Deranged (24 page)

Two Darien officials—Henry J. Case, chairman of the police board, and Detective Amos Anderson—were hoping to answer that question when they drove down to Manhattan on Saturday afternoon to interview Fish in the Tombs. But the old man, who could be either forthcoming with authorities or sulkily uncooperative, depending on his mood, simply shook his head in response to their inquiries. After a frustrating hour, Case and Anderson turned the interrogation over to Detective King and Captain Stein, who finally managed to pry some information out of Fish.

Back in police headquarters later that day, King informed reporters that, though Fish stoutly denied his guilt, he had admitted to being in Darien the previous spring. He had only gone there, however, to “visit friends.” All he knew about the dead child, the old man insisted, was what he had read in the papers.

By Saturday afternoon, reporters delving into Fish’s past had managed to locate his estranged wife, Anna, the mother of his six children. Living in Astoria, Queens, with a man named John Straube—by whom she’d had three more children—the pleasant-faced, gray-haired woman heard the news about Fish as though she’d been expecting it for years. Nothing that her former husband did would surprise her—she was prepared to believe anything about the old man. Had Fish ever behaved strangely while they were married, the reporters wanted to know? Mrs. Straube thought for a while before answering. “He used to beat himself with a whip,” she replied, then refused to say more.

Before the day was out, another of Fish’s wives would turn up—a sixty-four-year-old housemaid from Waterloo, Iowa, named Estelle Wilcox, who had been married to Fish for two months in early 1930. They had met through a matrimonial agency and had lived together for only one week when Fish began placing classified ads in the local newspaper, offering work to young girls. “I knew he didn’t have any work for them, but I didn’t know what to think,” Mrs. Wilcox told newsmen, her voice beginning to break. “I think he was crazy.” She started to weep, her tears called up partly by the memories of her brief, awful life with Fish and partly by the unwelcome publicity that her relationship with him had suddenly brought on her. Fish had disappeared after a few weeks, Estelle explained, and she’d never heard from him again, nor had she made the slightest effort to locate him. “I was glad he was gone,” she said through her tears. “I don’t care what happens to him.”

Meanwhile, in an effort to establish conclusively that the skeleton found at Wisteria Cottage was Grace Budd’s, detectives from the Missing Persons Bureau, King included, continued their search for the dentist who had filled three of the girl’s teeth at the dispensary in 1927. In the view of the authorities, this individual was a key to establishing the corpus delecti, since he could positively identify the dental work in the skull. But, though Captain Stein made a public appeal to all the dentists in the city, no one had yet come forward by the end of Saturday.

The Greenburgh police were back on the job first thing Sunday morning, continuing their search for more human remains and for the still-missing butcher knife. By late morning, the two wells had been drained and excavated. Five additional bones of indeterminate origin had been dug out of the muck. With typical moderation, the Mirror lost no time in announcing the discovery of another “ogre bone pile,” dredged from the wells behind “the charnel house where Fish dissected the stillquivering body of the hapless Budd child.” According to the paper, the new finds consisted of four human ribs and a woman’s kneecap that had “apparently been hacked in two by an axe or a cleaver.” “WOMAN’S BONES IN MURDER WELL!” blared the headline. “HOW MANY DID FISH KILL?”

As reporters pursued their own excavations, digging deeper into Fish’s past, new and increasingly bizarre revelations came to light. Fish’s twenty-one-year-old son, John—whose monthly paychecks from the C.C.C. camp in North Carolina had helped lead to his father’s capture—described the elder Fish as a “firebug” who derived unnatural gratification from the sights, sounds, and smells of burning houses. “The screams of endangered humans, the shrieking of sirens, and the clanging of bells were said to awaken ‘sex impulses’ in Fish’s twisted brain,” reported one newsman. According to John Fish, the old man had to be forcibly restrained on several occasions from setting fire to tenements. Fire Marshal Thomas P. Brophy announced that he would order an immediate search of his records for any unsolved arson cases that might be connected to Fish.

Even more disquieting were the disclosures of a woman named Helen Karlson, who presented herself at police headquarters on Sunday morning with a most interesting story. Mrs. Karlson, a widow, owned a house on 56th Street in Brooklyn, where she lived alone with her two sons. In 1927, she had rented the upstairs rooms of her house to an elderly man and his two sons, whom she knew at first only by their last name—Fish.

