Deranged by Harold Schechter

Author:Harold Schechter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, New York (State), Murder, Trials (Murder), Social Science, Espionage, True Crime, Criminology, Criminal investigation, Murder - Serial Killers, Fiction, Case studies, Murderers, Serial Killers, Murder - General, New York, General, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780671678753
Publisher: Pocket
Published: 1990-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

25

“Budd Murder Mystery Solved … Justice Always Wins!”

Page One, New York Daily Mirror, Dec. 16, 1934

From the moment it broke on December 14, the Fish story kept New York City spellbound with horror. By Friday afternoon, the news of the arrest was splashed across the front page of every paper in town, and for the following two weeks, the dailies covered each new development in lavish detail.

The Mirror and Daily News in particular served up a nonstop feast of juicy revelations, seasoned with the tabloids’ own special blend of prurience and moral indignation. The Mirror did an especially loving job of dishing out lurid tidbits for its readers’ delectation and never hesitated to spice up the facts when the truth wasn’t zesty enough for its sensationalistic standards. Fish’s statement that he had strangled Grace Budd slowly, for example, was transformed into the even more horrific but completely fictitious admission that “It must have taken me fully an hour to strangle her once I got my hands on her throat.”

The Mirror scribes were particularly inventive in coming up with lurid labels for the decrepit old killer. In the course of a single story, Fish was described as the “Ogre of Murder Lodge,” the “Vampire Man,” the “Orgiastic Fiend,” the “Modern Bluebeard,” the “Aged Thrill-Killer,” and the “Werewolf of Wisteria.” The articles themselves were written in an equally inflammatory style: “Out of the slime of the sadistic butchery of Grace Budd by the benign-looking Albert Howard Fish,” began a typical piece, “there emerged last night the hint of an even greater horror. A horror of multiple killings. Revealing a new type of Jack the Ripper … in the guise of a kindly old gentleman.”

Compared to the visual aids which accompanied the stories, however, the writing was a model of cool objectivity. On Saturday, December 15, for example, the Mirror ran an artist’s graphic rendition of the Budd murder. Headlined “HOW THE THRILL VULTURE POUNCED ON HIS COWERING PREY,” the drawing was a step-by-step reconstruction of the killing, culminating in a close-up of the little girl’s strangulation. In a bow to the public’s sensibilities, Fish was shown fully clothed. The Mirror, after all, was a family newspaper.

On another day, the paper printed a sequence of photographs that traced the route Fish and Grace had taken on their trip to Wisteria. Each photograph was accompanied by a breathless caption that did its best to summon up the titillating horrors of that day. “What were you doing on Sunday, May 28, 1928?” began the caption under the first picture in the series, a shot of the Budd’s old apartment building on West 15th Street. “On that day, Albert Fish was killing little Grace Budd!” The other landmarks in the series were the “el” at 14th Street (“Perhaps you used the station that day, rubbed shoulders with them …”), the Sedgwick Avenue Station (“Perhaps you were on that very train. Were you? The horrible ogre sat beside the little girl, planning his horrible crime”), Worthington Station (“Fish left his bundle on the train.

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