The crime that brought Fish to public attention was the 1928 kidnapping-murder of a pretty twelve-year-old girl named Grace Budd. After be-friending her parents, Fish made up a diabolical lie. He said that his niece was having a birthday party and asked if Grace would like to go. Mr. and Mrs. Budd--who had no way of knowing that the grandfatherly old man was a monster--agreed.
Dressed in her Sunday finest, the trusting little girl went off with Fish, who led her to an isolated house in a northern suburb of New York City. There, he strangled her, butchered her body, and carried off several pounds of her flesh. Back in his lodgings, he turned her "meat" (as he called it) into a cannibal stew, complete with carrots, onions, and bacon strips. He spent the next nine days locked in his room, savoring this unholy meal and compulsively masturbating.
For the next six years, Fish remained at large, but throughout this time he was doggedly pursued by a New York City detective named William King, who had made the Grace Budd case his personal crusade. Even so, Fish probably would have gotten away with the crime if it hadn't been for his own inner demons. In 1934, he felt compelled to send Mrs. Budd one of the sickest letters ever written (also featured on this website). In the end, King was able to track down his quarry through the letterhead stationery Fish had used.
Once Fish was in custody, authorities quickly relized that they had their hands ona killer of unimaginable depravity, one who had spent his whole lifetime inflicting pain--on himself as well as others. Like a number of serial killers, Fish was a religious maniac, and he subjected himself to grotesque forms of torture as penance for his sins--flagellating himself with leather straps and nail-studded paddles, eating his own excrement, shoving sewing needles into his groin. The children he mutilated and murdered were, in his demented eyes, sacrifical offerings to the Lord. Noted New York City psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham--who was called in by the defense to examine Fish--declared that the old man had practiced "every sexual perversion known," as well as a few that no one had ever heard of (among his grotesque pleasures, Fish liked to insert rose stems into his urethra). X rays of his pelvic region taken in prison revealed that there were 29 needles lodged around his bladder.
Though the jury at his 1935 trial acknowledged that he was insane, they believed he should be electrocuted anyway. After receiving the death sentence, the bizarre old man reportedly exclaimed, "What a thrill it will be to die in the electric chair! It will be the supreme thrill-the only one I have not tried!"
On January 16, 1936, the sixty-five-year-old Fish went to the chair--the oldest man ever put to death in Sing Sing.
