- 8 hours ago
Disaster Transbian episode 151
Features select writings from The Atavist Magazine: https://magazine.atavist.com/2012/angel-killer
Features select writings from The Atavist Magazine: https://magazine.atavist.com/2012/angel-killer
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LearningTranscript
00:00I gave my love a locket, and then I broke her heart, and then I broke her heart.
00:13In Genesis 22, 2, the Lord said to Abraham,
00:18Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah,
00:24and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.
00:30What must Abraham have felt?
00:32Should he obey God's command to slaughter his son?
00:35The letter to Mrs. Budd was delivered in an envelope that had a small hexagonal emblem,
01:02with the letters NYPCBA, representing New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association.
01:12A janitor at the company told the police he had taken some of the stationary home,
01:18but left it at his rooming house at 200 East 52nd Street when he moved out.
01:24The landlady of the rooming house said that Albert Fish checked out of that room a few days earlier.
01:33She said that Fish's son sent him money, and he asked her to hold his next check for him.
01:40Detective William King, the chief investigator for the case, waited outside the room until Fish returned.
01:47The girl of my dreams is the sweetest girl, of all the girls that I know.
01:59He agreed to go to headquarters for questioning, then brandished a razor blade.
02:04The name of old trail, laid in the afterglow.
02:11King disarmed Fish, and took him to police headquarters.
02:17Fish made no attempt to deny the murder of Grace Budd,
02:20saying that he meant to go to the house to kill her brother, Edward.
02:25Fish said it never entered his head to rape the girl,
02:29but he later claimed to his attorney that, while kneeling on Grace's chest and strangling her,
02:35he did have two involuntary ejaculations.
02:43This information was used at trial to make the claim the kidnapping was sexually motivated,
02:49thus avoiding any mention of cannibalism.
02:54Fish led police to his isolated little house, Wisteria Cottage.
03:00Night had fallen by the time they arrived.
03:02Fish walked straight to a crumbling stone wall that curved along the hillside, behind the cottage.
03:10It took only minutes of digging to uncover Grace's small, dirt-encrusted skull.
03:18He confessed to stalking, torturing, and assaulting 400 children while traveling the country.
03:25But although he was a suspect in a long list of child killings, including nearly ten in the New York area alone,
03:33he turned silent and tearful when questioned about them.
03:37You know as well as I, Fish wrote from his cell in a letter to King,
03:42that if I had not written that letter to Mrs. Budd, I would not be in jail.
03:47Had I not led you to the spot, no bones would have been found,
03:51and I could only be tried for kidnapping.
03:54It was a fate to me or my wrongs.
03:57In mid-February, 1935, Frederick Vettum, a German-born psychiatrist,
04:05sat down to talk with the gray man.
04:07Vettum had been hired by Albert Fish's defense attorney,
04:11who planned to fight for his notorious client's life with the insanity defense.
04:15At that time, psychiatrists like Vettum, who worked with the mentally ill,
04:22especially within the legal system, were still known as alienists,
04:26from the French word, ilion, insane.
04:32Vettum was just starting to make a name for himself as an expert in the science of murderous behavior.
04:39Born Frederick Vettimer in Nuremberg in 1895,
04:42he'd studied medicine in Britain and his native Germany
04:46before earning a medical degree in 1921.
04:50The following year, he moved to the United States,
04:53working first at a Massachusetts mental hospital
04:56and then in the psychiatric clinic at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
05:02In 1927, he became an American citizen and shortened his name to Vettum.
05:08He moved to New York City five years later
05:10to become senior psychiatrist in the Department of Hospitals,
05:14where he organized and directed a clinic
05:16that screened convicted felons for the city courts.
05:20It was that expertise that attracted Fish's defense attorney, James Dempsey.
05:26A former prosecutor with a hard-charging reputation,
05:30Dempsey had been appointed by the court to represent the killer.
05:34Vettum was known for his sympathy for the disadvantaged.
05:39While at Johns Hopkins, he had done pro-bono work
05:42for impoverished African-American clients
05:45represented by the crusading lawyer, Clarence Darrow.
