Deranged (35 page)

“In how many fingers did he stick it?”

“All of them.”

“How far up did he shove the pins?”

“As far as it would go.”

“What did you notice about his fingers after he had the pins stuck all the way in?”

“They bled,” Mary said simply.

Fish seemed disappointed that Mary and her sister weren’t as enthusiastic about this pastime as they had been about “Buck-Buck, How Many Hands Up” and “Sack of Potatoes Over.” “He asked us how come we didn’t stick the pins in our fingers, too.” But when the children explained the reason—“we told him it hurt”—he behaved very understandingly and “never said anything more.”

Apparently, no one in the Nicholas household saw anything wrong with Fish’s little games. They couldn’t help noticing, however, that the old man did have a few habits that seemed peculiar even to them. “Every night after we would get through playing the games,” Mary continued, “why, he would go to the toilet, and he took all the paper off the roll and lit it, and he had a big fire. The first night we noticed it, I just happened to be outside and seen smoke coming out the door and I ran back and told my mother. We went down there, and there he was, he had a fire in the middle of the floor. She told him to put it out, and he wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t help put it out, so we got some water and put it out.”

“Did the fire do much damage?” asked Dempsey.

“No.”

“Did it burn the floor?”

“No. He done that every night.”

“He set a fire every night?” Dempsey asked, his tone tinged with incredulity.

“Yes, every night.”

“In the center of the floor there?”

“Yes.”

Apparently, however, Fish’s virtues—whatever they were—outweighed his shortcomings in the eyes of Mary’s mother. Ten days after the old man showed up in Bartlett with his paint stick and matches and package of pins, he and the widow Nicholas were married.

Several members of Fish’s immediate family added their contributions to the never-ending catalogue of Fish’s eccentricities. His son Henry described the time the old man had spent three days trying to fill some cracks in the front stoop of their house by pouring several sackfuls of uncooked oatmeal down them.

Mrs. Anna Collins, Fish’s oldest daughter, recalled a night in 1917 when Henry—then a child of three—had asked her for a glass of water. Walking downstairs to fetch it, she had found her father lying on the floor, completely rolled up in the living-room carpet. Only his head was visible, from the nose up. “Pop,” she had admonished him. “Go on up to bed. You will never get any rest that way.” The next morning, when Anna came downstairs to fix breakfast, Fish was just unrolling himself from the carpet. When the girl asked him why he had chosen to sleep that way instead of upstairs in his bed, Fish had replied, “St. John the Apostle told me to.”

Fish’s pretty, eleven-year-old granddaughter Gloria—the apple of the old man’s eye—recalled a summer day, four years earlier, when she had come inside her house for a glass of water and found her grandfather bent over the living-room sofa, spanking himself with a stick.

Eugene Fish, the last of Fish’s children to testify, told of the time he had discovered his father standing nude by the front window of an apartment the old man had been hired to paint, running a dry brush over the window casing. A particularly poignant moment in the trial occurred toward the end of Gene’s testimony, when he was asked about an incident that had taken place in April, 1928, when he, his brother John, and their father were sharing an apartment on East 81st Street in Manhattan.

“One night,” Gene began, “I returned home from work about 5:15 or 5:30. We lived on the top floor. The kitchen was in between the front room and the back bedroom. As I came into the kitchen, I noticed a light in the bedroom. The kitchen was dark. So I walked into the bedroom”—here, Gene’s voice cracked slightly—“and I saw my father sticking needles into himself.”

“What happened at that time?” Dempsey asked gently.

“I asked him why he was doing it,” Gene answered, his lower lip beginning to tremble, “And he said he had a message from Christ.” With that, the young man buried his face in his hands and broke into sobs.

The psychiatric testimony began early on Tuesday, March 19, when Fredric Wertham took the stand. He remained there for the rest of the day and was back the following morning.

Of all Dempsey’s witnesses, Dr. Wertham was by far the most important. His testimony cast far-reaching light on Fish’s psychopathology, illuminating for the first time the terrible depths of his madness. To be sure, there were large, shadowy areas of the old man’s life and mind whose dark secrets Wertham had not been able to penetrate. Fish’s sexual history stretched back over half a century and was so steeped in iniquity that even he had lost track of his crimes.

