Authors: Harold Schechter
King showed Fish the letter that had been mailed to Mrs. Budd and asked the old man if he had written it. Without a moment’s hesitation, Fish acknowledged that he had.
King then held out the letter concerning the nudist club meetings which had been sent to Vincent Burke at the Holland Hotel on 42nd Street by “James W. Pell.” Had Fish written that letter, too? The old man nodded “yes.”
Finally, King handed Fish the telegram that the Budds had received from “Frank Howard” six and a half years before, on June 2, 1928. Again, Fish freely admitted that he was the pseudonymous sender.
When King asked him, however, if he was the person responsible for taking Grace Budd from her home, Fish denied knowing anything about it. King’s eyes narrowed and his voice grew stern. “In view of what I’ve just shown you,” he said, “do you expect me to believe that you weren’t the man who was at the Budd home?”
“I wasn’t there,” Fish answered. “Never saw Mrs. Budd.” King glared down at the old man, who kept his eyes fixed on the floor.
“All right,” King said quietly. “I’ll tell you what. I’m going to send for the manager of the Western Union Office at 104th Street and Third Avenue, where this telegraph was sent from. Then I’m going to get hold of a member of the Costa family, who owned 409 East 100th Street when you lived there in 1928. Then I’m going to send for Reuben Rosoff, the pushcart peddler you bought the little pail from—the one you carried the pot cheese in when you visited the Budds on Sunday, June 3. And then I’m going to bring down the whole Budd family and Willie Korman. I have a feeling these people will be able to identify you.”
With that, King turned and headed toward the office door. Before he reached it, Fish called him back. “Don’t send for those people,” he said softly. “I’ll tell you all about it. I’m the man you want. I took Grace Budd from her home on the third day of June and brought her to Westchester and killed her that same afternoon.”
King walked back to the door and left word that he was not to be disturbed by anyone. Then, fetching a notepad and fountain pen, he sat down at Stein’s desk and jotted notes, while Fish began matter-of-factly recalling that time in the summer of 1928 when his “blood thirst” (as he described it) became too ferocious to resist and he found himself driven by an overwhelming need to kill.
As it happened, Grace Budd was not Fish’s intended victim at all. Not, at any rate, to begin with. Originally, Fish told King, he had meant to murder her brother, Edward.
Not that Fish felt any animosity toward Edward Budd. He hadn’t even known of the young man’s existence until the morning of May 27, 1928, when he had spotted Edward’s classified ad in the New York World. It was simply that Fish felt the need for a sacrificial victim, preferably male.
Specifically, Fish hoped to lure his victim to an abandoned house in the Westchester community of Worthington (where Fish had briefly lived a few years earlier), overpower the young man, bind him with stout cords, and then slice off his penis.
Afterward, he planned to take the train back to the city, quickly pack his bags and get out of town, leaving the trussed and mutilated boy to bleed to death on the floor of the empty cottage.
Fish had been searching for a suitable victim when his eyes fell on the “situation wanted” ad Edward had placed in the World in the hopes of securing a summer job in the country. After years of concocting elaborate identities for his obscene correspondence, Fish had needed no time at all to invent the fictional persona of Frank Howard, the gentleman farmer from Long Island. (When asked how he’d come up with the alias, Fish explained that “Howard” was his own middle name. He couldn’t say why he’d picked “Frank.” The name had just popped into his head.)
Fish went on to tell King about his first visit to the Budds. His initial glimpse of Edward had been very disappointing. The broad-shouldered young man looked like a full-grown adult—not what Fish had in mind at all. And then there was the complicating presence of Willie Korman, Edward’s equally strapping friend, whom Fish had felt constrained to include in his plans.
Still, he had been determined to go through with the scheme. His blood-craving was too urgent to be denied. And he felt confident that he could handle both Eddie and Willie. As Detective King and other investigators would come to learn, the feeble-looking old man had experience in these matters. A great deal of experience.
Fish proceeded to describe his various preparations—the purchase of the enamel pail from Reuben Rosoff’s pushcart, the trip to Sobel’s hock shop to buy the necessary tools.
