ONE of the world’s most depraved serial killers dubbed “The Werewolf” bragged that he had abused or eaten a child “in every US state”.
Albert Fish claimed to have raped, murdered, and mutilated more than 100 children before he was executed by electric chair on January 16, 1936, aged 65.
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Fish was a suspect in at least ten murders and confessed to stabbing at least two other people – yet a lack of evidence meant it was not known whether his statements were truthful.
To date, there are only three confirmed killings.
Also known as the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Moon Maniac, and The Boogey Man, Fish was a child molester and cannibal.
The depraved killer would often eat his victims after torturing them – and would target young children, with his three confirmed killings aged four, nine and ten.
Read more on serial killers
Ten-year-old Grace Budd became his most notorious case – and the one which would see him apprehended in 1934.
After being found guilty of kidnapping and murdering the young girl, Fish was convicted and executed by electric chair the following month on January 16, 1936.
It brought an end to more than 40 years of cold-blooded murders.
Fish was was born in Washington, D.C. in 1870 to Randall Fish and Ellen Francis Howell – who had an age difference of 43 years.
His father was aged 75 at the time of his birth, his mother 32, and Fish was the youngest of four siblings.
But his family had a history of mental health issues.
When Fish’s father died when he was just five-years-old, his widowed mother couldn’t care for her four children alone and left them with a state orphanage.
There, at St John’s Home for Boys in Brooklyn, New York, he was regularly beaten, while kids were even encouraged to hurt each other.
It was in this cruel establishment that Albert discovered his love for pain, which would shape his future wicked crimes.
“I was there ’til I was nearly nine, and that’s where I got started wrong,” Fish later recalled. “We were unmercifully whipped. I saw boys doing many things they should not have done.”
He came to enjoy the punishments and associate them with pleasure, which later turned into sexual gratification.
By the time his mother brought him home from the orphanage in 1880, he had already been deeply damaged.
Two years later he began an unhealthy relationship with an older teenage boy who introduced him the sexual practices of consuming human waste, known as urolagnia and coprophagia.
Fish also started visiting public baths where he would watch other people undress, including young boys, and write obscene letters to women.
He would even prostitute himself, molesting young boys after luring them from their homes.
Violent tendencies
But in a bizarre turn of events, Fish would marry a woman in 1898 and father their six children.
Despite his sexually violent tendencies, he would never hurt his own.
In 1910, while working as a house painter in Delaware, Fish met Thomas Kedden and the pair began a sadomasochistic relationship.
Just ten days after their initial meeting, however, Fish lured Kedden to an abandoned farmhouse – locking him inside and torturing him for two weeks.
Fish mutilated Kedden’s body, even cutting off half his penis, before disappearing.
“I shall never forget his scream, or the look he gave me,” he later recalled.
Fish’s severe mental illness would catch up with him, though, leading his wife to leave him for another man in 1917.
He became more obsessed with his own self harm, pressing more needles into his groin and stuffing wool covered in lighter fluid up his anus – before setting it on fire.
Eventually, Fish displayed his vile behaviours in front of his children.
He would teach them strange and sadomasochist games, before inviting his kids to share raw meat-based meals with him.
By 1919, Fish began searching for vulnerable children, mainly intellectually disabled orphans and homeless black youths- one’s he assumed wouldn’t be missed.
He would look out for advertisements in local papers put out by young men looking for work or families looking for someone to perform housework.
This was how he found his most profile victim – Grace Budd.
But Fish had actually been interested in her older brother, who was looking for work on a farm or in the country, and had planned on “hiring” him in order to torture him at his country house.
When Fish turned up at the family house to make his offer to Edward Budd, his interest soon shifted to the young girl standing behind her parents.
Grace became the focal point of a new plan and Fish invited her to a pretend birthday party for his niece.
After convincing Delia and Albert Budd to let him take their daughter to the party, Grace would never be seen again.
‘Choked her to death’
In a written letter to her parents, Albert described in shocking detail the series of events that followed.
The twisted murderer confessed that, while Grace picked wildflowers in the yard, he hid in an upstairs bedroom.
There, he stripped naked so as not to get blood on his clothes.
He then called Grace up who screamed at the sight of him, before grabbing her to stop her fleeing.
“First, I stripped her naked,” his gruesome letter read. “How she did kick, bite, and scratch.
“I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take the meat to my rooms, cook, and eat it … It took me 9 days to eat her entire body.”
Before that letter was received, however, another child vanished.
This time, it was a four-year-old boy named Billy Gaffney.
His friend who he had been playing with, also called Billy, told police that the “boogey man” had taken him – but his claim was quickly brushed aside.
That was until their search all over the neighbourhood produced no clues, leading them to finally realise Billy had been abducted.
Like Grace, he was never seen again.
Shortly after, another boy vanished – eight year-old Francis McDonnell.
Francis had been playing on the porch with his mum when a grey-haired, frail, old man walked past them, muttering to himself.
Later that day, when Francis was playing in the park, his friends saw him walk off into the woods with a man matching the same description.
Francis would be found under some branches in the woods, badly beaten and strangled with his suspenders.
The letter received by the Budd family was soon investigated by the police who found it to contain an emblem of the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association (NYPCBA).
Upon further investigation, police found that the paper had been left behind by a janitor from the company at a rooming house he’d been staying at.
It turns out that Fish was renting a place at the same rooming house.
When his landlady told the police he’d be heading to the post office to pick up a letter, they were able to intercept him.
‘Drank his blood’
To the surprise of the police, Fish instantly confessed to everything, giving precise details of what he’d done to his victims.
Only three children – Grace, Billy and Francis – could be concretely proven to be his victims.
Speaking on the kidnapping and murder of Billy, Fish said: “I took tools, a good heavy cat-of-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six strips about 8 inches long.
“I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears — nose — slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes.
“He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood.”
Fish also admitted that he was ready to dismember the body of Francis until he thought he heard someone approaching, so fled the scene.
In trial, the defence argued that he was legally insane, using many descriptions and testimonies to prove to the jury that he was mentally ill.
However, the jury was having none of it and considered Fish to be a “psychopathic personality without a psychosis”.
Fish was found guilty after ten days of trial and would be executed by electrocution the following year.
Prior to his death, Fish was permitted to write a series of notes regarding his crimes to help reporters cover the gruesome case in more detail.
Fish’s attorney, Jack Dempsey, refused to share his client’s notes, determining that what Fish 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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