Albert Fish (19 of May of 1870 - 16 of January of 1936) was a serial killer and cannibal born in the United States, whose victims were only children. He is known by the nicknames of"The Gray Man,""Grandfather Murderer,""Werewolf Man of Wysteria"or"The Vampire of Brooklyn." He confessed to four murders and sexually abused more than 100 children. However, it is suspected that he may have committed many more murders than he alleged.
He went down in history for being one of the cruelest criminals. He spent years abusing children and adolescents, some of whom he kidnapped, tortured, dismembered, and cooked to eat. During his arrest and subsequent trial, no one could believe that behind that old face, seemingly fragile and with timid eyes, hid a completely macabre being.
Before beginning your life, you can begin to understand the personality of Albert Fish with some of his phrases:
"I always had the desire to inflict pain on others and cause others to cause me pain. I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt."
"What a thrill it will be if I have to die in the electric chair. It will be the supreme emotion. The only one I have not tried."
The family life of Albert Fish
Albert Fish, whose first name was Hamilton Howard Fish, was born on May 19, 1870 in Washington D.C. He had three brothers and he was the youngest of them all. His father, Randall Fish, was captain of a boat of river, but by 1870 was dedicated to the manufacture of fertilizers.
Father Fish died of a myocardial infarction when Albert was only 5 years old. Her mother was 43 years younger than her husband, And when dying this leaving to his position so many children, had to take some measures.
In 1875 his mother sent him to an orphanage because she could not take care of him. There Albert began a life of calamities, being the place where he discovered and Developed the personality of psychopath And sadomasochist.
And is that since his arrival at the orphanage began to be mistreated, where he was whipped, beaten and humiliated constantly by his companions. However, in that environment not only discovered that he liked the pain, but was even excited by the blows.
Obviously the environment in which he grew up was not healthy at all. But his problems really went beyond the environment. In his family there was a history of mental illness. Her mother had Hallucinations And claimed to hear voices in the street. One of his brothers was crazy and other alcoholic . In addition two of his uncles had been hospitalized in psychiatric institutions.
By 1879, when Albert was 9 years old, his mother's economic situation changed because he was able to get a job. The woman recovered her son and it was after that that the killer was renamed Hamilton Fish to Albert Fish. It is said that the psychopath took the name of a deceased brother and changed his original name because the children used to mock him by calling him 'Ham and Eggs', which in Spanish would be ham and eggs.
His first sexual experience was at age 12. Being so young began to have homosexual relations and began to visit public restrooms to see naked boys. By that time he was already attracted to sadomasochism and he enjoyed not only inflicting pain on other people but also himself. But not just this.
He also began to develop a taste for coprophagia, which is the fondness for eating feces from humans, as well as for urophilia, which is the act of feeling pleasure or masturbating with urine.
He also became interested in criminals who appeared in the press, so he began to collect material related to serial killers and especially cannibals, with whom he felt especially identified.
In 1890 he decided to leave Washington to move to New York. There, at the age of 20, he began to prostitute himself. But, unlike most who work in that trade, Albert did not seek money but rather the possibility of experiencing new sensations in the sexual realm. It was there, he confessed years later, that he began raping young boys.
The beginning of a"new life"
In order to help stabilize her life, Fish's mother sought a bride and arranged a marriage for her. Thus, in 1898, Albert married a woman, who was nine years his junior. From that marriage were born six children. Strangely enough, apparently the murderer was not a bad father. Although his children witnessed many strange acts on the part of his progenitor, he never abused them or beat them.
It is said that a few years later began to suffer hallucinations. He became obsessed with religion, with the idea of sin and believed that the way to atone for guilt was through pain.
For that reason he used to self-punish punishments, cut himself and rubbed his naked body against roses with thorns. In addition he used to prick needles in the body, especially in the pelvis and in his genitals.
At that time he worked as a painter of houses and, as the murderer confessed, during that time he had sexually abused at least 100 children, most of them under the age of six.
In 1903, Albert was arrested for embezzlement. He was sentenced to prison and sent to Sing Sing State Prison. This imprisoned time served to reaffirm his sexual orientation, since during those years he had sexual relations with several of the prisoners. After that experience in prison, he was arrested several more times.
Some of the motives were theft, payment with bad checks, and even sending obscene letters to commercials of marriage agencies that appeared in newspapers.
In early 1917, his wife left him for another man. This rejection affected him even more and it was from that moment when his hallucinations became more frequent.
His beginnings as a murderer
According to the same murderer, the first murder he committed was in 1910. It happened in the city of Wilmington, in the state of Delaware, and the victim was a boy named Thomas Bedden. Nine years after that murder, Albert stabbed a young man with a mental disability in Georgetown, Washington D.C.
