Deranged (19 page)

Back inside the house, he picked up the upper and lower halves of Grace’s body and propped them in a corner of the room beside the closet. Then he swung open the closet door so that the body was hidden from view.

By the time he was finished, his hands were coated with blood. There was no water in the house, so he walked back outside and spent some time scrubbing himself clean with fistfuls of grass. Then he returned to the second-story bedroom and got dressed. He carefully rewrapped his tools in the canvas tarp and placed the bundle behind the closet door, next to the dismembered corpse.

It was 4:10 P.M. when he left the house and headed back down Mountain Road toward the railroad station—just slightly more than an hour since he and Grace Budd had arrived at Wisteria Cottage. Under his arm, Fish carried a small newspaper-wrapped bundle.

But this was a detail that he neglected to mention to Detective King.

King paused to refill his fountain pen, then flipped to a fresh page of his notebook. “What time was it when you arrived at your home?” he asked.

“About 6:30.”

“And then what did you do?”

“I returned about four days later. I took the body and the legs out from behind the door. The legs were so stiff, they were as stiff as a board. I threw them out the window onto the lawn and carried the torso out, picking up the legs as I passed over the lawn, and went to the stone wall in back of the house. I laid the body and the legs as they would be in life behind this stone wall. I then went to the outhouse and got the head. It was all stiff, the hair was all clotted. I brought the head up and placed the head with the body just as it would be in life, the head, the torso, and the legs”

“Did you bury it?” asked King.

“No, I left it on top of the ground. Then I went back into the house, took the tools and threw them over the wall.”

“Have you been there since?”

“Yes, I have been up there four or five times with my son.”

“Have you seen the body?”

Fish shook his head. “No. I didn’t go to see the body.”

By now, it was nearly 2:45 in the afternoon. King had been questioning Fish for nearly an hour. There was only one more question he wanted to ask. What had made the old man do it?

Fish scratched one end of his moustache and looked thoughtful. “You know,” he replied after a moment. “I never could account for it”

21

He that walketh upright walketh surely; but he that perverteth his ways shall be known. PROVERBS 10:9

By that time, Captain Stein had returned from lunch and was waiting outside his office, conferring with several of his men, who had heard the news of Fish’s arrest. At a few minutes before three, King emerged from the office and, after receiving the congratulations of his colleagues, filled them in on the details of the old man’s confession.

Summoning a stenographer, Stein, King, and three other members of the Missing Persons Bureau—Lieutenant Scanlon, Sergeant Hammill, and Detective Von Weisenstein—entered the captain’s office, where Fish sat fiddling with his moustache. He looked up at the officers and smiled pleasantly.

Stein introduced himself and asked if Fish was willing to make an official statement regarding Grace Budd’s disappearance.

“Positively,” said Fish.

“Anything you say can be used against you. Do you realize that?” said Stein.

“Yes.”

Then, while the stenographer—Detective Thomas F. Murphy of the Main Office Division—wrote out a short-hand transcription, Stein commenced his interrogation. The time was 3:15 P.M.

Stein began by eliciting some basic information—Fish’s age, place of birth, current address, and occupa tion. In response to the last question, Fish identified himself as a “painter” (an answer which, as the Fish case entered the folklore of crime, underwent significant distortions, until the old housepainter was transformed, in certain accounts, into “a failed cubist artist”).

Fish explained that he had been married since 1898, though he and his wife had not lived together for many years. He was the father of six children, ranging in age from twenty-one to thirty-five, and was particularly close to his two married daughters, Mrs. Anna Collins and Mrs. Gertrude DeMarco, both housewives in Astoria, Queens. Neither woman was well-to-do—indeed their families were both on Home Relief. Still, Fish was always welcome in their households and, from time to time during the past several years, had lived with each. The rest of the time, he had resided in various boarding houses, sometimes renting a room by himself, at other times, sharing it with one or another of his sons.

Stein then turned to the details of the crime itself. Coolly and concisely, Fish repeated the story he had told Detective King only a short while before, beginning with his discovery of Edward Budd’s classified ad in the World and concluding with his disposal of the dismembered sections of Grace Budd’s corpse behind the stone wall bounding Wisteria Cottage.

“After the child was killed,” Stein asked, “did you tell anyone about this occurrence”

Fish shook his head. “Not a living soul. My own children had no idea. They read about the case in the paper like everyone else.”

At that point, Stein opened the file on the Budd case and removed the anonymous letter Fish had mailed to Mrs. Budd. Stein, wanting a sample of Fish’s handwriting, asked him to sign his full name on the back of the letter, and the old man complied without hesitation.

“What was your purpose in writing this letter?” Stein wanted to know.

The old man shrugged his rounded shoulders. ’“I don’t know. Just reading some books on things such as that. I just had a mania for writing.”

“In substance, do you remember what you wrote in that letter?”

“That there was a famine in China and that human bodies had been consumed for food purposes,” Fish answer matter-of-factly. There was a satchel in his room, he explained, containing various newspaper clippings that he liked to save. One of them dealt with some “fellows who used human bodies for food after the war was over.” If the police went up to his room, they would find that clipping in the satchel.

Captain Stein whispered something to one of his men, who immediately stepped out of the office to dispatch a couple of detectives to Fish’s current address, 55 East 128th Street. Then Stein turned back to Fish.

