Meet Albert Fish, one of the most notorious evil ever born whose acts are so frightening that they might send chills down your spine. Maybe you haven’t heard about him, but his story is very frightening. He’s called by different names like ‘Brooklyn Vampire,’ ‘The Moon Maniac,’ and ‘The Grey Man.’ He said he hurt about 100 people, but he was only caught for one crime and was killed by the electric chair.
In 1928, 65-year-old Albert was executed in New York’s Sing Sing prison for brutally killing a 10-year-old girl named Grace Budd. He had tricked Grace’s family into trusting him, pretending to be their friend. Then he took Grace away, saying they were going to a birthday party. Grace’s parents suffered for six years, feeling terrible and unsure about what happened to their daughter. But then, her mother, Delia Flanagan Budd, got a letter from someone who didn’t say who they were.
The letter said, “Dear Mrs. Budd… On Sunday, June 3 — 1928 I called on you at 406 W. 15 St. Brought you pot cheese — strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her..”
Hamilton Howard “Albert” Fish was born on May 19, 1870. He was the youngest in his family, but his mother, Ellen, left him at an orphanage after his father died in 1875. This information comes from Harold Schechter’s book called Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer. When Albert was 5 years old, he started to feel very eager to hurt others while he was at the Saint John’s Orphanage in Washington D.C.
Albert didn’t spend all his childhood in the orphanage. His mother took him back when he was 10 years old. But the time he spent in the orphanage affected him a lot. It made him think that feeling pain was somehow good. So, he started hurting himself. A doctor named Fredric Wertham studied him. There’s a famous X-ray picture of Albert’s pelvis and groin area in the Library of Congress. In the X-ray, you can see 27 needles that Albert had put inside himself.
Afterward, he moved to New York City. People think this is where he started his criminal career. He began by hurting and touching young boys in a bad way. Then, he started killing people. We don’t know who his first victim was or how many people he killed. He also stole things and got caught in 1903.
Over ten years ago, Albert married Anna Mary Hoffman at the age of 20, as coordinated by his mother. They had six children. In 1910, Albert met Thomas Kedden while painting houses in Delaware. They started a relationship where they did things involving pain and control, but it’s not clear if Kedden agreed to all of it.
Later, Albert suggested that Kedden might not have been very smart, but it’s hard to tell what’s true in his stories. Just 10 days after they met, Albert tricked Kedden into going to an old farmhouse, saying they were meeting for something. But when Kedden got there, Albert locked him inside.
For two weeks, Albert tortured Kedden a lot. He mutilated Kedden’s body and cut off half of his private part. Then, he suddenly disappeared. In his confession, Albert explained that he did not kill Kedden for fear of unwanted attention, so he covered the wound with peroxide and a handkerchief and left Kedden $10.
By 1917, Albert couldn’t hide that he was very sick in his mind. His wife left him for someone else. He started hurting himself more. He put more needles into his private parts and put wool covered in fire liquid into his bottom and set it on fire.
Albert started liking to eat raw meat and often made it for dinner. He started eating human flesh too. He chose victims whom he thought nobody would miss. Mostly, he targeted mentally disabled and African-American children, whom he tortured with his tools. He became completely crazy. He thought God wanted him to torture and cut up his victims with meat cleavers and handsaws. Some kids managed to get away, but many didn’t.
In 1928, Albert replied to an advertisement placed by a young man named Edward Budd, who was looking for a job in the countryside. He visited Budd’s family in Manhattan, pretending to be a farmer. He initially planned to lure Edward away and kill him. But when he met Edward’s little sister, Grace Budd, he changed his mind.
Grace was only 10 years old. Albert who was 58 years old then, told the Budd family that he wanted to take Grace to his niece’s birthday party, and they agreed. On May 28, 1928, He took Grace away, and she was never seen again.
Albert chose Wisteria Cottage, an empty house, before picking his next victim, Grace Budds. This happened in 1928, in a place called East Irvington, in Westchester County, upstate New York.
