The Devil's Dozen by Katherine Ramsland Page A

Westchester. His previous police record had been for various charges of larceny and vagrancy, although he had also been suspected in the 1927 disappearance of other children, notably four-year-old Billy Gaffney. A witness had seen them together in the vicinity of the place Fish had worked as a painter. Once he was ensconced in a prison cell, various medical people came to speak with him, even as dental records finally confirmed that Grace Budd was in fact dead. King received a well-earned promotion.

The Most Depraved Killer
    Dr. Frederic Wertham, a senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital, disliked the distinction between medical and legal insanity (which allowed psychotic people to be deemed guilty). Educated in Europe and England, he came to the United States in 1922 and became an outspoken and controversial figure in the psychiatric world. He founded a counseling service for the disadvantaged in Harlem and attempted to have comic books regulated.
    Wertham examined Fish for over twelve hours before his trial. Fish claimed he had been married four times (two of these women denied it), and that his first wife, after having six children, ran off with another man, taking all the furniture and leaving the children for him to raise. He loved them and did a passable job, despite his poverty, seeing them to adulthood. They knew he was eccentric, but did not guess the extent of his depravity. He claimed that his wife’s departure, and her faithlessness, opened up the floodgates of his sexual troubles. He figured it no longer mattered what he did, so he allowed himself to express his desires without inhibition.
    It was his sex life that seemed the focus of his pathology, developing in “unparalleled perversity.” Wertham counted eighteen different paraphilias, from cannibalism to vampirism to necrophilia. Fish’s perverse predilections apparently had begun when he was a child, arising from episodes of severe spanking by a female teacher at an orphanage. The act aroused him, as did watching her paddle the bare bottoms of other children. Thus his developing sexual desire centered on children, especially their buttocks. “I have always had the desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me,” Fish told the psychiatrist. Finding things with which to hurt himself was uppermost in his mind, such as inserting the stems of roses into his urethra. He even tried sticking needles in his testicles, but found the pain too intense. “If only pain were not so painful!” he stated.
    To Wertham, he described his method for seducing and bribing children, often going naked under his painter’s overalls so he could get himself near them and then quickly remove his clothing. He used many different aliases and chose victims from the poorest classes, especially “colored children,” because they were least likely to raise a fuss or instigate an investigation. Still, he’d been forced to leave town many times when adults heard rumors about him. He also enjoyed writing obscene letters to strangers, hoping someone with a similar inclination would respond. He sought a kindred soul with whom to inflict and receive physical abuse.
    Believing himself at times to be Christ or Abraham, and obsessed with sin and atonement, Fish had made a practice of beating his naked body with spiked paddles and sticking lighted cotton balls, soaked in alcohol, inside his anus. “The trouble with pain,” he said, “is you get tough and always have to invent something worse.” He also believed he needed to kill children (“lambs”) as a human sacrifice to please God and/or save their souls. Whatever he did he justified with quotes from the Bible. (He’d once been a church caretaker and had even painted angels on its ceiling.) Among the things he did to children were binding, castration, removing parts of the penis, anal assault, and beatings. He liked to hear them cry out in pain. He would then leave them, sometimes bound, for someone else