Deranged (30 page)

As the trial date drew nearer, Fish spent more and more time kneeling on the hard floor of his cell, begging God to save him from the chair. He also appealed to more proximate authorities. On Tuesday, March 5, James Dempsey conveyed a unique proposition to Westchester District Attorney Walter A. Ferris. Fish was willing to turn himself over to science as a “human guinea pig” in exchange for a life sentence. “Humanity will profit more by a study of my brain and body than by sending me to the electric chair,” he explained.

Unsurprisingly, the D.A. did not leap at this opportunity. The law would not permit such a bargain, Ferris told newsmen. And even if it did, he would never consider striking a deal with the old man. “As long as Fish is alive,” the District Attorney declared, “he will be a menace.”

Five days later, on the eve of his trial, Fish extracted a three-inch chicken bone from the bowl of soup he was served at lunch and sharpened it to a needle point on the concrete floor of his cell. After removing his shirt, he began ripping at the flesh of his chest and abdomen with the improvised weapon. Hearing his moans, Warden Casey hurried over to Fish’s cell and summoned a guard who unlocked the door, rushed inside, and wrestled the bone away from the old man, who had managed to inflict only minor flesh wounds on himself.

That evening, the newspapers reported that Fish had been thwarted in a suicide attempt. But people like Dr. Wertham and James Dempsey, who were closely acquainted by now with the workings of the old man’s freakish psychology, knew that he hadn’t been trying to kill himself. He had simply been enjoying an act of autoeroticism—an ecstatic release after his long, enforced abstinence from pain.

With Bruno Richard Hauptmann sentenced and sequestered on death row, the trial of Albert Howard Fish for the murder of Grace Budd became the biggest courtroom drama in town when it opened at the Westchester County Supreme Court Building in White Plains on Monday, March 11, 1935. More than three hundred people, most of them women, jammed the hallway outside the courtroom doors, pressing for admission. A dozen deputy sheriffs were posted at the entrance to keep the crowd orderly.

Spectators were admitted by ones and twos until the benches were full. No standees were allowed, which caused a good deal of grumbling among the scores of curiosity seekers who didn’t manage to get seats. But Justice Frederick P. Close was determined to avoid the circus atmosphere that had prevailed at the Hauptmann trial. “I intend to conduct a quiet, orderly trial,” he announced.

At the front of the courtroom, the big press table was packed with representatives from newspapers throughout the metropolitan region. For weeks, the city’s tabloids, basing their information on leaks from various officials involved in the case, had offered previews of coming attractions, hinting at the horror-show sensations the trial held in store. “From the witness stand,” wrote a reporter for the Daily Mirror, “Fish will recite the story of his life, admitting atrocities not surpassed by even that story of terror and bloodlust, Dracula. He will make his hair-raising confessions to save his own, miserable life.” By opening day, New Yorkers were primed for the most lurid revelations—tales of sexual depravity, cannibalism, human sacrifice and ritual torture.

They were not disappointed.

At around ten A.M. Fish, dressed in a shabby gray coat, dark dusty trousers, rumpled blue shirt, and badly knotted striped tie, shuffled into the courtroom on the arms of two deputy sheriffs. His head was bowed and his face hidden behind the fingers of one bony hand. As he was led to the defense table, where James Dempsey sat waiting with his assistant, Frank J. Mahoney, a dozen news photographers leapt to their feet and began shooting pictures. Even with his eyes covered, Fish winced at the exploding bulbs, and the cameramen were promptly banished from the courtroom by Justice Close.

The first day’s business, the impaneling of the jury, proceeded smoothly. By 5:30 in the afternoon, seventy talesman had been examined by Dempsey and his opponent, Elbert F. Gallagher, Chief Assistant District Attorney, who (along with another Assistant D.A. named Thomas Scoble) was in charge of the prosecution.

