Robert Evans and Maggie Mayfish dissect Albert Fish's horrific crimes, including the 1928 abduction of Grace Budd and his gruesome cannibalism over nine days. The hosts detail how Detective King solved the case by tracing paper from the New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association, leading to Fish's 1936 execution despite Wertham's claim he was incurably insane. They explore Fish's twisted religious delusions involving Abraham and Isaac, his self-mutilation with 29 needles, and how his family's silence enabled his unchecked violence, ultimately questioning the ethics of true crime media when relatives rationalize such atrocities. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:02
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He is not going to get away with this.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
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Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Talking Serial Killers00:04:10
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
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Hello, friends.
I am Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
Now, normally, this podcast features me and a guest who's coming in a cold talking about a horrific person in history.
And generally, I pick dictators or people who have abused power in some very large-scale way.
That's sort of our milieu.
We don't really talk about serial killers usually, but today we are talking about a serial killer named Albert Fish, who was a cannibalistic child murderer who loved lighting his own ass on fire.
Now, we're doing this for two reasons.
The first is that my guest today, Maggie Mayfish, is a relative of said person.
So let's start there.
What is the relation?
Okay, so I contacted my uncle Terry, who did our family tree.
And so I have a bunch of names here.
But basically, I'm related via his brother became our like direct family line.
So Albert Fish's brother ended up moving to Michigan, which is where the rest of that line ended up and where I was born.
Exciting.
I know.
Okay, so exciting.
Before we get any further, Maggie, you're not just a dead guy's relation.
You are a wonderfully skilled comedian.
No, I am just this dead guy's.
Gee, I mean, I'll never get out of his shadow.
Roger, what do you do?
Look at what he's done.
I will never beat him on that.
No, that's you have, for one thing, a wonderful YouTube video series where you, my favorite one is dissecting sort of the works of Tim Burton.
Oh, that fucking player.
Yeah, that fucking thing.
I really like your video on Tim Burton.
Thank you.
You're a talented comedian, talented writer.
You and I worked for the same site for a while, although our duties didn't generally intersect.
Yeah, I think we met afterwards.
Yeah, I don't think I met you while you were because they didn't let me into the videos.
No, no, no, no.
For good reason.
For good reason.
No one's saying they were wrong in that.
So yeah, basically the weird thing about today is that neither of us is coming in hot or cold.
I don't know what you know, and you don't know what I know.
So we're just gonna...
We're just gonna find out.
Yeah, we're gonna make Reese's piece's peanut butter cups of knowledge, where it's like a knowledge truck and then another knowledge truck back.
And they collide.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And the drivers have to crowdfund their medical care because it's 20 years old.
Yeah, but then they become friends.
And then the one like falls in love with that guy's sister and then like they're all over queer eye, you know?
You just pitched a really upbeat movie about our failed medical system.
Okay.
All right.
Well, let's talk about a serial killer now.
Great.
So I guess I'm going to...
My research for this was mainly I read a book called Deranged by Harold Schechter.
Have you given that one a read?
I've not given it, although it has been recommended to me several times.
It's good.
If you're a fan of the books about serial killers genre, it's a very solid entry into that.
I also watched a documentary called Albert Fish about Albert Fish that's terrible.
I watched that on YouTube.
We're going to get into that in a little bit because we've got a couple of video clips from that that I just got a.
Just trying to light on, if you will.
Very excited for this episode.
All right, so let's talk about Albert Fish's crimes.
Yeah.
The ones that we know about.
That we know of.
Here's where I'm confused, and maybe you can shine a light, is I know what he did, but I also know the rumors, and I don't know which is like factually happened and which is like, oh man, what if Albert Fish also?
Yeah, yeah, and I tried to stick mostly to stuff that we know because we know there's three children that we know he killed.
Yes.
The Albert Fish Mystery00:14:18
But he claimed to have killed a bunch of other people after he was caught.
Right.
But he also had, as we'll get into, a very rich fantasy life.
Very rich, which seems like, and also like, you know, he's not the only serial killer to have like made up deaths.
Yeah.
So.
So some of this is going to be up to the readers to decide, but hopefully you and I can lock down what will forever now be the ironclad history of Albert Fish.
This is it.
All right.
So on July 14th, 1924, eight-year-old Francis McDonald was playing on the front stoop of his porch in Staten Island, which was at that time like the middle of nowhere.
Yeah, it was still...
There were like trees and shit.
Trees and shit.
What's the roly tumbly weed?
Walls.
Yes, walls.
There were walls.
Walls and trees.
So while his mother was watching him, she saw a strange old man with a gray mustache creeping down the street in exactly the sort of way normal people don't.
If it had been 2018, she probably would have taken her kid inside and called the cops or at least taken him inside.
But it was 1924 and she was just like, oh, what a weirdo.
And he was white, so I'm sure it was like, well, he's white.
What a brown man.
Of course that could happen.
It's the 20s.
Yeah, so Francis left after his mom went inside to play with his brother and some neighbor kids.
They were playing some sort of ball game, probably something old-timey like stickball or...
Yeah.
Or do you have a ball?
Or do you have a ball?
That's a game from back then.
Polio ball.
Yeah.
I don't know, 1920 sports.
But at some point, that weird gray man started watching them, and Francis ran over to see what he wanted because, again, 20s.
Right.
While his friends and brother were focused on the game, Francis and the man both disappeared.
Now, once people realized Francis was missing, search parties were formed.
A trio of Boy Scouts found Francis' body.
The newspapers described, yeah, bad time for the Boyd.
What a troop.
What a troop.
Yeah, they're having some dark camp outs after that.
Just these kids sitting around the fire taking drags of cigarettes and just staring.
We've seen worse than death.
The newspapers described Francis as having been, quote, atrociously assaulted.
All of the clothing below his waist had been torn off.
He'd been strangled to death with his suspenders, and it looked like he'd been cut up, too.
So sorry, retroactively.
I mean, not that I have any control over an ancestor, but you know.
None of us are responsible for what terrible people in our past.
Like, when you think about it, everybody's got a serial killer relative.
I hope.
If you go back far enough.
Yeah, go find them, guys.
Go find what you do after this episode.
Go find your serial killer relationship.
Go find your mass murder.
And spoiler alert, my relative who killed people is going to wind up having a camo in this story.
So this is going to be fun.
Yeah.
This is a massive crossover episode.
So, yeah, on February 11th, 1927, four-year-old Billy Gaffney was playing with a three-year-old friend and his 12-year-old brother.
The 12-year-old walked off because 12-year-olds aren't really good at babysitting.
And the two little kids wound up on the roof because, again, there were no rules in the 1920s and kids could just go anywhere.
Billy's three-year-old friend was later found safe on the roof.
And when the adult who found him asked where Billy had gone, he said, quote, the boogeyman took him.
You are a descendant of the boogeyman.
Yeah.
The scariest thing is that the photo of Albert Fish on the Wikipedia website looks so much like my current relatives.
Just his piercing eyes, like they run in our family.
So it's terrifying to look at him.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think you look like Albert Fish.
Thank you.
But y'all do have piercing eyes.
I was going to bring that up.
So both of these abductions caused sensations when they happened, right?
It was not common for kids to be abducted in the 20s.
It was common for kids to die for no reason because it was the 20s and medicine was whiskey.
Yeah.
But like this sort of thing was not common.
And so it caused kind of a sensation.
And local papers covered the cases breathlessly and even got some national coverage.
And if you're feeling bad about the state of journalism right now, which who isn't?
Give me something to look forward to.
This is like my day.
This will make you feel better because it turns out it's always kind of in garbage.
Here's how the New York Daily News wrote about Billy's disappearance.
Somewhere in New York or nearby is little Billy Gaffney or his body.
An army of detectives, 350 strong, is hunting that somewhere.
Watch for the results of that search in tomorrow's news, all caps.
Hoping against hope, police continue their search for the missing Billy Gaffney.
Follow the trail in tomorrow's all caps news.
Will the seventh day bring joy or sorrow to the parents of little Billy?
Read all the developments of the hunt in tomorrow's all caps news.
That's some journalism.
That was an advertisement for the news coupled around a tragic story of a disappearing boy.
Little boy's getting murdered.
Time to sell some papers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if you've paid attention to the last any length of time, really, in American culture, you may have picked up on the fact that we are a high-strung bunch as a country.
Woohoo, we are.
That was such a nice way to put it.
Americans in the 1920s did not take the realization that kidnapping existed any more gracefully than Americans today take scary news reports about MS-13.
According to Harold Schechter's Deranged, in the immediate aftermath of Billy's abduction, over the course of a single week, three separate angry mobs assaulted different suspected boogeymen.
Oh, boy, to be that other man and just to be targeted because everyone looked weird back then also, I'm assuming.
Because there's no way to fix any of it.
Well, no, and you see anybody walking around in 20s clothing today, and you're like, that's a pedophile.
Yeah, that is a fun.
Yeah.
But it's just how they dress.
Yeah.
They just dressed.
The bowler hat just is so suspicious.
You can get arrested for just a bowler hat.
Oh, my God.
And should.
You should.
Yeah.
It's not okay.
So, yeah, here's a quote from Deranged about the first guy to be cornered by an angry mob because of Albert Fish's curse.
A 63-year-old salesman named Giles Steele was, which Giles!
This precious poor man.
Giles Steele was strolling down East 92nd Street when a four-year-old boy was.
He was strolling!
That's the only way to be alive.
It's the only way people could walk in the 20s.
