Deranged (29 page)

As he proceeded toward the steep metal staircase that descended into the sub-basement where the furnace was located, he noticed an erratic trail of red splotches that led from the Warwick Avenue entranceway across the basement floor, through the Ping-Pong room and toward the sub-basement.

Later, Nancy Jean’s little rubber ball would be found in the Ping-Pong room, where it had rolled into a corner.

As soon as Hutchinson stepped inside the sub-basement, he saw a puddle of blood on the cement floor directly beneath the white hot firebox of the furnace. He turned and ran to call the police. As he rushed for the stairway, he thought he glimpsed the shadowy figure of a thickset young man crouched in a dark corner of the basement.

A short time later, Detective Frank Springer arrived. The two men returned to the sub-basement. Springer opened the furnace door. Inside were the charred remains of a young child.

Springer immediately telephoned police headquarters, and a patrol wagon, carrying two more detectives and a patrolman, was dispatched to the scene. As the wagon neared the apartment house, however, it collided with an automobile. The three police officers were slightly injured. It took only a few minutes for an ambulance to arrive from Mount Vernon Hospital. As the attendants were seeing to the injured officers, a powerfully built young man in blood-spattered clothing stumbled up to the ambulance and clambered inside, insisting that he was badly hurt. He was driven to the hospital along with the officers. When physicians examined him, however, they discovered that he had sustained no injuries at all. At that point, the doctors couldn’t say where all the blood on his clothing had come from. But it certainly wasn’t his own.

The young man—Lawrence Clinton Stone—was taken to police headquarters for questioning. That night, he confessed to the murder of Nancy Jean Costigan, though the story he stuck to at first was that the little girl’s death had been accidental. According to Stone, he had taken the child down into the basement to play catch with her. At one point, he had carelessly tossed the small rubber ball too hard and hit her on the brow. The child “toppled to the floor,” struck her head on the cement, and began bleeding from her mouth. Stone took her limp body into his arms, began carrying her upstairs and then—believing that she was dead—panicked and decided to dispose of her body in the furnace.

Eventually, Stone admitted that he had deliberately strangled the child. Investigators later ascertained that Stone had sexually assaulted the girl before he killed her, and that she had probably still been alive when he threw her into the furnace.

Shut away in Eastview until his trial began, Stone passed his days pacing around his cell and cursing incessantly. Several months later, Fish had arrived and was placed in the adjoining cell. His delicate sensibilities offended by his neighbor’s profane ravings, Fish wrote a letter of complaint to Warden Casey, requesting that Stone be moved to a different cell. “The cell I am in now is nice and light but I can’t stand Stone. I can’t read my Bible with a mad man raving—cursing—snarling. Can’t you put him down at the other end in # 1?”

Fish’s plea was ignored and Stone remained where he was. The old man was compelled to pursue his religious activities as best he could. It was hard for him, though, to practice his singular form of worship under the constraining circumstances of prison life.

Every Sunday morning, for example, a Mass was held for the Catholic prisoners. During one of these occasions, several weeks before the start of Fish’s trial, the ceremony was in progress when a guard heard strange grunting noises coming from the old man’s cell. The guard walked over to investigate. There stood Fish, pants pulled down around his ankles, masturbating furiously to the rhythm of the prayers. Hastily unlocking the cell door, the guard stepped inside and forced him to stop.

At the time, Albert Fish was just three months shy of his sixty-fifth birthday.

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But the thing which in eminent instances signalizes so exceptional a nature is this: Though the man’s even temper and discreet bearing would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not the less in heart he would seem to riot in complete exemption from that law…. That is to say: Toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort…. HERMAN MELVILLE, Billy Budd

With Fish’s trial date set for March 12, James Dempsey had to move fast, and one of his first steps was to secure the services of two psychiatrists of his own. The men he engaged were an impressive pair. Smith Ely Jelliffe was one of the country’s most distinguished neurologists. A tireless champion of Freud’s revolutionary ideas, Jelliffe was a pioneering figure in the history of American psychoanalysis (though Freud himself had a somewhat disparaging view of him, as he did of the United States in general). Jelliffe had already served as a psychiatric expert in a number of sensational cases, including the trial of millionaire playboy Harry K. Thaw. (In June, 1906, Thaw shot and killed architect Stanford White on the roof of Madison Square Garden, a building that White himself had designed. Thaw committed the crime after discovering that his wife, former showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, had been White’s mistress. He was declared criminally insane and institutionalized for nine years.)

The second psychiatrist Dempsey retained was Dr. Frederic Wertham. Born in Nuremberg in 1895, Wertham was educated in Germany, London, and Vienna (where he had a brief but memorable encounter with Freud). Emigrating to the United States in 1922, he joined the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins, authored a standard textbook on neuropathology called The Brain as an Organ, and began a long and at times controversial career that would make him one of the best-known psychiatrists of his day.

Among Wertham’s proudest achievements was the establishment of the LaFargue Clinic in Harlem. Created with the support of such prominent figures as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Paul Robeson, the clinic offered psychological counseling to the disadvantaged for the nominal fee of twenty-five-cents per visit.