He briefly related the episode involving the two neighborhood boys, Cyril Quinn and the son of the Italian coalman. Fish explained that he had been planning to murder the Quinn boy for a while. When King asked “Why?” Fish simply shrugged. In any event, the plan hadn’t worked out. Fish described how young Cyril and his friend had fled the apartment after discovering the cleaver, saw, and butcher knife stashed beneath the old man’s bed.
Fish quickly sketched in the events of Sunday morning, June 2. How he had wrapped his three “implements of hell” in a piece of striped canvas tarp. How he had stopped on his way to the Budds to fill the enamel pail with pot cheese and to purchase a container of strawberries. How he had left the canvas-wrapped parcel at a newsstand on the corner of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street. How he’d joined the Budd family for a potluck lunch.
And then he described his first glimpse of little Grace.
As soon as he had seen her standing in the kitchen doorway, still dressed in the pretty outfit she had worn that morning to church, he knew that it was the girl, not her brother, that he wanted to kill. He told King how she had climbed upon his knee, and about the four bits he had given her to run out and buy candy. Before she returned, he had already thought up the imaginary birthday party at the fictitious address.
When he proposed taking Grace along, even Fish was surprised at how readily her parents consented.
Fish paused in his recitation. He asked King for some water, which the detective fetched from a cooler. The old man sipped for a moment from the glass.
Then, speaking in the same low monotone, he summoned up the events of that sweltering afternoon when he had led Grace Budd away from her home and family under the pretext of taking her to his niece’s birthday party.
After bidding goodbye to Mrs. Budd and retrieving his bundle from the newsstand, Fish had led the little girl to the Ninth Avenue El and up the long stairway to the subway platform, where they boarded a train to Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. They switched lines at that point and traveled to the Van Cortlandt Park Station.
There, Fish, holding the little girl’s hand, made his way to the ticket booth of the Putnam Division of the New York Central Railroad. Handing the man behind the window ninety cents, he purchased a round-trip ticket for himself to the Westchester community of Worthington, less than twenty miles north of the city.
For Grace Budd he purchased a one-way ticket.
Inside the train, Fish let Grace sit next to the window so that she could look out at the scenery. Lowering himself slowly onto the seat beside her, he leaned across her lap and propped the canvas-wrapped bundle against the side of the car. Then they settled back for the forty-minute ride upstate, Fish occasionally turning to Grace to tell her how much fun his niece’s birthday party was going to be or reaching down to give her knee a gentle pat.
Seated beside her grizzled companion, hands folded primly in her lap, Grace stared silently through the window at the landscape rushing by. She had only been outside of the city on two occasions in her life. If she wondered now why the train seemed to be carrying her off into the green, open countryside, she never said a word. Seeing the nicely dressed couple—Fish in his dark, three-piece suit and gray fedora, and Grace in her white silk communion dress and light summer coat—another passenger would have taken them for a dapper old gentleman and his pretty little granddaughter, headed upstate for a Sunday outing.
When they disembarked at Worthington Station, Fish seemed slightly distracted. As they stepped onto the platform, Grace tugged at his sleeve. “You forgot your package,” she exclaimed. Turning on her heels, she dodged back into the car. Seconds later, she reappeared with the red-and-white-striped parcel cradled in her arms. Fish took it from her without a word.
The sky had cleared, but even here, twenty miles north of the stifling city, the air seemed suffocatingly hot. As Fish led the little girl along the path that ran between the train tracks and the Saw Mill River Parkway, he asked if she felt hot. “Oh, yes,” she said, sighing. At Fish’s suggestion, she removed her hat and coat and handed them to the old man, who rolled the coat into a small bundle with the hat neatly folded inside.
They turned left at Mountain Road and proceeded up the steep, curving hillside for another half mile, past the house of a man named Frank Cudney. Directly across the road from Cudney’s place was a farm owned by his mother, an elderly widow who was standing beside the fence that bounded her property, replacing some wooden slats that had been knocked down by her livestock. As Fish and Gracie walked past, he tipped his hat to the old “cow-woman” (as Fish described her to King) and remarked on the heat.
Then, taking Gracie by the hand, he continued up the road to his destination—an empty, two-story house known to the locals as Wisteria Cottage.
