The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

have found her,” Fish remarked to a police official. “I’m glad I told everything.”

The abduction and slaying of Grace Budd was no isolated, spur-of-the-moment deed in the life of Albert Fish. Soon, he confessed to killing a seven-year-old boy on Staten Island in 1924 and a four-year-old boy in Queens in 1927. He also recalled abducting and torturing a young man in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1910 and torturing a boy near Washington, DC, although he didn’t remember when. He cut them with knives, then fled, not knowing if his victims had died. He was also a prolific child molester.

The monster that thrived within Albert Fish was nurtured in an orphanage in Washington, DC, where he spent much of his childhood after he was abandoned by his parents. He recalled the institution as a place of sadistic discipline where whippings were routine. There, he learned not just to endure pain but to enjoy it—whether inflicting it on others or on himself.

The adult Albert Fish became a house painter and handyman. He married and had six children before his wife ran off with a boarder. He seems to have had mixed success as a parent. At least one daughter remained loyal to him even after he was arrested, while a son referred to him as “that old skunk.”

While trying to preside over a household, Fish sometimes dined on raw meat, occasionally howled at the moon, and liked to spank himself with a nail-studded paddle. He was also given to shoving needles into his groin area for pleasure, self-punishment, or both.

Since there was no doubt about Fish’s actual, factual guilt, his only chance to escape the electric chair was to plead insanity.

“This man is undoubtedly an abnormal individual,” one psychiatrist concluded with remarkable understatement. Two other psychiatrists, or “alienists,” as they were sometimes called at the time, ventured that Fish suffered from some “limited abnormalities.”142 Indeed.

But no, the two psychiatrists conceded, he was not “insane” in a legal sense. That is, he did not lack the capacity to understand that his actions were wrong.

So Detective William King had added to his understanding of the depths of human depravity, not that he needed any more insight. Even as he was stalking the killer of Grace Budd, he was following another ugly case, the disappearance of a six-year-old girl.

On September 19, 1934, Dorothy Ann Distelhurst vanished in Nashville, Tennessee, while walking home from kindergarten. Two days later, her father, Alfred E. Distelhurst, sales manager for a religious-book publisher, got a postcard saying information about her would follow. In another two days, he got a letter—mailed at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan—demanding $5,000 and promising that instructions for delivery of the ransom would arrive soon.

A few days later, he got another letter from Manhattan, ordering him to come to New York and register in a hotel on Eighth Avenue. There, presumably, he would be contacted.

Instead of traveling to New York himself, Distelhurst sent a “friend” who registered in his name, the New York Times reported. After ten days in the hotel and with no contact from a kidnapper, the friend returned to Nashville. The friend was really an FBI agent. Distelhurst had informed the Department of Justice of his daughter’s disappearance early on.

Meanwhile, the Nashville police learned that on the afternoon that Dorothy Ann vanished, a car with New York State license plates was seen near the Distelhurst home. The last two digits on the plates were 76. Plates with those digits were generally issued in Ulster County, north of New York City. But New York police were unable to find a car with 76 plates that had recently been in Nashville.

On October 12, Distelhurst got a third letter, also from New York City. The sender told Distelhurst to travel to Manhattan himself if he wanted his daughter back alive and to check into the hotel where he had been told to stay before. He was told to pace the hotel lobby at frequent intervals, day and night, to periodically stroll the streets near the hotel, and finally to take out a newspaper ad saying in part, “Dorothy, come home. Father in New York at same place…”

It seemed that the author of the ransom letters had not been fooled by the ruse of an FBI agent posing as a friend of Distelhurst. Perhaps Hoover’s sober-dressing, unsmiling men still had not learned how to blend in.

Distelhurst came to New York City on November 7, paced in the hotel lobby, and strolled the streets as instructed. Nothing.

On November 12, he issued a statement begging the kidnapper or kidnappers to reach out to him. Distelhurst said details in the letters showed that the writer had “a complete knowledge of Nashville,” including information about the Distelhursts’ neighborhood.

The next day in Nashville, two groundskeepers for a tuberculosis hospital were digging flower beds in an isolated section of the hospital grounds when they discovered the nude body of a child under two inches of dirt. The remains had been there for weeks. Dental records soon confirmed that the body was that of Dorothy Ann Distelhurst. She had died of a skull fracture.

Either the kidnapper or kidnappers had killed the child, then tormented her father in a bid to get ransom, or some heartless chiseler who knew only that the girl was missing had tried to exploit the father’s anguish. Whoever had written the letters to Dorothy Ann’s father never got any money, suggesting that he had lost nerve in the end.

As he sat on death row in Sing Sing prison, Albert Fish said he was looking forward to the exciting experience of the electric chair. “It will be the supreme thrill…the only one I haven’t tried,” he told his jailers.143 His wish was fulfilled on the night of January 16, 1936. Just before he died at the age of sixty-five, he handed his lawyer a farewell statement.

“I shall never show it to anyone,” the lawyer said after the current had passed through his client’s body. “It was the most filthy string