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

by Harold Schechter

  “That man is perfectly all right?” asked Dempsey incredulously.

  “Not perfectly all right,” Gregory said, making an effort to subdue the angry tremor in his voice. “But he is socially perfectly all right.” Indeed, said Gregory, countless people suffered from the very same perversion. “Not only that, they are very successful people, successful artists, successful teachers, successful financiers.”

  A few moments later, as Dempsey continued to attack Gregory’s handling of Fish’s case, the psychiatrist became so agitated that he half-rose from his seat, shouting, “In a city hospital, you have to do the best you can!”

  “And very often, the best you can is none too good,” answered Dempsey, his voice heavy with scorn. “Isn’t that right?”

  “No!” shouted Gregory. “It is very excellent, and you can’t show many mistakes!”

  Justice Close leaned toward the witness. “Don’t get excited, Doctor,” he said soothingly.

  “I am not excited,” Gregory answered, but his voice was trembling so badly that the judge called a five minute recess until the witness could compose himself.

  Dr. Perry M. Lichtenstein, who had served as the resident physician in the Tombs prison for nearly twenty years, was the next witness. Before he began testifying, Dempsey spent a good deal of time questioning Lichtenstein’s psychiatric qualifications. And for valid reasons, since Lichtenstein had never had a day’s formal training in psychiatry. By his own admission, his knowledge of the field came almost entirely from his “personal studies of individuals.” He had also read a number of books on the subject. Dr. Lichtenstein proudly maintained that from these sources, as well as from his long acquaintance with many qualified alienists, “I did learn a whole lot in psychiatry.”

  “I submit, if your Honor please,” Dempsey said, turning to the bench, “that in questioning Dr. Lichtenstein’s qualifications, we have a man here who upon his own admission has never had any hospital or institutional experience in the study of psychiatry, nervous or mental diseases. His education has been acquired in the Tombs during these twenty years, and it is an absolute fact that his connection with the Tombs has been that of an attending physician as distinguished from a psychiatrist. I therefore challenge the qualifications of Dr. Lichtenstein.”

  Gallagher was ready with an answer. “I want to state here,” the prosecutor declared, “that the doctor stated he has drawn his experience from practical life, and that Abraham Lincoln never went to college.”

  “Abraham Lincoln never testified as a psychiatrist, as I know of,” Dempsey replied dryly.

  Nevertheless, Justice Close overruled Dempsey’s objection and allowed Lichtenstein to proceed, leaving “the question of the weight of his testimony to the jury.”

  Unlike Dr. Gregory, Lichtenstein remained perfectly unflappable during his time on the stand. Though Dempsey battered away at his testimony for more than an hour, he could not shake the doctor’s serene insistence that Fish’s mind “was perfectly sound and that he knew what he was doing” when he murdered Grace Budd.

  At one point Dempsey asked Lichtenstein if he recalled Fish’s “statement that at the time of the killing he thought it was a boy.”

  “Yes, sir, I remember that,” Dr. Lichtenstein said.

  “Does that indicate to you that there was any confusion of ideas or that the defendant was laboring under any mental disturbance?”

  Lichtenstein shook his head. “Not at all.”

  “In other words,” Dempsey said, raising his eyebrows, “that does not indicate to you that there was any question in the defendant’s mind at that time as to whether he knew what he was doing?”

  “In my opinion,” the doctor said calmly, “at that time he had in mind that he wanted to take the boy originally, and while he perpetrated the act upon the girl he had a mental picture of the boy.” Lichtenstein gave a little shrug. “It was nothing abnormal.”

  Lichtenstein also had a unique explanation for Fish’s self-tormenting activities. “Assume, Doctor,” Dempsey asked at one point, “that a man takes alcohol and puts it on cotton and puts that into his person and sets fire to it. Does that indicate an aggravated mental condition?”

  “That is not masochistic,” Lichtenstein declared. “He is only punishing himself and getting sex gratification that way.” Of course “getting sex gratification” from being punished is the textbook definition of masochism. But Lichtenstein never noticed the self-contradiction.

