Budd’s classified ad had mentioned farm experience, and Fish promised him impending work, saying he would return - and left with visions of killing Budd.įish returned in June with hopes of torturing Budd, but then met 10-year-old Grace and had her sit on his lap. On May 28, 1928, six years before the letter written by Albert Fish would arrive at 406 West 15th Street in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Vampire came himself, responding to a classified ad placed by 18-year-old Edward Budd, Grace’s older brother, who was looking for work.Īlbert Fish posed as a Long Island landowner in need of a helping farmhand and arrived at the Budd family residence and introduced himself as Frank Howard. How The Brooklyn Vampire Murdered Grace Budd Then on May 25, 1928, he found a classified advertisement from 18-year-old Edward Budd - and decided to make him his first victim. While he primarily sought out Black or disabled children, Fish twice tried and failed to abduct young white girls. That same year, he stabbed another mentally disabled boy in the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C. By 1919, Fish was regularly hallucinating - and eating only raw meat. Their sadomasochistic relationship concluded with Fish cutting off Kedden’s penis. In 1910, he met a mentally disabled man named Thomas Kedden while painting houses in Delaware. In 1898, he started a family of his own.įish would spare his own children but continued to mutilate others. As a New York City prostitute, Fish would routinely lure young boys out of their homes to torture them with a nail-laced paddle - before brutally raping them. Long before the infamous Albert Fish letter traumatized a family forever, its author destroyed the lives of countless others. In 1890, Fish was 20 years old and moved to New York City - where his cruelties would be wielded against others. He would stick needles into his groin and abdomen, with X-rays after his arrest confirming 29 of them in his pelvis. While his mother would become stable enough to bring Fish home by 1880, he had already begun to psychologically devolve - and marry pain infliction to sexual gratification.įish began drinking urine and eating feces with a local telegraph boy in 1882. Wikimedia Commons Fish claimed to have killed children across the country, but would only be charged in one murder.įish would recall Saint John’s as the place “where I got started wrong.” He had learned to enjoy the beatings and associate their pain with pleasure. For five long years, he would be sadistically beaten by his caretakers and peers. Financially struggling, she would abandon Fish at Saint John’s Orphanage. His mother Ellen Fish would regularly hallucinate, while his uncle was diagnosed with mania, his sister with a “mental affliction,” and his brother sent to a mental institution when he was a child.įish was the youngest of his living siblings but became a burden for his afflicted mother when her 80-year-old husband died of a heart attack in 1875. His family was riddled with mental illness. The Early Crimes Of Albert FishĪlbert Fish was born Hamilton Howard Fish on May 19, 1870, in Washington, D.C. While the envelope it came in would lead police to identify its sender as the Brooklyn Vampire himself, Albert Fish’s letter had only provided a mere glimpse at his unspeakable crimes. Only the arrival of a macabre letter for Grace Budd’s mother in 1934 would detail her murder and gruesome cannibalization. A supposed farmer, Howard would fully ingratiate himself with the family - and charm them enough to take Grace to his niece’s birthday party.

A man who called himself Frank Howard had materialized on their doorstep to offer 18-year-old Edward Budd a job. It had been six years since she vanished, but her family recalled it well. Her family was baffled - until Albert Fish’s letter to her parents arrived. Grace Budd was 10 years old when she disappeared in 1928. Known as the “Brooklyn Vampire,” he lured children into abandoned homes to kill them. While plenty of Americans spent the Roaring Twenties at wild parties, Albert Fish developed a taste for human flesh. Bettmann/Getty Images Details on the envelope of Albert Fish’s letter to the family of Grace Budd led directly to his arrest.

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