Profile of Albert Fish
Albert Fish is best known for being a sadistic child rapist and murder. His reign of terror started in the early around 1919 and didn’t end until his death by lethal injection in 1936. His crimes came in an era when people tended to trust their neighbors and were less suspicious, his crimes opened the eyes of many.
Fish was born in 1870 to an elderly father 75 years of age and to a mother that was 43 years younger than the father, who also had a history of mental illness. Fish’s family history was plagued with many relatives that had a history of mental illness and he too later in life had auditory hallucinations. His mother placed him in a orphanage where he was treated roughly and began to enjoy the pain brought upon him.
Later he began a relationship in his early teens with a boy who introduced him to eating feces and drinking urine. From there he slowly escalated into watching boys undress in showers and writing obscene letters to women. With escalation he claimed to become a male prostitute and he grew more interested in castration and soon after he attempted castration on a mentally retarded lover. He started to rape young boys and continued to do so even after he was married in 1898.
His wife soon left him for another man and forced him to be an single parent of six children. Around this time he started to inflect self-pain by inserting needles in his pelvic region. The pressures of his failed marriage and single parenthood escalated his rapes and mutilations into murder. He claimed that he stabbed a mentally retarded boy in 1919. He started murdering often; while his exact number is unknown he targeted mentally retarded individuals because he assumed that they would not be missed.
In 1928 he had placed an ad in the paper looking for a farm hand under a false name. He had planned on murdering the boy who answered it, but when he arrived to interview the boy he saw the boys 10 year old sister grace. He talked her parents into letting him take her to his “nieces birthday party.” He murdered the girl, but was not a suspect in it until six years later he sent a letter to the mother explaining in great detail how he murdered and ate grace. He admitted after he was arrested to abducting, murdering and eating a 4-year-old missing boy from Brooklyn named Gaffney after questioned by police. Later he admitted to another unsolved murder of an 8 year old boy.
After his arrest he admitted to other murders and even boasted that he had a child in every state. It was unclear however how many he actually killed and how many he raped. He was suspected of at least sixteen murders but claimed he had over one hundred. When tried his defense claimed he was insane and was religiously psychotic. He was known as the “Gray Man” and “Boogie Man. Some say he was the most vicious child murder of all time.