Albert Fish Crimes

Albert Fish crimes shocked New York between 1924 and 1934. The Albert Fish crimes involved multiple child abductions and at least three murders, with several additional cases that investigators privately linked to him but never formally charged. The crimes occurred across Staten Island, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Westchester County, and the investigations spanned the jurisdictions of the New York Police Department, the Westchester County Sheriff, and — briefly, in 1935 — the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Fish was convicted in March 1935 for the murder of ten-year-old Grace Budd and electrocuted at Sing Sing State Prison on 16 January 1936.

What crimes did Albert Fish commit?

Three murders are documented with physical evidence, witness testimony, or confessional statements accepted at trial. The first, in July 1924, was the abduction and killing of Francis McDonnell, an eight-year-old boy taken from a front porch on Staten Island. The second, in February 1927, was the disappearance and murder of Billy Gaffney, a four-year-old child abducted from a Brooklyn hallway. The third — the crime that led to Fish's eventual arrest — was the June 1928 abduction and murder of Grace Budd, a ten-year-old girl lured from her family's Manhattan apartment to a house in Worthington, New York.

In addition to the murders, Fish was charged and convicted of a broader pattern of offences, including indecent assault, the production and distribution of obscene correspondence, and — the forensic record that gave rise to the Albert Fish pelvic X-ray — the long-standing self-insertion of sewing needles into the groin region, which the Bellevue psychiatric team documented as an expression of his paraphilic disorder.

How many people did Albert Fish kill?

Three Albert Fish murders are documented. Fish himself claimed at various points during his 1935 trial and in his jailhouse conversations with the psychiatrist Frederic Wertham to have "assaulted or killed about one hundred" children. Contemporary prosecutors considered this figure self-aggrandising; the Westchester County District Attorney's office, which tried the Budd case, concluded that Fish was inflating his record in an attempt to shift the verdict from guilty to not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity.

Investigators in New York City, Washington D.C., and New Jersey privately linked Fish to an additional five or six disappearances between 1910 and 1932 — cases that were never formally charged either because the physical evidence was insufficient, the statute of limitations had expired, or the jurisdictions declined to pursue them once the Budd conviction and death sentence had been secured. For the consolidated list of confirmed and suspected cases, see the Albert Fish victims page.

Albert Fish victims overview

The three confirmed victims of Albert Fish are listed below, with the date and place of the abduction:

• Francis McDonnell — aged 8, taken from Port Richmond, Staten Island, on 15 July 1924. His mother Anna McDonnell described an "old gray man" seen speaking to Francis in the hours before the disappearance; the phrase became the earliest of Fish's press aliases.
• Billy Gaffney — aged 4, taken from an apartment hallway on 99 15th Street, Brooklyn, on 11 February 1927. A three-year-old playmate, Peter Kudzinowski, later testified to police that a "boogey man" had taken Billy away. Fish confessed to the crime by letter to Billy's mother Elizabeth in 1935.
• Grace Budd — aged 10, taken from her family's apartment on 406 West 15th Street, Manhattan, on 3 June 1928. The case remained unsolved for six years, five months, and eight days until the November 1934 confession letter from Fish to her mother, Delia Budd, led to his identification and arrest.

For the full record of each victim — including the investigation notes, the family statements, and the surviving physical evidence — see the individual dossiers linked above and the consolidated Albert Fish victims page.

How Albert Fish committed his crimes

Fish's method across all three murders followed a consistent pattern. He approached children in public settings — a Staten Island porch, a Brooklyn tenement hallway, a Manhattan advertisement responded to in person — presenting himself as a harmless older man: grey-haired, soft-spoken, dressed in a dark suit, often using an alias ("Frank Howard" in the Budd case, later Fish's own signature in the Gaffney letter). He offered small inducements — the promise of a party, a job, a visit to a country relative — to persuade the child to accompany him.

In the Budd case, the forensic record is most complete. Fish appeared at the Budd family's West 15th Street apartment on 3 June 1928 in response to a newspaper advertisement Grace's older brother Edward had placed seeking summer work. He gave his name as Frank Howard, claimed to be a Long Island farmer, invited the family to a niece's birthday party, and left with Grace that same afternoon. He took her by train to Worthington in Westchester County and to an abandoned house known locally as Wisteria Cottage. The murder occurred within hours of their arrival. The Budd case was unsolved for six years until Fish himself reopened it by posting the 1934 confession letter to Delia Budd.

Where Albert Fish committed crimes

The Albert Fish crimes were geographically distributed across four principal locations:

• Staten Island (Port Richmond, 1924) — the abduction of Francis McDonnell. The body was recovered in a wooded lot near the McDonnell home within forty-eight hours.
• Brooklyn (15th Street tenement, 1927) — the abduction of Billy Gaffney. No remains were ever recovered; the 1935 Fish confession letter to Elizabeth Gaffney described the circumstances of death but did not lead to physical evidence.
• Manhattan (West 15th Street, 1928; East 52nd Street rooming-house, 1934) — the Budd family apartment from which Grace was taken, and the Manhattan rooming-house where Fish was arrested on 13 December 1934.
• Westchester County (Wisteria Cottage, Worthington, 1928) — the abandoned farmhouse where the Grace Budd murder occurred. The site became the centre of the investigation after Detective William F. King traced Fish there in December 1934 and recovered corroborating physical evidence from the premises. See the Wisteria Cottage page for the full forensic record.

The Albert Fish arrest on 13 December 1934 closed the decade of Albert Fish crimes. Fish was charged with first-degree murder in the Budd case, tried in Westchester County in March 1935, found guilty on 23 March, and sentenced to death. He was executed at Sing Sing on 16 January 1936 at 11:06 p.m., at the age of sixty-five.

Further reading on the Albert Fish crimes

For related material in the archive, see the full Albert Fish biography, the consolidated Albert Fish victims page, the Albert Fish letters archive, the forensic Albert Fish X-ray record, and the account of the Albert Fish arrest. The psychiatric evaluation by Frederic Wertham and the primary source bibliography provide the documentary basis for the account on this page. For a comprehensive narrative of the entire case, return to the main Albert Fish Archive.

Last reviewed: 19 May 2026 · Editorial team: Bureau of Historical Research · Sources: Westchester County Court records (1935), Wertham psychiatric papers (Cornell), New York Times, Herald-Tribune, and Daily News press archives (1924–1936), Schechter, Deranged (1990), Heimer, The Cannibal (1971).