I guess.
You were either strolling or you had polio and could not walk.
And then you were rolling.
So he was strolling down East 92nd Street when a four-year-old boy stepped into his path.
He told the kid to move aside and reached down and took the kid by the shoulder.
And at that point, the kid's mother, Miss Sadie Bernstein, came out and saw him with his hand on the kid's shoulder.
And she just starts screaming.
And so a crowd, quote, a crowd of neighbors immediately descended on Steele and began pummeling him.
He just started.
It's not even a restraining for the cops.
Just beat the shit out of him.
So Steele was saved by a cop who took him to the station.
He was questioned, and it became obvious that he had nothing to do with anything illegal.
Miss Bernstein eventually agreed that she had overreacted.
Steele was still arraigned on a kidnapping charge because the cops just thought he seemed shady.
Oh, poor Giles.
I know you must talk about a lot about like wrongly convicted people.
Probably.
On this podcast, it comes up a lot, but I always feel terrible.
I mean, usually because dictators are just having people executed for crimes they didn't commit.
But yeah, this.
Now, the weird thing is the other two cases of people getting mobbed were dudes with prior convictions for, quote, impairing the morals of minors.
And they were caught trying to trick young people into dark alleyways, probably to molest them.
Probably.
So it seems like, okay, so it was a movement and it was okay.
Two-thirds of the time, the mobs were right.
Right, right.
Which is really pretty good for mobs.
Yeah.
You see, Boy Scouts go out and one out of one, they find a dead body, and then mobs are two out of three.
One thing I learned in Indiana Jones is if you're a Boy Scout in the 20s, you're finding some dead people and you're probably going to wind up having a fight on top of a train.
Oh, yeah.
Those are the two things that I would assume.
Two things that 20s Boy Scouts for sure do.
So yeah, mobs, mobs in the streets, people freaking out.
So up until May of 1928, these were just two scary, isolated, unsolved crimes, one with nobody and both without a clear villain, right?
So people get sort of riled up both times these kids get abducted, but then it sort of fades, kind of like a shooting does.
Only these are less common at this point.
This all changes on May 25th, 1928, because Albert Fish saw an ad in the Situations Wanted section of a local newspaper that said, young man, 18, wishes position in country, Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street.
Now, at this point, the classified section was basically the equivalent of like Craigslist today.
The main difference is that today, everyone is so aware of the danger of creepy people that like if you're by a couch on Craigslist, you joke like, all right, I'll be back in an hour unless I get murdered.
Right.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Unless a guy eats me.
And then there's that one case where that girl did go on a date and she didn't come back.
No, yeah, exactly.
There's an expectation that danger can happen in this.
It did not exist then.
So an 18-year-old boy would just be like, I want to work in the country and put out an ad.
And two days later, the doorbell rang at Edward Budd's house.
His mother opened it and saw a small elderly man in a suit.
They were very poor, very, very poor family.
His suit was not particularly nice, but the fact that he was wearing a suit meant that he was above them on like the class rung.
So they were very impressed by that.
He was polite and genteel and like kissed her hand, which she was super impressed by.
He does all of like the upper class seeming stuff.
And he claimed to be a former interior decorator who had made a bunch of money and then started a farm upstate.
I like interior decorating.
Do you like starting farms?
Oh, I could.
Well, I like farm video games.
I don't know where I'm going with this because this is just a lie he used to abduct a child.
Oh, I know, but I'm thinking, hmm, if that's what he wanted, what's in my jeans is basically what I'm trying to suss out.
Well, he didn't work as an interior decorator.
No, no, no.
But he might have been a pet.
Maybe he wanted to.
Well, maybe you can exercise that part of the fish jeans and not everything we're about to talk about today.
Get to do, sorry.
So part of his lie was that he'd moved out to start a farm with his wife and kids, and she'd abandoned him because she was terrible and he'd had to raise his kids alone, but they were doing great.
But now his kids were out of the house and he needed some help.
So he was willing to hire 18-year-old Edward Budd.
He called himself Frank Howard, too.
Ah, yes.
So have you ever found yourself wanting to go by the name Frank Howard?
Only if I thought it would be better for my job applications.
That's a solid job application.
That sounds like a banker.
But anyway, yeah, so Fish's actual plan was to murder, eat, and probably molest Edward.
Yes.
In that order?
Probably not.
Probably not.
Well, it's hard to say.
I feel like he kind of had a dead body thing.
I think he sort of did.
Although he claims he never fucked the dead people, which it's hard to say.
Hard to say.
Yeah.
At that point, that's like, you know, yeah.
We'll get into the things that he masturbated about.
Spoiler, there's a lot of masturbation in this episode.
So yeah, Edward, the kid that he was going to hire, is super excited.
This guy's going to pay him like 15 bucks a week, which is really good wages back then.
And he's like, hey, I've got a friend who also wants to work on a farm.
Do you need any additional work?
And I think at this point, Albert Fish is just not that great at lying in the moment.
And so he says yes, but he doesn't really want it.
No, because number one, this kid's already kind of big, like big enough that Albert's worried, like, I might not be able to overpower him because I'm eat all of them.
And I don't want to get rid of some of them.
I want to eat all of it, you know.
Okay.
He's very resourceful.
Isn't he like retroactively like placing like good quality on the murder?
He wants to use every part of the boy he murders.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, he is kind of a recycling guy.
So Albert Fish says like, yes, but I think it's a panic thing.
And he immediately comes up with an excuse to delay and says that like he's not quite ready to leave yet, but he'll be back the next day.
And then the next day, instead of coming back, he sends a telegram and says, I'll be there the next day.
When he does finally show back up, he brings pot cheese, which is what you'll find in every write-up of this that he brought.
I didn't know what pot cheese was.
It's cottage cheese that people would bring to Potlucks and pots.
I don't know why.
It just seems like a weird old-timey cheese.
Wow, geez.
So if you read about Albert Fish, you're going to come across the phrase pot cheese a lot.
And I didn't know what it was.
Guess I have a new password for all of my devices.
There you go.
Pot cheese.
So he brings like some cheese and claims that it came from his farm.
And they have like a lunch and everybody's very impressed with this guy.
He wounds up like playing with their young daughter, Grace.
And after the meal, he tells the boys he can't take them until later that evening, but he pulls out a big wad of cash, which is like 90 bucks then, which is a lot of money to these people.
Yeah.
And he gives a couple of dollars to Edward and his friend and is like, go see a movie with your buddies or whatever.
I'll be back tonight.
And then kind of as like an afterthought, I was like, you know, I'm heading out to this birthday party my sister is throwing.
Maybe your daughter Grace wants to come with me.
Is Afterthought in quotes?
I think he kind of brought it up at the end of things.
Right.
And they say yes, because there's this old man, very classic, very genteel.
He's helping out the family.
So he takes Grace.
And obviously, you feel bad for the parents because the dad is the one who makes the final call.
And Grace is a sickly kid.
She's ill a lot.
And he's like, she never gets to have any fun.
Let her go have some fun.
An Outsider With A Secret00:05:30
Which it doesn't end well for Grace or the buds.
They get really pretty fucked over on this.
So he gives them an address of where he's going to be, which they later find out is fake.
And then he disappears.
And Grace never comes back.
They never see Frank Howard again.
On Tuesday, June 5th, the New York Times reports on Grace's abduction with the classy headline, Huntman and Child he took to party.
That is classy.
It ends on party, so I'm kind of like excited at the end.
Oh, a party!
A party.
Yeah.
And you kind of forget that.
Huntman.
Oh, yeah.
That's actually not a bad, if I was going to start a superhero.
Huntman and Child, Batman and Rock.
Yeah, Huntman and Child.
I immediately know what that's about.
No questions asked.
Yeah, so Depraved says the book that I read for this says that the story unspooled in the tabloids in kind of the same way that the Gaffney abduction had.
So first off, there's a shitload of false leads.
People start just sending lies into the family.
And we'll get into that in a little bit.
A lot of sketchy witnesses.
And then there's just this big surge in anxiety over kidnappings for the people of New York.
The tabloids make as much of this as they possibly can.
And, you know, it's the same thing.
Follow the story.
It's a Nancy Grace kind of situation.
Yeah, exactly.
And these newspapers are all giving daily updates and like, follow this, the search tomorrow and the daily news and yada yada yada.
And we'll have a list of all of our sources on the website, behindthebastards.com.
We're going to get to what happens afterwards and kind of how Albert Fish's crimes sort of started the idea of stranger danger.
Like we're influential in that concept we were all raised with and to fear and how he sort of had an impact on that and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.
But first, you know what goes great with discussions of the terrible things that serial killers do is products and services.
I love it.
You love products and services?
I do.
I use them all the time.
Pull out all your cards and throw them into the air and buy a product now.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
They scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Kidnapping Craze Wave00:06:17
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back, and we are talking about Albert Fish, the ancestor to my guest today, Maggie Mayfish.
And listeners, just as a heads up, Maggie's one of the nicer people that I have met in the city of Los Angeles.
She's not a murderer, as far as I'm aware.
I mean, there's no trail.
There's no trail.
We've learned.
You are wearing a red shirt.
I am.
I thought blood.
Yeah.
And then I put on the shirt.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
So.
Although I think that's before everything I wear.
Blood, blood, blood.
This is going on in my head.
Like a cat.
Or a little dog.
Okay.
So, years go by after the Grace Bud kidnapping, which is what we had just talked about in the end.
And the case, like the other two, gradually starts to fade from memory.
