When a specific event of a caliber of murder takes place, the first thing that comes across the mind is the question of ‘why?’. And when it involves serial murder of children who had been subjected to torturous death and sexual abuse during the event, then the question in focus is more than ‘why’.
Hamilton Howard “Albert” Fish is considered one of the most horrid pedophiles, serial child killers, and cannibals of crime history. And once his interviews were recorded and the knots were untied, it shook the world to its core, what you’re going to read next will make you believe from the start that it’s not something a sane person would even think of. He admitted to molesting more than 400 children and torturing and killing several of them. (Cannibal Serial Killers, 2015, pp. 50–54).
In 1910, Albert committed his first attack on a child, Thomas Beddin from Wilmington Delaware followed by his second victim in 1919 a mentally handicapped boy from Georgetown Washington DC whom he stabbed. In 1924, he attempted to take away a young girl named Beatrice keel who thankfully was saved by her mother who had noticed her with Albert. In 1928, Albert saw an ad from the Budd family where he went for the job and introduced himself as Mr. Howard. He established himself as a loving grandfather figure by giving gifts to the children. However, one day after lunch, he explained that he had to attend a child’s birthday party at his sister’s home and would return later to pick up Eddie and his friend. He then suggested that the Budds allow him to take their oldest daughter, 10-year-old Grace, to the party. The unsuspecting parents agreed and dressed her in her Sunday best. Grace, excited about going to a party, left the house and was never seen alive again. The investigation went on for 6 years, until 11 November 1934 when the Budd family received an anonymous letter that had details of their daughter grace’s murder and cannibalism.
The letter traumatized the Budd family with details about the empty house their grace was taken to in Worcester, New York, and how she was stripped of her clothing, strangled, cut into pieces, and eaten. The tracing of the letter helped in identifying a flophouse where Albert was living. He was arrested and he immediately confessed to the murder of grace. With that another one of Albert's victims came out, the 8-year-old boy Billy Gaffney who went missing in 1927 a year before he took grace. The boy was playing with his neighbor while he took both of them however the other boy Billy Beaton was found on the roof of their apartment. He described Albert as ‘boogeyman’ that took his friend away. The details of someone who saw Albert drag Billy Gaffney matched with Albert's and later when Billy’s mother visited him in prison, he admitted to having tortured and murdered her son furthermore he confessed to his cannibalistic intentions toward Billy and how he ate him. In prison, he confessed to another murder of an 8-year-old child, Francis McDonnell in 1924 whose body was later found in the woods near where one of the neighbors had seen Francis with Albert.
Later when several psychiatrists assessed him, they identified his several sexual fetishes including, coprophilia (the sexual arousal and pleasure from feces), urophilia (the sexual arousal and pleasure from urine), and pedophilia (sexual desires and towards children), and masochism (the tendency to attain sexual gratification from own humiliation or pain).
In January 16, 1936, he was finally executed in an electric chair, and while that was happening, he admitted that this was the most supreme thrill of his life. What Makes a Killer a Killer? The psychodynamic theory by Freud lays the basis for one of the arguments that can be attributed to the development of personality towards such deviant behaviors. This theory identifies the importance of the relationship between a child and his caregiver in early childhood, when we talk about Fish’s early history, we see that he had lost his father by the age of 5 and when he passed away, his mother couldn’t afford the resources to take care of him, hence left him at an orphanage, we can attribute this to the psychodynamic theory.
According to research, the most common event among serial killers was that as children they were all separated from their peers. (Vronsky, 2004). Albert was alone at the orphanage where he was bullied for his name and physically abused by the teachers and the other students, he received regular beatings. According to a theory, due to bullying received as a child, many serial killers began harboring “secretive aggressive fantasies”. (Vronsky, 2004).
According to Freud, overexposure to trauma and negative experiences serves as an obstacle to the development of human personality. These personality traits can be called “ID, Ego, and Super Ego”. The “ID” supplies the unconscious drives for sexual intercourse and food, basically all the basic urges needs, and desires. The “Ego” functions as a guide to comply with society's norms and rules. Whereas, the “Super Ego” induces and tries to integrate values and morals. As we can see that once Fish developed a liking for the beatings, he began developing sadomasochistic tendencies and that is when he began with his sexual self-mutilation obsession such as the regular embedment of needles into his groin and abdomen accompanied by flogging of self with a nail-studded paddle.
