by Colin Wilson
Fish was a strange paradox of a man. His face lit up when he talked of his twelve-year-old grandchild, and he was obviously sincere when he said: ‘I love children and was always soft-hearted.’ He was also deeply religious, and read his Bible continuously. The answer to the paradox, Wertham soon concluded, was that Fish was insane. He genuinely believed that God told him to murder children.
Albert Hamilton Fish had been born in Washington, DC, in 1870; his father, a riverboat captain, was seventy-five at the time. Various members of the family had mental problems and one suffered from religious mania. One brother was feeble-minded and another an alcoholic. The father had died when Fish was five years old, and he was placed in an orphanage, from which he regularly ran away. On leaving school he was apprenticed to a house painter, and this remained his profession for the rest of his life. Access to other people’s homes also gave him access to children. He was twenty-eight when he first married, but his wife eloped with the lodger. Later, there were three more marriages, all bigamous.
Fish talked with complete frankness about his sex life – he had always enjoyed writing obscene letters, and no doubt confessing to Wertham gave him the same kind of pleasure. Wertham wrote:
‘Fish’s sexual life was of unparalleled perversity . . .1 found no published case that would even nearly compare with his . . . There was no known perversion that he did not practise and practise frequently.
‘Sado-masochism directed against children, particularly boys, took the lead in his sexual regressive development. “I have always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me. I always seemed to enjoy anything that hurt. The desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost.” Experiences with excreta of every imaginable kind were practised by him, actively and passively. He took bits of cotton wool, saturated them with alcohol, inserted them in his rectum and set fire to them. He also did this to his child victims. Finally, and clearly also on a sexual basis, he developed a craving going back to one of the arch-crimes of humanity – cannibalism.
‘I elicited from him a long history of how he preyed on children. In many instances – I stated under oath later “at least a hundred” – he seduced them or bribed them with small sums of money or forced them and attacked them. He often worked in public buildings and had an excuse for spending times in cellars and basements and even garrets. He would put on his painters’ overalls over his nude body, and that permitted him to undress in a moment . . .
‘Most, if not all, of his victims came from the poorer classes. He told me that he selected coloured children especially, because the authorities didn’t pay much attention when they were hurt or missing. For example, he once paid a small coloured girl five dollars regularly to bring him little coloured boys . . .Frequently after a particularly brutal episode he would change his address completely . . . Altogether he roamed over twenty-three states, from New York to Montana. “And I have had children in every state.” He also made a habit of writing letters to women, trying to persude them to join him in whipping boys.
‘Fish told me that for years he had been sticking needles into his body in the region near his genitals, in the area between the rectum and the scrotum. He told me of doing it to other people too, especially to children. At first, he said, he had only stuck these needles in and pulled them out again. They were needles of assorted sizes, some of them big sail needles. Then he had stuck others in so far that he was unable to get them out, and they stayed there. “They’re in there now,” he said. “I put them up under the spine . . .I did put one in the scrotum too; but I couldn’t stand the pain.”
‘I checked this strange story on a series of X-rays of his pelvic and abdominal region. They showed plainly twenty-nine needles inside his body. One X-ray of the pelvic region showed twenty-seven. They were easily recognisable as needles . . . Some of them must have been years in his body, for they were eroded to an extent that would have taken at least seven years. Some of the needles were fragmented by this erosion so that only bits of steel remained in the tissue.’
Ih his middle fifties, says Wertham, Fish began to develop psychosis with delusions and hallucinations. (He was fifty-eight when he murdered Grace Budd.) ‘At times he identified himself with God and felt that he should sacrifice his own son. He tried to stick needles under his fingernails but could not stand the pain. He made the poignant remark: “If only pain were not so painful!”
‘He had visions of Christ and his angels . . .He heard them saying words like “stripes”, “rewardeth” and “delighteth”. And he connected these words with verses from the Bible and elaborated them delusionally with his sadistic wishes. “Stripes means to lash them, you know.”
‘He felt driven to torment and kill children. Sometimes he would gag them, tie them up and beat them, although he preferred not to gag them, circumstances permitting, for he liked to hear their cries. He felt that he was ordered by God to castrate little boys . . . “I am not insane. I am just queer.” After murdering Grace Budd he had cooked parts of the body with carrots and onions and strips of bacon, and ate them over a period of nine days. During all this time he was in a state of sexual excitement.
‘His state of mind while he described these things in minute detail was a peculiar mixture. He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, like a housewife describing her favourite methods of cooking. You had to remind yourself that this was a little girl that he was talking about. But at times his tone of voice and facial expression indicated a kind of satisfaction and ecstatic thrill. However you define the medical and legal borders of sanity, this certainly is beyond that border.’
It became apparent that Fish was a wanted killer who had become known as ‘the Brooklyn Vampire’, who committed four child murders in 1933 and 1934, luring little girls to a basement, flogging them, then garrotting them with a rope. In 1932, a sixteen-year-old girl had been killed and mutilated near Massapequa, Long Island, where Fish was painting a house. Other murders almost certainly committed by Fish were those of seven-year-old Francis X. McDonnell on Staten Island in 1924, four-year-old Billy Gaffney in Brooklyn in 1927, and eleven-year-old Yetta Abramowitz, who was strangled and mutilated in the Bronx in 1927. (Billy Gaffney’s mother subsequently had a series of nervous breakdowns from grief.) Detective Will King, who investigated these murders, was not allowed to introduce them as evidence, since the D.A. was anxious to prove that Fish was sane, and too many murders might throw doubt on this.
