Deranged (17 page)

“I am certain, too … that when they got to the end of that long trail after six and one-half years … that they were all shocked, because they found at the end of that trail an unbelievable man.” JAMES DEMPSEY

In the end, it wasn’t the letter itself that led to the capture of Albert Fish. It was the envelope it came in.

Imprinted on the back flap of the envelope was a small hexagonal emblem with a circle in the center (it resembled the schematic drawing of a hex nut). On each of the inside corners of the hexagon was a single capital letter. Taken together, they spelled out the initials N.Y.P.C.B.A.

A two-line address appeared directly below the emblem. The anonymous sender had taken a pen to the top line, obscuring the street number with ink. But he had left the words below it—“New York City”—untouched. Nor had he made the slightest effort to cover up the emblem itself.

All in all, for a man with compelling reasons to cover his tracks, he had done a surprisingly careless job of it—so careless, in fact, that with the help of a magnifying glass, King could easily make out the scratched-out street address: 627 Lexington Avenue.

Grabbing his overcoat, King headed uptown, where he discovered what the letters in the hexagon stood for. The address turned out to be the headquarters of the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association. After introducing himself to Arthur Ennis, the president of the N.Y.P.C.B.A., Detective King showed him the envelope and asked if a man called Frank Howard had ever belonged to the association. Ennis checked through his files but found no record of anyone with that name.

King then asked to examine all the personnel forms filled out by active and retired members of the organization. Ennis handed over a carton containing nearly four hundred membership forms to King, who returned to his office and began the laborious task of comparing the handwriting on the forms to that on the anonymous letter. But he was unable to come up with a match.

The following day, King went back to the headquarters and requested that Ennis call an emergency meeting of the association. It was held the following afternoon. Addressing the members, King reviewed the facts of the Budd case, described the man he was searching for, and—without going into specifics—told them about the anonymous letter that had arrived at the Budds’ apartment in a N.Y.P.C.B.A. envelope. If any member knew of someone who had removed stationery from the office, King declared, it was critical that he come forward.

After the meeting, King was approached by a sheepish-looking young man, who introduced himself as Lee Sicowski and explained that he worked part-time for the organization as a janitor and errand boy. Sicowski confessed that, about six months earlier, he had stolen a few sheets of stationery and some envelopes from the office.

And what had he done with them? King asked.

Taken them back home, said Sicowski.

When King asked Sicowski where he was living, the young man gave the detective his address—a rooming house at 622 Lexington Avenue.

Here, at last, was an encouraging development. If the person who had written to the Budds was not a member of the association—and he didn’t seem to be—then perhaps the envelope was one of the batch Sicowski had swiped. If so, then King knew where to look next—the rooming house on Lexington Avenue.

But when king arrived there a short while later, he could find no one who recognized his description of “Frank Howard.” Nor did the register contain any signature resembling the kidnapper’s handwriting. King was bitterly disappointed.

He sought out Sicowski and, once again, questioned him closely. Only then did the young man recall that, at the time he had taken the stationery, he hadn’t moved to his present address. At that point, he was living in a different rooming house, located at 200 East 52nd Street. In room No. 7.

Sicowski also mentioned something else he had forgotten until that moment. He told King that he had ended up using only one or two of the letterhead envelopes.

What had happened to the others? King asked.

Sicowski shrugged. He didn’t know. He had stuck them on a wooden shelf above his bed and had forgotten about them. As far as he knew, they were still there when he moved out, about five months earlier.

King immediately went to the address Sicowski had given him and spoke to the landlady, Mrs. Frieda Schneider. He showed her one of the old kidnap circulars with its detailed description of “Frank Howard.”

Mrs. Schneider was taken aback. The person in the circular sounded very much like one of her boarders, a quiet old man with a gray moustache who had moved into room No. 7 just a few days after Lee Sicowski left. The old man had remained in her house for two months. In fact, he had checked out only a few days earlier—on November 11.

King asked to see the register. In his jacket pocket, he carried the unspeakable letter that had been mailed to the Budds on the very day that Mrs. Schneider’s boarder had moved out. Unfolding the letter, King held it open beside the place in the register where the old man had signed in two months before.

The signature matched the handwriting in the letter exactly. King stared down at the signature. The name the old man had inscribed was “Albert H. Fish.”

*  *  *

Stressing the urgency of the situation, King grilled Mrs. Schneider about her former tenant. The landlady had little information to offer, but she did provide one crucial fact. The old man had a son who was down in North Carolina, working for the C.C.C. (the Civilian Conservation Corps), a federal program, established as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which put unemployed young men to work in the national parks. The old man was partly supported by this son, who mailed his twenty-five-dollar paycheck to his father every month. Mrs. Schneider knew about the checks because the old man had asked her to cash them on occasion.

Mrs. Schneider told King something else, something that made the detective very happy. Fish was expecting at least one more of these checks to arrive at Mrs. Schneider’s address. Before moving out, he had asked the landlady to hold it for him. He would return for it, he had told her, in a week or so.