In pictures of the crime scene, the house looks like it’s surrounded by woods. Today, the house is at 379 Mountain Rd in Irvington, a wealthy village in the town of Greenburgh, just a 45-minute drive north of New York City. The house looks different now, covered in modern siding and still surrounded by some woods. It was put up for sale this year for $1 million.
When real estate agents didn’t want to talk about the house’s history, Patrick Raftery, a librarian at the Westchester County Historical Society, confirmed its dark past. The distinctive chimneys, ornate eaves, and windows of the spruced-up modern dwelling match the house seen in the background as detectives swarm the property, digging for Grace Budd’s bones and those of Albert Fish’s other victims.
In 1934, the Budd family received an anonymous letter with many spelling mistakes. The letter described a man’s descent into madness and cannibalism. The writer talked about a sailor he knew who went to China. There, the sailor claimed he saw people eating children to survive during a famine. The sailor got so used to eating young flesh that when he came back to New York, he kidnapped two children, killed them, and cooked them.
Albert wrote a letter about a man named Capt John Davis who may have been involved in Grace Budd’s murder. After he was caught by the police, Albert was linked to the killings of Francis McDonnell and Billy Gaffney.
A man saw 8-year-old Francis following an old man into the woods in July 1924. Francis was later found hanging from a tree in Staten Island. He was beaten up badly and hurt. Albert said he didn’t do it, but a neighbor said they saw him around the time when McDonnell disappeared. This was reported by the New York Times in December 1934.
Francis’ mother is said to have named Albert “The Gray Man.” Anna McDonnell, when talking to the police, described the attacker like this: “He came walking down the street, talking to himself and doing strange things with his hands… I saw his thick grey hair and his droopy grey mustache. Everything about him seemed faded and grey,” according to the Toronto Sun.
Albert was later identified as the man seen with missing 4-year-old Billy Gaffney, who had disappeared from his Brooklyn home in February 1927. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Dodd told the New York Daily News in March 1927 that he spoke with Billy’s neighbors, who reported seeing the child moments before he was taken.
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“Their most remarkable disclosure was that Billy Gaffney vanished within three minutes. Mrs. Cordovez saw him playing in the fourth floor of the building where he lived at 5:30 p.m.,” Dodd told the newspaper. “Not more than three minutes later, Beaton looked there and the child was gone.”
At this time, mothers were afraid for their children as young boys were being taken from their homes, only to be found dead days later. “He was really the living incarnation of every parent’s worst nightmare and every child’s worst nightmare. What the Boogeyman is,” Schechter told WTOP News.
Of course, Albert wasn’t responsible for every disappearance. Amid the search for Billy, a 5-year-old boy was nearly kidnapped by Louis Sandman, who was then attacked by a mob of angry mothers, the New York Daily News reported in a separate March 1927 article.
“The hunt for little Billy Gaffney took new life yesterday as a mob of screaming Brooklyn mothers, for the second time in five days, sought to beat down a suspected kidnapper. Less than a mile from the Gaffney home at 138 Warren St., the women clawed and spat at Louis Sandman, 42, caught in the act of dragging 5-year-old Frank Malerba into a dim hallway,” the newspaper recalled.
Billy’s body was never found, but Albert was identified as a suspect by a streetcar motorman who claimed to have seen an older man forcing the boy into a trolley the night the 4-year-old had disappeared, according to a December 1934 article by the Asbury Park Press.
The jury thought Albert might be insane because of his strange behavior and hearing things, but they decided he was sane and guilty. One juror said they chose this because they thought he should be punished by death. In January 1936, Albert was killed in an electric chair at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. Before his execution, Albert Fish’s attorney Jack Dempsey refused to share his client’s notes. It only took one glance at them to determine that what Albert had described was too macabre for public consumption.
“I will never show it to anyone,” he said. “It was the most filthy string of obscenities that I have ever read.”
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