacramental as well as a sexual act for Fish. In his insanely disordered mind, the drinking of the child’s blood and the eating of her flesh had been “associated with the idea of Holy Communion.”

  On Wednesday morning at nine A.M., Wertham was back on the witness stand. It was time for Dempsey to present the “hypothetical question” that he and his associates had spent the previous evening putting together.

  A legal device dictated by the rules of evidence, this question was a detailed recapitulation of all the evidence presented so far—cast, however, as hypothesis instead of fact and culminating in a question mark.

  Gallagher insisted on examining the question before Dempsey presented it. The lawyers spent the next two hours closeted with Justice Close. It was nearly 11:15 when the three men finally emerged from the judge’s chambers and Dempsey began reading the question to Wertham.

  “Now, Doctor, assuming that on or about the 19th day of May, 1870, a male child was born in Washington, the youngest of twelve children upon his father’s side and the youngest of seven children on his mother’s side,” Dempsey began. He proceeded to relate Fish’s biography from his boyhood in the orphanage to his life as a family man and devoted father, prefacing each part of the narrative with the same formulaic phrase—“Now assume further, Doctor …”

  Dempsey went on to describe Anna Fish’s desertion and the increasingly weird behavior Fish’s children had observed in their father in the ensuing years. Eventually the lawyer arrived at the Budd murder itself, describing it yet again in graphic detail. Then came the series of bizarre episodes that followed—Fish’s obscenity arrests and bigamous marriages, his visit to the family of Mary Nicholas, his dealings with Grace Shaw, the things that Albert Jr. had witnessed while living with the old man. “Assume, further, Doctor, that in the year 1934 the defendant was residing at 1883 Amsterdam Avenue in the City of New York and was seen in his bedroom jumping up and down looking back at himself and hitting himself with a paddle. Assume further that he was hitting himself on the backside and his face had a very red color.”

  On and on the question went, describing the letter Fish had mailed to the Budds, his arrest and confessions, his obsession with cannibalism, the clippings on nudism and sterilization found among his belongings, the needles in his body and burn scars on his gluteal cleft, the letters he had written from prison.

  The entire question, 15,000-words long and covering forty-five typewritten pages, took an hour and fifteen minutes to read. It was nearly 12:30 P.M. when Dempsey finally reached the end. “Now, Doctor, assuming the truth of the facts as stated in the foregoing hypothetical question, what, in your opinion, is the mental condition of this defendant today?”

  Wertham needed only three words to answer: “He is insane.”

  Following the lunch recess, Gallagher cross-examined Wertham for several hours, pressing him on the question of Fish’s ability to distinguish right from wrong. Didn’t Fish’s cunning both in the commission of the crime and in his attempts to conceal it afterward indicate that he did, in fact, know the difference?

  Wertham responded that Fish was certainly intelligent enough to understand the consequences of his crime and to take precautions against discovery and arrest. But to really know right from wrong requires a “certain emotional sympathy,” Wertham explained. “You have to feel what is right and wrong. This defendant is suffering from a mental disease. He is so mixed up about the question of punishment, of sin, of atonement, of religion, of torture that he is in a particularly bad state to know the difference between right and wrong. He is even worse off than that, because he actually has a perverted, a dis torted, if you will, an insane, knowledge of right and wrong.”

  At another point, the prosecutor asked whether much of what Fish had told Wertham might not have been fantasy. Referring to the needles in the old man’s groin, Wertham replied that he had never seen a fantasy that showed up on an X-ray. “And if the attorney will permit me to say,” Wertham added, “the child is dead, after all. I mean, it was no fantasy when he told me he killed this girl.”

  It was late afternoon when Wertham left the stand. Determined to have the case in the hands of the jury by week’s end, Justice Close ordered an evening session, the trial’s first. After recessing for supper, the court reconvened at 7:30 P.M. to hear the testimony of Dempsey’s two remaining expert witnesses, Doctors Smith Ely Jelliffe and Henry A. Riley, a professor of neurology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, who had been brought in to bolster the insanity defense shortly before the trial began.

  The two physicians corroborated Wertham’s findings, adding a few new details. Riley’s testimony stressed Fish’s religious delusions, describing the old man’s hallucinations or, as Fish called them, “visitations”: “He would see the face of Christ or the whole body of Christ garbed in various kinds of raiment, showing the marks of the nails in the hands and the feet,” Riley explained. “Often he said he could see blood actually coming out of the side of Christ. And usually when these visitations occurred, he could see the lips of Christ moving, and they would be saying things to him, giving him definite messages.”

  One of these messages shed additional light on Fish’s motives for murdering Grace Budd. “He told me,” said Riley, “that he had received a direct command that he should take a virgin and sacrifice her so that she shouldn’t become a harlot.”

  Jelliffe confirmed that the “whole killing of the Budd girl took on the character of a religious ritual.” He also repeated Fish’s revised account of the crime—an account which contradicted, in one key respect, the old man’s previous confessions.

  In his initial statements to the police, Fish had steadfastly denied any sexual dimension to the murder. To Jellife, however, he admitted otherwise, revealing that, while kneeling on her chest and choking the struggling girl, “he had had two emissions.”

  34


  He shall have judgment without mercy, that hath showed no mercy.

  JAMES 2:13

  Commenting on the trial years later, Frederic Wertham had trouble keeping the scorn out of his voice when he referred to the witnesses Gallagher put on the stand on Thursday, March 21, to rebut the defense psychiatrists. All four of these men, Wertham charged, offered “extraordinary statements under oath.” Their testimony made for one of those questionable parades of expert opinion “so often said to give a black eye to psychiatry … especially forensic psychiatry.”

  Dr. Menas S. Gregory, former head of the Bellevue Psychiatric Department, was the first to testify that morning after the defense had rested its case. Gallagher questioned him briefly, asking him to describe the examinations Fish had undergone during his thirty-day observation period in late 1930. Dr. Gregory then read the report he had prepared in which he had diagnosed Fish as “abnormal” but sane.

  Dempsey’s cross-examination was considerably more intense. Fulfilling his pledge to blame the Bellevue staff for “turning Fish back on the streets,” Dempsey hammered away at Gregory, his tone growing more scathing as he went on. Put on the defensive, Gregory angrily maintained that Fish was no different from millions of other people.

  “Is it a common sort of thing, Doctor, for people to have sexual abnormalities with respect to urine and human excretion?” Dempsey inquired.

  “Well, it is much commoner than you think.”

  Dempsey arranged his features into a “do tell” look. “Do you call a man who drinks urine and eats human excretion sane or insane?”

  “Well, we don’t call them mentally sick.”