05:49Now Dempsey was asking him to take on an unprecedented challenge.
05:54He was asking Vettum if he could testify in favor
05:58of keeping a now-legendary child-murdering cannibal alive.
06:02He went to meet Fish at the Westchester County Jail in Eastview,
06:08where Fish had been moved in preparation for his trial.
06:11By now, the killer was known to the press
06:14not only as the Gray Man, but as the Brooklyn Vampire,
06:18the Werewolf of Wisteria,
06:20and thanks to a rumor that he did his best work by Moonlight,
06:24the Moon Maniac.
06:25Although Vettum should have known better
06:29from his years studying criminals,
06:31he was somehow expecting a monster,
06:33a shimmer of visible evil.
06:36Instead, the prisoner who was led in to meet him,
06:39quote,
06:40looked like a meek and innocuous little old man, unquote.
06:45Vettum wrote in his 1948 book,
06:48The Show of Violence,
06:49This harmless persona came naturally to Fish.
07:01He knew how to put it on for strangers,
07:03and he wasn't all that impressed with his earnest interlocutor.
07:07Some doctor came and asked me one million questions.
07:12He wrote no letter to his daughter
07:13after his first meeting with Vettum.
07:17But Vettum kept coming back again and again,
07:20spending some twelve hours
07:22in increasingly intimate conversations with the killer.
07:25And over the years, Fish started to talk.
07:28I'm not insane, he told Vettum.
07:31I'm just queer.
07:32I don't understand it myself.
07:34It is up to you to find out what is wrong with me.
07:38He talked about the children he'd assaulted
07:40in his endless pursuit of pain.
07:43Sometimes the children didn't satisfy him,
07:45so he'd find women willing to use a whip.
07:48When that wasn't enough,
07:50he lashed himself.
07:52When that wasn't enough,
07:53he'd eat his own feces,
07:55drink his urine.
07:56Sometimes that wasn't enough either,
07:59so he'd burn himself
08:00by lighting alcohol-soped cotton balls on fire in his rectum.
08:04And when even that wasn't enough,
08:06he'd drive needles under his body,
08:08mostly deep into his groin.
08:10Sometimes the pain made him scream.
08:13Always the children screamed.
08:15Sometimes he wanted that.
08:17Sometimes he gagged them.
08:19There was no known perversion
08:20that he did not practice,
08:22and practiced frequently,
08:24Vettum later wrote.
08:25But as the alienist came to realize,
08:28that deeply deviant history,
08:31or perhaps Fish's desire to atone for it,
08:34had been contorted into a justification for murder.
08:38Fish never forgot the brutal lessons
08:40of his old Episcopal orphanage,
08:42that all sinners must seek redemption.
08:45I had sort of an idea through Abraham,
08:48offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice.
08:51Fish explained,
08:52It always seemed to me
08:53that I had to offer a child for sacrifice,
08:56to purge myself of inequities,
08:59sins, and abominations
09:00in the sight of God.
09:03He told Vettum
09:04that he always listened to the angels
09:06who came to visit him.
09:08They brought him instructions from God.
09:10He recited some of them to the alienist.
09:13Their demands
09:14that he beat children with whips,
09:17or batter them with stones.
09:19In the case of Grace,
09:20he said he knew she was the daughter of Babylon,
09:24and that I should sacrifice her
09:26in order to prevent her further outrage.
09:36In a cruel way,
09:38Grace's own youthful guilelessness
09:40had helped sentence her to death.
09:42As Fish disembarked with her
09:44from the train in Westchester County,
09:47he forgot on his seat
09:48a bundle he had carried with him.
09:50His implements of hell
09:51as he described them to Vettum.
09:54A knife,
09:54a saw,
09:55and a butcher's cleaver,
09:56concealed in a cloth.
09:59It was Grace who remembered it
10:00as she jumped from the tram.
10:02You have forgotten your package!
10:04she exclaimed,
10:05and ran back to the seat to retrieve it.
10:07If she hadn't done so,
10:09Fish told Vettum,
10:11the child would now be in their home,
10:13and I would not be where I am.