But kidnapping did not fade.
The disappearances of these three children had helped to spark a new crime epidemic in American history.
The kidnapping craze.
And I spelled craze with a K in that sentence.
Thank you.
I know.
Thank you.
I knew you'd appreciate that.
Yeah.
The kidnapping craze had come.
Here's a quote from Harold Schechter's Deranged.
In 1932 alone, there were 282 reported kidnappings in 28 states, and all but 65 of the perpetrators had gotten away scot-free with their crimes.
By the summer of 1933, kidnappings were occurring so frequently that newsreaders required a scorecard to keep track of them all.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
So that's where we are.
That's where we are.
And I feel like Albert Fish is so crazy that maybe just no one had really been like, oh, I could just take it.
Just take people.
I could just take people.
What?
This is great.
It was probably the guy who committed the first cybercrime.
It was probably the same rush of, what have I opened?
I'd love to see just a movie about the man who invented mugging, just like this poor guy on the street seeing people pull money out of their pockets and like looking at a knife in his hand and looking at a rich guy and a knife in her and then just like eat the rich.
Blood, blood, blood, blood.
He doesn't want to get stabbed and he has money.
There's a connection between these things.
I can figure this out.
So yeah, most of the kidnappers, unlike Albert Fish, which, again, we'll get to in a while, were not doing it for sex or murder.
They just wanted money, you know?
It became very clear that it was hard for cops to catch kidnappers.
And as it became clear that that was the case, intelligent criminals realized that kidnapping was very safe and very profitable.
In June of 1932, the New York Times reported on more than a dozen kidnapping cases.
And one of them, Maggie, was actually committed by my ancestor, Charles Pretty Boy Floyd.
No!
Yeah!
When I saw that in the book, I was like, how do I got a guy in the mix?
Wow.
So Pretty Boy Floyd was a gangster.
He's generally considered to be the last of the big gangsters to die.
His death is.
This is cool.
Well, he gets shot in a field, but yeah.
That's cool.
That is cool.
It's a great place to get shot.
So Donald Trump and I, our current president, have two things in common.
One of them is a literary agent, which is weird.
That isn't cool.
And the other is that Woody Guthrie wrote songs about both of our ancestors.
He wrote a song about Donald Trump's dad because Donald Trump's dad denied tendency to black people.
Yeah, yeah.
And he wrote a song about Pretty Boy Floyd, my ancestor, because my ancestor beat a cop to death with a log chain.
Oh, hey!
Yeah!
Wow!
So in that year, 1932, Pretty Boy Floyd tried to kidnap an actress from Malibu and ransom her.
She was to be kidnapped and flown to Mexico, but the police found out about it and ringed the street with cops at the last minute.
And Floyd somehow learned of the trap and never appeared.
And that's the end of this digression, but I had to bring it up.
No, that was great.
So, yeah.
Everybody's got murderous.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the kidnapping wave grew and grew in the 30s until it reached its apex with the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932.
Charles Lindbergh was an aviator, first man across the Atlantic, national hero, potential presidential candidate, and anti-Semitic fascist sympathizer.
His wife, Ann Lindbergh, was an acclaimed author and also probably talked about it.
Probably a long time ago.
Yeah, I would guess.
Their baby, Charles Jr., was 20 months old and a baby.
Maybe would have grown up to be a racist.
Yeah, but at the time, was just a baby.
Yeah, at the time it was a baby.
At the time was a baby.
And he was kidnapped on March 1st, 1932, and immediately pretty much killed on accident.
Probably fell off a ladder.
We don't know.
Now, up until this point, the only other crime in American history this famous had probably been the assassination of Lincoln.
Like, this is like, it's big.
And it inspired the creation of the Federal Kidnapping Act in, I think, 1934, which made transferring an unwilling person across state lines a federal crime.
So, the Lindbergh kidnapping was sort of the crest of a wave or a crime meme that was then spreading through the culture.
And that wave kicked off with the crimes of Albert Fish, although he would not be caught until 1934.
Yeah, that is the other.
He went a very long time without, you know, any sort of reprimand for what he'd done.
And it's some of that's got to be just the fact that, like, we didn't know how to be detectives back then.
Lindbergh And Albert Fish00:14:05
Right.
And he changes his name, and he doesn't, he's not glued to this reality in some way.
Because he's not like a super smooth criminal.
No, no, no, no.
He's messy.
Oh, real messy.
When he abducts Grace Budd, he keeps all of his knives wrapped up in like a kit that he calls his implements of hell.
And when he goes to pick her up, he leaves them at like a grocery store.
He just hands them to the clerk and said, can you hold these?
Here's a Joker card.
Oh, I'm kidding.
Here's all of my knives.
And this is the 20s.
So the guy's like, of course.
I'll take your knives.
I've got some extra children you can take on a walk if you want.
20s.
Yeah, what a time.
So nowadays, when terrible things happen to the children of people, like the Newton shootings, when like 20 people lost their very young children to a mass shooter, they immediately start getting harassed horribly online by Alex Jones fans who think it's a false flag or whatever.
It's important to note that that's not new.
Blaming the parents kind of is.
But being incredibly shitty to parents who've just lost a child is at least as old as the 20s.
Oh, this is the part I was not aware of.
Lay it on me, Robert.
So all of these families, these people we've talked about whose kids get abducted, all of them get bombarded with crank letters from just hundreds of random people.
Here's one letter the Gaffney family received.
My dear friends, I will be fine to boy, my son in Waters River Cellars.
Look out.
My God, want back boy.
I might have gotten that exact same message on Twitter just in my DM.
I was going to guess, tender, but yeah.
Yep.
Wow.
You want another one?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wait!
Do not appear too anxious.
Your son is in safe hands.
We fought for him, but I got him now.
We will get the beaten boy for Billy to play with, for Billy is lonesome.
Do not show this letter to anyone if you know what is good for you.
Again, I say that Billy is safe and that we are experimenting on him.
Can I say that that sounds exactly like when people tell their alien abduction stories, like what the aliens tell them, like almost verbatim.
Yeah, like you can tell it's like someone actually hallucinating and their brain just firing words out into a waking dream or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sounds like aphasia.
Yeah.
Some other asshole sent a letter to this grieving family saying, quote, I didn't mean to kill him, God forgive me, and giving a hand-drawn map of where his corpse was supposedly buried.
Police found nothing there.
And the Boy Scout troops tell him nothing.
Those were the police back then.
Yeah, they had neckerchiefs instead of guns.
It's a lot safer for murderers.
Yeah, for murderers.
It was a lot safer.
The book Depraved also notes that psychics pledged to aid in the efforts to no effect, obviously, along with an inventor who arrived with what he called a mechanical bloodhound.
Well, that is cool.
Yeah, that's just a little bit.
Well, it was just a divining rod with a rubber tube attached to it filled with Billy's hair.
I appreciate that.
You appreciate the name.
Appreciate it.
Sure.
Yeah.
Why not?
Why not?
Yeah, it didn't work either.
The Budd family also received crank letters.
Depraved claims they were receiving dozens every day for a while.
Many of them were like this: quote, My dear Mr. and Mrs. Budd, your child is going to a funeral.
I still got her.
Howard.
Whoa.
All caps.
And this.
I have Grace.
She is safe and sound.
She is happy in her new home and not at all homesick.
I will see to it that Grace has proper schooling.
She has been given an Angora cat and a pet canary.
She calls the canary Bill.
I am a keen student of human nature.
That's why I was attracted to Grace.
She seemed like a girl who would appreciate nice surroundings in a real nice home.
I drove with Grace past your house in an automobile several days ago.
I saw several persons standing in front of the house and did not stop as it looked as though they were waiting for me.
I will see to it in the near future that some arrangements are made so Grace will be able to visit you for a short time.
Wow.
Why would you send that?
What is what is?
I don't know.
I don't understand this.
I don't know.
Like, at least one of those has got to be like one or two people being like, if I say she's all right, maybe they'll feel better.
But then like, I don't care.
Yeah, and fuck it.
I don't give a shit.
I'm not connected to this in any way.
Yeah.
To be honest, I actually think these are worse than the people, the Alex Jones people who are harassing the parents of dead kids on because at least those people believe there's a crazy conspiracy.
Right.
You're just fucking with a family for no reason.
Man, it really makes me just like what people did for fun back then.
Yeah.
It was a very boring time.
It was a very boring time.
And one of the biggest sports in the country right now, the Dollop does a great episode of this, was pedestrianism, which is just people walking in circles for weeks.
Wow.
Like days, hundreds of miles.
So like there's nothing to do at this point.
Right.
Like World War One at least gave some people something for a while.
Make a victory garden.
Yeah, make a victory garden.
Go die in the mud.
Yeah.
Oh, both better options than life in the 20s.
So, yeah, the letters, however, were not all entirely negative.
There was a detective named William King who was basically your stereotypical lantern-jawed chain-smoking 20s detective.
Like, picture Dick Tracy.
Of course, of course.
Of course.
He's the guy.
If you just saw him walking down the street and you had a problem, you would run to him and be like, This is my chance to be involved.
Fix all of this.
Yeah, He's that kind of detective.
So he had gotten on the Budd case right after Grace was abducted and spent six fruitless years trying to track down her killer.
Wow.
Now, 1934, because this was the year that had the Lindbergh trial, and the kid had been kidnapped in 32, but the trial was in 34.
It was a big year for awareness of kidnapping, and Detective King decided to take one more stab at solving it.