Still, the story Wertham told that day—the seventh of the trial—provided the most shockingly detailed picture of Albert Howard Fish that the world would ever get. Once again, Justice Close ordered all women spectators from the courtroom. The twelve male jurors, who had begun to seem slightly numbed by the week-long barrage of horror, were jolted to life by Wertham’s testimony, looking visibly dismayed throughout much of the day. Fish’s children, sitting on the bench behind their father, repeatedly covered their eyes and wept.

Wertham began by sketching Fish’s family history. In two generations (meaning, Wertham explained, Fish’s “brothers and sisters and the brothers and sisters” of his parents), the doctor had discovered no less than seven cases of extreme psychopathology, including a paternal uncle who suffered from a religious psychosis, a half brother who was confined to a state hospital for the insane, a younger brother who died of hydrocephalus (“water on the brain,” as Fish called it), and a sister who, in Fish’s words, “had some sort of mental affliction.” Fish’s mother, too, was regarded by her neighbors as “very queer, inasmuch as she heard noises on the street and saw things.”

Fish’s father, Randall, had been seventy-five-years old when the boy was born. Fish claimed to have distinct memories of how the old man looked. Beyond that, he recalled only one detail, the nickname his father had given him—“Stick in the Mud.”

Randall Fish died when his youngest son was five, and the boy was shipped off to St. John’s Orphanage in Washington, D.C. The years he spent in that institution were the stuff of nightmares, a brutal induction into a life of petty crime and routine depravity. It was there that he first learned to associate pleasure with pain.

“Now the experience in the orphanage is very important,” Wertham explained.

Because he dates his earliest sexual abnormalities to this time. He described to me very vividly that in that place not only did the inmates commit all sorts of sensory acts with each other, in which he joined, but it made the greatest impression on him. One of the guardians there, a sister or teacher, had the habit of frequently whipping the boys and taking six at a time and having them strip and having one see what happened to the others. And he remembers very vividly seeing the other boys whipped, and he recalls that before the age of seven, he had his first sexual feeling.

“And what did he get that feeling from?” asked Dempsey.

“From being whipped himself and from seeing other boys whipped and screaming.”

As a young child, Wertham continued, Fish had displayed “a number of early neurotic traits,” including enuresis—bedwetting—which he experienced until he was eleven. He was also a high-strung and inordinately “sensitive” child. “I can give you one example of that,” said Wertham, going on to explain that Fish’s real first name was Hamilton. He had changed it as a teenager, however, because his schoolmates used to tease him by calling him “Ham-and-Eggs,” and “he couldn’t stand it.” The name he adopted, Albert, had originally belonged to his younger brother, the one who had died of brain disease.

At this point, Wertham proceeded directly to what he called “the outstanding fact” of Fish’s life, a fact, he said, which could be summed up in a single sentence. “I can tell you that, to the best of my medical knowledge, every sexual abnormality that I have ever heard of this man has practiced—not only has he thought about it, not only has he daydreamed about it, but he has practiced it.”

To begin with, said Wertham, Fish was a sadist of “incredible cruelty … All his mind was bent on eliciting responses of pain in someone else.” In addition, he was a homosexual. “All through his life, women were just a substitute,” said Wertham. “An entirely secondary choice and secondary pleasure.”

Fish’s third “outstanding” abnormality, Wertham went on, was what was known technically as pedophilia. His “prime sexual interest,” the doctor explained, “has only been children from the age of about five to fourteen or sixteen.”

There were more abnormalities, of course. Indeed, Wertham had provided Dempsey with a list of no less than seventeen perversions or paraphilias that Fish had practiced throughout his life. For the moment, however, Wertham was only interested in focusing on Fish’s three “main abnormalities” and the strategies he had relied on to satisfy them:

He started his sexual career, so to say, at the age of seventeen, at the time he became a painter. Now, that profession of painter this man has used as a convenience. He worked in many different institutions. He worked in Y.M.C.A.’s, he worked in homes for the tubercular, he worked in any kind of home where there were children, where he thought he could get children. In all these places, he made his headquarters the basement or the cellar. And he had the habit of wearing a painter’s overalls over his nude body, which gave him two advantages. First of all, he was nude in a moment. And secondly, he would be seen by his victims only in his painter’s clothes, and if they later met him on the streets or in his other clothes, they wouldn’t recognize him.