10:17Fish was by turns open and sly,
10:20cooperative and cagey.
10:22He would later admit to the murder of Francis McDonnell
10:24without hesitation.
10:26The story of Billy Gaffney,
10:28he told only in a letter he sent to his defense attorney,
10:32written with the same precision as the bud letter.
10:35Fish explained that he'd taken the sobbing child
10:37to a mostly deserted street,
10:39near a city dump,
10:41to an empty house he discovered,
10:43while working on a painting crew.
10:45I brought him to the Riker Avenue dumps.
10:48There's a house that stands alone,
10:51not far from where I took him.
10:53I took the G-boy there,
10:55stripped him naked,
10:57and tied his hands and feet
10:58and gagged him with the piece of dirty rag
11:00I picked out of the dump.
11:02Then I burned his clothes,
11:04threw his shoes in the dump.
11:06Then I walked back and took trolley
11:08to 59th Street at 2 a.m.
11:10and walked home from there.
11:12Next day, about 2 p.m.,
11:14I took tools,
11:16a good heavy cat-o'-nine-tails,
11:18homemade, short handle,
11:21cut one of my belts in half,
11:23slit these half and six strips
11:25about eight inches long.
11:26I whipped his bear behind
11:28till the blood ran from his legs.
11:32I cut off his ears,
11:34nose,
11:35slit his mouth from ear to ear,
11:37gouged out his eyes.
11:39He was dead then.
11:41I stuck the knife in his belly
11:42and held my mouth to his body
11:44and drank his blood.
11:46I picked up four old potato sacks
11:48and gathered a pile of stones.
11:50Then I cut him up.
11:52I had a grip with me.
11:53I put his nose, ears,
11:55and a few slices of his belly
11:57in the grip.
11:58Then I cut him
11:59through the middle of his body,
12:00just below his belly button,
12:02then through his legs
12:04about two inches below his behind.
12:06I put this in my grip
12:08with a lot of paper.
12:09I cut off the head,
12:11feet, arms,
12:12hands,
12:13and legs
12:13below the knee.
12:15This I put in sacks,
12:17weighed with stones,
12:18tied the ends,
12:19and threw them into the pools
12:21of slimy water.
12:22You'll see all along the road
12:24going to North Beach.
12:26Water is three to four feet deep.
12:28They sank at once.
12:30I came home with my meat.
12:32I had the front of his body
12:33I liked best.
12:34His monkey and peewees
12:36and a nice little fat behind
12:39to roast in the oven and eat.
12:41I made a stew of his ears,
12:44nose,
12:45pieces of his face,
12:46and belly.
12:46I put onions,
12:48carrots,
12:49turnips,
12:49celery,
12:50salt,
12:50pepper.
12:51It was good.
12:52Then I split the cheeks
12:53of his behind open,
12:55cut off his monkey and peewees,
12:57and washed them first.
12:59I put strips of bacon
13:00on each cheek of his behind
13:02and put it in the oven.
13:04Then I picked four onions,
13:06and when meat had roasted
13:07about a quarter hour,
13:08I poured about a pint of water
13:10over it for gravy
13:11and put it in the onions.
13:13At frequent intervals,
13:14I basted his behind
13:16with a wooden spoon
13:17so the meat would be
13:19nice and juicy.
13:20In about two hours,
13:22it was nice and brown,
13:24cooked through.
13:25I never ate any roast turkey
13:27that tasted half as good
13:28as sweet,
13:29fat little behind did.
13:31I ate every little bit of meat
13:33in about four days.
13:35His little monkey
13:36was sweet as a nut,
13:38but his peewees
13:39I could not chew.
13:41Throw them in the toilet.
13:42I ate every day.
13:51Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish.
13:52I thought you did him, fish.
13:57Wish your daddy
13:58could have dipped your mama.
14:00Listen, dig it, poke.
14:01I'm a wizard.
14:02I poke chocolate.
14:04Yes, please.
14:05Get it, baby.
14:07Please, please.
14:08Poke your ass,
14:09now give me a part of the load.
14:11Billy Gaffney's mother, Elizabeth Gaffney, visited Fish and Sing Sing, accompanied by Detective King.