Beginning that very night—November 14, 1934—King set up a round-the-clock stakeout of 200 East 52nd Street. While several of King’s men kept watch over the rooming house, King himself took other measures. He contacted the finance officer of the C.C.C. camp in North Carolina, who promised to alert him as soon as the next pay checks were mailed out. He arranged for New York City postal inspectors to monitor the mails for any letters directed to Albert Fish. He traveled uptown to the address Fish had given in his letter to the Budds—409 East 100th Street. He was able to learn very little from the owners of the building, a family named Costa, though the husband did recall that an elderly man had lived in the building for a few months during the summer of 1928. King also asked Arthur Ennis to hold on to any undeliverable mail returned to the association in an N.Y.P.C.B.A. envelope.

This last precaution produced an interesting result. During the third week of November, a letter, mailed in an N.Y.P.C.B.A. envelope, was returned to the association because its addressee—a Mr. Vincent Burke of the Holland Hotel in Manhattan—could not be located. Ennis passed the envelope along to King. Inside, written in Fish’s unmistakable hand, was a short note, dated November 11:

Dear Sir, I was formerly a member of the Out-Door Club, Tacoma Park, Washington, D.C. A Nudist group. Business took me away. I have travelled a lot so join up my membership in club. I am located here permanently so wish to know where you have your Nudist meetings and the hours. Hoping to be informed I am very truly James W. Pell

At this point, of course, there was no absolute proof that Albert Fish was the person who had kidnapped Grace Budd. But if Detective King had any lingering doubts that he was on the trail of anything but a bizarre personality, this note—written the same day that Fish had mailed his monstrous letter to the Budds and had moved from Mrs. Schneider’s rooming house—served to dispel them.

In the meantime, King and his men kept up their vigil. But as the days passed with no sign of Fish—or of the check from his son—the detectives became concerned.

Finally, on December 4, a postal inspector called King to tell him that an envelope addressed to Albert H. Fish had just been intercepted at the Grand Central Annex post office. The envelope was turned over to King, who felt more confident than ever that Fish would be in his custody in a matter of days.

More time passed, however, and still the old man did not appear. Once again, King began to grow worried. Perhaps Fish had gotten wind of the stakeout. King decided to remove his men from the premises.

Then, on the afternoon of December 13, 1934, as King sat at his desk, the telephone rang. It was Frieda Schneider, calling to tell him that Albert Fish had just showed up at her rooming house, inquiring about his check.

King told the landlady to stall the old man. Then he jumped into a squad car and sped uptown to the 52nd Street address.

Mrs. Schneider met King at the front door and ushered him into one of the furnished rooms. There, seated at a small wooden table and sipping noisily from a teacup, was a pinched and hollow-cheeked old man with a wispy moustache. He was dressed in a tweed suit-jacket and vest, shirt and tie, and shabby striped trousers that did not match the top half of his outfit. A black overcoat was draped over the back of his chair, and a soiled gray fedora lay on the table beside him.

King closed the door behind him. “Albert Fish?” he asked.

The teacup and saucer rattled slightly as the old man set them down on the table. Gazing at King with watery eyes, he rose to his feet and nodded.

As King crossed the room, the shriveled old man stuck his right thumb and forefinger into his vest pocket as though reaching for his watch. What he extracted, however, was a razor blade, which he held straight out in front of himself as King continued to approach.

King grabbed the old man’s bony wrist and twisted. The razor blade went flying. Fish collapsed back into the chair.

King was not given to open displays of emotion. But standing there, staring down at the gray old man he had hunted so tirelessly for so long, he couldn’t keep a note of triumph out of his voice.

“I’ve got you now,” said William King.

PART 3

Wisteria

20

Dear and dear is their poisoned note, The little snakes of silver throat, In mossy skulls that nest and lie, Ever singing, “Die, oh! die.” THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES, “The Phantom Wooer”

Before it was over, Albert Fish would tell his story to many people: Detective King to begin with, then King’s colleagues and superiors, and eventually a whole series of psychiatrists—none of whom had heard anything like it before (and would never hear anything remotely like it again). He would even relate a version of it to the public at large in the form of a serialized newspaper autobiography.

Various details would be added and subtracted. Modifications would be made. But the confession he offered immediately after his arrest—though it certainly contained significant omissions—was essentially the story he adhered to until the end of his days.

New Yorkers first learned about the story on the following morning, December 14, 1934, when it was splashed across the front page of every paper in the city. But in the end, no one—not the police or the public or the mental health professionals who examined Fish firsthand—could ever quite believe what they were hearing. Not even after an overwhelming body of evidence corroborated Fish’s story in every terrible detail.

After taking the old man into custody, King drove him down to Police Headquarters and ushered him into Room 115, the office of Captain John G. Stein, head of the Missing Persons Bureau. By now, it was around 1:50 P.M., less than two hours since King had received Frieda Schneider’s phone call and hurried over to her boarding house. King and Fish were alone in the office, Stein having gone out to lunch.

King directed the old man to a high-backed wooden chair, then perched himself on a corner of Stein’s desk a few feet away from the suspect. For over half a decade, Grace Budd’s spectral abductor had loomed so large in King’s imagination that he could hardly believe how diminutive and harmless-looking the flesh-and-blood reality had turned out to be. Fish was no more than five and a half feet tall and 130 pounds—the kind of stooped and sunken-chested old codger you’d offer to give your seat to on a crowded subway car. His decrepit appearance only made the tale he had to tell seem that much more incredible.