To Fish’s delight, he was sentenced to death – he remarked with unconscious humour that being electrocuted would be ‘the supreme thrill of my life’. When he was on Death Row, the prison chaplain had to ask him not to ‘holler and howl’ so loud as he masturbated during services. In the execution chamber on 16 January 1936 he mumbled ‘I don’t know why I’m here’ just before the switch was thrown.
Wertham records that he tried hard to get Fish’s sentence commuted. ‘To execute a sick man is like burning witches’, he told the prison governor. He went on to make this important observation – even more relevant today than it was in 1936: ‘Science is prediction. The science of psychiatry is advanced enough that with proper examination such a man as Fish can be detected and confined before the perpetration of these outrages, instead of inflicting extreme penalties afterwards. The authorities had this man, but the records show that they paid no attention.’ Understandably, the governor was unmoved. Like the D.A, he probably recognised that Fish was legally insane, but felt that it made no difference – that there was no point in burdening society with the keep of such a man. What Wertham had failed to recognise is that the execution of a murderer like Fish actually serves a ritual function. The public wants to see sadistic killers executed, in the same way that children want fairy stories to end with the defeat of the wicked giant. It serves the purpose of exorcising the horror.
In December 1927 twelve-year-old Marion Parker, daughter of a Los Angeles banker, was kidnapped. When her father went to the appointed spot to pay the ransom, he saw h
is daughter sitting in a car beside the kidnapper; the man took the money and promised to. let Marion out at the end of the street. She proved to be dead, her hands and legs hacked off, her body disembowelled, and her eyelids propped open with wire. A bloodstained suitcase found the next day was traced back to a man named William Edward Hickman, who had a grudge against Marion’s father, and he was eventually arrested in Washington State. Psychiatric examination revealed that he was insane, believing that angels had ordered him to kidnap Marion. Yet although his insanity was beyond doubt, so was his ultimate execution; the horror of the crime demanded the ritual exorcism in the death chamber, or at least in a prison cell. The serial killer has no monopoly on irrationality.
What turns a man into a sado-masochist? In the case of Albert Fish, fortunately, we know the answer. In 1875, his father suffered a heart attack in the Pennsylvania Station. Unable to provide for twelve children, Ellen Fish was forced to consign most of them to an orphanage. The five-year-old boy had no idea why he had been suddenly abandoned; he was deeply miserable, and at first ran away repeatedly. Discipline in the St John’s Refuge was rigid and severe; the matron made them pray for hours every day and made them memorise chapters from the Bible. The slightest infringement of discipline was punished by flogging, administered by the matron. Fish discovered that he enjoyed being whipped on his naked bottom. His fellow orphans teased him because punishment always gave him an erection. What they did not know was that watching other boys being whipped also produced sexual excitement in him. Since it was a co-educational institution (although the boys and girls were kept strictly segregated outside class) there was naturally a great deal of sex talk. After a while, the young Fish was initiated into masturbation and other sex games. By the time his mother took him away from the orphanage two years later – she had obtained a government job – sado-masochism had been firmly ‘imprinted’ in the seven-year-old boy. He told Wertham of an occasion when he and some friends had soaked a horse’s tail in kerosene and set it on fire.
He was a sickly and introverted child, and a fall from a cherry tree produced concussion; thereafter he suffered severe headaches, dizzy spells and a severe stutter. (It has been pointed out that a large number of serial killers have suffered head injuries in childhood.) He continued to wet the bed for many years, and his companions taunted him about it. Fish’s reaction to the jeers was to retreat into a world of daydreams. At about this time he insisted on being called Albert (the name of a dead younger brother) rather than Hamilton because his schoolmates called him Ham and Eggs. He began to suffer from convulsive fits.
The daydreams were often of being beaten or watching others being beaten. When his elder brother Walter came home from the Navy and showed Albert books with pictures of naked men and women, and told him stories of cannibalism which he claimed to have witnessed, more sado-masochistic traits were ‘imprinted’. His favourite reading was Poe’s story ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, with its details of mental torture, and this led him on to study everything he could find about the Spanish Inquisition. He became a devotee of true murder cases, and began carrying newspaper clippings in his pockets until they disintegrated. (He was carrying an account of the Hanover ‘butcher’ Fritz Haarmann when he was arrested.) Yet at the same time he continued to be a devoted student of the Bible, and to dream of becoming a clergyman. Having become habituated to sexual and religious fantasy from an early age, he saw no contradiction between them.
