The Devil's Dozen by Katherine Ramsland

over to King.
    King knew that something had to break soon. They were just steps behind this offender. Then he learned that the check from Georgia had arrived at the Grand Central postal office on December 4. It was for twenty-five dollars.
    “I knew he would return for the check,” King told Times reporters, “and I kept a constant watch on the place.”
    But Fish did not come right away, and King worried over whether he had sniffed out the surveillance. It was a week before the short, elderly man finally arrived on December 13 to claim his check. Mrs. Schneider called King and then detained Fish until the detective could get there to arrest him. Although Fish attempted to defend himself with a razor blade, King was much more powerful. He twisted the blade out of the shriveled old man’s hand and took him to headquarters for questioning.
    This “undersized wizened house painter with restless eyes and thin, nervous hands,” as reporters referred to him, danced around in denial before finally confessing in lurid detail. At no point did he display any emotion. He seemed to have expected to be caught.
    Fish, aka Frank Howard, stated that he had originally meant to kidnap Edward, but the boy was larger than he had expected. While at the home the second time, he had spotted Grace and decided to kidnap her instead, so using the ruse of the party, he took her away. He’d brought a parcel of tools—the “implements of hell”—with him (a saw, butcher knife, and cleaver), wrapped in a piece of four-by-six-foot canvas. He stowed this bundle near a newsstand before going to the Budds’, and retrieved them with Grace in tow. Together they boarded a train, bound for Westchester County, where he once had lived. He knew of an isolated, abandoned house there, called Wisteria Cottage, that he could use.
    All along, Grace had believed she was going to a party. She had even run to fetch the canvas bag when Fish left it on the train seat. But once they arrived at the dilapidated, eight-room house, he prepared to kill her. He let her play in the yard while he undressed, and then called her to come in. In an upper room, he strangled her with his bare hands, which took about five minutes. He told one person he had ejaculated twice during her struggle. Then he cut her head off, draining the blood into a can. He tried to drink some of it, but it made him ill. He sawed the body in two and left the lower torso and legs behind the door. Taking the head outside, he covered it with paper. He also removed some of the flesh, which he packaged up and took home. This is what he claimed he had mixed with carrots and potatoes to make a stew which, in a state of constant sexual arousal that lasted over a week, he consumed. Four days after the murder, he returned to the cottage to get rid of the remains. He took the torso and head into the woods and threw them over a stone wall.
    “It makes my conscience feel better now that you have found her,” Fish said. “I’m glad I told everything.”
    The Budds, father and son, had no trouble identifying Fish as the man who had come to their home. Edward lunged for him and wanted to kill him. In the Times, Mrs. Budd was quoted as saying, “If only I could lay my hands on that man.”
    Fish agreed to take police to Worthington Woods, to show them the place where he had killed Grace and tossed her remains. Her skull was visible in the dirt behind the stone wall, where a rusty cleaver, saw, and the rest of her bones were found; further searching yielded more bones in the floor of the basement of Wisteria Cottage. The police suspected more outrages and sent the bones for analysis, but failed to pin anything further on Fish: the bones were from animals. However, the media, especially the tabloid papers, had no trouble associating “the ogre” with any number of missing or dead children.
    So now he had committed crimes for which he could be tried in two different jurisdictions—kidnap in Manhattan and murder in