 - MANHATTAN, New York: He looked like every kid's favorite grandfather -- but behind the gentle facade of the silver hair and mustache and watery-blue eyes lurked a bloodlusting monster who preyed on small children.
- Crime historians are still arguing over
- exactly how many kids fell prey to Albert Howard Fish, certainly one of the most perverted sex killers in the annals of U.S. crime history. What's pretty certain is that there were dozens of murder victims, and hundreds of molested children in just a quarter of a century.
- Vampirism, cannibalism, dismemberment -- every sado-
- masochistic perversion known to man -- were all part of the murderous repertoire of Albert Fish who, prematurely decrepit at age sixty-five, was and still is one of the oldest men ever put to death in the electric chair.
- Polite, well-mannered, and devoutly religious, Fish was
- the unlikeliest of predators. That's why he had no difficulty persuading the parents of ten-year-old Grace Budd to let the child accompany him to a birthday party on Sunday, June 3, 1928. They had no idea they had entrusted their child to a monster.
- The kidnapping of Grace Budd is as good a place to
- start as any in recounting the horrible saga of Albert Fish. Her abduction led to a manhunt which lasted six years.Police had given up hope of ever solving her mysterious disappearance when a slender clue -- gleaned from a mean-spirited anonymous letter written to the missing girl's parents -- led dogged detectives to Fish, his arrest, and his gruesome life story of murder and perversion.
- Grace Budd's disappearance evoked a widespread hue
- and cry in New York City that fall, particularly when the detectives and family went to the media with their story. Little Grace's likeness was emblazoned over all the front pages and garnered hundreds of tips and peices of advice from an angry public. During the six years the police were chasing leads that went nowhere, a grey-haired old man was arrested in New York City and charged with sending obscene materials, namely letters, through the mail.
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Madness...
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The letters, sent to a famous Hollywood producer, offered large sums of money to put Fish in touch with women prepared to indulge in sadomasochistic orgies with Fish. He was comitted to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital for a ten-day observation. The withered and frail-looking obscene letter writer claimed that, although his friends knew him as Albert, his real name was Hamilton Fish, and he was a relative of the famous New York family of the same name. He was to tell the same story when he was again arrested four years later for the atrocious Grace Budd murder -- and there's never been any reason to doubt that he hailed from prestigious stock.
Fish, in fact, stayed in Bellevue for nearly thirty days that winter of 1930. He was polite, cooperative, and doctors judged him sane. They did diagnose him as having sexual problems, but they attributed that to dementia associated with advancing years. He was judged harmless, and released from Bellevue on probation in the custody of his daughter Anna.
On November 11, 1934 -- six years afterthe kidnapping -- out of the blue Mrs. Budd recieved an unsigned and otherwise anonymous letter. The letter claimed to be written by a friend of someone called Captain John Davis.
Will King immediately dug out "Mr. Howard's" original telegram blank. There was no doubt about it. The handwriting was the same. "Howard" and this latter day letter writer were one and the same.
 Fish's East 52d Street address proved to be a flophhouse. But the investigators struck gold. The landlady, Mrs. Frieda Schneider, said, yes, indeed, there was a man living there who answered Frank Howard's description. In fact he was still there -- Mr. Albert Fish, living in room number seven.
Carefully, Detective King checked the signature in the flophouse, register --A.H. Smith. It was the same handwriting. He had found his man!
When the detective confronted him was a harmless-looking, white-haired old man with a scraggly gray mustache and watery-blue eyes slurping a cup of tea.
Detective King identified himself; Fish did not attempt to deny his own identity, then the officer asked Fish if he would accompany him to police headquarters for questioning.
Then Will King got the shock of his life. Wihout warning, this seemingly harmless old creature reached into his pocket and lunged at King, brandishing a vicious razor blade.
At the police station, Fish seemed more resigned to his arrest and disclosure as the kidnapper-killer of Grace Budd. The 'blood thirst' had come over him that summer of 1928, and it was necessary for him to select a victim.
"Yes," he said, "he was the stranger who called on the Budds that summer"...although he did say that he meant his victim to be Edward Budd, the older son who had advertised for a job.
But when he got to the house and saw the sizeof stocky teenager Edward, he abandoned his desire for a male sacrifice and turned his sights on the more vunerable Grace.
He freely confessed to abducting innocent Grace, taking her by train to a dilapidated building called Wisteria Cottage in a place called Wortington Woods, in Westchester County, on the outskirts of New York City.
Fish's memory of little Grace Budd's last day on earth was remarkably clear after six years. He remembered that he bought a round-trip ticket for himself - and a one way ticket for Grace. Fish particularly relished recounting how he had cut off his victim's head, holding her over a five-gallon paint drum so as not to lose as much as a drop of her precious, warm blood.
 His eyes rolled in his head as he told how he vampirishly drank his young victim's blood -- gulping down so much that he even made himself sick! His interrogators were incredulous. They could hardly believe that horror spouting from the mouth of this apparently refined old man.
And Fish couldn't stop confessing. He ended up confessing to four hundred child murders, committed between 1910. when he was forty years old, and 1934. Much of what he told police later turned out to be false or exaggerated, but he still provided enough details of his gory past to chill the hardened investigators.
Digging out police dossiers on Fish, investigators weren't really surprised to find out he had a long criminal record going back to 1903, when he'd served sixteen months in Sing Sing on a grand larceny charge.
But what really chilled and frustrated investigators was the fact that Fish had been arrested in the New York area SIX times since the disappearance of Grace Budd on charges ranging from petit larceny, to vagrancy, to sending obscene literature through the post.
Fish was sentanced to die in the electric chair. Ironically, a snap poll of jurors after the trial revealed that the majority of jurors in fact agreed with attorney Dempsey and Dr. Wertham that Fish was indeed a stark, raving lunatic. But because his crimes were so downright heinous, they felt it only right that he should be electrocuted anyway. Albert Fish, monster extraordinary, died like an ordinary man, with no fanfare, with no unnatural occurances at all.
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