“The issue,” Zilboorg went on, “is fundamentally not between the basic intent of the law and psychiatry, but between a revengeful, suspicious and instinctive hatred of the criminal … and that scientific humility which knows that man is human.” For true justice to be done, he insisted, the two sides needed to be brought to a more common understanding of justice in the case of the truly mentally ill.
The Fish case still echoes through debates over how to navigate the borderland between scientific knowledge and criminal justice. In 2005, forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland argued in her history of serial killers, The Human Predator, that Fish had been put to death “despite his obvious insanity.” But as Ramsland also pointed out, the criminal insanity defense has never been particularly successful. That was true in Fish’s time and it remains true today. Defense attorneys attempt an insanity defense in barely 1 percent of all violent crime cases for exactly that reason; by one estimate, at most a fourth of such defenses actually succeed.
This remains the case even though the law has been updated several times in the past century to allow for a broader definition of criminal insanity than existed at the time of Fish’s trial. Most insanity pleas that succeed, Ramsland notes, involve plea bargains in which psychosis appears obvious to a judge. It’s more often juries, she suggests, that convict “people who are genuinely psychotic.” In 1992, for instance, the Milwaukee cannibal killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and ate more than 17 people, was found sane at trial.
The best explanation for this is the tension that Zilboorg described in 1938: the extent to which the imperatives of science are at odds with the natural human need to define the most terrifying criminals as the personification of evil. “The problem with calling an act evil rather than considering it an illness is that it often overlaps with the insanity issue and taints it,” Ramsland writes. “If people decide that some behavior is ‘evil,’ they don’t want to believe that a mental defect was responsible; they want the evil person to be supremely punished.”
James Dempsey believed that it was this need to punish “evil” that had complicated the Fish verdict, and he was haunted by the case for the rest of his life. Although he spent many decades as a successful defense attorney, he kept his Fish files and his sense of outrage, eventually sharing the documents with Harold Schechter, a professor of literature and culture at New York’s Queens College. The result was a 1990 book called Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer!
In the years after the Fish trial, Fredric Wertham rose to prominence as one of the country’s best-known criminal psychiatrists, consulting in numerous murder trials. He became a public figure—praised by some and reviled by others—in the 1950s, 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 violence behavior.
Like Dempsey, Wertham could never quite let go of the Fish case. In a 1966 book, A Sign for Cain, he repeated his conviction that Fish had been wrongly executed and that science had thus lost an opportunity to learn. “Our knowledge [of murderers] is limited,” he wrote, “because we know the psychology only of the unsuccessful murderers.”
Detective William King, too, was intent on learning something from the Fish case. Two years after Fish was executed, he testified before the state legislature, using the Gray Man story to urge new laws requiring a centralized database of fingerprints for known sexual predators. (The state of records in law enforcement in the 1920s and ’30s was such that, at the time of Francis McDonnell’s murder, a 20-year-old mug shot of Fish—looking distinguished in a bowler hat—was on file in the NYPD’s records but wholly unknown to the detectives pursuing the case.)
To 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. Not long after Fish’s execution, one of the murderer’s relatives paid a visit to Wertham. After they had talked for a while, Wertham asked the man if he had any sense of how many children Fish had killed. His visitor hesitated. “You know, Doctor,” he finally replied, “there were plenty of old, abandoned places.”
Source Notes
This story was recreated from numerous newspaper accounts, court and police documents, papers in law and psychology journals, and earlier tellings of the Albert Fish story in books and magazines. For much of the information on the atmosphere of New York City at the time, I consulted documents that I had gathered for my own book, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. I am especially grateful for the thorough work of Harold Schechter in his book Deranged, cited in my epilogue, which is the definitive reference on the story. Other invaluable resources included the books of Katherine Ramsland, who teaches forensic psychology at DeSales University, in Center Valley, Pennsylvania—particularly her studies of serial killers in history, such as The Human Predator and The Devil’s Dozen, and her terrific book on forensic psychology, The Criminal Mind. For further perspective on Albert Fish, I consulted Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman’s fascinating book The Serial Killers, which looks at the history of sex-related murder; Colin and Damon Wilson’s Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection; and Louis Cohen’s 1954 book, Murder, Madness and the Law. I’m also grateful for the eloquent writings of Fredric Wertham, including his account of the Fish story in two books, The Show of Violence (1948) and A Sign for Cain (1966). Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the many biographies and original documents concerning Fish available on true-crime and serial-killer websites, such as Troy Taylor’s story in the Dead Men Do Tell Tales series on Prairie Ghosts and Marilyn Bardsley’s version at Crime Library.
Credits
Angel Killer, by Deborah Blum, is Issue No. 18 of The Atavist, published October 2012.
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Author: Deborah Blum
Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. A professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she has written for Scientific American, Slate, Tin House, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She is currently working on a book about the history of poisonous food.
Editor: Charles Homans
Producers: Olivia Koski, Gray Beltran
Fact-Checker: Alex Carp
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Footage: Edited from Manhatta (1921), by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, courtesy of the Internet Archive
“A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody”
Written by Irving Berlin
Performed by John Steel (recorded 1919)
Additional Music:
“Hush, Hush, Here Comes the Bogeyman” (1932)
Written and performed by Henry Hall
“Shine on Harvest Moon” (1908)
Written by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth
Performed by Miss Walton and Mister MacDonough
“Life’s a Funny Proposition After All” (1911)
Written and performed by George M. Cohan
Special thanks to: the New York Public Library
© 2012 Atavist Inc.
Deborah Blum, Angel Killer
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