EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (27 page)

Albert Fish

It was probably a good job that Delia Budd was illiterate because, in 1934, six years after her daughter, Grace, had been abducted, she received a letter containing these chilling words:

On Sunday June the 3, 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick — bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.

The letter had been written by Albert Hamilton Fish, the man who had taken and killed Grace Budd. Fish, then fifty-eight years old, had arrived on the Budds’ doorstep in May 1928, pretending to be Frank Howard, a farmer from Farmingdale, New York. He was calling in response to an advert placed in the New York World by Edward Budd, Grace’s eighteen-year-old brother. It read:

Young man, 18, wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street.

Fish spun a story that he needed someone to work on his farm and Edward was eager for the work. Fish returned a few days later to confirm that Edward had the job and was asked to stay for lunch. While there, Fish befriended Grace. She sat on his lap at the dinner table. As he was about to leave, he said he was on his way to a children’s birthday party at his sister’s house and wondered whether Grace would like to accompany him. Grace’s mother was unsure, but her husband Albert thought it would be fun for the girl and off Grace went with Albert Fish. It was the last they saw of their daughter.

Albert Fish was born Hamilton Fish in 1870 and his father was forty-three years older than his mother. When his father died in 1875, the five-year-old Hamilton was put into St John’s Orphanage by his mother. It was there that he changed his name to Albert to avoid the nickname ‘Ham and Fish’ that he had been given by the other children.

Life in the orphanage was harsh and cruel. There were regular beatings and whippings, but, perversely, Albert grew to enjoy the pain. He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that he would have erections for which the other children mocked him. His mother was able to look after him again when she found employment in 1879, but Albert was already scarred by his experiences at St John’s. By the age of twelve, he was engaged in a homosexual relationship. His partner, a telegraph boy, introduced him to perverse practices such as coprophagia and drinking urine. He spent his weekends watching boys undress at the public baths.

Fish claimed that by 1890 he was working as a male prostitute in New York City and that he was raping young boys on a regular basis. In 1898 he married and six children followed. He was working as a house painter but was also molesting countless children, mostly boys under the age of six. At this time, he developed an interest in castration and tried it out on a man with whom he had been having a relationship; the man fled before Fish could carry it out.

In 1903, he was charged with embezzlement and was sent to Sing Sing. But it wasn’t that much of a hardship for him as he could have sex with other inmates.

His life changed completely, in 1917, when his wife ran off with another man. Fish began to behave even more strangely than before. He claimed to hear voices and once wrapped himself up in a carpet, saying he had been ordered to do so by Saint John. His children reported seeing him beat himself on his nude body with a nail-studded piece of wood until he was covered with blood. Once they saw him standing alone on a hill with his hands raised, shouting: 'I am Christ.'

He inserted needles into his body, in the area of the groin – twenty-nine were discovered by an X-ray following his eventual arrest – and inserted alcohol covered balls of cotton wool into his anus; he would then ignite them. In this way, he thought he could cleanse himself of his sins.

Some four years prior to the abduction of Grace Budd, seven-year-old Francis McDonnell was playing with some friends near his home on Staten Island. His mother saw a man behaving oddly. He walked up and down the street, wringing his hands and talking to himself. She thought no more of him and went indoors. Later that same day, the same man lured Francis into some nearby woods. The next day his body was discovered, sexually brutalised, mutilated and strangled. It would be another ten years before they would discover who the killer was.

A year before Grace’s murder, Fish abducted, tortured and killed another child, Billy Gaffney. Fish later confessed:

I brought him to the Riker Avenue dumps. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took him. I took the boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took the trolley to 59 Street at 

2 a.m. and walked from there home. Next day about 2 p.m., I took tools, a good heavy cat-o-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six strips about 8 inches long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears, nose, slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood. I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in the grip. Then I cut him through the middle of his body. Just below the belly button. Then through his legs about 2 inches below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head, feet, arms, hands and the legs below the knee. This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to North Beach. I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee-wees and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears, nose, pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when the meat had roasted about 1/4 hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about 2 hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was a sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet.

Ultimately, it was Fish’s arrogance that betrayed him. The letter he wrote to Mrs Budd was delivered in an envelope that bore the logo of the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association. It turned out that a janitor of the association had left some stationery in a boarding house when he had moved out. Albert Fish had moved in after him but, the landlady told police, he had also since moved out. However, he had been expecting some money to be sent and had asked her to hold on to the cheque for him until he could call round to collect it. Detective William F. King waited at the house and when Fish arrived, asked him to accompany him to police HQ to answer some questions. Fish lunged at King with a razor, but the policeman easily overpowered him and arrested him.

Fish confessed to the pre-meditated murder of Grace Budd launching a debate as to whether he was sane which raged both before his trial and throughout it. However, he was found to be both sane and guilty and was sentenced to death. He thanked the judge for his death sentence and after sentencing confessed to the murder of Francis McDonnell. It is speculated that as well as the three murders that can be ascribed to Albert Fish with certainty, he may actually have murdered at least fifteen children and assaulted hundreds more over the years.

