Doris Lane

The view from the Outerbridge Crossing, the bridge that takes travelers over the Arthur Kill from Perth Amboy, New Jersey to Staten Island, New York, gives some sense of what the town of Charleston was like at several times in its history. You can pick out Greek Revival mansions built by early 19th century oyster captains and the rotting hulks of early 20th century ships abandoned in the Kill. The burnt clay of this area helped define Manhattan’s terra cotta skyline in the early 20th century.

On a hilltop stands the Stick-Style mansion of Balthazar Kreischer, whose yellow bricks paved some of New York’s streets in the late 19th century and covered many of its row house blocks. Kreischer built a thriving company town he called Kreischerville. The town had a waterfront, and marshland on the other side. The other two borders were deep woods. Despite the factory, the town’s aspect was, and in some areas, still is, decidedly rural.

By the 1920s, Kreischerville was already calling itself Charleston and the factory that Kreischer built was on its way out of business. The little factory town was slowly relaxing back into its pre-industrial countryside. It was a slow kind of place. The kind of place where a nursing mother sitting on her porch would notice a stranger passing by, simply because he was a stranger.

But this stranger was acting, well, strange.

Anna McDonnell would say, “He came shuffling down the street, mumbling to himself, making queer motions with his hands. I’ll never forget those hands.? I shuddered when I looked at them…how they opened and shut, opened and shut, opened and shut.”

Mrs. McDonnell would have cause to remember and never to forget.

It was a July day in 1924. Playing near her on the porch as she nursed her new baby was her 8-year-old son, Francis. As she watched the gaunt, gray-haired fellow pass her house, he politely tipped his hat to her. On this long summer afternoon Francis and his friends ran off to play ball. The boys noticed the old man watching them as they played. They noticed Francis talking with the old man and then they noticed Francis was gone. A neighbor thought he saw a boy who looked like Francis going into the woods with an old bum. Three days earlier, very nearby, an old man had tried to take an 8-year-old girl into the woods, and was stopped by her father.

Francis’s father, a policeman, found him in the early evening. The boy was covered with some branches, his suspenders tight around his neck, his clothes torn from his body, which had been violently mauled as if by some animal gone wild.

There was a massive manhunt for the killer; he was not found.

Mrs. McDonnell would remember: “I saw him look toward Francis and the others. I saw his thick gray hair, his drooping gray mustache. Everything about him seemed faded and gray.”

They called him “The Gray Man.”

Criminals often receive nicknames in the press and among the public. Albert Fish, The Gray Man, has had more nicknames than most: The Brooklyn Vampire, The Cannibal, The Patron Saint of Sadomasochism, The Father of Sadism, The Moon Maniac, and, quaintly, The Werewolf of Wisteria. Since many of Fish’s victims were small children, it is perhaps appropriate that another nickname was granted him by a 3-year-old child, who, when asked where his little friend had gone, answered, “The Boogey Man took him.”

In the blocks off the Gowanus Canal in 1927 Brooklyn, it was considered safe for children to play on winter days in the common hallways. Five-storey apartment rows lined long streets that ran straight downhill from Prospect Park to New York Bay; the building fronts forming effective tunnels for ice cold wind. The streets themselves were mean streets, the air gray with factory soot, warmth for adults found mainly in bars and booze. Drunks and punks who’d failed a shape-up at the nearby ship terminal roamed the streets. No place for children to play.

On February 11, two small boys named Billy played in the hallway of their apartment house; one Billy was three and the other Billy was four. A12-year-old neighbor was supposed to be inside his own apartment babysitting, but he, too, was out in the hallway. He heard his baby sister crying and left the two younger boys at play. He was inside only a few minutes, but when he came out again, the boys were gone.

He knocked on the door of the youngest boy and little Billy’s father learned his son was missing. He must have been deeply relieved to find the child safe on the top floor of the building, yet alarmed to find little Billy had been out on the roof.

We can imagine, it may have come almost as an afterthought to his own family drama, when the man asked the boy, “Where’s Billy Gaffney?”

“The Boogey Man took him.”

