He Used a ‘Birthday Party’ Ruse to Abduct a Girl. Six Years Later, a Letter Revealed What He’d Done — and Consumed

Content warning: The following article contains graphic descriptions of violence against children and cannibalism.

In 1934, police arrested 65-year-old Albert Fish after he sent a handwritten letter to the family of a missing 10-year-old girl — calmly confessing to strangling her, cooking her body and eating it over the course of several days. 

The girl was Grace Budd, who had vanished from her parents’ Manhattan apartment more than six years earlier. 

The letter, quoted in part in the New York Daily Mirror and later entered into evidence at trial, described in detail how Fish had killed the child in an empty house in Westchester County and roasted parts of her flesh in an oven. 

Fish, a slight and soft-spoken man, first appeared at the Budd home in May 1928, using the name Frank Howard. He posed as a wealthy farmer from Farmingdale, Long Island, responding to their teenage son Edward’s newspaper ad seeking work. 

“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,” Fish would later write in his letter. “I made up my mind to eat her.”

After winning the family’s trust, Fish returned several days later and asked to take Grace to what he claimed was a birthday party for his niece. Grace dressed in her “Sunday best,” was excited for what she believed was a party, and accompanied him, according to a longform story about Fish in The Atavist. 

Grace never returned home.

“I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out,” Fish later told her family in his letter. “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,” he continued.

Then, he described how he strangled Grace to death before cooking her remains and then eating them over a period of nine days.

Local newspapers, like the New York Daily News and Brooklyn Daily Eagle, ran photos of the girl along with descriptions of the mysterious “Mr. Howard,” but no solid leads emerged.

But when Fish’s correspondence arrived in late 1934, police were able to identify him using the letter’s stationery, which they traced to a Manhattan boarding house where he had stayed. He quickly confessed when confronted by authorities. 

According to court testimony and police records, Fish told police he had dismembered the girl’s body with a handsaw at an abandoned house in Irvington, and cooked portions of it with strips of bacon, onions and carrots. 

He told investigators he stored the girl’s bones in a burlap sack and scattered them behind the property in the woods. Authorities recovered the girl’s buried remains in the weeks following Fish’s confession, per a notice in the Columbia Spectator.

While in police custody and after his conviction, Fish admitted to more unthinkable crimes. 

In 1924, 8-year-old Francis McDonnell was found strangled in the woods on Staten Island. Fish initially denied involvement despite police suspicion after his arrest, but admitted he killed the boy after his 1935 conviction on first-degree murder charges in Grace Budd’s death.

He confessed to the 1927 kidnap and murder of 4-year-old Billy Gaffney, who had vanished while playing in a hallway in his Brooklyn building. According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a young friend told police that “the boogeyman took him.” 

Fish penned a similar letter to the boy’s mother, writing that he had tortured the boy and eaten his remains. The letter was withheld from public release at the time, but its existence was reported on in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and cited at Fish’s trial.

Beyond the three confirmed murders, police said Fish had a long history of sexually abusing children, estimating that he had assaulted more than a dozen minors over several years — generally targeting children who were unhoused, lived in poverty or had disabilities.

Although Fish was never formally charged in these cases, they were discussed in psychiatric evaluations submitted during his trial — at one point, he allegedly boasted that he “had children in every state,” and claimed that he victimized about 100 children.

Though often described as a “grandfather” in headlines, Fish’s own family had little contact with him by the time of his arrest. He had six children of his own from a long-estranged marriage and several grandchildren. None of Fish’s grandchildren were believed to have had contact with him in the years leading up to the murders.

Fish’s attorneys argued that he was insane, delineating lifelong religious delusions and self-harming behavior. X-rays presented in court showed that Fish had inserted — and never removed — 27 needles into his own pelvic region over the years. 

He also admitted to administering ritualistic punishments to himself, like self-flagellation, that he believed were prescribed by God. 

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At his trial, Fish’s children described a chaotic home life marked by erratic behavior, religious delusions and violence. One of Fish’s sons testified that his father had once forced him to beat him with a paddle studded with nails.

Psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham, who examined Fish, testified that the killer suffered from “sexual psychopathy” and “religious mania,” but acknowledged that he understood the difference between right and wrong — making him ineligible to be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

A White Plains jury found Fish sane and guilty.

On January 16, 1936, he was executed via electric chair at Sing Sing Prison. Officials said it took two jolts of electricity to kill him — possibly due to the needles embedded in his body.