Deranged (34 page)

When Mrs. Shaw wrote back to say that she had consulted her twenty-year-old daughter and both of them were willing to care for Bobby in the style “Hayden” had described, she received a warm response by return mail. “Just got home and found your letter,” Fish had written. “Am so glad you are interested. Before I call on you, will you kindly advise me—Are you a widow? And if so would you consider another marriage?”

Mrs. Shaw replied that she was indeed married, though her husband’s presence, she hastened to add, would not in any way interfere with the regimen recommended by the eminent Professor Cairo of Vienna. Apparently, Fish was somewhat crestfallen by the news of Mrs. Shaw’s marital status. Clearly, she was a woman after his own heart. But he was happy to have lucked upon her nevertheless and immediately sent a reply:

My Dear Mrs. Shaw Just got your very nice letter. I am much pleased to know that you are not one bit ashamed to strip Bobby naked and bathe him. Am also glad you spoke to your daughter and she is willing to aid you in taking care of him. There is no good reason why either of you should be ashamed. You know times have changed and so have the people. What in times past was considered immodest is now very commonplace. Then again look at what young girls training to become nurses see and touch in hospitals. Now with so many brothers and sisters, you should be highly proficient in bathing. Not to speak of the fine art of spanking. You know in Bobby’s case whipping is to be your pass word. In your efforts to earn a living for yourself and daughter, you are fortunate in having a girl old enough to assist her mother in using a paddle or the cat-o-nine-tails on Bobby’s bare behind. You say she gives her OK and is willing to do her part. I shall be very glad to compensate her for spanking or switching him. Bear this in mind, both of you. It is for his own good that he is to be whipped. So don’t let your heart stay your hand. Do you know that I feel that in part I am to blame for the condition Bobby is in. My conscience says that for being careless I should be well whipped in the same manner (and place) both of you will whip Bobby. Some day I hope you will accommodate me. I would give a nice new $100 bill for a good old fashioned spanking and a taste of the switch. There is a place on 42 St., Fleishman’s Baths, where naked men are rubbed all over by women. White, Black—Chinese. I could go there and be well whipped. Most women would get a kick out spanking a naked man. But I prefer some privacy—a home. Let your daughter read this letter. I am a man of the world and she can get knowledge of the world through it. I feel that we shall be fast friends.

Again, Mrs. Shaw conveyed her willingness to perform the prescribed services. With that, Fish commenced a month-long relationship with the Queens housewife, conducted mostly by mail, that grew progressively more perverse. Fish wrote to her regularly, sometimes twice a day, describing in ever more graphic detail the corporal punishments Bobby’s mental health required. At one point, he even enclosed a helpful little diagram, representing the ideal position for a spanking—belly-down, spread-eagle, ankles and wrists secured to the corner bedposts, bare buttocks ready for the whip. And to all these proposals Mrs. Shaw gave her unqualified consent.

According to her courtroom testimony, Mrs. Shaw was simply stringing her correspondent along until she had gathered enough evidence to bring to the postal authorities—though under cross-examination, she admitted that she had, in fact, been willing to perform the proposed “duties” on Bobby for the substantial sums “Hayden” had promised.

In any event, she did a good job of convincing Fish that he had found the dominatrix of his dreams. Eventually he contrived to meet Mrs. Shaw in person, hoping to receive, as he put it in another letter, “some good home cooking with a good spanking thrown in.”

But—though he had been paving the way for this possibility from the very start (“some day I hope you will accommodate me”)—the old man decided, for whatever reason, not to show up in the guise of Hayden. Instead, he invented another identity for himself, a “friend and ward” of Hayden’s named James Pell, whom he introduced in a letter dated October 7, 1934. “Last night,” Fish had written:

I thought of a good way to test your ability at Spanking. Now Mr. James W. Pell is a friend & ward of mine. He has been declared incompetent and I have $32,500 of his money in trust. He is without a living relation and I don’t see why you can’t earn some of his money. Two of his sons were blown to pieces in the War. At times he imagines he is a boy at school, has been naughty and must be spanked for it … The least I have in mind is this. You have told me that I need not worry about you being ashamed to strip Bobby naked and spank his bare behind. If you are not ashamed of Bobby, you won’t be of Jimmy. So when you meet him, take him upstairs, undress him, give him a bath, then spank him good. He will say teacher whip me. You might as well let your daughter acquire the art of spanking by beginning on Jimmy.