I love that.
It's like a set of first story.
You're giving me a hold up face.
It's great because he fucking solves this case.
Spoiler.
But he does it in like the most unethical way.
Yes.
Super fun.
He's like Columbo.
Like, whatever.
His strategy for years had been to randomly call newspapers and lie about the Budd case and just give them bullshit information so they would write a story based on his lies that like said that essentially they were there was been a break in the case.
And he did this because every time it would happen, there would be a shitload of more letters sent into the police with tips and sent to the family.
And he felt that it kept the story fresh.
So some people would say it's unethical to just repeatedly lie to newspapers about a little girl's abduction, but King was like, you got to keep people thinking about it somehow.
So his big guy he would do this most often with was a gossip columnist named Walter Winchell.
Most listeners will recognize him as one of the rapid-fire names spat out in Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire.
He comes right before Joe DiMaggio.
Oh, McCarthy Richard Nixon's dude.
Yeah, okay.
So before he was part of a classic song, he was America's most famous gossip columnist.
His column on Broadway was probably the most influential piece of writing every given week in New York City.
So he's a big deal.
And some people say, women gossip.
Well, this guy.
Walter Winchell probably said that because I'm sure he was super misogynistic.
I mean, you just got to assume.
I mean, that's one of his baby.
The woke guys have just gotten down to being okay with women voting at this point.
It's a long road.
It's been a long road.
So, Walter Winchell in early November included this line or paragraph in his column.
I checked on the Grace Budd mystery.
She was eight when she was kidnapped about six years ago.
It is safe to tell you that the Department of Missing Persons will break the case, or they expect to, in four weeks.
They are holding a cokey now at Randall's Island, who is said to know the most about the crime.
Grace is supposed to have been done away with in Lyme, but another legend is that her skeleton is buried in a local spot.
Moranon.
So, that's all lies.
Right.
It was not going to be broke.
But it just so happened that Albert Fish was a habitual writer.
Which again, I write.
Yeah.
Robert, walk me away from this cliff.
This is when you step in and tell me that it's not about the same.
You're a much better writer than him.
Oh, thank you.
I don't know what you write in your private time.
Yeah.
Oh, I have all of my books right here.
You don't want to read them.
Oh, yeah.
They're made out of skin.
Blood, blood.
Is that a whole piece of paper made of band-aids?
Yes.
Okay.
So 11 days after this Walter Winchell column comes up, the Budds receive a letter in the mail.
And one of the only mercies in this entire case is that Grace Budd's mother gets the letter and she cannot read.
Which is the only time in history you're going to be like, oh, thank God for illiteracy.
Oh, thank God.
She never learned to read.
That is a mercy in this case.
Her son read it and immediately goes to the police.
As soon as I start to read an excerpt from it, you will be aware this is not like the other letters.
And this was written by Albert Fish.
And again, 11 days after Winchell's column.
So it seems like Detective King's strategy worked.
It's like he knew beforehand, you know, the whole zodiac thing.
They like attention.
They like attention.
Detective King does not play by the rules, but he gets results.
He gets results.
He gets results.
You hear that?
Police do whatever you want.
God, you know he pistol whipped a cokey.
You know, that was like a weekly thing for Detective King, is pistol whipping a cokey.
That's his like one kick.
Yeah.
And then he tried to stop it.
He just loves pistol whipping.
Yeah.
And it's more of an art than anything.
I agree.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A good pistol, a solid pistol whipping.
It'll change someone's mind.
Yeah.
It'll do something to their mind.
Okay.
So, yeah, the full text of the letter is available online.
You can find it if you wish.
I'm going to read it.
If you wish.
If you wish.
You wish.
If you do not wish, don't read it.
Do not.
I will read a part of it, and I have...
I'm reading not the worst parts because we don't need that.
But I got to read some of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Have you read this letter?
I have.
Okay.
Yeah.
My dear Miss Budd, in 1894, a friend of mine shipped as a deckhand on the steamer Tacoma, Captain John Davis.
They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong, China.
On arriving there, he and two others went ashore and got drunk.
When they returned, the boat was gone.
At that time, there was a famine in China.
Meat of any kind was from $1 to $3 a pound.
So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold to the butchers to be cut up and sold for food in order to keep others from starving.
A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street.
You could go into any shop and ask for steak, chops, or stew meat.
Part of the naked body of the boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it.
A boy or girl's behind, which is the sweetest part of the body, and sold this veal cutlet, brought the highest price.
John stayed there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh.
On his return to New York, he stole two boys, one 7 and 11, took them to his home, stripped them naked, tied them in a closet, then burned everything they had on.
Several times a day and night, he spanked them, tortured them to make their meat good and tender.
He then goes on into detail about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
To make the meat good and tender.
Yeah, to make the meat tender.
Yeah, it's not just spanking for the sake of spanking.
Albert Fish is not.
Please, there's one that accuse me of many things, but that.
Not needless spanking.
No, no, no.
There's going to be a lot more spanking in this episode.
So Albert Fish claims that this guy that he met turned him on to the idea of how good human flesh tasted.
So he made up his mind to try some of his own.
And that's why he abducted Grace Budd in 1928.
And he admits in the letter in pretty graphic detail that he murdered Grace, cooked, and ate her.
The letter ends on this line.
It took me nine days to eat her entire body.
I did not fuck her, though I could have had I wished.
She died a virgin.
Which is, I don't know what your goal is with that line.
I guess, again, it's one of those things.
It's like, well, I did this, but I did not.
You know, a lot of, I mean, serial killers kind of do that.
They'll admit to like a part of it, but then take a hard stance on another part they're accused of.
Everyone wants to feel like there's that line in the wire, man's got to have a code.
Everybody wants to feel like that.
Yes, even if you're eating children.
Right.
So for him, like the goalpost is so far this way that don't worry, I'm still in the good.
No, I mean, yeah, I murdered her and ate her and it gave me sexual gratification, but I did not fuck her.
No, no, no, no.
Yeah.
I was pleased in every other sort of way.
Yeah, every other sort of way.
And he, yeah, he goes into detail about that.
So the horrible letter wound up being Fish's Undoing, which is, again, one of those rare times where justice happens in the universe.
That's another reason I do actually like this story because he gets caught.
Not only that, he got caught because he just needed something.
He just needed to fuck with this family one more time.
So the way he got caught is he sent letters that were stamped with a logo of the New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association.
So the cops eventually found a janitor for that very specific group who admitted to having stolen a bunch of paper and envelopes from work and left them in his room when he moved out.
The guy who moved into the room after him was Albert Fish.
Since he had moved out, Fish had moved out by the time they found him, but his son was in the WPA, which is one of those New Deal organizations where you like, that's where we get national parks was these young men like building shit.
So he would send his dad regular checks.
And Fish had moved out of the room, but he had one more check coming and he told his landlord that he would be back for it.
So the landlord told the cops, this guy's not here anymore, but he's going to be back in a few days to get his check.
So the cops waited for him.
And yeah, that's how he was caught.
Detective King caught Albert Fish.
He was eventually convicted of murder and sentenced to die via electric chair, which is exactly what happened.
So that's the story of Albert Fish in broad.
We've got a lot more to drill into.
We're going to be talking some more about how Maggie found out that she was related to this guy, and then we're going to go a lot deeper into Albert Fish's psyche.
So it's going to be very dark.
My skin is crawling.
Excellent.
Detective King Catches Fish00:03:41
That's how you should feel on this podcast.
All right.
Capitalism.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Personal Journeys In True Crime00:10:06
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Now, when we, we just now kind of got through talking about the broad strokes of the story of Albert Fish.
And now I wanted to sort of talk about your personal journey of figuring out you related to this guy.
My personal journey.
Yeah, your own personal fish journey.
Like a salmon swimming to return to George or Robert.
Yeah, tell me about my life.
What was it like?
Well, I know that bears are involved.
And I know that you swim upstream.
And then we procree and then we swim downstream?
Yes.
Well, I think usually you get eaten by bears.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
That's most of what I know about fish.
And we get redwoods because of fish.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you're welcome.
Yeah.
Well, that's my favorite drink.
So how did I find out?
The first time that I heard this, I was five or six at my grandpa's cottage, and my uncles were working on our family tree.
I was playing like on the stairs or something, and my dad came down, and I have this as a memory on the stairs and was like, Maggie, you're related to someone from a long time ago who was a bad person, and he went to jail.
And as a kid, I was like, oh, that is so cool.
Like, I'm related to like an old timey battle.
You're picturing Bonnie and Clyde or something.
Oh, yeah.
I was like, ah, an outlaw.
Fun.
For years, I lived under that delusion that it was just some sort of like nebulous.
Probably robbed banks to give it to poor people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That kind of thing.
Like supporting, you know, his daughter that he loved and he put her through higher education.
He had to take that hospital by armed force so that his kid could get the surgery he needed.
And boy, I respect him for it.
Because, you know, we don't want to think about it.
He followed the law in his heart.
Much like the detective.
The detective, yeah.
I would be really proud to be this guy's relative.
She's the only cop I'll say that about.
Yeah, really, actually, though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So for just, and then I just kind of like forgot about it until it was actually pretty recently, maybe two years ago, I was listening to my favorite murderer.
Oh, boy.
Very fun podcast, which if you guys listen to this, maybe you also listen to them.
They're great.
But they had an episode in Albert Fish.
And just from the title, I was like, oh, Fish.
Oh, I'm related to.
Oh.
Oh.