A few years after the clinic was established, in the early 1950s, Wertham gained widespread renown (and undying notoriety in certain circles) for spearheading a national campaign against comic books, which he saw as a major cause of juvenile delinquency. His bestselling 1954 diatribe, Seduction of the Innocent, led to a Congressional investigation of the comic-book industry and the creation of the Comics Code Authority, a strict self-regulatory agency that remains in force to this day.

Comic-book devotees still regard Wertham as a sort of boogey man and lump him together with more recent, right-wing proponents of media censorship. In fact, Wertham was a political liberal and humanitarian, whose anticomics crusade was only one manifestation of a lifelong obsession with the social roots of violence.

At the time that Dempsey approached him, in midFebruary, 1934, Wertham had been senior psychiatrist at Bellevue for two years, as well as the director of the psychiatric clinic for the Court of General Sessions, a pioneering program which provided a complete psychiatric evaluation of every convicted felon in New York City.

Of all the psychiatrists who interviewed Fish in the weeks leading up to the trial, Wertham came to know the old man best, partly because they spent the most time in each other’s company—more than twelve hours in all during Wertham’s three visits to Eastview (Vavasour and Lambert together had traveled to the prison only once and examined Fish for a total of three hours). Moreover, though Fish seemed indifferent to Wertham at first (“Some Doctor came … last night and asked about 1,000,000 questions,” he sneered in a letter to Anna on February 14), he warmed up to the psychiatrist when he realized that Wertham had a sincere, scientific interest in understanding the workings of Fish’s baroque psychology.

As Wertham later wrote in a published reminiscence of the case, Fish began to show “a certain desire to make himself understood and even to try to understand himself.” The old man conceded that he might be suffering from some psychological problems. “I do not think I am altogether right,” he declared at one point in their conversation.

“Do you mean to say that you are insane?” Wertham asked.

“Not exactly,” answered Fish. “I compare myself a great deal to Harry Thaw in his ways and actions and desires. I don’t understand it myself. It is up to you to find out what is wrong with me.”

Accepting Fish’s challenge, Wertham probed into every aspect of the old man’s sordid past, grotesque fantasy life, and appalling sexual history. So many of Fish’s assertions seemed incredible that, in an effort to verify them, Wertham spent hours checking the old man’s medical and psychiatric records, interviewing his family members, and studying criminological literature for comparable cases.

In the end, Wertham was forced to conclude that there were no comparable cases. Fish’s life had been one “of unparalleled perversity,” Wertham later wrote. “There was no known perversion that he did not practice and practice frequently.” Wertham determined that all these depravities had been fueled by a single, monstrous need—an unappeasable lust for pain. “I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me,” Fish told Wertham. “I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt. The desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost.”

Wertham was the first to learn another significant fact from Fish, too—a piece of information that the doctor promptly transmitted to James Dempsey, who saw it as a key to the insanity defense he was preparing. Fish told Wertham that, after decapitating Grace Budd, he had tried drinking her blood from the five-gallon paint can he had shoved under her neck. The warm blood had made him choke, however, and he had stopped drinking after three or four swallows.

Then he had taken his double-edged knife and sliced about four pounds of flesh from her breast, buttocks, and abdomen. He also took her ears and nose. He had wrapped the body parts in a piece of old newspaper and carried them back to his rooms. Simply holding the package on his lap as he rode the train back to New York put him in a state of such acute excitation that, before he had traveled very far, he experienced a spontaneous ejaculation.

Back in his rooms, Fish had cut the child’s flesh into smaller chunks and used them to make a stew, with carrots, onions and strips of bacon. He had consumed the stew over a period of nine days, drawing out his pleasure for as long as he could. Later, Fish would tell Dempsey that the child’s flesh had tasted like veal, though he had found her ears and nose too gristly to eat.

During all that time, he had remained in a state of absolute sexual arousal. He had masturbated constantly. At night he would lie in the darkness, savoring the lingering taste of the meat, and masturbate himself to sleep.

The next morning he would awaken, hungry for more.

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Perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart. EDGAR ALLAN POE, “The Black Cat”

When Fish wanted to smoke, he handed a cigarette to a guard, who lit it and then passed it back through the bars of the old man’s cell. On Monday, February 25, however—the day after Wertham’s last visit took place—Fish kept badgering the guards for matches. He wanted to light his own cigarettes, he said.

Eventually, one of the guards grew suspicious, searched Fish’s cell, and discovered a box of absorbent cotton and a bottle of alcohol. No one knew how the old man had gotten hold of these items (apparently one of his children had smuggled them into the jail). But there was no doubt about the use to which he had intended to put them. Fish had already told both Wertham and Detective King that, in addition to shoving needles inside his body, he liked to soak pieces of cotton in alcohol, cram them up his rectum, and set fire to them.

He had also told Wertham that, on a number of occasions, he had tortured children in the same manner. Sometimes, he had found it necessary to gag them, though he preferred to leave their mouths unobstructed since part of his pleasure came from hearing their screams.