His name was Albert Fish. As victims, he chose only children, whom he killed and ate. The perversions of this man were so terrible that no one ever doubted that he was mentally ill. Despite this, Fish was found sane and was sentenced to death.
At birth, Albert was named Hamilton. Hamilton Fish was born in 1870 in Washington into a very respectable family. However, many of his relatives suffered from various mental illnesses. Hamilton spent his high school years at a boarding school, where he first began receiving corporal punishment, as well as watching other students receive it. It was during this period that his first homosexual contacts began. When he came of age, he moved to New York, where he changed his name to Albert because he was teased at school for “ham and eggs”.
Soon, his mother insisted that he marry. His wife bore him six children. She later reassured that Fish was a good family man, although at times his behavior was very strange. For example, once he deliberately injured his hand badly with a nail.
Fish was first arrested in 1903 for robbing a store where he worked. He was sent to prison, where Fish spent two years. But he was not destined to go down in forensic history as a robber.
Fish only became a serial killer in the 1920s, when he was about 50 years old. However, an investigation revealed that he committed the first murder of a child in 1910 in Wilmington. Fish also repeatedly raped the boys, but managed to go unpunished every time.
On the morning of July 14, 1924, 8-year-old Francis McDonell disappeared. He was last seen leaving the playground, accompanied by a thin middle-aged man with a gray mustache, dressed in gray clothes. A few hours later, Francis's body was found in the woods. The child was severely beaten, raped and strangled with his own braces. The police began a search for the "gray man", as the killer was named. However, the investigation has yielded no results.
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On February 11, 1927, 4-year-old Billy Gaffney went missing near his home. A neighbor boy Billy was playing with said that a thin elderly man with a thick mustache had come up to them and took Billy away. The child's body was never found. Another incident occurred on June 3, 1928. This time the crime was somewhat different from the previous two. Eduard, 17, who was looking for a job, posted an ad in a newspaper. He was answered by a man who introduced himself as Frank Howard. Soon Howard came to Edward's house, he was old, thin and with a thick gray mustache. He made a good impression on the family.
Howard visited them again, ostensibly to finalize the hiring agreement for the young man. On his last visit, he offered to host one of Edward's younger sisters - 10-year-old Grace - on a children's party. After some hesitation, her parents agreed to let her go with a respectable and charming gentleman. Needless to say, they never saw their daughter again.
The police immediately began searching for the missing girl. It soon became clear that there was no such person as Frank Howard. No trace of the child was found, and a few months later the case was dropped due to lack of evidence that Grace Budd had been killed.
Ten years later, Fish, whose brain seemed to become even more foggy, wrote to the girl's mother a letter detailing what he had done to her daughter. He wrote that he took Grace to an empty house that he had rented in advance, stripped the baby, strangled, and then cut open the soft parts of the body and roasted them in the oven. He ate the girl for nine days.
The investigation was reopened. This time, it was headed by Detective William King, who very carefully worked out all the options. After a while, Albert Fish ended up in the hands of the police.
The exact number of victims of the serial killer remains unknown. It is believed that he killed 7-15 people. Fish raped some of them. During the investigation, he described in detail how he killed children, cooked them and ate them. In addition, he was prone to self-torture: he flogged himself with a whip, burned himself, beat himself with a stick. During the medical examination of the accused, 27 needles were found, which he drove into his groin.
Psychiatrists found the offender sane. When Fish learned that he was about to be electrocuted, he said that the punishment seemed extremely interesting to him. On January 16, 1936, the killer was executed.