No.
Oh, God.
No.
So you learned the details about this guy from a podcast.
From a podcast.
Oh, man.
Two lovely women just describing the horrors of what he'd done.
So I'm putting together in my head a story about what happened with your dad that day in your family cottage.
And the story in my head is that he's with some other member of your family doing genealogy.
And they're like, we're related to somebody famous.
And without waiting to hear more, he runs downstairs to me, just belts down there and then goes back up, learns the second half of the story, and is like, oh, God, what if we just don't say anything else?
Let's just let this be a dream in her head.
Yeah, let's just, she's young, right?
She will forget this question mark.
What do you think the odds are of like a global information network arising and then leading to like a new replacement for radio that spreads even wider and like involves long-form stories about that'll never happen, right?
Never.
We'll be fine.
No.
Let's just not tell her anything else.
Oh boy.
I like knowing my father, that like kind of thing.
He's a very like jovial man.
Just got so excited.
I'm so excited.
So you learn about Albert Fish from a podcast.
Yes.
Which was very surprising because I was into true crime like a long time before that.
And I had just never come across Albert Fish.
Maybe because he was so old.
I was more interested in that.
He's more obscure.
Yeah.
He's not like your Bundy or whatever.
Yeah.
And I had just moved to California.
So I was more interested in like, ooh, like the sacramento killer.
So many.
So many.
Oh, yeah.
It's so rich.
So for just some reason, I had never come across it until that day.
And then I read the Wicked Baby article.
And then I called my father.
And he was cooking potato soup.
And I asked him, I was like, Dad, so is it Albert Fish that we're related to?
And very calmly, like my father, who's very calm, level-headed, he's like, oh, let me just, let me just check my email real quick.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yes.
Albert Fish.
Yeah, that's the guy.
Oh, God.
So he didn't know, actually.
I guess, yeah, I think a similar thing.
He like kind of knew, or like at least didn't know all of the details, or at least like had just forgotten, and then was like re-excited by like yeah yeah, it's, Albert Fishman killed Nate Children.
Kill The Nate Children.
It was called the Werewolf Of Wisteria, Wisteria The Gray Man, the Boogeyman.
So, like I have very mixed feelings about true crime in general because, like the book that I love the most that I read in high school was probably in cold blood, which I still think is a really good I mean, it started the genre.
But I also there's definitely an extent of and I know that my own show, because of our focus, runs the risk of crossing this territory too of just like it's important to study these people, because it's always important to study the worst and most dangerous people, for the same reason that you like look when you hear a car crash right, but there's a line and I many tickle the line, yeah yeah uh, doing these like film analysis, there's a lot of that of people like having their cake and eating it too.
Yeah, of like what you want to say, but then what ends up happening?
And a lot of true crime can end up.
Glorifying is a strong word, but making a party out of it.
Yeah, and this is definitely not a party story yeah um, and neither are any of the other stories we have on here.
I do think, like one of the things that I think is the in terms of like useful lessons that we get from this is less about how Albert Fish actually acted, because he was he was just a, he was a monster right um, but more about how everyone else, like the fucking crank letters and stuff, and like just how people fuck with the families, and that's always been a thing right, and that it is still happening yeah, and that it's just evolved with the mediums.
That's really interesting to me yeah um, and I think there's a lesson in there about like sort of human nature, which is that we're garbage, we are garbage, we're garbage, we'll jump on anything.
And also, I guess, like a lesson from like the mob and like that kind of mentality that like yeah, you know it's, it's okay to have very strong feelings and be afraid.
Yeah like, I think that is totally okay.
Um I, I am curious as to like, how did you feel?
Like, is there because this is a story of, and we'll get to it mental illness?
What was the like the thought process of accepting that this is a part of your past, like your family's past.
Right, it's weird.
It does also seem like a cautionary tale obviously, for mental illness and what it can lead to if it is not addressed, which I kind of blame the rest of the family for.
Yeah, probably because there are just so many stories of him doing just crazy, like rolling around in rugs and yeah, calling himself I am Christ while beating his own ass with a metal paddle.
Yeah we'll, we'll delve into that in a minute here.
Yeah uh which again, you know in the 20s.
What language do you use for?
Yeah, a family member who would like eat carpet if you left them alone?
Yeah, you know, But again, like they didn't do anything to stop or help or and like his son kind of just like kept giving him money.
Yeah.
Which I, you know, in a lot of ways we didn't have protocols to follow.
People also didn't want to talk about mental illness.
So it's rather let's not talk about it and just let our crazy uncle just be.
Yeah.
Which I think is still dangerous if we don't talk about, you know, the mental illnesses that we have.
Yeah, it's hugely important to talk about mental health in general because people need that sort of vocabulary and need to, I do think, and this will make a little, like once we get a little bit further, I'm sure we'll talk about this more.
But I do think this is a case of a guy who very likely, it's possible that he'd been killing people for decades.
It's also possible these are his only three killings.
And if he in his 40s or 50s even could have been potentially stopped from hurting anybody.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's hard.
It's like we can't know for sure, but that is a possible avenue here.
If his family members who clearly loved him had like been like, what the hell, man?
Instead of just not talking about this, let's talk about this.
Let's talk about this.
Let's talk about Kevin.
But crazy deranged.
It's always like everybody knows, like, you and I are both white people.
So like, there's this assumption, and with everybody, it's true that like someone who you're related to far enough along the line did something terrible, whether it was slavery or something else.
That's just the world.
But there's something different when it's someone who is recent enough that like, no, we have a specific name.
We know this guy is in our line.
Here's where he is and here's what he did.
Digging Into Their Lives00:11:04
Yeah.
Yeah.
I had a weird moment because Pretty Boy Floyd, like my family's always talking about, has always talked about that.
My grandma, who was otherwise a very conservative lady, was super pressed.
She would always tell us, you know, you got outlaw blood in you.
She was proud too.
She was super proud.
And I read about it.
I was like, this guy was Robin Banks and murdering cops.
Like the Woody Guthrie song is about he's riding into town with his wife and a cop curses in front of him.
And so he just beats the man to death with a lock chain.
That's a fun song.
It's interesting the way like families talk about these kind of people.
And then when you actually dig into their lives and you're like, oh man, this guy was not a good person.
Not a good person.
There is definitely kind of like a little bit of hangover guilt, but really, you know, there's nothing you can really do.
No, and you're like, you said of his brother.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Who didn't do anything that I'm aware of.
Right.
And it's like, well, if they're going to hide Albert Fish, then like, I won't.
I'm related to him.
No, and there's some fucking Hitler people around here with lines to Hitler and like they didn't do anything wrong.
Right.
His nephew just ran over here during the war because he had a nephew who like joined the Navy and stuff.
Oh.
Yeah.
Which just like felt real bad about having Hitler as an uncle.
I'm sorry guys.
Really sorry.
No, you're not responsible for your family's crimes.
Yeah.
But you can inherit their wealth.
Hell yeah.
We've got a great system going here.
Blood money.
Okay.
So in addition to reading Deranged, which is a legitimately good book, I also watched this documentary, Albert Fish, when I was prepping for this.
It's directed by a guy named John Borowski, and it is one of the worst documentaries I've ever seen.
Good job, John Boransky.
It is very ugly.
Very little creativity involved.
Creepy voice acting, but bland recreations of aspects of the crimes.
Great.
But then, then, Maggie, 15 minutes into this excrable documentary, we meet John Coleman.
John Coleman is an artist who collects serial killer memorabilia and dresses exactly like you'd expect based on that description.
Extremely ornate waistcoats.
I'm going to have you describe him in a minute.
I kid you not.
That is what I pictured.
100%.
Yeah.
100%.
Whoa.
He has Albert Fish's original letter framed in his house.
And I'm just going to put him on.
We're going to play him for a couple of seconds.
I'm going to have you describe him.
And then we're going to play the rest of his story about how he came to own that letter.
Okay.
This is what I've always said is the Magna Carta of crime artifacts.
This is the Albert Fish letter.
It's the most.
You wanna take a shot at describing John Coleman?
Describe his face or my face watching his face.
I will describe your face watching his face.
Oh.
Because you look like you just saw a dog start to tap dance.
Like that, like slack jawed, but not in a positive way.
He looks like he's licked that letter several times.
Like before he framed it, he tried to get as close to that ink as possible.
Yeah, he has definitely stroked that letter while tweaking his own nipple.
Yeah, And 100 times, for sure.
Yeah, and he's super RNA waistcoat.
Yeah, yeah, super RNA waistcoat.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, here's him describing how he came to have Albert Fish's original creepy murder letter.
Tragic and painful document to a monster that's ever in print.
And I have it, so I'm honored to have it.
I've always felt that the objects themselves have desires of their own, and they come here for their own reasons.
Did he make did he draw that?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, he drew that picture of Albert Fish.
When I do like a severed head of a little girl.
It's not about the horrors of the world.
It's not about trying to.
Oh my God, it's act that Jordan Peterson in Jesus's.
Yeah, my painting is over.
But yeah, like the creepy paintings that he makes, like the painting, listeners, is a painting of Albert Fish.
Almost looks like a Mad Magazine illustration.
I guess very like grimy and it almost looks like an R crumb drawing.
Yeah.
And so it's a it, but it's the picture of Albert Fish and he's holding the severed head of Little Grace.
And it's terrifyingly creepy.
The way he says the word monster, it's with awe.
Yeah.
It's not with judgment.
Yeah, this is not a guy who is like... I don't sense respect for like the gravity of the crimes here.
