Albert Fish: The Notorious Life and Legacy of the Brooklyn Vampire

Albert Fish did not look like a monster. That was what people remembered after the newspapers had printed every sensationalized story, the trial had ended, and Americans were left with trying to understand who Albert Fish was. Pictures showed him with a slight frame, white hair, and mild blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. Those who actually knew him recalled the way he spoke to children, mixing patience, kindness, and gentleness in ways that children recognize and trust without being taught. Neighbors described him as pleasant, and landladies said he was no trouble at all. He paid his rent on time, never raised his voice, and smiled easily and often. His smile reached his eyes like genuine ones do, in a way that cannot be easily faked.

It turned out that for more than 40 years, Albert Fish had been moving through the country, leaving behind him a trail of victims that the authorities had not yet connected and would not connect for years to come. That trail, when it was finally mapped, would test the limits of what the American criminal justice system had ever been asked to confront.  He was, according to the psychiatrists who examined him, the most complex case of sexual psychopathy in American history, and he engaged in behaviors so far outside normal human boundaries that many professionals found themselves lacking adequate clinical language to describe him. His crimes were not driven by money, ambition, or any of the motives that typical criminals possess when committing such acts. What motivated him were issues so deeply rooted in the wreckage of his childhood that the psychiatrists who later examined him could trace his crimes back to his youth and still not fully understand what they found. 

Fish was also genuinely good with children, a detail that every person who studies him eventually learns but struggles to internalize. He had a natural ease with young people, a patience and playfulness that boys and girls recognized and responded to.