14:35She wanted to ask him about her son's death, but Fish refused to speak to her.
14:41Fish's trial for the murder of Grace Budd began on March 11, 1935, in White Plains, New York.
15:11Frederick P. Close presided as judge, and Westchester County Chief Assistant District Attorney Albert F. Gallagher was prosecuting attorney.
15:24The trial lasted for ten days. Fish pleaded insanity and claimed to have heard voices from God telling him to kill children.
15:33Several psychiatrists testified about Fish's sexual fetishes, which included sadism and masochism, flagellation, exhibitionism, voyeurism, pikerism, cannibalism, coprophagia, urophilia, hematalagmia, pedophilia, necrophilia, and infibulation.
15:55Dempsey, in a summation, noted that Fish was a psychiatric phenomenon, and that nowhere in legal or medical records was there another individual who possessed so many sexual abnormalities.
16:09During two days of testimony, Wirtam explained Fish's obsession with religion, and specifically his preoccupation with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, Genesis 22.1-24.
16:27Wirtam said that Fish believed that similarly sacrificing a boy would be penance for his own sins, and that even if the act itself was wrong, angels would prevent it if God did not approve.
16:42Although he knew Grace was female, it is believed that Fish perceived her as a boy.
16:49Wirtam then detailed Fish's cannibalism, which, in his mind, he associated with communion.
16:57The last question Dempsey asked Wirtam was 15,000 words long, detailed Fish's life, and ended with asking how the doctor considered his mental condition based on this life.
17:12Wirtam simply answered, he is insane.
17:18Gallagher cross-examined Wirtam on whether Fish knew the difference between right and wrong.
17:25He responded that he did know, but that it was a perverted knowledge based on his opinions of sin, atonement, and religion, and thus was an insane knowledge.
17:38The defense called two more psychiatrists to support Wirtam's findings.
17:44The first of four rebuttal witnesses was Manasse Gregory, the former manager of the Bellevue Hospital, where Fish was treated during 1930.
17:54He testified that Fish was abnormal, but sane.
17:59Under cross-examination, Dempsey asked if coprophilia, urophilia, pedophilia, indicated a sane or insane person.
18:12Gregory replied that such a person was not mentally sick, and that these were common perversions that were socially perfectly alright, and that Fish was no different from millions of other people.
18:25Some very prominent, successful, like Donald Trump, who had the very same perversions.
18:32One of the defense witnesses was Mary Nicholas, Fish's 17-year-old stepdaughter.
18:38She described how Fish taught her and her brothers and sisters several games involving overtones of masochism and child molestation.
18:48None of the jurors doubted that Fish was insane, but ultimately, as one later explained, they felt he should be executed anyway.
18:57They found him to be sane and guilty, and the judge sentenced the defendant to death by electrocution.
19:04Fish arrived at prison in March 1935, and was executed on January 16, 1936, in the electric chair at Sing Sing.
19:14He entered the chamber at 11.06 p.m. and was pronounced dead three minutes later.
19:36One, two, three, two, and...
19:43Oh, let me from this day be holy by...
19:54What's the matter, what's the matter?
19:56It's all off.
19:57All off? You mean this program?
19:59Yeah, it's been put off for two weeks.
20:01Good night.
20:02Well, that's broadcasting. Why was it put off?
20:06The Williams people want to work up a new instruction and are holding up everything.
20:10Jack, quick, tell that fellow it isn't off.
20:12He was buried in the Sing Sing prison cemetery.
20:16Fish is said to have helped the executioner position the electrodes on his body.
20:22His last words were reportedly,
20:24I don't even know why I'm here.
20:27According to one witness present, it took two jolts before Fish died, creating the rumor that the apparatus was short-circuited by the needles that Fish had inserted into his body.
20:39These rumors were later regarded as untrue, as Fish reportedly died in the same fashion and time frame as others in the electric chair.
20:47At a meeting with reporters after the execution, Fish's lawyer, James Dempsey, revealed that he was in possession of his client's final statement.
20:58This amounted to several pages of handwritten notes that Fish apparently penned in the hours just prior to his death.