Many of the talesmen were dismissed for personal reasons—family illness or jobs they couldn’t neglect. The first person questioned, a Peekskill laborer named William A. Waite, was unwilling to serve unless he could go home every night. His wife couldn’t tend the furnace by herself, he explained. Waite was promptly excused. Other talesmen were dismissed because they had already decided that Fish was guilty or insane.

In questioning the potential jurors, Dempsey gave a strong indication of the strategy he planned to follow during the trial itself. Each of the talesman was asked whether he, a family member, or any acquaintance had ever been treated at Bellevue Hospital. It was clear that Dempsey intended to attack the competence of the Bellevue psychiatrists who had examined Fish in 1930 and declared him sane. Dempsey’s references to Bellevue were so contemptuous that, at one point, Gallagher bitterly objected to his “snide remarks.”

“Oh, you’ll hear plenty about Bellevue before this trial is finished,” Dempsey snorted in reply.

During a later, angry exchange with Gallagher, Dempsey revealed another part of his defense plan. He intended to establish that Fish was suffering from lead colic, an occupational disease of housepainters, which was believed to cause dementia.

The defense lawyer also warned of the “gruesome details” that jurors would be exposed to, including “obscene testimony” about cannibalism. “Would the fact that there is evidence that Fish, like yourself the father of six children, killed a little girl and ate her body so shock you that you could not weigh the evidence?” he demanded of one of the talesmen, an elderly farmer. The old man blanched visibly, admitted that it might, and was excused.

“This trial will be sordid, to put it mildly,” Dempsey emphasized to each prospective juror, “Will that affect you and if you find, after hearing the evidence, that the defendant is insane, will you agree to send him to Matteawan Asylum for the criminally insane?”

Gallagher—a large, imposing man who would later become a State Supreme Court Justice—required less time with each talesman. The gist of his examination could be summed up in two questions: First, “If you find that Fish knew the difference between right and wrong, will you vote him guilty?” And second, “Have you any prejudice against the death penalty?”

The first juror accepted—and automatically made foreman—was John Partelow of Mount Pleasant, New York, a forty-eight-year-old carpenter and father of three children. By the end of the day, eight more jurors had been selected. Except for one, all of them, like Partelow, were middle-aged family men. Among them, they had eighteen children. The only bachelor in the group, a steamship agent from Yonkers named Gilbert Nee, was engaged to be married after Lent.

Throughout the day’s proceedings, Fish—“the benign-looking Bluebeard,” as the tabloids had taken to calling him—sat slumped in his chair at the defense table, right elbow resting on the arm of his chair, head propped in his hand, eyes closed. He displayed no interest at all in the proceedings. Indeed, he showed few signs of life, though he did stiffen slightly at Gallagher’s first mention of the death penalty.

For the rest of his trial, Fish would maintain the same indifferent pose. To one observer, Arthur James Pegler of the Daily Mirror, he resembled “a corpse insecurely propped in a chair.” To others he appeared to be dozing.

Much of the time, he was.

32

“Sometimes I myself am not sure what is real and what is not, what I’ve really done and what are things I want to do and thought about doing so long that it got to be as if I had done them, so that I remember them just as clearly as the real things.” ALBERT FISH

On the morning of Tuesday, March 12, the Daily News published the first of a five-part serialization of Albert Fish’s life story. The series was supposedly written by Fish himself, though its spirited style and dramatic structure were clearly the work of a professional.

For the most part, this ostensible autobiography was simply a titillating, though highly bowdlerized, account of Fish’s adult life, with particular, prurient emphasis placed on his wife’s infidelity and Fish’s own geriatric sexual escapades. “The thing that started me on the real big things I have done in the last fifteen years was the trouble I had in 1917 with my wife and that man John Straube,” the author proclaimed in a typical passage. “Marriage is not all that it is cracked up to be, but it certainly serves one purpose. So long as the man and woman keep the bargain, they will both stay out of other trouble. It is a good safety valve. As long as Anna stuck to me, and the children kept coming one after the other until there were six, I might have had my outside fancies but would keep my end of the bargain.