In the beginning, the elderly gentleman seemed the soul of kindness. He was particularly attentive to Mrs. Karlson’s youngest son, who was seven at the time. “He was always buying him candy and urging me to let him take the boy to the movies,” she explained. Mrs. Karlson didn’t regard Fish as a danger. On the contrary, “he appeared to be such a harmless old man.” Even so, she was reluctant to let her son go off with a relative stranger, particularly since—like so many Brooklyn mothers—she had been deeply unnerved by the Gaffney abduction, a crime which had occurred only a short time before.

Her boarders had been living in the house for almost a month when Mrs. Karlson awoke one morning to find that an envelope had been shoved under her bedroom door. Inside was a handwritten letter of unspeakable vileness. It was signed “Albert.” Mrs. Karlson was dumbfounded. She destroyed the letter instantly and didn’t speak a word about it to anyone. But after receiving two more such missives, each filthier than the first, she confronted the old man and demanded that he leave.

“He became very angry and abusive,” she told the police. “He shook his fist at me and shouted that he would put a curse on me for life.”

It was a great relief to Mrs. Karlson when the old man and his sons packed up and left. As soon as they were gone, she went upstairs to clean their rooms. On the floor of the old man’s room she discovered the nasty thing that she still couldn’t bring herself to discuss without blushing. “A little mess” was the way she described it to the police. And in the attic directly above his room, she found something even more disconcerting—a crudely made wooden paddle, two feet long and studded with nails. It was wrapped inside one of Mrs. Karlson’s linen tablecloths. Both the cloth and the paddle were clotted with old blood.

Mrs. Karlson let out a deep breath as she concluded her story. “It makes me shudder when I think what might have happened to my own son.”

Mrs. Karlson’s son wasn’t the only child to have had a close call with Fish. Indeed, as the weekend progressed, the city seemed to be filled with youngsters who had “narrowly escaped Fish’s fiendish clutch” (as the Mirror put it).

Mr. and Mrs. Alonzo La Furde, who lived in a house near Wisteria Cottage, trembled with “after-fear” as they told news reporters how, only two months earlier, Fish had tried to lure away their curly-haired little daughter, Marion, by promising to show her “funny pictures” and giving her “huge handfuls of candy and peanuts.”

Another young girl who got her name in the news by recalling an encounter with Fish was an eleven-year-old named Mary Little. Seeing Fish’s picture in the papers, she suddenly recognized him as the “horrible old man” who had accosted her in 1928, when she was five years old.

“I was playing by the candy store while Mummie stood by the baby carriage,” she explained to reporters. “He came up and took hold of my hand. I was frightened because he was such a bent old man. He asked me if I was alone, and I told him no, my mother was over there. Then he looked at her, and I pulled my hand away and ran back to Mummie.”

At that point in her recitation, Mrs. Little interrupted with her own recollections of that moment. “Mary kept staring at him, and I asked her what was the matter. Then I noticed him. All hunched up with his hands buried in his pockets, he was. He looked at us and started laughing. It was a horrible, cackling sound.”

Little Mary let out a deep sigh. “Oh, what he did to that poor little girl,” she said. “If only he had taken the boys. They were bigger and could have fought him. Poor little Gracie.”

Marion La Furde and Mary Little were only two of many children who would recall encounters with the hunched, gray-haired “boogey man” in the days to come. Some of these memories were clearly the product of overheated imaginations, the kinds of fantasies commonly generated by highly publicized crimes. But others were authentic.

One youngster who, by the old man’s own admission, had narrowly escaped death was Cyril Quinn, the adolescent boy whom Fish had intended to butcher as a warm-up for the Budd murder. On Sunday, the police announced their plans to bring Quinn down to the Tombs to identify Fish. Another witness scheduled to confront Fish that day was an unnamed nine-year-old girl who had been attacked by an old man near her home on Amsterdam Avenue two years earlier. At the time of the incident, Fish was working as the superintendent of two apartment buildings close to the little girl’s home.