  Dr. Charles Lambert, the next psychiatric witness called in rebuttal, testified that, during his three-hour interview with Fish, the old man had been “frank, friendly, and talked freely in an orderly way.” Fish had confessed to having violated “as many as twenty-five or thirty boys and girls” every year. His victims, according to Lambert, numbered in the hundreds. Like the two men who preceded him, Lambert declared that Fish was sane, defining him as a ’psychopathic personality without a psychosis.”

  “Doctor,” said Dempsey, looking hard at the witness. “Assume that this man not only killed this girl but took her flesh to eat it. Will you state that that man could for nine days eat that flesh and still not have a psychosis and not have any mental diseases?”

  “Well, there is no accounting for taste, Mr. Dempsey,” Lambert replied breezily.

  At a later point, Dempsey returned to the question of coprophagy. Lambert’s response was much the same as Dr. Gregory’s had been.

  “Tell me how many cases in your experience you have seen of people who actually ate human feces, of your own knowledge,” Dempsey inquired.

  “Oh, I know individuals prominent in society,” Lambert answered in his characteristically off-hand manner. “One individual in particular that we all know,” he added.

  “That actually ate human feces?” Dempsey demanded.

  “That used it as a side dish in his salad,” Lambert replied, projecting the perfect nonchalance of the psychiatric investigator whose experience of human behavior had made him immune to surprise.

  Dempsey had no more success in getting the final witness, Dr. James Vavasour, to admit that Fish’s multiple perversions were a sign of psychosis. He did, however, manage to raise certain doubts about the alienist’s impartiality, pointing out that in the five years Vavasour had been professionally associated with the Westchester District Attorney’s office he had never once declared a defendant insane.

  Like Lambert, Vavasour confided that one of his patients, “a very prominent public official,” enjoyed dining on human feces. When Dempsey asked whether such behavior was common among psychopaths, Vavasour replied that it “was not uncommon.”

  Dempsey shook his head. “I have learned there are a lot of common things in this case I never knew about before,” said the lawyer, undoubtedly speaking for many others in the courtroom for whom the trial had been a crash course in sexual psychopathology.

  Minutes later, the state rested its case. Justice Close recessed the court until the following day at nine A.M. “Keep your minds open,” he admonished the jurors. “Do not form or express any opinion until you hear the summation of counsel and the charge of the Court, when you will retire to deliberate with your fellow jurors.”

  As the day’s session ended, Fish handed Dempsey a small scrap of paper on which he had scrawled a short, cryptic message—“Before you sum up, read to the jury Jeremiah, Chapter 19, 9th verse.”

  It is impossible, of course, to know what the old man was thinking when he made this suggestion. Perhaps, in his derangement, he hoped to impress the jury with his knowledge of the Bible. Or perhaps he was offering Scriptural justification for his deeds.

  In any case, it seems unlikely that Dempsey would have helped his client’s case by taking his advice.

  The passage, involving the Lord’s threats of punishment against the sinning kingdom of Judah, reads: “And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemie
s, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.”

  Each of the summations lasted about two hours. Dempsey spoke first, rising to address the jury shortly after 9:15 A.M. on Friday, March 22, the tenth and final day of the trial.

  Dempsey delivered an eloquent speech on behalf of the defendant whose crimes, by the lawyer’s own admission, had been “fiendish, brutal, inexcusable.” In selecting the jury, Dempsey explained, he had aimed for a group made up mostly of fathers because “I don’t believe that in Westchester County any jury composed of eleven fathers can convict another father of six children who loved his children. And I don’t believe that any jury of eleven fathers will believe that a man could do the deed that this man is charged with doing unless he was out of his mind.”

  Dempsey accused the police of deliberately “softpedaling the evidence” by neglecting to ask Fish about cannibalism. “Why? Why didn’t they ask that question? Why do you suppose, gentlemen, that not a single police official and not anyone of the two prosecutor’s offices who have questioned this man asked why he took that girl’s head outside and left it in the privy” and why, after dismembering the body, “he kept the fleshy parts?”