He's a creepy dude.
I should email him and be like, dude, there's my relative.
I would like that letter.
I think it wants to be with me.
I think that object wants to travel to me.
So the creepy house that he's in, he calls it the auditorium.
I'm going to one guess as to how he spells auditorium.
The way.
Yeah.
That way.
Yeah, the way that the creepy dick would spell it.
Yeah.
And here's how he describes the auditorium in his website.
Quote, Joel Coleman is a collector.
He collects fascinating friends.
He collects artifacts related to infamous historical events.
He collects sideshow and serial killer ephemera.
He collects religious artifacts that call to his obsessions with violence, with twinning, and with power.
Like his art, his collection is filled with reliquaries containing the twinned power of both the sacred and profane.
Welcome to the auditorium.
Wow.
So yeah, that's Joel Coleman.
Wow.
Twinning.
There has definitely been like secret societies that just have their meetings there.
Yeah, but not the good ones.
Oh, no, no, no.
The ones that it's like, oh, you guys are you?
This is where the Masons are at these days, huh?
Oh, I think I'm just going to go grab a beer over anywhere.
On the street.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe join the Mormon church.
I'll just walk around for weeks on end because I'd rather do that than done.
Things sound better than sitting around here with you people.
Now, Joe's a painter, as we already got into, and he believes he was put on this earth to express the pain of the world through, for example, elaborate face paintings with the separate heads of small children.
Now, he believes the objects he collects want to be his, and we're going to play the excerpt now that actually does explain how he wound up owning that letter.
Because spoiler alert, he kind of stole it from the government.
Oh, yeah.
Life, I was trying to get like the police records and this stuff, and I go into Westchester.
I'm trying to get a Xerox copy of the letter, the infamous letter that Albert Fish wrote to the mother of Grace Budd.
And that's all I want.
I just want a Xerox copy of the letter for my research.
And as fate would have it, the secretary there takes the letter, Xeroxes it, goes over to me, and gives me the actual letter.
I looked at it.
He came as soon as that happened.
Oh, man.
She then walked away with the Xerox copy, put it in a file, and put it in a cabinet.
I'm like.
Okay.
Then I knew that Fish wanted me to have it.
He didn't want anything.
Fish doesn't want anything.
He didn't, and he doesn't.
You piece of shit.
I'm going to tell you something I know has happened in that guy's life on a weekly basis.
Is he has opened a door for a woman with a very exceptional flourish and then said, after you, my lady.
Oh, yes, and then kissed her hand.
Oh, my God.
So many times.
So many hands kissing.
So many times.
And so many complaints from co-workers for the hand kissing after he's been asked to stop.
He's that guy.
Yeah.
He's a thousand percent that guy.
I don't like Joe Coleman.
We're going to play one more segment from later in the documentary where Joe Coleman tries to explain why Albert Fish did not sexually assault.
Oh, this would be great to hear him explain that.
That would be awesome.
I could see it on your face.
You were waiting for him to weigh in on why Albert Fish didn't rape the child.
Yeah.
Fish embodies this kind of pathology.
That there is something saintly and beautiful about suffering, but there's something ugly and repugnant about sex.
Because he saved little Grace Budd from this terrible crime.
He kept saying, I did not defile her.
She died a virgin.
And I know from my Catholic upbringing.
Oh, he was Catholic.
That's exactly.
There's a certain truth that he's saying.
And any Catholic is going to know.
Albert Fish, by mutilating and cutting this little girl up in pieces and doing this horrible thing to her, he's made her into this martyr.
He's made her into this creature that's going right through.
Actually, defiling a body is against the Catholic Church.
I'm pretty sure, yeah.
So cutting it up, actually, not that he cares about any of these.
No.
Yeah, I don't think.
It's definitely true.
We're going to get into this a little bit.
That Fish's peculiar personal brand of Christianity super had an impact on his crimes.
Yes.
But I think what Joe was saying there is full of shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Any Catholic knows that there's a way in which he became a martyr.
What are you talking about?
No, Okay.
So Albert Fish had a history known to his family of very creepy religious behavior.
In 1934, his son Albert Jr. was living with him in a small apartment.
One day he came upon his father, bare ass naked, in the middle of the living room, holding his erect penis and paddling himself on the ass with a nail-filled paddle.
His ass was red and bloody, and he was drenched in sweat.
This made Albert Jr. recall an incident in 1922 when he was playing football with his two brothers.
Here's how Deprave describes it: Albert had just bent down to catch a low kick, Albert the younger, not the murderer.
And as he straightened up to boot the ball back to Henry, he caught sight of his father standing in the apple orchard on the little hill behind the bungalow.
The old man had his right hand raised high in the air and was shouting something over and over.
Albert had strained to listen.
The old man was shouting, I am Christ, which is like his catchphrase.
Yeah.
He would shout, I am Christ a lot, particularly while beating himself.
Yeah.
He also had a habit of lighting his own ass on fire.
Yeah.
He's a huge fan of blood.
He's a huge ass on fire.
The Benign-Looking Monster00:15:06
Well, you know, once you hit it with nails, that's like a sharp pain.
You're like, ooh, what's a dull overall pain?
Yeah, what else can I do?
Fire.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Burn it.
Burn it.
So another time, Albert Jr. found several of his dad's homemade nail-studded bloody and rusted paddles.
He asked his father for an explanation, which is the start of the conversation that you should be having.
And Albert Fish, his dad, explained, quote, I use them on myself.
I get these feelings that come over me.
And every time they do, I have to torture myself with those paddles.
Period.
Yeah.
Should have been a longer conversation.
Duh, son.
Yeah.
It should have been longer.
I'm punishing myself with paddles.
Because I'm Christ.
Because I'm Christ.
So Albert Fish had a very, very long, very, very long history of writing insane and unbelievably creepy letters to random women.
He would find them in newspapers through matrimonial agencies, classified ads.
A lot of times there were women letting out rooms who were like landladies, and he would just like start.
Yeah.
He would start?
He would start.
He would just send them these crazy letters.
And they would, some of them would start kind of reasonable and then would descend to him asking for paddlings.
Usually they're paddling focused one way or the other.
He would pretend to be a Hollywood agent in some cases.
We're teetering towards that cliff again.
Here's a quote from one letter he sent to a woman while he was pretending to be Mr. Hollywood.
I wish you could see me now.
I am sitting in a chair naked.
The pain is across my back, just over my behind.
When you strip me naked, you will see a most perfect form.
Yours, yours, sweet honey of my heart.
I can taste your sweet piss, your sweet shit.
You must pee pee in a glass, and I shall drink every drop of it as you watch me.
Tell me when you want to.
Number two, I will take you over my knees, pull up your clothes, take down your drawers, and hold my mouth to your sweet honey fat ass and eat your sweet peanut butter as it comes out fresh and hot.
This is how they do it in Hollywood.
Yeah.
You know, part of me is like, maybe he got some kicks off that way.
She was definitely getting kicks off.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But you think, yeah, it probably did work with some people.
Like, statistically, you send a lot of letters out.
So there are a ton of his creepy letters that you can read if you want to read Depraved or you can just look them up online.
We're not going to read every piece of correspondence he sent.
I do want to go over a little bit more of it, though.
A number of women came forward after he was arrested when he was like in court and his letter was made public.
And these were people who had been freaked out by his letters before and in some cases had kept them and hadn't known what to do.
Because like nowadays, if you're a woman, because of the internet, men are going to send you terrifying things.
Right.
That's just what happens.
But back then, some lady would just receive a letter that's like 16 pages in the mail of a guy talking about wanting his ass paddled or wanting you to poop on him.
And you just didn't have any.
And you don't tell your girlfriends because you don't know if they like, is this normal?
Yeah.
What?
Is this part of being a person?
Yeah.
Do they really do it in Hollywood that way?
I just imagine like looking out at mailboxes and just thinking, is everyone getting letters like this?
What?
Is this just life?
Why is no one talking about this?
Um, so he sent the other kind of families of letters that he would have is he would he would message women, generally landladies, telling them that he had an adult son who was mentally ill and needed to be spanked regularly.
Right.
And sometimes he would send them like a dozen letters, like very long conversations where they would agree, like, okay, I can spank him if he's bad.
And then he'd like go on to specify, like, no, it needs to be done.
Like, oh, I like it.
This is how I like it.
The doctor says three or four good spankings a day on his bear behind will do him good as he is nice and fat in that spot.
It will be an aid to him.
When he don't mind you, then you must strip him down and use the cat o nine tails.
Say you won't hesitate to use the paddle or cat o nine tails on him when he needs it.
Now, that's one paragraph.
There are pages of him detailing how to spank his fake son.
He was very concerned about making sure it was the right way.
Yeah, his fake son might not get spanked the right way.
And he's clearly doing this to get off, which is creepy and not okay.
But this is what I suspect this is most of what he did up until he committed those murders.
Yeah, it feels like this was him, you know, the escalation.
Exactly.
Starting with letters, doing that.
Always the fascination with the butts, though.
That's fat butts.
Fat butts.
Fat butt.
You know, in a different timeline with like right medication, he would have just liked Fat Bottom Girls Rule the World.
Well, yeah, exactly.
Different person.
You know.
Freddie Mercury could have saved him and all of those people.
Freddie Mercury could have done anything.
He could have done that.
I love Freddie Mercury.
This is yet another case where if we had a time machine, you get Freddie Mercury and you just travel around time.