“But when I found out about Straube, my eyes were opened to the fact that no bargains hold and that only fools know any restraints. That freed me. It threw off my chains. I had a right after that to any fun I could find or grab.”

Most of “KILLER FISH’S OWN STORY” (as it was advertised on page one) operated on the same crudely suggestive level. None of it was nearly as shocking as the disclosures that would be made at Fish’s trial in the coming days.

There was one brief passage, however, which did succeed in capturing the intensely bizarre quality of Fish’s imagination, and that was the very start of the series, which recounted a story that Fish had told more than once. It was presumably a childhood recollection, though it may well have been a dream. In either case, it was revealing:

I am a man of passion, [the passage began]. You don’t know what that means unless you are my kind. At the orphanage where they put me just before Garfield was assassinated, there were some older boys that caught a horse in a sloping field. They got the horse up against a fence down at the bottom of the field and tied him up. An old horse. They put kerosene on his tail and lit it and cut the rope. Away went that old horse, busting through fences to get away from the fire. But the fire went with him. That horse, that’s me. That’s the man of passion. The fire chases you and catches you and then it’s in your blood. And after that, it’s the fire that has control, not the man. Blame the fire of passion for what Albert H. Fish has done.

It is impossible to say whether this episode was memory or fantasy. Perhaps even Fish could no longer tell. But given his particular method of torturing himself with alcohol-soaked cotton, there is no doubt that the story had symbolic meaning for him, that on some level he did indeed associate himself with the nightmarish image of the fiery-tailed horse—a creature propelled through the world by the searing ecstasies of pain.

The selection of the three remaining jurors and one alternate occupied the morning of the trial’s second day. The court recessed for lunch at ten minutes before one and reconvened an hour later. Shortly after two P.M., prosecutor Gallagher cleared his throat and rose from his chair at the front of the hushed, crowded courtroom to present his opening statement.

After a few preliminary remarks to the jury, Gallagher proceeded to lay out the state’s case against Fish. Speaking in a somber, modulated voice, Gallagher sketched out the details of the crime as though reciting a story he’d read in a pulp horror magazine—Weird Tales or Eerie Mysteries. His speech held the audience spellbound. The only person in the courtroom who seemed completely uninterested was Fish, who sat drowsing in his chair, head resting in one hand, fingers visoring his eyes.

“In 1928, the People will prove, there lived in the city of New York the Budd family,” Gallagher intoned. “They lived at 406 West 15th Street. They lived in a small apartment in the rear of the apartment house. There was the father Albert, the mother Delia, there was Grace, there was Edward, and several other members of the family.

“Edward Budd was looking for a job. And so he made application to the New York World to have them put an ad in their newspaper. That ad appeared on Sunday, May 27, 1928, under the classified ad section, situations wanted, and it read as follows in substance: ‘Youth 18 wishes position in country. Signed, Edward A. Budd, 406 West 15th Street.’

“The following day or so there appeared this defendant at the Budd home. In the latter part of the afternoon there came a knock on the door. Mrs. Budd opened it, and this defendant was there. He said his name was Frank Howard, that he had seen the ad in the New York World, that he had come to see Edward about the job he had advertised for. He said he had a farm located down in Farmingdale, Long Island, a truck farm, and wanted to know if Edward could work on it. So Edward agreed to go down on the farm.

“This defendant said, ‘I will come for you on Saturday.’ That was on June 2, 1928.”

After explaining how “Howard” had failed to show up at the appointed time and describing the telegram he had sent to the Budds, Gallagher went on to recount the events of that fateful Sunday morning when Fish first laid eyes on little Grace.

“She was a young girl at that time, approximately ten years and nine months of age. She had been to church that morning. She came in. She sat in this defendant’s lap, he stroked her head, and he allowed her to play with the money he had. While she was sitting there, he said to the Budd parents that his sister was giving a birthday party for her children, up at 135th Street in the city of New York, and he thought it would be nice if Grace would go along with him. He said he loved children, he would return early that night, they need not worry, it would be all right. They hesitated to let her go, but finally consented.