  The reason, Dempsey proclaimed, was simple: “When they came to the end of a long trail, six and one-half years, they found a maniac, and it is significant to me that the district attorney has been trying to keep down some of the actual horror.”

  He also continued his attack against Bellevue “for having such a man as this down there for a period of three or four weeks” and then “turning him out on the streets.”

  If Bellevue could not do a better job of diagnosing “people that are suspected of having mental aberrations,” Dempsey charged, “then I say to you, gentlemen, that there is very little protection afforded to law-abiding citizens by the psychiatric ward of Bellevue from maniacs and such people.”

  Dempsey also laid part of the blame for the tragedy on Grace’s parents—a charge that no one had ever made before, at least not publicly. “Now I appreciate, as you do, the sorrow that this case has brought to Mr. and Mrs. Budd,” Dempsey said.

  But I honestly do believe, gentlemen, that one of the reasons why Mr. and Mrs. Budd feel so badly is because they permitted that little child—whom God had given to them for protection and care during her infancy and childhood—they permitted that little girl to be taken off by this defendant. This is not a case, gentlemen, where the man takes the little girl off the street or by force. This is a case where the man took the child with the consent and permission of the parents.

  Now, whether they appreciated it or not, the fiend that this man was, he was, after all, a total stranger to them. And I say to you advisedly that there is no feeling of protection, in the animal sphere or in the human sphere, no feeling of protection such as a mother gives to her child. I submit that some of the responsibility must go to that family for permitting that little girl to go with an absolute stranger on that particular Sunday.

  Mostly, however, Dempsey stuck to a single theme, returning time and again to the one, bedrock issue on which he had built his defense—how could a man who had spent a lifetime committing such atrocities possibly be in his right mind?

  Dempsey’s voice grew more impassioned as he reviewed the outstanding facts of the case and posed the same crucial question about each of Fish’s acts—Would a sane man have behaved that way? “Does a sane man go out, just decide he is going to kill someone, and it doesn’t make any bit of difference who it is?” Would a sane man have taken his victim “right up next door to where he had lived” in the “broad light of a mid-afternoon in June,” killed her “alongside the window that was nearest the adjoining house,” then walk outside to clean his hands in the grass “in the afternoon sun, in the light of day?”

  Would a sane man have neglected to take such an elementary precaution against arrest as shaving off his moustache? Or written such a letter as the one Fish had mailed to Mrs. Budd? Could a sane man have practiced “the most repulsive indulgences a human mind can conceive of” for over fifty years?

  And how could any man eat human flesh and be in his right mind?

  There was no doubt, Dempsey acknowledged, that Fish had proceeded with diabolical cunning and deliberation,

  But every maniac, every insane person plans and connives. Every animal, gentlemen, plans and connives. Plans are in all existence, whether human or animal, whether the mind is intact or not. The squirrel plans for the winter and brings the nuts so that he might tide himself over the barren winter months. All animals plan. And there is, I daresay, more planning, conniving, and scheming of people behind the walls of Matteawan than any other place. The fact that a man can connive and plan an outrageous, dastardly, fiendish crime like this is no indication of the fact that a man is in his right mind.

  Dempsey ended with a flourish—a final, impassioned plea meant to impress on the jurors the full weight of the “fearful responsibility” that now lay before them. “So I ask you gentlemen,” Dempsey said solemnly, I ask you to bear with me for a moment. Tell me now, each man answering in his own heart, now that you have heard all the evidence for the People and all of the evidence for the defense, tell me now: Do you believe before[msp311 ] God that Albert Fish was sane on June 3, 1928? Do you believe on that day he knew the distinction between right and wrong?