You'd fix a couple things here.
You'd fix a couple of things here and there.
So in 1930, though, Albert Fish sent his insane, creepy letters to the wrong damn woman, a housekeeper named E. Solarid.
She sent the letter to the police, and since he had included a return address because he was hoping to keep up this concept.
Yeah.
They were able to find and arrest him because it's not legal to send horrifying letters like that to strangers.
Wow, even back then.
Yeah.
Even back then.
He was sent to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital to be diagnosed, and he spent a few weeks there.
He was found to be sexually psychotic, which seems fair.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There seemed to be a crosswire between sex and pain.
They also, though, found that he was quiet and cooperative.
They said he conducted himself in an orderly and normal manner, and his bad behavior was mostly chalked up to the fact that he was old and probably senile.
So he was released after too long.
Now, in 1931, he was arrested again for sending obscene letters to a woman who owned a boarding school in the area.
This time, the police searched his home and found his homemade cat of nine tails, as well as a Frank Furter and a carrot, both really gross looking.
Gee, I wonder where those have been.
Well, the cops asked him why he had these in his dresser, and Fish replied, I stick them up my ass.
Oh, yeah, mystery left.
You know, to his credit, he was honest because he was crazy and doesn't realize.
Was not hiding it.
No.
Yeah.
So during the trial, you know, when he was finally caught and stuff, it was revealed that Fish's original plan had been to abduct a teenage boy rather than Grace.
He'd planned to tie up Edward, slice off his penis, and then skip town while the boy bled to death.
Right.
Because he didn't want to kill him.
He just wanted the penis.
Well, he wanted to kill him, but he wanted it to take a long time.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Grace was a consolation murder victim.
And he usually would sometimes refer to Grace as a him just because I guess that's what he said.
He wanted it that way.
I think that, yeah, he wanted it that way.
So in interviews with police, Albert Fish reported a general sort of amusement and confudlement over why he had killed Grace, saying, first, you know, I never could account for it.
He would later claim that his brother had served in the Navy in China because he'd claimed before it was a friend of his.
Later, he said it was his brother.
I don't think either of them.
I don't think it either was.
The rest of the family was kind of just like doing normal things, which is so and all his kids turned out really normal.
Yeah, and they seem in the story, they seem pretty normal.
Yeah, like they have a range of different reactions to this because his daughters are kind of in his court and say he was always a good dad, like he's a normal guy.
Yeah, all the kids are really good dad.
Yeah, and he's he's he never even hit his kids, which is weird for that period of time because everybody hit kids back in their 20s.
Um, but not Albert Fish, he would just hit himself, yeah, again, the gold poster and the kids that he murdered, yeah, the gold poster was gold poster, yeah, all over the place, yeah.
Um, so uh, he would later tell Detective King that he traced his problems back to the fact that when he was five years old, he was placed in an orphanage by his mother.
His dad was 75 when he was born, and his dad had died when he was very young.
And as soon as that happened, his mom put him in the orphanage.
Uh, he said he saw a lot of things a child of seven should not see.
Um, I, yeah, not to say that there's not truth to, I'm sure some either it was he's always like had you know this mental problem, or yeah, there's usually an inciting incident.
He says they were whipped in the orphanage, which definitely happened in orphanages back then, so maybe that's where it started.
Yeah, and if you're you know developing sexually and sometimes a little and you're getting hit on the button, but all the time that's your thing, that's how it works.
Yeah, we're amazing machines.
Um, we're amazing, we're so we should be trusted with so much.
Yeah, isn't it great we have missiles?
That was a real solid development for species with our sorts of impulse control.
Um, yeah, so further investigation determined that Fish's legal troubles had actually started back in 1903 when he'd spent 16 months in prison on grand larceny.
He'd been arrested six times just since Grace Budd's abduction, sometimes for sending horrible letters to people, sometimes for vagrancy or for passing bad checks.
In court, he was no clearer on why he'd killed Grace, saying, The temptation just came over me.
That's all I can say.
I can't account for it.
I don't understand it.
But he was always emphatic that he had not had sex with her, saying, No, sir, no, sir, no sex at all.
I did not outrage her.
Which I think murdering someone outrages them, probably.
Yeah, I guess.
And also, I think he was probably gay.
So that's probably a huge reason why he didn't with Grace.
Yeah, and he does seem to be the, who we'll talk about in a minute here, the psychiatrist who diagnosed him, did come to the conclusion that he was homosexual.
Yeah.
But he was a lot of things.
And I wouldn't, yeah, and that's almost like why even mention it?
Because his sexuality is like a pollock painting.
Like, it is, it is a mess.
It's all over the place.
Yeah.
So the media was as gross as you would expect from everything we've talked about in this story when they covered the trial.
Depraved, the book, notes that a single article in the mirror called Fish The Ogre of Murder Lodge, The Vampire Man, an Orgiastic Fiend, and the Werewolf of Wisteria, all in the same article.
Wow, the same.
That's too pick one.
That prose is so purple, it's red.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Here's a quote from that article: Out of the slime of the sadistic butchery of Grace Budd by the benign-looking Albert Howard Fish, there emerged last night the hint of an even greater horror, a horror of multiple killings, revealing a new type of Jack the Ripper in the guise of a kindly old gentleman.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's weird that they describe him as kind and like normal looking.
Because he wasn't creepy as creepy as fuck.
Yeah, and it's clear, like at the time, when you talk about his first crimes, people noticed him.
They were like, there is a creepy ass fucking gray dude walking around.
That must be who abducted the child.
And they were not wrong.
No, no, he was the guy.
Yeah.
He looks like the guy that if you like see him walking around a playground, you're like, I'm just going to call a cops.
Like, I feel like there should just be some armed men around us.
Which I like, I hate doing that because there are plenty of wonderful people who do look creepy and vice versa.
But he is one that you look at and it's like, oh, no.
yeah.
And in fact, go to our website to look at those pictures.
Fish's case was confusing, as that last quote to people of the time because he, aside from his criminal record, he didn't fit society's profile of a sex murderer.
He was a descendant of American aristocracy, which I guess you are too.
Yes.
Some famous revolutionary dude, right?
Yeah, famous revolutionary dude.
And he was also related to, I guess he was like in the treasury in D.C., Hamilton Fish.
Yeah.
That sounds like a treasury name.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
There's a lot of official checks with his like ostentatious signature on it.
And Hamilton Fish actually deleted some historical records that connects them as we ran into that big gap while doing our family tree.
It's like, gee, why did he?
Sure seems like a well-connected dude tried to cover up.
He was related to this man.
That's amazing.
Same last name.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
That's fun.
Yeah.
Okay.
So who's worse?
No.
Albert Fish was.
It came out during all this that his wife had abandoned him when the kids were very young and left the kids with him.
And again, as we said, he'd been a decent dad.
And you can't blame when you, because the wife gave testimony at the trial and were just talked about the same things the kids had seen.
They'd seen, but they were not okay with it.
They were fucking terrified of him.
Right.
And they left.
Which, fair, totally fair.
Yeah.
Especially in a time when no one has a vocabulary to discuss something like this.
Yeah.
Not cool to leave the kids with him.
No.
That's a questionable move.
I don't agree with that choice.
Which is made weirder by the fact that he was apparently fine as a dad.
Yeah.
So, but there's no way that woman could have known that.
No, they just ran.
Yeah.
And I guess some of it's probably that I imagine at that time, if you went to court for custody of the kids, it was probably easier for the man to win back then.
I don't know enough about how the laws were, but.
Also, maybe she was a little homophobic and saw some things like that she didn't like.
So it was just like, bah, you know.
Or maybe, yeah, maybe it was oddly woke and that they just thought he was gay and were like, well, gay people can raise kids just fine.
Right.
I just don't want to be out.
Yeah.
Who knows?
Who knows?
But he was clearly very angry at his wife for leaving.
And he, in fact, stated a number of times, yeah, he wrote a letter to his daughter Gertrude and said, all I hope for, all I want to live for is to be able to go in court that I may tell what a bitch of a mother you all had, the kind of wife I had.
Wow.
And you know what?
I bet he got it.
Like, I bet he got to save.
He sure did.
He wrote a letter to his daughter Annie and said, tell old Pegleg, your bitch of a mother, that the day I go into court and take a stand will be a sorry one for her.
It's weird.
The only time he sounds like a normal guy is when he's being really angry at his ex-wife.
Like he reaches clarity because I'm sure it's like a clear, like solid thing on this earth that he can be mad at.
And then everything else will just spiral into Vannis.
But he's got this anger point of being pissed at his wife.
So there were also a bunch of stories from his kids who had all just sort of chalked up his weirdness to dad being weird.
In court, Fish expressed deep concern for his children and at one point asked a reporter to send them Christmas baskets.
That's sweet.
Yeah.
He claimed he regretted the murder of Grace Budd as soon as he committed it.
Depending on the day of the trial, he would veer from asserting he was ready to die for his crimes to trying to get a lesser sentence.
Erasing Family Records00:10:12
So it was not totally consistent.
Fish was a very religious guy.
He had a lot of the Bible memorized, and his favorite Bible passage was Isaiah 36, 12.
I'm going to read it, and you try to figure out why he might have liked it.
But Rab Shaketh, and apologies to listeners named Rab Shacketh if I pronounced that wrong.
But Rab Shaketh said, Hath not my master sent me to thy master and to thee to speak these words?
Hath he not sent me to the men that sit upon the wall that they may eat their own dung and drink their own piss with you?