Showing him the N.Y.P.C.B.A. envelope that the Budd letter had been mailed in, Stein asked Fish where he had obtained it. The old man replied that he had found a “dozen or more” of them on a shelf in his room at Frieda Schneider’s boarding house. “I had some paper but just run short of envelopes,” Fish explained. “I wouldn’t have known there was any there, only I was sitting in a chair one night and there was a roach on the wall, and I got up on the chair to kill the roach and saw the envelopes.”

At 3:45 A.M., a half-hour after it began, the interrogation was over. Captain Stein, like the others, was struck by Fish’s complete lack of emotion. Judging strictly by his tone, anyone would have thought that he had done nothing worse than bring Gracie home late from the party instead of leading her to a ghastly death in the silence of Old Wisteria.

Perhaps the most sobering detail of all, however—at least from the police’s point of view—was the one about the roach. For six years, Grace Budd’s abductor had been the object of one of the most intensive manhunts in New York City history. The full resources of the Missing Persons Bureau had been applied to the pursuit. Detective King alone had devoted countless hours to the case. Ultimately, of course, Fish had been apprehended. But as it turned out, his capture had as much to do with pure chance as with the skill and dedication of the police.

In a very real sense, a cockroach had led to the capture of Albert Fish.

22

That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

It was nearly five P.M. when a pair of squad cars pulled away from police headquarters and headed north in the thickening darkness toward Westchester County. In addition to the driver, the lead car carried two members of the Missing Persons Bureau, Sergeants Thomas J. Hammill and Hugh Sheridan. Bureau Chief John Stein occupied the front passenger seat of the second car. Behind him, flanked by Detective King and Deputy Chief Inspector John Ryan, sat Albert Fish.

It took over an hour for the cars to reach White Plains, where they switched positions at a stoplight on Central Avenue. Then, with Fish providing directions, they proceeded to the Saw Mill River Road, following it until they reached the village of Irvington in the Westchester town of Greenburgh.

Turning right at Mountain Road, they ascended the steep, winding hillside and pulled up at Frank Cudney’s house, a few hundred yards east of Wisteria Cottage. While the others waited in the cars, King went up to the front door, knocked, and after identifying himself to the owner, disappeared inside. A few moments later, King emerged again accompanied by Cudney, who walked around to the side of his house where he fetched a shovel and pick from his tool shed. Meanwhile, Sergeant Hammill had unlocked the trunk of his car and removed an electric emergency lamp—a portable device resembling an automobile headlight attached to a large battery.

With Hammill’s beam lighting the way in the blackness of the country night, the party of men, Cudney included, marched up the road to Wisteria Cottage.

“Over here,” said Fish, leading the others up the little rise toward the yard. Then, while Hammill trained his light on the frozen ground, Fish pointed out the grim landmarks of his crime.

Here was the place where he had left Gracie picking wildflowers. Here was the spot where he had found the old five-gallon paint can. Back there, he said pointing, was the tumbledown outhouse where he had stashed the girl’s shoes and (until he had returned to move it to a different location) concealed her blood-drenched head beneath some old newspapers.

It was nearing seven by now, fully dark and very cold. The old man’s breath frosted as he spoke, and in the dead silence of the remote, rural neighborhood, his voice—as whispery as the rustle of dry leaves—carried clearly.

Fish led the men along the wraparound porch to the front entrance, then up the stairs to the second-story bedroom, where the actual atrocity had taken place. There, he continued with his grim guided tour, moving around the room as he re-created the murder in all its details.

He pointed to the spot where he had unwrapped his bundle and neatly laid out his cleaver, saw, and knife. He stood beside the window, just as he had six years earlier when he had called out to Gracie, telling her to come upstairs. He assumed the position he had taken behind the bedroom door as he waited, naked, for the little girl to reach the landing. He indicated the dark corner where he had stowed her butchered body before deciding to dispose of it outside.

The house was without electricity, and as Fish moved about the abandoned room, reenacting the crime, Hammill kept his emergency beam fixed on him like a theatrical spotlight. In the bright yellow glare, the little man’s shadow loomed behind him, sliding along the decaying walls.

It took only a few minutes for Fish to complete the macabre performance. Then it was time to go back outside. Time to show the police the final resting place of Grace Budd’s dismembered—and crudely reassembled—corpse.

Fish led the others up the hill behind the house, where an old stone wall, about three feet high, marked off the eastern boundary line of the property. In the darkness, Fish couldn’t say precisely where he’d deposited the remains, though he indicated a general area that seemed about the right distance from the house.

Carrying the pick and shovel supplied by Frank Cudney, King and Stein stepped over the wall along with Sergeant Hammill, who kept his light directed downward while his colleagues began turning over the top layer of soil with their tools.

A few minutes later, Stein scraped up a faded piece of fabric. Examining it in the light, he saw that it was an old scrap of canvas, badly weatherworn. Even so, it was easy to tell that at one point it had been striped.

Fish, meanwhile, had been making his way back down along the wall, squinting in the darkness for any recognizable landmarks. King, Stein and Hammill were still inspecting the tattered piece of fabric, when Fish’s voice came drifting up to them. “Come down further,” he was calling. “You’re too far uphill.”