There was a thorough search for Billy Gaffney, by police, by neighbors, by his distraught family. Nearby factory buildings were searched; yards, parks, and vacant lots combed; the Gowanus Canal was dredged. But Billy Gaffney’s body was not found. Little Billy described a thin, gray-haired man who was old and had a moustache. The police paid little attention to a 3-year-old boy’s imaginative telling and didn’t connect the “Boogey Man”with the “Gray Man.”

They should have listened to little Billy.

Joseph Meehan, a motorman on the Brooklyn trolley, was concerned for a small boy riding with an old man. The child, crying for his mother, was all but dragged onto the car by the old man, who was very nervous and jittery. Meehan may not have thought much of it; a grandfather, perhaps, unused to tending children and impatient with tears. But it was February, and the boy wore no coat. Unfortunately, Meehan took no action and Albert Fish dragged Billy Gaffney from the trolley car at a stop near the Riker Avenue garbage dump.

Mr. Meehan, too, would remember.

Fish took Billy to a small, vacant house he knew of bordering the dump. It was an isolated place. He stripped him, bound and gagged him. He burned his clothes and threw his shoes in the dump. At two o’clock in the morning, Fish took the trolley home and got a night’s rest. Twelve hours later when Fish returned, he had with him a home-made cat-o’nine-tails with a short handle. He used it to whip Billy until his blood ran. At some point, Billy died. After this, Fish cut off Billy’s ears and nose, slit his face ear to ear, and gouged out his eyes. He then drank the child’s blood.

When he was sated, Fish dismembered and beheaded the corpse. Using burlap bags weighted with stones, he threw the discarded body parts into nearby water. He packed some select cuts into a suitcase he had brought along, including the genitals and behind. “I came home with my meat,” he later told police. And he ate every bit, stewed or roasted, over the next four days.

“I made a stew,” he said, “out of his ears — nose — pieces of his face and belly.? I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper.? It was good.”

It’s hard to know what is true and what is not. A great many myths have grown up around Albert Fish. There are modern day bands who make music and songwriters who compose lyrics devoted to Albert Fish. There are artists who paint themes of the life and times of Albert Fish. There are at least 50 websites devoted to his legend.

A favorite myth, although untrue, is that the electric chair short-circuited several times in 1936 during his execution, because of needles he had inserted into his pelvic area, inserted so deeply they could not be removed. A variation on the myth is not short circuits, but great blue flames or lightning bolts emanating from between his legs when the jolt of electricity ended his barbarous life.

Yet X-rays did show the needles existed, 29 of them, embedded in his groin; that much is true.

In 1932, the body of 15-year-old Mary O’Connor was found in some woods in Far Rockaway, Queens. Her corpse had been violated in a manner similar to Francis McDonnell’s eight years earlier on Staten Island. At the time, Albert Fish was painting a house nearby. Fish would later confess to killing a man in Delaware in 1910, a retarded boy in 1919, and a 12-year-old boy in 1917.

He traveled the country as an itinerant house painter and said he killed at least one child in each of 23 states he lived in. Fish often left a job because of suspicion he was involved in mutilation deaths or molestation of children. He claimed to have molested, tortured, and mutilated over 100 children in his lifetime. ‘Don’t take candy from strangers’ seems coined for Albert Fish, who used sweets to tempt his victims.

Fish told Dr. Frederic Wertham that he concentrated on black children, because authorities didn’t care about them. The known victims were Irish-American, but this may only prove Fish right. Maybe nobody did care about the little black ones; nobody except their families.

Dr. Wertham, who examined Fish for his insanity defense, believed that Fish had killed 15 children and mutilated about a hundred others. ?His belief, he said, was based on figures verified by police officials. Dr. Wertham believed Fish was insane, partly because he believed nobody who was sane could eat a child. On the prosecution side, Dr. Charles Lambert testified that Fish was “a psychotic personality without a psychosis.”

Fish himself admitted to no understanding of what drove him to such deeds, except a “blood lust” that would, from time to time, overcome him. Fish apparently did have some sort of religious mania, believing he was doing God’s work when castrating little boys. He was known to stand at the top of a hill shouting that he was Christ. He composed Biblical-type maxims to apply to his holy work, such as, ‘Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones and dasheth their heads against the stones.’

He said Grace before every meal.