Albert Fish

What the record shows

Albert Fish, born Hamilton Howard Fish, was a New York house painter convicted by a Westchester County jury in March 1935 of the first-degree murder of 10-year-old Grace Budd in 1928 and executed at Sing Sing Prison on January 16, 1936. Courts convicted him of one murder. According to the Wikipedia article and the EBSCO Research Starters entry, he confessed to three child killings in New York that police could trace: Francis McDonnell on Staten Island in 1924, Billy Gaffney in Brooklyn in 1927 and Grace Budd in 1928. Contemporary police and psychiatric estimates attributed roughly five to fifteen deaths to him, and he made far larger, unverified claims.

The first traced killing took place in July 1924, when 8-year-old Francis McDonnell disappeared from Port Richmond on Staten Island and was found strangled in nearby woods. Witnesses described an older grey-haired man seen in the area that day, and according to Wikipedia Fish admitted the killing in March 1935, after his conviction in the Budd case. On February 11, 1927, 4-year-old Billy Gaffney disappeared from a Brooklyn apartment building; his body was never found. A trolley motorman later identified Fish from a newspaper photograph as the man seen with a crying boy that day, and Fish described the killing in a letter to his attorney.

On May 28, 1928, Fish answered a classified advertisement placed by 18-year-old Edward Budd of Manhattan, who was seeking farm work. Calling himself Frank Howard and posing as a farmer, he visited the family twice, and on June 3, 1928, according to the Great American Trials account on Encyclopedia.com, he obtained the parents' permission to take Grace to a children's party. She never returned. In 1930 a building superintendent, Charles Edward Pope, was arrested in the case and spent 108 days in jail before being acquitted.

The case went unsolved for six years. On November 11, 1934, the Budd family received an anonymous letter describing Grace's killing. Detective William F. King of the New York Police Department noticed that the envelope carried the emblem of the New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association. A member said he had left some of its stationery at a rooming house on East 52nd Street in Manhattan, and the landlady there matched the handwriting to a recently departed lodger named Albert Fish. King waited at the rooming house and arrested Fish on December 13, 1934. Fish confessed to the Budd murder and led officers to Wisteria Cottage, an empty house in Irvington in Westchester County, where remains were recovered.

Fish was tried in White Plains before Judge Frederick P. Close from March 11 to March 22, 1935, with Elbert F. Gallagher prosecuting and James Dempsey defending. He did not deny the killing; the defense argued that he was insane. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham testified for the defense that Fish was mentally irresponsible, while the prosecution's experts said he was abnormal but legally sane. On March 22, 1935, after about four hours of deliberation, the jury found him sane and guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death. According to the EBSCO entry, an appeal and a plea to the governor both failed.

Fish was electrocuted at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York, on the evening of January 16, 1936, at the age of 65. His claims of victims in many states and of about 100 children harmed were never substantiated; Wikipedia notes it is unclear what he was counting. Police also considered him a suspect in several other unsolved child deaths in the New York area between 1926 and 1932, none of which resulted in charges.

Fish was born in Washington, D.C., on May 19, 1870. His father died in 1875, and he was placed in St. John's Orphanage, where he was frequently beaten; his family had a history of mental illness. He moved to New York City around 1890, married Anna Mary Hoffman in 1898 and had six children; she left him in 1917. By the time of his arrest he had served a prison term for embezzlement and had twice been held in mental hospitals, mainly over obscene letters sent to women.