Deranged (27 page)

The twenty-six-year-old Brooklyn man (who, like Meehan and Kiel, had recognized Fish’s picture in the newspapers) told police that in July, 1924, when he was sixteen, he had been sitting on a bench in Battery Park, watching the incoming ocean liners when a gaunt, gray-moustached man sat down beside him and struck up a conversation. Discovering that Eiseman had worked as a painter’s helper, the friendly old man—who described himself as a housepainter and handyman—told the boy of a job he was doing on Staten Island and asked if he would like to work as his assistant. Eiseman, recently arrived from Russia and unemployed, readily agreed, and the pair set out together on the ferry.

Arriving at St. George, Staten Island, they boarded a train and rode for half an hour. The old man then led the boy to a deserted shack. “Wait here while I get my tools,” he said, then disappeared inside the house.

Eiseman was standing outside when another man—“an elderly Negro,” in Eiseman’s words—suddenly appeared. “Listen, son, you better get out of here,” the man said. “A lot of kids have gone in there and didn’t never come out.” Alarmed by the stranger’s warning, Eiseman turned and fled back to the ferry.

The penniless boy prevailed on the conductor to let him ride back to Manhattan for free. Back home, he spilled out the story to his mother, Mrs. Rose Eiseman, who immediately contacted the Clinton Street police station. Several detectives were dispatched to the Eisemans’ Henry Street apartment. According to Eiseman, the detectives offered him one dollar if he would return to Battery Park the next day and act as a decoy. But the teenager, deeply shaken by his experience, refused.

Now, having seen Fish’s face in the papers, Eiseman was absolutely certain that the old man was the same one who had lured him to the isolated shack ten years before. “I would never forget that face,” he declared. He would never forget the man’s strange, coarse whisper, either. Indeed, said Eiseman, if the police brought him to Eastview and positioned him so that he could hear Fish speak without seeing him, he would be able to identify the old man from the sound of his voice alone.

On Sunday, December 23, while Brooklyn police were checking their records to substantiate Eiseman’s story, four more witnesses were brought to the Westchester County penitentiary to view Fish. For the first time since Fish had been arrested, he refused not only to speak to his visitors but also to so much as look at them.

The four witnesses were the wife and three daughters of Hans Kiel, the Staten Island farmer who had identified Fish as the suspicious stranger he had chased off his farm a few days before the McDonnell murder.

Informed of the women’s arrival, Fish announced that he would not allow himself to be seen by them. The McDonnells were led to the corridor directly outside his cell. Seeing them approach, Fish covered his face with a newspaper. The women withdrew, but returned about ten minutes later. This time, Fish knelt on his cot and buried his face in the blankets.

Once again, the four women pretended to depart, only to tiptoe back in another ten minutes. Fish was caught off guard. Though he hastily lowered his head between his knees, eighteen-year-old Beatrice was able to get a glimpse of his face.

It was all she needed. Fish, she declared, was the old man who had approached her ten years before and offered her five cents to accompany him into the woods—the same woods in which Francis McDonnell’s brutalized corpse had been discovered four days later.

*  *  *

Christmas Eve, 1934, was the first day since Fish’s transfer to Eastview that no one came to interview, interrogate, examine, or inspect him. He passed the day quietly, gazing through the bars of his cell at the Christmas tree that had been set up in the corridor. Late in the afternoon, he asked to see an Episcopal minister.

The next day, he joined the other inmates for a special chicken dinner, then received a visit from Reverend Reginald Mallett, rector of the Grace Church in White Plains. The two men prayed together. Afterward, Fish asked the minister to send him a pen so that he could write some letters. Informed of the old man’s request, prison officials told Reverend Mallet that a pencil would be safer. By then, they had reason to be leery of the uses to which Fish might put a pointed metal object.

On Thursday, December 27, Benjamin Eiseman’s story was verified when police at the Clinton Street station, searching through their records from 1924, located their files on his case.

That afternoon, Thomas J. Walsh, District Attorney of Richmond County, announced that Eiseman’s story, plus the testimony of Hans and Beatrice Kiel and several other Staten Island residents, had persuaded him to seek an indictment against Albert Fish for the murder of Francis McDonnell.

28

“These X-rays are unique in the history of medical science.” FREDERIC WERTHAM

Charles Lambert and James Vavasour, the two alienists engaged by the Westchester District Attorney to evaluate Fish’s sanity, had spent three hours and ten minutes examining him in his cell on the evening of December 21. According to their subsequent testimony, the old man spoke freely and frankly about the darkest secrets of his life—secrets that would, when they were divulged during Fish’s trial, make even hardened lawmen realize how little they had known about the limits of human depravity.

Among his other astonishing admissions, Fish revealed—as he had in his December 16 letter to Detective King—that, as an act of contrition for killing Grace Budd, he had purchased a pack of sewing needles, and, using a thimble, had shoved five of them up behind his testicles, so deeply that they had remained permanently embedded inside his body.