There was another benefit to the painter’s trade, too. It allowed Fish to move easily from one locality to another. His basic equipment was highly portable. All he needed to do was pack up his brushes and tarps and leave, though sometimes, Wertham explained, Fish had found it necessary to depart in such a hurry that he had simply abandoned his belongings and disappeared.

As Wertham spoke, a terrifying picture came into focus of Fish as a creature of fiendish cunning, a prowler in the darkness, emerging from his netherworld to snare his young prey. “Now this man has roamed around in basements and cellars for fifty years,” said Wertham. “There were so many innumerable instances that I can’t begin to give you how many there are. But I believe to the best of my knowledge that he has raped one hundred children. At least.”

After committing one of his outrages, Fish would promptly pick up and move, sometimes to a different neighborhood, sometimes to a different city. And sometimes, “after a particularly brutal episode,” to a different state. Fish had been “in no less than twenty-three states, from New York to Montana,” said Wertham. “And in every state he has had something to do with children.”

Here Wertham glanced over at Justice Close. “The story becomes a little more repugnant as we go along.” This remark turned out to be a significant understatement.

Though many details of Fish’s past remained hazy, Wertham had learned that, in his teens, Fish “had been a homosexual prostitute, a boy who stood around on corners and went with other men for money.” As a young man in his twenties, he had also made a trip overseas to Brussels, where he had visited brothels specializing in flagellation and other sadomasochistic acts. There, Fish had “practiced oral perversions on the rectums of men and women. He was also extremely interested in urine.” After his return to America, Fish began to “do all of these things” to his child victims.

“The terrible thing of it all,” Wertham continued, “is that his interest was not so much to have sexual relations with these children as to inflict pain on them.”

Wertham explained Fish’s method. He would entice his little victims into a basement with small bribes of candy or pocket change. Once there, he would bind them, rape them, and beat them—or worse. Sometimes he would gag them, “although he preferred not to gag them, circumstances permitting, for he liked to hear their cries.”

Many of his victims, Wertham explained, “came from poorer classes. He told me he selected colored children, especially because the authorities didn’t pay much attention when they were hurt or missing.”

The doctor went on to describe an instance in which Fish had “kept a colored boy in a shack by the Potomac in Washington for a number of weeks. He undressed this boy, took his clothes away, and kept him as a captive. He told me that he intended to kill this boy, but somehow or other it didn’t work out.”

In another instance, Fish had taken a young boy, bound him, and whipped him violently “on both sides of his body.” Fish had eventually let this little victim go, but the boy’s genitals were bleeding so badly that Fish became frightened and fled the city.

The most appalling incident of all the atrocities that Wertham recounted that day was the so-called Kedden episode, which had taken place in 1911. At the time, Fish was forty-one and living in St. Louis.

Kedden, a handsome but slow-witted nineteen-year old who looked even younger, had “bummed his way from the South on a banana train.” There had been five black men in the boxcar along with him, and the six of them had spent the trip engaging in “all kinds of sexual activities, mostly fellatio and homosexuality.”

Fish “picked the boy up somehow” and brought him to his room. Kedden was covered with lice. Fish bought a patent hair remover and “stripped all the hair off his body, including the hair off his pubis.” Then, for a period of two to three weeks, “they carried on all kinds of mutual sadistic and masochistic activities.”

“He had this boy whip him and he played all sorts of games—one was the father and one was the child, one was the teacher and one was the child. He forced the boy to urinate on him.” Fish drank the boy’s urine and ate his feces, then “forced the other one to eat and drink these things, too.”

Their games began to grow more frenzied. At one point, Fish “cut the boy’s buttocks with a razor blade and attempted to drink the blood.” Eventually, Fish tied the boy up, stimulated him to erection, and began to cut off his penis with a pair of scissors. Before he could finish the job, however, he experienced a sudden change of heart. “The boy had such an agonized look that Fish couldn’t stand it,” Wertham explained. Binding the bleeding wound, Fish left a ten dollar bill on the bed for the mutilated boy and ran away to another city.