  Unless you believe that, gentlemen, if you later find him guilty, it will be on mere breath, not upon evidence. Recall the answer in your heart when you get to the jury room. Record that answer man for man when you cast those ballots for life or death. The voice of one man, gentlemen, saves Albert Fish’s life. It takes twelve ballots of guilty to send him to death. And before you make that answer, I have but one more request to make of you, and having made it under these circumstances, you cannot, gentlemen, you will not forget it.

  In the course of human nature ten of you twelve men will die in full possession of your reason and memory. When that hour comes, when the blood begins to congeal and the breath to fail, when death snaps one by one the strings of life, when you look back to the past and forward to judgment, remember Albert Fish, that when he was helpless and defenseless and pleaded with you for his life, that you said, ‘Let him live,’ or ‘Let him die,’ and if you said ‘Let him die,’ may He who breathed into your nostrils the breath of life judge you more mercifully than you judged this maniac.

  Though Edward Budd had been present in the courtroom throughout the trial, his parents had not attended since the day of their testimony. Today, all three of them sat together on a bench not far from the defense table, listening expressionlessly as Dempsey summed up his case. Directly across the narrow aisle sat Fish’s six children, dry-eyed except for Gertrude, who clutched a handkerchief to her tear-streaked face.

  Throughout the trial there had been virtually no communication between the members of the two families, though at one point, during a short recess, Gertrude had approached Edward Budd in the hallway outside the courtroom and tearfully apologized for her father’s dreadful crime.

  Fish himself sat up during Dempsey’s summation and, for one of the few times since the start of the trial, actually seemed to be paying attention. When the lawyer made his final appeal, the old man lifted his gnarled hands in a small, pathetic gesture of supplication, then let them drop helplessly into his lap. Then, as Dempsey begged mercy for the poor, “defenseless” old man who sat before the jury, pleading for his life, Fish’s eyes filled with tears and he began to weep silently for himself.

  In contrast to Dempsey’s impassioned summation, Gallagher’s was largely a cut-and-dried recap of the case. His tone suggested that the prosecution had no need for oratory, that the facts spoke for themselves, that no reasonable man, confronted with the evidence of Fish’s dreadful crime, could possibly fail to find the old man guilty.

  Indeed, his most emotional comment was his first one. “Mr. Dempsey in his closing remarks asked you to remember certain things about the defenseless Mr. Fish,” he said, his voice t
urning harsh as he spoke the old man’s name. “Gentlemen, I want you to remember the defenseless little innocent Grace Budd as she kicked and screamed in the springtime of her life and said she would tell her mamma.”

  Gallagher took time to answer Dempsey’s charges against Bellevue Hospital and Grace Budd’s parents, arguing that those accusations were simply “a smoke screen, an attempt on the part of the defense to kick up some dust here and throw it into your eyes to get away from the true issues of this case.”

  Those issues could be stated very simply: Had Grace Budd been killed by Albert Fish and, if so, had the old man been in full possession of his senses at the time of the murder?

  As for the first of these issues, Gallagher reminded the jury that he had “produced in this case an array of over forty witnesses to prove the People’s case” beyond “any doubt.” He then provided a step-by-step synopsis of the evidence, paying particular attention to the proof of the corpus delecti.

  The second point, Fish’s sanity, had been established by the expert witnesses the state had put on the stand—a more trustworthy bunch, Gallagher suggested, than the trio who had testified for the defense. “I think so far as the array of alienists is concerned, ours showed a more friendly attitude, they told you from their own minds and hearts what this defendant told them, they did not shift about in the chair and quibble about little points.”

  Acknowledging that Fish was “sexually abnormal”—a “conniving and scheming sexual pervert” who had “engaged in revolting practices with women and children”—Gallagher nevertheless insisted that Fish was not suffering from “a disease of the mind.” He scoffed at the idea that Fish had been motivated by a “divine command.” “There was no divine hallucination or divine command when he purchased this pot cheese can or these tools with which to carry out this nefarious plan. And when he sent the telegram there was not any divine command. And when he went there that day, there was no divine command to go to the house.