When he was twelve, Fish began a homosexual relationship with a telegraph boy who excited him by describing what he had seen in brothels. This youth also introduced to Fish peculiar practices such as drinking urine and tasting excreta. By his late teens, Fish was tormented with a violent and permanent sexual appetite that never left him alone. (But this is less unusual than it sounds; the majority of teenagers could tell a similar story.) When he moved to New York at the age of twenty, he quickly became a male prostitute, and spent much of his weekends at public baths where he could watch boys. It was at this time that he began raping small boys. By now the pattern was set, and even a marriage – arranged by his mother – failed to change it. A period in Sing Sing – for embezzlement – virtually ended the marriage, and he returned to homosexuality. After his wife’s desertion, he began to show signs of mental disturbance; he heard voices, and on one occasion wrapped himself up in a carpet and explained that he was following the instructions of St John. Then began his period of wandering around the United States and working as a painter and decorator; during this time, he told Wertham, he raped more than a hundred children, mostly boys under six.
When he was twenty-eight, a male lover took him to see the waxworks gallery in a museum; there he was fascinated by a medical display showing the bisection of a penis. He returned to see it many times, and ‘imprinting’ occurred again, leading to a new obsession with castration. During a relationship with a mentally defective homosexual, Fish tied him up and tried to castrate him. The rush of blood frightened him and he fled. Now he began adding castration to his rapes, on one occasion severing a child’s penis with a pair of scissors. He began going to brothels where he could be spanked and whipped. He committed his first murder – of a male homosexual – in Wilmington in 1910. In 1919 he mutilated and tortured to death a mentally retarded boy. From now on, murder also became a part of his pattern of perversion.
Here, then, we are able to study in unusual detail the development of a sado-masochistic obsession. It is impossible to doubt that it began in the St John’s Refuge in 1875, when he was first whipped by the matron of the Episcopal Sisterhood. It is possible to say with some degree of confidence that if Fish had not been sent to an orphanage at the age of five, he would never have developed into one of the most remarkable examples of ‘polymorphous perversion’ in the history of sexual abnormality.
Then why did his fellow orphans never achieve the same dubious notoriety? Presumably because they lacked his intensely introverted temperament, the tendency to brood and daydream about sex and pain. In short, they lacked the ability to retreat so totally into a world of fantasy. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that what turned Fish into a dangerous pervert was precisely the same tendency to morbid brooding and fantasy that turned Edgar Allan Poe into a writer of genius.
How far does this enable us to understand the serial killer? It enables us, at least, to grasp that there is a link between his abnormality and what we recognise as normality. Fish was turned into a serial killer by a kind of ‘hothouse’ conditioning that led him to spend most of his childhood brooding about sex. We must bear in mind that he was born in 1870, at a time when sex crime was almost non-existent. By the time of the Jack the Ripper murders, Fish was eighteen – old enough, in theory, to have committed them himself. But he was still living in a world of Victorian morality and Victorian behaviour, where ‘dirty books’ were still banned – most of the ‘obscenity’ prosecutions of that period now strike us as incomprehensible – and prostitution regarded with deep disapproval. Fish became a fully-fledged pervert by accident, starting with the accident of being sent to an orphanage at the age of five. If Fish had been alive today, he would have had no difficulty finding material to feed his fantasies, from hard porn magazines to ‘snuff videos’. In most large American cities he would have found streets lined with male and female ‘hookers’ willing to cater to every perversion. It becomes possible to see why, some twenty-five years after the relaxation of the laws governing pornography, serial crime suddenly began to develop into an epidemic.
There is an important basic difference between Albert Fish and the other killers in this chapter. Fish enjoyed pain, and so when he inflicted it on his victims, he felt – in some obscure and muddled way – that he was doing them a favour. The impulse that drove Hooker, Glatman, Fearn, Folk and even Robert Poulin was pure sexual aggression, the will to power. But the development of the obsession followed the same path in all of them, including Fish: fantasy fuelled by frustration. The fantasy, in turn, is subject to ‘the l
aw of diminishing returns’, so that it becomes distorted and unbalanced. This seems to be one of the few basic rules in the development of sadists and sex killers.
* * *
1 The Criminal Personality by Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow, 3 vols, New York 1976–88.
Five
The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome
IT SEEMS SELF-EVIDENT that, if Fish had not been caught, he would have gone on killing indefinitely; but is this obvious ‘truth’ as incontestable as it seems? A man who does not wish to be caught does not write a letter in a traceable envelope, with the telltale initials merely inked out. It is almost as if he wanted to be caught – or as if, at least, he no longer cared. This seems to be a version of the ‘suicide syndrome’ discussed in the first chapter. (One third of all murderers commit suicide.)
To recognise the ‘suicide syndrome’ is also to recognise that sadistic killers are not really a species apart from other human beings. They become suicidal for basically the same reason that anyone else does: because they recognise that their lives are unfulfilled, and are likely to remain so. When the killer recognises clearly that his actions have turned him into a social outcast, a ‘monster’, the result may be suicide, or some absurd ‘mistake’ that leads to his arrest. He is, in effect, two people, a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The ‘mistake’ is Jekyll’s attempt to destroy Hyde.
On 10 December 1945 a maid entering the Chicago apartment of a thirty-year-old ex-Wave named Frances Brown was alarmed to see that the pillow on the bed was bloodstained; in the bathroom she found the woman’s naked body draped over the side of the bath. On the wall over the bed, someone had scrawled in lipstick:
For heavens