Fish was also visited that day by various law enforcement officials, seeking to connect him to virtually every unsolved child murder in the Northeast. Among his interrogators were the Long Island police inspector Harold King, who still seemed convinced of Fish’s involvement in the slaying of the fifteen-year-old girl from Massapequa, Mary Ellen O’Connor, and Lieutenant Amos Anderson of Connecticut, who had not given up on his efforts to link Fish to the skeleton of the unknown child discovered in Darien.

Investigators from the Manhattan Missing Persons Bureau also spent time grilling Fish again about the Gaffney case. This time, they had more success. Though Fish continued to maintain his innocence, he did reveal an intriguing fact, which Detective King announced to reporters at a news conference late in the day.

At the time of the Gaffney boy’s disappearance, in February, 1927, King said, Fish had been employed as a housepainter by the Brooklyn real estate firm of Wood, Harmon & Co. and was working at a location only a few miles away from the Gaffneys’ apartment building on the day the child vanished.

In his free moments, when he wasn’t pacing about his cell or being questioned by lawmen, Fish pursued one of the few compulsive activities still permitted him—writing letters. In the weeks ahead, he would spew out a constant flow of them—to his children, to his lawyers, to prison officials and others.

The first of these letters was to Detective King. Fish seemed to have developed a strange regard for his captor, or perhaps he simply perceived a streak of compassion in King upon which he hoped to play. Whatever the case, when King came to visit him in his cell late Sunday afternoon, Fish passed him an envelope.

King waited until he was back in his office to open it. Inside was a four-page handwritten letter. Seated at his desk, King—a two-pack-a-day smoker—lit a cigarette and began to read. Like many of Fish’s letters, this one was a crazy scramble of biographical facts, bizarre selfrevelations, and shameless appeals for sympathy:

Dear Mr. King In 1906 or 7 I lived at 519 Main st, Bridgeport Conn with my wife and 2 childrn. Albert now 35 and Anna 33. They took part in a play at Palis Theatre called Little Orphan Annie. From there we moved to Springfield Mass where I done some painting for Rev Charles F. Slattery rector of Christ P.E. Church. In April or May of 1933 my son Henry drove me in his Car to New Haven, Conn to see a widow who had an ad in Friendship Magazine for a husband. When we got there she had gone to town…. During these 4 years I wrote to about 20 widows who claimed to have money but it was all hot air…. I write as habit—Just cant seem to stop. A few months after I done that deed I shoved 5 needles into my belly—legs—hip. At times I suffer awful pains. An Ex Ray will show them. Three weeks ago I spilled Alcohol on my behind and then lit a match. I can hardly sit still now. You know as well as I that if I had not written that letter to Mrs. Budd, I would not be in Jail. Had I not lead you to the spot no bones would have been found and I could only be tried for kidnapping. So again I say it was fate, due me for my wrong. Now my dear Mr. King I am going to ask you In Gods Name do this for my poor childrens sake. For my self I ask no mercy. Write to Hon Wm. F. Brunner ask him to get in touch with Hon Hamilton Fish. See if you cant have me tried in N.Y. City on the kidnapping charge. When 5 yrs old I was placed by my mother in St Johns Orphanage Washington D.C. There I learned to lie—beg—steal and saw a lot of things a child of 7 should not see…. I hear they are going to take me out to Westchester next week. Suppose I deny the killing. ! have signed no statement as yet. You tell me. I only want to live long enough to see my poor children at work and out of want. Misery leads to Crime. I saw so many boys whipped it took root in my head. I have many hundreds of times whipped and tortured myself as marks on my behind will show…. the Blessing of Almighty God on you. I am Albert H. Fish

King read the letter over several times. Clearly, Fish, for all his professed indifference to his own fate, was not eager for a murder trial. He even clung to the desperate and delusional hope that Congressman Hamilton Fish might intercede on his behalf, presumably out of family loyalty. But the parts of the letter that struck King most forcibly were the confessions of self-torture. Could it possibly be true that the old man poured alcohol onto his backside and lit it? And shoved five needles into his own body?

King, of course, was well aware of the fourteen sewing needles that had been threaded through the packet of clippings in the old man’s leather satchel. And he knew about something else, too, something which the press hadn’t yet gotten wind of.

In searching through Fish’s rooms, the police had come upon a leatherbound volume lying on a shelf. Riffling through it, they had found a page with ten more needles stuck into it.