The very next day, Fish sent Mrs. Shaw another letter containing additional details about Pell. “In 1928 he was operated on for a hernia. When you have him stripped you will see the mark of the incision. Look on his left groin, from his penis to his hipbone. He was prepared for another operation ten days ago. All hair shaved off. That is why he looks like a picked chicken…. Jimmy has a habit of painting his behind red or gold. When you strip him you will see.”

Mrs. Shaw agreed to meet Pell. And so, on a Sunday afternoon in late October, Fish—carrying a letter of introduction, supposedly written by Hayden, plus a small, newspaper-wrapped package—rode the bus to Glenwood Avenue and Northern Boulevard, where he was met by Mrs. Shaw. Surprised at the shabby appearance of the withered old man, Mrs. Shaw led him along the quiet suburban streets to her home. In response to his question, she explained that her husband was away on an errand and not expected back for at least one hour.

Ushering him into the living room, she introduced him to her daughter, who offered him a cup of coffee. While the young woman went off to prepare it, Fish handed Mrs. Shaw the paper-wrapped package and letter. She carried them into another room and tore each of them open in turn.

Inside the package was a length of rope that been soaked in brine. The letter, as she testified at the trial, contained detailed instructions for whipping the old man with the rope. The language of the letter, said Mrs. Shaw, “was of such a nature that I could not go through with it.”

Shaken, Mrs. Shaw returned to the living room and pulled up a chair in front of the old man. “Mr. Pell,” she said, “there is no reason why I should have to whip you. There is no need for it. You are not a patient of mine. Were I to do such a thing and you dropped dead, I would be held for murder.”

By then, Mrs. Shaw had become convinced that she had been made the victim of a hoax, that there was no wealthy movie director named Robert Hayden—only this shriveled old deviant with his drooping moustache and painted ass. She allowed him to finish his coffee and then sent him on his way.

The next day, she made copies of all the letters she had received from “Hayden” and mailed them to The New York Times. Within a week, the material had been passed along to the proper authorities and, in early November, a postal inspector named R. H. Kemper was assigned to the case.

Acting under Kemper’s instructions, Mrs. Shaw continued to correspond with “Hayden.” Indeed, she made the tone of her letters markedly more personal, addressing him for the first time as “My dear Robert.” The increased intimacy of her letters sent Fish into rapturous flights of utterly degraded fantasy. “My Dearest Darling Sweetest Little Girlie Grace,” Fish wrote to her on November 9. “Just got your letter calling me dear Robert. Dear Honey Heart of mine, you have captured me. I am your Slave and everything I have is yours. Prick—Balls—Ass and all the money you want…. If you were my own sweet wife, you would not be afraid of me. O girlie of my heart would I love you—and how. Hug-Kiss-Squeeze you, spank you, then KISS where I spanked! Your nice-pretty-fat-sweet ass…. You won’t need toilet paper to wipe your sweet pretty fat Ass as I shall eat all of it, then Lick your sweet ass clean with my tongue….” And so on.

Following Kemper’s directions, Mrs. Shaw answered these ravings by asking “Hayden” to her home for Thanksgiving dinner, an invitation which he immediately accepted. When the holiday arrived, several post-office inspectors plus a New York City police detective were waiting at her home to arrest the old man.

But he never showed up.

Helen Karlsen, the Brooklyn landlady who, in 1927, had been another recipient of Fish’s unwelcome attentions, also testified on Monday. Unlike the forthright Mrs. Shaw, she blushed at having to discuss such sordid business. No amount of coaxing by Dempsey could get her to describe the precise contents of the letters Fish had slipped under her bedroom door.

“Do you recall the substance of the letters?” Dempsey asked.

“Well, I do but I don’t want to say anything about it.”

Dempsey finally prevailed on her to summarize one of the less unmentionable parts of Fish’s first letter. “He told me he was going to a lodge,” Mrs. Karlsen said, her voice barely above a whisper, “and he expected to have a lot of things done to him, and one of the principal things would be he would be tarred and feathered, and he wanted me to help him next day to remove all this. He said the lodge allowed him twenty dollars for this procedure and he would double it to forty dollars if I would help him.”