At Sing Sing on 16 January 1936, at 11.06, he was strapped into ‘Old Sparky’, the electric chair, and three minutes later, was dead. He is reported to have said that the execution would be ‘the supreme thrill of my life’.

Ian Brady And Myra Hindley

The Moors Murderers

Rejecting an appeal for their early release of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in 2000, the House of Lords described their crimes as ‘exceptionally wicked and uniquely evil’. The country agreed, disgusted by the depravity of their deviant sexual relationship, and Brady and Hindley became possibly the most despised people in Britain in the last forty years.

They met in January 1961, when he was twenty-one years old and Hindley was nineteen. He was working as a clerk at a Manchester chemical company where she got a job as a secretary. Their attraction to each other was immediate.

Myra Hindley was from Gorton in Manchester, the oldest child of Bob and Nellie Hindley. She was brought up, however, by her grandmother. Her childhood was fairly uneventful and she was thought of as a reliable girl who could be trusted, ironically, given her later acts, to babysit. Not considered bright enough to take O Levels, she left school at the age of fifteen and started working as a clerk at an electrical engineering firm. She was engaged at seventeen, but she called it off shortly after, taking fright at the type of life that would lie ahead of her. She wanted something a little more exciting than a mortgage, kids and a husband who spent his wages in the pub.

Ian Brady was certainly that. By the time she met him he was already a disturbed young man. He had been born out of wedlock in the rough Gorbals area of Glasgow and his mother had given him up for adoption. He became increasingly difficult as he got older, having terrible tantrums during which he would bang his head on the floor. At school, he was a loner who did not take part in the games the other boys played and he hated sport.

He was an intelligent boy, however, doing well enough to gain entrance to a good school, Shawlands Academy, at the age of eleven. But he never fulfilled his potential and was constantly in trouble. He also developed an unhealthy fascination with the Nazis, devouring books about them and collecting Nazi memorabilia. He began to get on the wrong side of the law and was charged with housebreaking three times between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. Eventually, he was ordered to leave Glasgow to live with his mother or be given a custodial sentence. He chose his mother and Manchester, moving to Moss Side.

With his Glasgow accent, Brady found it even more difficult to fit in in Manchester and became even more of an outcast. His mother had re-married a man named Brady and he took his name. His stepfather found him a job as a porter at the local market and he then found work at a brewery. Before long, however, he was arrested for stealing lead seals from his employers and sentenced to two years in a young offenders institution. However, there was no room for him and the first few months of his sentence were spent in Strangeways Prison where he had to grow up fast.

Released in November 1957, he got a job at Millwards where he met Myra Hindley.

She fell head over heels in love with him, seeing him as silent and aloof whereas others just thought he was sullen. To her, he was enigmatic and very different from anyone else she had ever gone out with. He rode a motorbike and she would comment in her diary about how he looked and what he was wearing. Nonetheless, it took him a year to ask her out – their first date was spent watching the film,
Judgement at Nuremberg
– and pretty soon they were an item.

He initiated her into his world, making her read his favourite books –
Mein Kampf, Crime and Punishment
, and the works of the Marquis de Sade. He persuaded her to bleach her hair blonde and to dress differently, wearing leather skirts and high boots. She allowed him to take pornographic pictures of her and he photographed them having sex. Some of the photographs show the marks left by a whip across her buttocks. She had always been a churchgoer, but when he told her there was no God, she stopped going. She believed everything he told her.

Within six months, he had moved in with her at her grandmother’s house where the elderly lady spent most of her time in bed. Her devotion to him was now total and as she was about to prove she would do anything to please him.

On the night of 12 July 1963, sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade was on her way to a dance. Some friends of hers had been forbidden to go as alcohol was going to be served, but they were curious to see if she would actually go on her own as she had said. Wearing a pretty pink dress, she did indeed set out for the dance, but she never arrived. Her friends followed her and then took a shortcut to surprise her outside the club. They waited but there was no sign of her.

At midnight, her parents went out looking for her and the next morning, having found no trace of her, they informed the police that she was missing.

Hindley had apparently intercepted Pauline and asked for her help in finding a glove that she had lost on Saddleworth Moor, an isolated and windswept area of the Peak District National Park. Once they were on the moors, Brady turned up on his motorbike. According to Hindley, he went off with the girl to search for the glove while Hindley waited at the car. She claimed that Brady raped Pauline and cut her throat before coming back to enlist her help in burying the body. Brady disagrees, saying that Hindley took an active part in sexually molesting Pauline.

On 11 November of the same year, they killed again. Twelve-year-old John Kilbride had gone with a friend to the cinema and had afterwards walked to the Ashton-under-Lyme market where there was sometimes money to be earned helping stallholders pack up. His friend left John at the market to catch a bus home and it was the last time he was seen alive.

A massive search was launched, involving thousands of police and volunteers but, as before, not a trace was found.