21:06When pressed by the assembled journalist to reveal the document's contents, Dempsey refused, stating,
21:13I will never show it to anyone. It was the most filthy string of obscenities that I have ever read."
21:20Two years after Fish was executed, Detective William King testified before the state legislature using the gray man's story to urge new laws requiring a centralized database of fingerprints for known sexual predators.
21:39The state of records in law enforcement in the 1920s and 30s was such that, at the time of Francis McDonald's murder, a 20-year-old mugshot of Fish, looking distinguished in a bowler hat, was on file in NYPD's records, but wholly unknown to the detectives pursuing the case.
21:58In the years after the Fish trial, Frederick Wertham rose to prominence as one of the country's best known criminal psychiatrists, consulting in numerous murder trials.
22:10He became a public figure, praised by some and reviled by others, in the 1930s, when he wrote a provocative book called Seduction of the Innocent, on the power of violent images, such as those found in comic books and television shows, to influence violent behavior.
22:30And that seems to be the pitch against comics. You pick one or two bad ones, make an enormous stink about them, and parents tear Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse books out of the pathetic fingers of their screaming infants.
22:45You know, I like you, but when I see you, I feel about you like waiting about Faust. It hurts me in my heart so deep to see the company you keep.
22:55Why do you ally yourself with these bloodhucksters, who don't sell two or three comic books, but millions of them, and the majority of them, are dealing with bloodiness, with cruelty, and with torture?
23:06And that has nothing to do with you. Why don't we stick to schmooze, and discuss philosophy, and discuss entertainment?
23:13But you, you make yourself the spokesman of a group, which I definitely think is anti-social.
23:19Mr. McCaffrey, if I may quote over the radio, a distinguished literary critic, Mr. Sterling North, who made a special study of comic books, and he called the comic book publishers racketeers.
23:32There's a word I'd like to say for my friend, the bloodhuckster. I think the whole...
23:38Maybe you say something about this distribution. Why is it that people are forced to sell, torture, and murder, when they want to sell a decent magazine?
23:45I've seen that with my own eyes, and some of these little people have told me that.
23:48Let's look at the fairy stories. Look at the violence, and shall we, to quote a word, grimness of them?
23:57Yes, there's two M's. There's two M's. Red Riding Hood. What big teeth you have, Grandma. All the better to eat you with, my dear. Now these stories are read out to little tops.
24:12Fairy tales, of course, in themselves are creations of art. They're written well.
24:17But the children do not know their fairy stories. They know their stories.
24:22Who has a grandmother who's eaten by a wolf? That doesn't mean anything to a boy on the streets of Los Angeles or New York. That's a totally different thing.
24:28But if he sees a gangster on the street who shoots from an ordinary car, right then and there, that is much more close.
24:35Well, I'm only questioning, I'm only going back to the fairy story to show that this thing is part of a child's education.
24:43And they get educated to some kind of, shall we call it, awfulness, that they don't really believe in.
24:51Somebody asked me, when did you first learn about creating fear in people? I said, I learned it when I was six months old. I was in my mother's arms. And she went, boom, and scared me and gave me hiccups. And then I giggled. And she was so pleased.
25:12To this day, the full extent of Albert Fish's murderous history remains unknown. Credible assessments at the time implicated him in somewhere between five and fifteen killings, though many suspected those numbers to be low.
25:27Not long after Fish's execution, one of the murderer's relatives paid a visit to Vantum. After they had talked for a while, Vantum asked the man if he had any sense of how many children Fish had killed.
25:41His visitor hesitated. You know, doctor, he finally replied, there were plenty of old abandoned places.
25:49The bats are in the boundary. The two is on the moor.
25:59The bats are in the boundary. The two is on the moor.
26:11The bats are in the boundary. The nine patches.
26:14The bats are puedan. You know, when it comes into apple.
26:16The birds are wild and every other.
26:24Such a sad old feeling, the fields are soft and green
26:34It's memories that I'm stealing
26:38But you're innocent when you dream, when you dream
26:44You're innocent when you dream, when you dream
26:54You're innocent when you dream
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