Awww.
Do you think it's that he's a big fan of Rab Shaketh?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's why he liked that quote.
When he was in jail one Sunday during a mass for prisoners, a guard heard grunting coming from his side.
Uh-oh.
And walked over to look.
He saw Fish with his pants down and just enormous erection, stroking his, you know, to the sounds of the Lord's Prayer.
Yeah, yeah.
So he loved God.
He's really into God.
He loved God.
Super into God.
Frederick Wertham, a distinguished psychiatrist who comics fans will know and hate for originating the comics code.
That guy was the guy who assessed Albert Fish's mental state for the court and tried to decide whether or not he was too crazy to be convicted.
He wrote, quote, there was no known perversion that he did not practice and practice frequently, which is in a way an accomplishment.
Yeah, normally that's a positive thing when you haven't murdered people.
Right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Wertham linked all of Fish's weirdness back to a desire for pain.
And Fish did tell him that, quote, I always seem to enjoy everything that hurt, the desire to inflict pain.
That is all that is uppermost.
To Wertham, Fish explained the details of what he'd done to Grace Budd.
He claimed that he'd first tried to drink her blood, but had not been able to handle it.
Instead, he'd cut off four pounds of flesh from her buttocks, breast, belly, and ears and nose.
Ears seem odd.
Not a lot of them.
He just wanted them.
Yeah.
That seems odd.
Yeah, yeah.
So he wrapped them up in newspaper and took them back to his homes.
This excited him so much that he ejaculated while riding the train back home before he even got home.
Yes, of course.
Once he was back, he used Grace's flesh to make a stew with carrots, onions, and strips of bacon.
He said he'd eaten the stew for nine days.
Oh, no, is that our family recipe?
Oh, dear God.
My father was making soup when I called.
I know.
And when he talks about eating the boy, he talks about the potatoes that he used.
Like, he makes like a bisque.
Yeah.
Oh, we do have a really good potato soup family recipe.
I kind of want it.
They're spamming it.
It's spam.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
That's the closest meat to people.
We all know that.
I mean, taste buds, it's inherited to an extent.
You want to come over for dinner?
Kind of, yeah, actually.
I can tell you that burning human flesh smells almost exactly like cooking bacon.
Okay.
Yeah.
I would absolutely buy that.
So, yeah, he ate her for nine days and pleasure himself and stuff.
We all know where this is going.
We're all adults.
Yeah, that's the kind of guy he is.
Yeah.
Okay.
So it was also in prison where Wertham and Detective King discovered Albert Fish's other favorite hobby.
He loved shoving needles inside himself.
Oh, he did.
Yeah.
Usually pushing them into his taint or somewhere else around his pelvis.
The doctors actually gave him an x-ray because he had chronic pain and he came back just filled with needles.
They found 29 needles inside of him.
There's the x-ray.
Haven't seen it.
I think I have, but I love it so much because...
He's just full of needles.
He's just full of needles.
They're just everywhere.
Industrious fellow.
You got to give him that.
There's one right there, like in the lower butt cheek, just kind of dangling.
Yeah.
Because a lot of times he would try to get him out, but a lot of times he just got him in two T.
Yeah.
Which.
There's that old Ian Malcolm quote from Jurassic Park.
You didn't stop to think of if you should.
Oh.
Yeah.
No, I bet he did.
He decided.
He decided yes.
This was a reasoned decision from Albert Fish.
They also found that Fish liked to soak cotton in alcohol, shove it up his ass, and light his ass on fire.
Yeah.
He claimed to have tortured many children the same way.
He did claim there were many children, a life full of victims.
Wortham said, quote, he started his sexual career, so to say, at the age of 17 at the time he became a painter.
Now, that profession of painter, this man has used as a convenience.
He worked in many different institutions.
He worked in YMCAs.
He worked in homes for the tubercular.
He worked in any kind of home where there were children, where he thought he could get children.
In all these places, he made his headquarters the basement or the cellar, and he had a habit of wearing painters' overalls over his nude body because he could get making.
So either it's true, and this guy killed a shitload of people, or he's lying.
And I think it's totally credible because it definitely was important to him to be a good father.
I think it's totally possible.
He spent all of his time working and doing masturbating in weird ways and sending letters to people.
And it was when he was no longer working and his kids were supporting him that he really got the time to actually commit horrible crimes.
Right.
To enact his fantasies.
Yeah.
We'll never know.
That's my read on it.
Yeah.
And that he was getting off on talking to the psychiatrist about stuff.
Yeah.
I think that was also part of it.
Because he told him lurid stories about seducing kids into basements with bribes of candy and money and then doing terrible things to them.
He did claim that most of his victims were colored because the authorities didn't care if black kids went missing.
Damn.
They knew back then.
And that part's true.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know if he actually did that, but I'm going to bet it was easier to get away with.
Yes.
And is still today.
Yeah.
So we'll never know how many of these victims are real or not.
Wortham did uncover more religious influences.
He found out that Fish was obsessed with the story of Abraham and Isaac, which he claims convinced him he needed to sacrifice a child.
He figured that if God didn't want the boy to die, he'd send an angel down to stop Fish.
Oh, so God's the real bad guy.
Yeah, God, all right.
Come on, God.
Don't write a book like that and just leave us to interpret it.
We'll do things like this.
Send some angels down.
Like, we're not, you know, you made us.
You know, we're not smart enough to figure this shit out.
We're sticking needles in our asses.
Come on.
On purpose.
On purpose.
In the end, Wortham concluded that Fish was, in fact, far too mentally ill for the state to execute.
He is, in my opinion, a man not only incurable and unreformable, but also unpunishable.
Which is probably accurate.
Probably, I don't think there was anything anyone could have done to be like, Do you realize what you've done?
I mean, at that point, who are you talking to?
And the court didn't disagree with this guy.
Nobody, none of the jurors thought that Fish was not criminally insane.
Yeah.
But they all wanted him killed anyway just because they thought he needed to die.
Yeah.
I mean, and I don't really disagree with that either.
Quality of life, if that is a factor, he's not leaving.
He's hurting himself.
Yeah, he's, it's, yeah.
Yeah.
So he was taken to the electric chair.
He was killed on January 16th, 1936.
He left behind a final statement to his lawyer, Jack Dimpsey, who stated, I will never show it to anyone.
It was the most filthy string of obscenities that I have ever read.
Oh!
One last creepy letter.
One letter to my dear lawyer.
So that's all I've got on Albert Fish.
Is there anything else that you brought to the table that we haven't gotten to yet?
Really, you covered a good amount of it.
I think, yeah, just the kind of the rest of the family and Hamilton Fish, like not only trying to not talk about it, but like erase records of being want to destroy the evidence.
Yes.
Destroy the evidence.
I think, yeah, it kind of speaks to the, I guess, shame of it all, which again is tied into mental health, which is tied into like sexuality and just.
Yeah.
I'm glad that we have at least a couple more nets to catch things like this before.
And now in a society where maybe a guy who grows up like Albert Fish and wanting to have his ass paddled bloody and wanting to paddle other people and be lit on fire, now that guy can just go to a dungeon and light his own ass, have his ass lit on fire, light other people's asses on fire, and there can be consent and it's all fine.
Right.
And he doesn't have to.
And not to say that he didn't choose to also.
Yeah, yeah.
But he's not a monster because he shoved needles up his ass.
That's a respectable way to pass the time.
Like, you want to, you do whatever you want to your own ass.
This is America.
Yeah.
Just don't eat children.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe eat adults.
Maybe.
Maybe the rich.
Maybe the rich.
Eat the rich.
Maybe eat the rich.
Eat the rich.
Doritos?
Doritos.
Yeah.
The only thing tastier than the flesh of the rich.
The only thing.
Yeah, yeah.
That's the only thing holding society together right now is that Doritos are tastier than the flesh.
And if they ever dip in quality, which they never will.
Which they never will.
Doritos are amazing.
But if they ever did, society would collapse because we would start eating the rich.
We would.
We will.
We would go right for the bangers.
Really?
We just owe a lot to Doritos, don't we?
We do.
We do.
And that's a positive note to end this horrible, horrible episode about a terrible criminal.
Maggie, you want to plug your pluggables?
Yes.
Yeah, you can find me Maggie and Mae Fish.
That's May M-A-E.
Also named after my great-great-grandmother, who is in the same line.
That's okay.
Yeah.
I bet she was really horrified when all this came out.
Oh, I don't know if she ever knew.
And thank God.
I'm just imagining members of your family like picking up the news over in Michigan and like reading about the trial and going, oh, I'm going to throw this newspaper in the trash here.
Don't let the kids see this.
Call our cousin in DC.
I think we need to have some files burned.
Burning The Files00:03:28
Hamilton will know what to do.
Yeah, so find me on Twitter.
I have a podcast about friendship called My Top Eight of the Small Beans Network.
And you can catch my videos at Breakdown Film and Society on my YouTube channel.
They're fantastic videos.
Check them out.
Check out Maggie's work.
She's one of the most talented people I've ever worked with.
I'm Robert Evans.
And next week, next Tuesday, we'll be back, as we are every week, with another story about someone terrible.
So please tune in for that.
It will probably be a dictator rather than a mass murderer.
But, you know, one in the same.
Yeah, one in the same.
Not as different as you might expect.
Yeah, you can find this podcast on Twitter at at BastardsPod, Instagram too.
You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com.
Have a cool ranch day.
And I love, yeah, about 40% of you.
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