The superego as we talked about tries to create a balance between the id and ego while identifying right and wrong. Weak or under-development of the superego, will lead an individual to have little control over his id impulses and will engage in activities that will gratify his id as in this case we saw Fish gratifying his “ID” impulses which works on the immediate pleasure principle. Below is an X-ray of his pelvis showing the needles embedment.
Apart from the psychological aspect, there are certain neurological explanations as to why fish’s functioning and cognition were distorted. Albert Fish had a family history of mental illnesses, including his mother who suffered from auditory and visual hallucinations (Bardsley, 2013). At least seven of the Fish family members have been identified as suffering from severe mental illness and two of them reportedly died in asylums (Newton, 2006). Since his mother had hallucinations, today they could be treated under the schizophrenia spectrum disorder in the DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). According to research, young people who have a parent with schizophrenia are themselves at risk for schizophrenia spectrum disorder even before entering adulthood, the period of greatest risk for schizophrenia. In a sample of young people whose parents had various mental disorders, schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder occurred in only young people who had a parent with schizophrenia. (Hans et al., 2004). Therefore, it can be judged that with the environment around him and his genetics, the cards were already stacked against him, and hence was at a greater risk of developing a mental illness.
His wife left him because of his heinous torture of himself and his distorted behaviors and that is when he started having auditory hallucinations to which he stated he started hearing voices. One incident that was quoted is that he said that he “wrapped himself with a rug because John the apostle had asked him to do so”. According to research, thirty studies (43%) reported on the relationship between delusions and hallucinations and religion and the supernatural. Delusions and hallucinations were categorized as having a religious nature when they included a direct reference to organized religious themes (e.g., prayer, sin, possession) or religious figures (e.g., God, Jesus, devil, prophet). (Gearing et al., 2011). Moreover, he even reported that he was paying up for his sins and doing God’s work by sacrificing children and he heard the voices of Christ and his angels who were giving him the command to sacrifice children.
He quoted “I had sort of an idea through Abraham offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice. It always seemed to me that I had to offer a child for sacrifice, to purge myself of iniquities, sins, and abominations in the sight of God…If it wasn’t right, then an angel would stop me at the last moment,” (Cutler, 2017).
There might be numerous biological and psychological factors in his life, but not a single one was sufficient enough to explain how he ended up as he did. While his negative experiences would predict his behavior, however, they still cannot fully account for his crimes. Similarly, his family history also cannot solely account for his behavior. Hence the answer to his crimes lies in the nature vs nurture debate and cannot be attributed to a single phenomenon.
Bibliography
1. Montaldo, Charles. (2021, September 8). Biography of Albert Fish, Serial Killer. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/serial-killer-albert-fish-973157
2. Hans, S. L., Auerbach, J. G., Styr, B., & Marcus, J. (2004). Offspring of Parents With Schizophrenia: Mental Disorders During Childhood and Adolescence. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 30(2), 303–315. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.schbul.a007080
3. Gearing, R. E., Alonzo, D., Smolak, A., McHugh, K., Harmon, S., & Baldwin, S. (2011). Association of religion with delusions and hallucinations in the context of schizophrenia: Implications for engagement and adherence. Schizophrenia Research, 126(1–3), 150–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2010.11.005
4. Bardsley, M. (2012). Albert Fish. Crime Library. Retrieved January 1, 2014, from http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/fish/index.html
5. Cutler, M. (2017, July 17). “The Werewolf of Wysteria” — Albert Fish Killer Profile. Parcast. https://www.parcast.com/blog/2017/7/16/the-werewolf-of-wysteria-albert-fish-killer-profile
6. Newton, M. (2006). The encyclopedia of serial killers (2nd ed.). New York: Facts on File, Inc.
7. Vronsky, P. (2004). Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters. Berkley Books.