“The other two letters,” asked Dempsey. “Were they of similar character?”

“Yes, only worse than that.”

Mrs. Karlsen went on to describe the bloody, nailstudded paddles she had discovered in the attic after Fish’s eviction, though she shied away from characterizing the “little mess” she had found on his bedroom floor.

“What do you mean by a little mess?” asked Dempsey.

“I don’t like to say just what it was,” Mrs. Karlsen replied. “He just made some dirt and left it behind the door.”

“Can you say what kind of dirt it was?”

“Human dirt.”

“Number Two?” asked Dempsey, resorting to playground euphemism.

“Yes.”

Without doubt, the day’s weirdest testimony came from the person described by reporters as a “surprise defense witness.” This was Mary Nicholas, Fish’s seventeen-year-old “step kiddie” to whom he’d written from Eastview, promising her “18 good hard smacks” on her bare behind for her birthday and describing the voyeuristic opportunities available at the Y.M.C.A. Dempsey had brought her to White Plains from her home in Bartlett, Ohio, to testify on behalf of the old man she continued to refer to as “Papa.”

A plain-featured high school freshman with a pug nose and round, wire frame glasses, Mary struck the streetsavvy newsmen at the press table as the epitome of Midwestern innocence. Reared in rural Ohio, the youngest of seven children of Mrs. Myrta Nicholas—one of the three women Fish had wed illegally in 1930—the darkhaired teenager seemed as naive as a nursery schooler as she told of the bizarre doings that had taken place in her home shortly after Fish’s arrival.

It had been in January, 1930, when Mary was twelve, that Fish had traveled to the Nicholases’ little house in Bartlett to meet Mary’s widowed mother, whose name he had gotten from a matrimonial agency. He spent the first night getting acquainted with the family and describing his train trip from New York.

On the second night, he offered to teach the children some games.

“What games?” Dempsey asked.

“Buck-Buck, How Many Hands Up,” Mary said pleasantly.

Speaking in the tone of voice grown-ups tend to use when conversing with very young children, Dempsey asked her to explain how the game was played.

“He went into his room,” said Mary, “and he had a little pair of trunks, brown trunks, that he put on. He took everything else off but those. He put those on and came out into the front room, and he got down on his hands and knees, and he had a paint stick that he stirred paint with.”

“About how big a stick was that?”

“It was about that long,” Mary said, holding her hands approximately two feet apart. “And about that wide,” she said, moving her palms to within six inches of each other.

Dempsey asked her to continue.

“He would give the stick to one of us, and then he would get down on his hands and knees and we would sit on his back, one at a time, with our back facing him, and then we would put up so many fingers, and he was to tell how many fingers we had up, and if he guessed right, which he never did, why, we weren’t supposed to hit him. Sometimes he would even say more fingers than we really had. And if he never guessed right, why, we would hit him as many fingers as we would have up.”

Justice Close leaned toward the witness. “Was your mother there when you played that?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How long would you play that game?” Dempsey asked. “For hours?”

“Oh, no,” Mary said. “We wouldn’t play it very long, just about an hour at a time every evening.”

Occasionally, Mary went on to explain, they played the game with a hairbrush instead of a stick. For variety’s sake.

“Which end of the hairbrush would you hit him with?” Dempsey asked.

Mary shrugged. “Sometimes the side with the bristles on, sometimes the other side, just whichever way we happened to pick it up.”

“And all he had on was this little pair of trunks?”

“Yes, and they were very thin.”

When Dempsey asked if she and her siblings had played anything else with their elderly guest, Mary said, yes, a game called “Sack of Potatoes Over.” And how was that one played? inquired Dempsey.

“He put on those little trunks, and then he would throw us up on his shoulder, and we would slide down his back, and we would scratch him with our nails. By the time we would get through playing, why, his back would be red.”

Fish had also tried to introduce his new little friends to another of his favorite activities, but this time he had met with some resistance. “He brought a package of pins with him,” Mary explained, “and he told my sister and I one evening to see if we could stick those pins in our fingernails right up there just as far as they could get, and he gave my sister and I one, and before we even had any stuck into our fingers, he stuck a pin in his finger, too.”