The house was set back a few dozen feet from the road, up a small slope. It was surrounded on three sides by dense woods, which served to isolate it from the neighboring houses, the nearest of which was a hundred yards away. Behind the house, the land ascended steeply. A small wooden privy stood fifty feet up the hill.
Fish led Grace up a half dozen log steps to a small grassy yard at the side of the house. The yard was blanketed with wildflowers. Fish told the child to play there while he went inside the house for a moment to fetch something. It was three in the afternoon and the lawn blazed in the sunlight. Grace had never seen such beautiful flowers. She crouched in the grass and began to pick a bouquet, humming softly to herself.
Fish walked around to the rear of the house, where patches of bare soil had been furrowed by rainwater. A large flat stone lay across one of the ruts. Laying down his canvas-wrapped bundle, Fish lifted one end of the rock and stuffed Grace’s coat and hat underneath it. Then he picked up his package and headed for the side door of the house. Before he reached it, he caught sight of an empty five-gallon paint can lying in the grass. He walked over to it, lifted it by its wire handle, and carried it inside the house.
The old low-ceilinged house had been uninhabited for many years and smelled heavily of must and mildew. The striped wallpaper in the living room was shredded and stained, and the floor was strewn with rodent droppings. Though the windows were bare, a passerby would have had trouble seeing into the house. The dirty panes blocked out everything but the daylight, which filtered into the empty rooms from every direction.
Fish climbed the staircase to the second floor of the house and entered the corner bedroom that overlooked the yard where Grace was picking flowers. Squatting underneath the window, he unrolled the canvas bundle and removed his tools one by one—the saw, the cleaver, and the double-edged knife—laying them neatly on the floor to the left of the canvas. Then he removed his clothes and dropped them in a pile a few feet away from the canvas. His legs were skinny and slightly bowed, his lumpy chest matted with tufts of white hair. Opening the window a crack, he called down to the child, asking her to come up to the house.
Carrying her bouquet of flowers, Grace walked up the porch steps and into the house. “Up here,” Fish called out when he heard her enter. She began to climb the stairs. As soon as she reached the second floor landing, Fish stepped out into the hallway.
At the sight of the naked old man, the little girl began to scream. “I’ll tell my mama!” she yelled. Dropping her flowers, she turned and tried to run downstairs.
With surprising speed, Fish grabbed Grace by the throat and pulled her into the empty bedroom. The little girl began to struggle wildly, kicking and scratching with her own surprising strength. Fish dug his fingers deep into her throat. He dragged her over to the canvas tarp, wrestled her to the floor, and knelt on her chest with his full weight while he continued to choke her. By then, he had become erect.
When he was sure she was dead, he lifted her head and rested it on the rim of the five-gallon paint can. Then he reached over for his double-edged knife and cut off Grace’s head, taking care to catch as much blood as possible inside the empty can.
* * *
At this point, King interrupted the confession to ask if Fish had “used the girl’s body” in any way. Interpreting the phrase (as King apparently intended it) to refer to rape, Fish insisted that he had not violated Grace sexually—that she had “died a virgin,” as he’d stated in his letter to the Budds.
In that letter, of course, he had described putting the girl’s body to a very different and even more unimaginable “use” by carrying it home and eating it. But for some reason, King did not question Fish explicitly about the matter of cannibalism. And Fish himself made no mention of it.
After a few moments, Fish said, he undressed the headless corpse and tossed the spattered clothing into an empty walk-in closet a few feet away. Getting stiffly to his feet, he shoved open the window, picked up the paint bucket, and dumped the blood out into the yard.
Returning to the body, Fish knelt beside it and, using the knife again, began to slice through the midsection, just below the navel. When he reached the spine, he switched to his cleaver. Before very long, the body lay chopped in two.
Carrying Grace’s white shoes in one hand and her head in the other, Fish went downstairs, out the side door, and up the hill to the wooden outhouse. He thought about disposing of the head down the toilet hole, but the idea of dropping it into “the muss” seemed wrong to him, so he set it in a corner and covered it with some old newspapers that were lying on the floor. He did, however, stick the shoes into the hole, placing them on a small rock ledge just below the opening.