When authorities arrested Albert Fish for the murder of Gracie Budd in 1934, they had no idea how far and wide the case was going to blow open. According to archives at the TruTV crime library, this unassuming, elderly man had, for 30 years, commited murder, kidnapping, pedophilia, sadism, masochism, coprophagy, urolagnia, child abuse, rape, dismemberent of a corpse, cannibalism — and that is just what experts could identify. By Fish’s own accounts quoted in several later profiles, he “had a child in every state” (via ATI), a victim count in the hundreds, and it all started at age 5.
TruTV records that mental illness was already in the family when Fish was born, a predisposition not helped when he was regularly and severly beaten while in an orphage; Fish, who liked it, would say it was then that he “got started wrong.” By 20, he was a sex worker raping young boys. He preyed on Black boys in particular because, in a sign of the times, he felt the authorities would not care if they went missing.
Records are limited given the period and passage of time, but Radford University officially attributes just seven deaths to Fish. However, it adds that he is suspected of many more, plus attempted murders. By his execution, Fish struck such a nightmare nerve that ever after, his moniker was “The Boogey Man.”