The next victim would arrive in 1924. After his arrest, the psychopath confessed to the murder of Francis X. McDonnell, an 8-year-old boy who died on Staten Island, an island in the state of New York. Apparently the killer had been stalking the child for days. The body of the child was found in a nearby forest. He had been strangled.
The next victim was Billy Gaffney. In 1927 his disappearance was reported in Brooklyn. The boy had been playing with another child, who was barely three years old. Both disappeared but shortly after the small was found on a roof. When asked about Gaffney's whereabouts, the boy replied that the coconut had taken him.
Billy's body was never found. And as the killer confessed after his arrest, after killing him ate it in parts. Despite all these crimes, Albert Fish was not caught until about eight years after the kidnapping of Billy Gaffney.
The case of Grace Budd
But the beginning of the end of Albert Fish came with the kidnapping and murder of Grace Budd. For some reason, the killer changed his modus operandi and began to approach the children in another way.
Fish bought newspapers to choose people who advertised themselves looking for a job. So the psychopath came to the Budd family. In May 1928 Edward Budd, 18, had put up an advertisement offering his services and, after reading it, the killer decided to pose as a farmer to approach the family.
He knocked on the door of the house and introduced himself as Frank Howard. He said he was a farmer in Farmingdale, New York and said he would give the boy a job. Although supposedly his plan was to take Edward, everything changed when he met Grace, the young man's 10-year-old sister.
On a second visit to the house, the elderly man brought strawberries, fresh cheese and the family invited him to breakfast. But just before leaving, Fish convinced the girl's parents to let her accompany him to an alleged niece's birthday party.
The mother hesitated but soon became convinced. Fish promised to take her home before nine o'clock at night, but that never happened. Fish left with Grace and she never came back. When they went to the address where the man lived, they found nothing. The police investigated, distributed more than a thousand leaflets, but the girl did not appear alive or dead.
The case manager was Detective William F. King, who never seemed to give up on the case. Six years after Grace's disappearance and a few weeks after the case was officially closed, something happened that changed everything. The girl's mother received a letter from the murderer in which she told a story about cannibalism and then related how she murdered and ate the child.
Although many did not believe that letter could be true, Detective King followed all the details and clues. When identifying a symbol in the envelope of the letter, they found with the landlady of a place where Fish had lived.
The killer waited for a letter from his son and the landlady had to keep it. In December 1934, the woman called the detective to warn him that Fish was in the place. When the police arrived the old man had a cup of tea, identified himself as Albert Fish when they asked for his name and when he got to his feet took out a small knife. The detective quickly controlled the situation and was arrested.
Arrest and death
After his arrest, Fish did not deny Grace Budd's murder, but confessed that at first his intentions were to assassinate Edward Budd. After that, the psychopath confessed to be the author of other crimes. He also narrated all the aberrations he had committed all his life. It was also him who confessed that the number of his victims for rape amounted to about 100.
Fish confessed to only four murders. However, Detective William King believed that he was responsible for three other crimes. King thought Fish might have been the rapist and killer nicknamed"The Brooklyn Vampire." The victims were Yetta Abramowitz, a 12-year-old girl killed in 1927 in the Bronx; Mary Ellen O'Connor, 16, murdered in Queens in 1932; And Benjamin Collings, 17, also murdered in 1932.
Albert Fish was brought to trial for the premeditated murder of the girl Grace Budd. The trial, which began on 11 March 1935 in New York, lasted ten days. To defend himself, in addition to claiming madness, the murderer assured that he heard voices of God that ordered him to kill children.
During the trial, several Sexual fetishism Including coprophagia, urophilia, pedophilia and masochism. Fredric Wertham, the chief defense expert and child development psychiatrist, said Fish was a madman. Nonetheless, the jury categorized him as sane, was convicted and sentenced to death.
The criminal was condemned to die in the electric chair. He arrived in prison in March 1935 and was executed on January 16, 1936. His entry to the execution chamber was registered at 11:06 p.m. And three minutes later he was pronounced dead. Before he died, the murderer defined his punishment as the supreme experience of his life.
Psychological profile
After his arrest, Albert Fish underwent several psychological exams. Psychiatric reports pointed to masochism, sadism, castration and self-castration, exhibitionism, cannibalism, pedophilia, voyeurism, coprophagy, fetishism, homosexuality, and hyper-hedonism.
The conclusion of some psychiatrists is that Fish was mad. He was diagnosed with paranoid psychosis. However, despite having been diagnosed as having Psychotic , He did not certify his madness.
It is worth mentioning that during his life, the murderer was hospitalized several times in psychiatric hospitals. However, on each of those occasions they let him leave because they considered that he was not crazy and that he was not dangerous. He only suffered from a psychopathic personality of a sexual nature.