Though the claim seemed impossible to credit, authorities already had enough evidence of Fish’s manifold degeneracies to take it seriously. It was also true that the old man walked with an odd, bowlegged gait and seated himself very gingerly, as though suffering from some sort of discomfort between his legs. And so, on December 28, a week after his transfer from the Tombs to the Westchester County jail at Eastview, prison officials decided to check the old man’s story.

Fish was driven to Grasslands Hospital, where he was X-rayed by the chief roentgenologist, Dr. Roy D. Duckworth. When the X-rays were developed, Duckworth clipped them to a shadow box and examined them closely. They were like nothing he had ever seen before. Or would ever see again.

The X-rays were of Fish’s pelvic region. Scattered throughout the area of the old man’s groin and lower abdomen were a number of sharp, thin objects—long, black splinters that appeared to be floating in the bright tissue around and between his hip bones. The objects varied in length. A few were fragmented, though most were intact. It was obvious that they were needles, not only from their size and shape but also from their eye-holes, which were clearly visible in many cases.

Duckworth saw at once that the needles could not possibly have been swallowed. Their location—around the rectum and bladder, just below the tip of the spine, and in the muscles of the groin—made it clear that they had been inserted into the old man’s body from below, evidently through his perineum, the flesh between his anus and scrotum.

Duckworth’s response to the X-rays was the same as that of everyone who saw them in the days and weeks to come: he wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it. The old man had been telling the truth after all.

Or at least part of it. As it turned out, Fish hadn’t been entirely forthcoming. He had told both Detective King and the two alienists that he had punished himself by pushing five needles into his body. But Duckworth did several counts of the black objects and came up with the same figure each time.

Lodged inside the old man’s lower body were twenty-seven needles.

That same day, December 28, all of the city’s newspapers reported on the results of the alienists’ psychological examination of Fish. Vavasour and Lambert had submitted their findings to Westchester’s new District Attorney, Walter Ferris, who had announced them at a press conference the previous afternoon.

According to the two psychiatrists, although the old man suffered from some “limited abnormalities,” there was no question in their minds that Albert Howard Fish was legally sane.

PART 4

Bloodlust

29

“I trust in Almighty God and have no fear as to what the outcome will be. He has the Power to Save.” ALBERT FISH

Albert Fish’s murder trial would take place in early March, 1935, and when it did, its daily parade of horrific disclosures would make Fish a front-page fixture all over again. In the meantime, the Fish case was overshadowed by an even more sensational event—the trial of the accused Lindbergh baby killer, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a courtroom extravaganza that dominated the headlines for six solid weeks, from January 2, when jury selection began, until Hauptmann’s conviction on February 13.

Like the rest of his countrymen, Fish followed the press accounts of the Hauptmann melodrama with keen interest. Reading newspapers, in fact, was one of his principal daily pastimes, as it had been throughout his adult life. He continued to search their pages for items of interest, though he could no longer indulge in two of his favorite activities—clipping articles about sex crimes and answering classified ads from landladies and professional masseuses in the hope of establishing an obscene correspondence.

This is not to say that Fish was forced to give up his cherished letter-writing entirely. On the contrary, he was supplied with stationery and stamps and was permitted to write as many letters as he pleased, provided that he used the blunt-pointed pencil furnished by the warden. His correspondence was also restricted to family members and officials involved in his case.

During the weeks leading up to his trial, a steady stream of letters flowed from Fish’s cell. The bulk of them were addressed to his children—or at least to five of them. His namesake, Albert Jr., who had publicly denounced his “old skunk” of a father, had become anathema to Fish. Indeed, the perfidy of his oldest son—whose name, from that point forward, he refused ever to mention again, either in speech or in writing—was a recurring theme in Fish’s letters to his other offspring.

In a letter dated January 17, for example, Fish wrote to his married daughter (and favorite child), Gertrude: “What A does I don’t care, he is no son of mine … Now dear Gertie if you never do anything else for me, I want you to do this. Don’t you ever call him your brother again. Never allow him inside your home. Teach your little ones to despise him.”

Fish urged his other children, Henry, Annie, John, and Gene, to extend the same treatment to their brother. “Slam the door in his face,” he wrote to Annie.

The old man was equally vicious toward his first wife, Anna. In classic paranoid fashion, Fish blamed everyone but himself for his problems and traced the source of his troubles to the day in 1917 when his wife had run off with their boarder, a man named John Straube. (The fact that Fish’s life, from early adolescence onward, had been one long nightmare of sexual criminality and that he’d done a stretch in Sing Sing from 1903 to 1905 were only two of the many realities that the old man had trouble hanging on to.) “All I hope for,” he wrote to Gertrude, “all I want to live for, is to be able to go in court that I may tell what a bitch of a mother all of you had, the kind of wife I had.” In the same vein, he wrote to Annie: “Tell old Peg Leg, your bitch of a mother, that the day I go into court and take the stand will be a sorry one for her.”