Why So Sad, Dear Albert?
I’ve decided I’m going to do a series of posts on serial killers. Serial posts, if you will. Does that work? First: Albert Fish!
- Hamilton “Hamy” Fish was born in 1870 to a family with a long history of mental illness and religious fanaticism.
- After his father’s death, Fish’s mother put him into an orphanage.
- Taunted by the fellow orphans who called him “Ham and Eggs,” Hamy changed his name to Albert, after a dead sibling.
- Whipped and beaten by the orphan master, Albert Fish discovered that he liked pain.
Sorry I’m about to post all this disturbing stuff, Mom, but I can’t tell the story without these facts.
- Fish left the orphanage only to discover a love of homosexual relationships, watching young boys undress, drinking urine, and coprophagia.
- In 1890, Fish relocated to New York City, where he became a male prostitute and began raping young boys.
- His mother arranged for Albert to wed a bride 9 years his junior, and together they had 6 children. Is that a case against arranged marriages, or what?
- Albert Fish: house painter and child molester.
- He became fascinated with castration after visiting a wax museum and tried to castrate a mentally retarded man.
- In 1917 his wife left him for a handyman.
- Fish was crushed over the breakup. He began hearing voices.
- In 1910, Fish stabbed his first victim, a young boy in Wilmington, Delaware.
- He continued his attacks, focusing on the mentally handicapped and African Americans, as he felt “they would not be missed.”
- In May of 1928, 58-year-old Fish noticed an ad in the classified section of the New York World: “Young man, 18, wishes position in country.”
- Fish traveled to Manhattan to visit Edward Budd, who placed the article, under the pretense of hiring him.
- Going under the alias “Frank Howard, Farmer from Farmingdale,” he hired Edward and convinced the Budds to let Edward’s 10 year old sister, Grace, accompany him to a birthday party that evening. They complied.
- Neither Grace nor Fish returned, and the house superintendent was arrested under suspect of kidnapping.
- SEVEN YEARS LATER a letter arrived at the Budd household. Police traced it back to Fish.
- Full of grammatical and spelling errors, the letter told the story of a man who sailed from San Francisco to Hong Kong, where there was such a lack of food that young children began to be butchered and sold as meat.
- “John,” the protagonist of this tale, returned to the States with a taste for childrens’ flesh and proceeded to steal 2 boys, torture them…
You know what? I’m not going to go on with this post. I feel bad. I feel offensive. I feel like I’m writing things that I don’t want permanently posted on my blog. I feel like this is one of those things that you read about once, have in your head, and don’t necessarily need to revisit. I’ll leave this here as it is to show that I was working on a post today and to show how my mind changed in a mere 20 minutes’ time. Who wants to read this, anyhow? Not my mom, not Dan Samiljan, not the one person in Iran who reads my blog…I’m done with this post, and you know what? I might even be done with the whole series of serial killer posts.