The sickest of the sick. A repulsive, repellent monster. Forget fairy-tale concoctions like Hannibal Lector, or Leatherface...Fish was the horrifying "real deal". At his trial, psychiatrists (I believe in those days they were called "alienists") noted that there wasn't one perversion listed in the Kraft-Ebbing guide or imagined by a Marquis De Sade that Fish didn't practice, and practice frequently. Child-rapist and murderer, cannibal, sadist/masochist; Fish was the stuff of nightmares. And he looked the part: photographs I've seen show him as a deceptively frail, geriatric-appearing vampire, staring into the camera with his dead eyes and hollow, stubbled cheeks. He was ultimately brought to justice for the murder of a child named Grace Budd, whom he strangled, butchered and ate (he seemed to take a perverse pride in the fact that he didn't sexually molest her before killing and cannibalizing her). The authorites believed he was responsible for many more child murders than he was convicted of. He was ultimately executed in Sing Sing's electric chair. The urban myth is that the electric chair short-circuited because of the needles he had stuck into his pelvis over the years. The short-circuiting story is bogus; the part about the masochistically-applied needles is true. Without question, he was clinically insane (ironically enough, he had several children to whom he was devoted to, and they always spoke of him as a good father), but surely humanity as a whole was justified in breathing a collective sigh of relief at his passing from this world. On a personal note: my adoptive grandmother, who died some years ago at the age of 105, lived for a time on West 15th Street in NY and knew the Budd family. Grace was abducted and murdered in 1928, and my grandmother never forget the chilling horror of the crime. The authorities were able to recover some of Grace's bones and I'm not sure what ultimately became of them (hopefully, they were accorded a proper burial). It appears that Fish was buried in Sing Sing's cemetery in an unmarked grave. Supposedly, there's a legend that the spirits of those who lie in unmarked graves are condemned to walk the earth for eternity. Hard to imagine that the ghost of Albert Fish could be any scarier or more destructive than the actual flesh-and-blood human...

Cannabalized little kids and sent notes describing how he ate them to their mothers. I hate this sick @#$%*!