That day, Hindley had hired a car that was used to abduct John Kilbride. It was returned covered in mud and according to Hindley’s sister, Brady and Hindley shopped at Ashton market every Saturday.

In May 1964, Hindley bought a white Mini van and on 16 June, another child went missing. Twelve-year-old Keith Bennett stayed at his grandmother’s house every Tuesday evening while his mother went to bingo. That night when he failed to turn up, his grandmother just thought that his mother had decided not to send him over. The next morning when she turned up at her daughter’s door without Keith the police were called and another massive, but ultimately fruitless, search was launched.

Meanwhile, Brady and Hindley had joined a local gun club and would often go up onto Saddleworth Moor for target practice. Chillingly, they would also visit the graves of their victims, photographing each other kneeling on them.

Their fourth victim was ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey. On Boxing Day 1964 she went to a local fair with her two brothers and some friends. They had soon spent all the money they had been given and decided to go home. Lesley Ann decided to stay, however. She was last seen by a schoolmate, standing alone next to one of the rides.

Again, a huge search was initiated with thousands of people being questioned and hundreds of posters being put up. Yet again it was all to no avail.

Lesley Ann’s abduction and subsequent torture was about as depraved as two human beings could get. Photographs were later found of the little girl, naked and bound, posing for pornographic photographs. They tortured her, callously making a recording of her screams as she died. On the tape, the voices of both Hindley and Brady could be heard threatening and abusing her.

Brady, like the true psychopath he was, thought of himself as invincible and all-powerful. He now attempted to gain another recruit for his depraved acts, trying to corrupt Myra’s seventeen-year-old brother-in-law, David Smith. He gave him his beloved books and made him write some quotations in a notebook – ‘Murder is a hobby and supreme pleasure’ and ‘People are like maggots, small, blind, worthless fish-bait.’ He boasted to an incredulous Smith about the murders he had already committed and then decided to involve him in a murder. It would be his and Hindley’s undoing.

On 7 October 1965, Smith turned up at Hyde Police Station and told an astonishing story. He said that the previous night, his sister-in-law, Myra Hindley had told him that she was too afraid to walk home alone and had asked him to accompany her. On arriving at her house she invited him in to pick up some miniature bottles of wine that her boyfriend, Ian Brady, had left for him.

As he stood in the kitchen, however, he heard a loud scream coming from the living room, followed by a yell from Myra for him to come through. He rushed to the room wondering what he would find. On entering he saw Ian Brady holding what he at first thought was a life-size doll. He realised with a start, however, that it was actually the body of a young man. Brady stood up and straddled him, an axe in his hand. The young man on the floor was moaning and Brady raised the axe and brought it down on the man’s head. As the groans subsided, Brady swung the axe down on his head again and the groans changed to gurgles. Brady threw a cover over the youth’s head and wrapped a piece of electrical cord around his neck, pulling it tight and repeating the words ‘You fucking dirty bastard’ over and over again. The man on the floor stopped making any noise and Brady then turned to Hindley and said calmly, ‘That’s it, the messiest yet.’

While they had a cup of tea, Hindley and Brady joked about what had just happened. But Smith was horrified, and also very afraid of what might happen if he made the wrong move. He stayed long enough to help them clean up the mess and truss the body up for removal and disposal. He then went home and was violently sick.

The police were just as incredulous as Smith had been about Brady’s bragging, but they went round to Hindley’s house to check. Sure enough, there in the back bedroom they found the body of the young man they had murdered the previous evening, Edward Evans, a seventeen-year-old homosexual that Brady had picked up in a pub in Manchester.

When confronted, Brady admitted to killing Evans but said that it happened during an argument. He also tried to implicate David Smith, something he consistently did during interrogation. Hindley was not initially arrested, but four days later, a three-page document turned up in her car that detailed how she and Brady were going to carry out the murder and clean up afterwards. Critically, however, they also found a mention of Hindley’s prayer book. Examining that, they discovered a left luggage ticket between its pages. In the locker at Manchester Piccadilly station they made a horrific find. There were two suitcases containing pornographic books and magazines. But there were also pictures of Lesley Ann Downey, naked and gagged, as well as the tape of her screams as they brought her young life to a cruel end.

The trial was a procession of perversion and cruelty. It seemed that Myra Hindley was turned on by watching Brady perform homosexual acts on his victims but throughout the trial the pair said nothing and showed no remorse.

They were each sentenced to life, Brady refusing to appeal while Hindley did, but her petition was rejected. For seven years they corresponded with each other in prison before Hindley stopped. She took a university degree and helped police with information about the whereabouts of their victims’ bodies.

As the years passed, Hindley made many attempts to obtain a release from prison, but Brady constantly countered her moves by revealing more about her involvement in the murders. It all became academic in 2002 when she died in prison. Brady, meanwhile, has never sought release and has been trying to starve himself to death for a number of years.

Keith Bennett’s body remains undiscovered forty-six years after his murder.