The Execution

The Sentence

Fish was convicted of first-degree murder in the Westchester County Court on 22 March 1935, following a ten-day trial before Judge Frederick P. Close. The jury deliberated for approximately three hours before returning a unanimous guilty verdict and rejecting the insanity defence mounted by Dr. Frederic Wertham. Judge Close imposed the mandatory sentence: death by electrocution, to be carried out during the week of 13 May 1935. The sentence was successively postponed by three rounds of appeal.

Defence counsel James Dempsey filed the final motion for reconsideration in early January 1936. Governor Herbert Lehman declined to commute the sentence on 15 January. The execution was set for the following night.

The Death House

Fish was transferred from the county jail in White Plains to the Sing Sing death house in December 1935 and assigned cell no. 5. The death house, a two-story brick annex at the northeast corner of the prison, held twenty-four condemned cells and the small green-tiled execution chamber known to inmates as "the dance hall." The electric chair itself — built at Sing Sing in 1891 and used for every New York State execution thereafter — sat against the far wall under a bare overhead lamp.

In his thirty-seven days in the death house, Fish received two visits from his adult children, wrote a short will, and continued his correspondence with Dr. Wertham, who was then preparing the case notes that would later become The Show of Violence (1949). The prison chaplain reported that Fish spent much of his time reading the Bible and making careful annotations in the margins.

The Electrocution

The state executioner was Robert G. Elliott, a former electrician from Queens who had served as New York's official executioner since 1926 and would personally carry out 387 electrocutions before his retirement in 1939. Elliott arrived at Sing Sing on the evening of 16 January 1936. Fish was taken from his cell shortly after 11 p.m.

Witnesses — five newspaper reporters, the warden Lewis Lawes, and three official witnesses — were seated on wooden benches facing the chair when Fish entered. He walked without assistance, was strapped in, and made a brief remark to the attending priest which is not recorded verbatim in the prison register. The first current was applied at 11:06 p.m.

The execution required two applications. Press accounts of the time — later repeated as legend — suggested that the needles embedded in Fish's pelvis (documented in the pre-trial X-ray) caused a short-circuit during the first jolt. Prison records and Elliott's own memoir (Agent of Death, 1940) contradict this: the second application was routine, consistent with Elliott's standard two-stage electrocution protocol for heavy-set prisoners, and had nothing to do with the needles. Fish was pronounced dead by the prison physician, Dr. Charles Sweet, at 11:09 p.m.

The Last Words

Several variants of Fish's last words circulate in popular accounts. The best-attested version, given by Robert Elliott in his 1940 memoir and broadly consistent with the warden's contemporaneous notes, is that Fish said nothing to the witnesses directly. In the anteroom, speaking to the guards while being prepared, he is reported to have said:

"I don't even know why I'm here."

Later, second-hand sources attributed to Fish a more theatrical final line — that the electric chair would be "the supreme thrill of my life, the only one I haven't tried." No primary source confirms this. Wertham, who had interviewed Fish continuously for nearly a year, considered the line apocryphal.

The Last Meal

Fish took his final meal in the death-house pre-execution anteroom at approximately 5:30 p.m. on 16 January 1936, some five hours before his execution. The New York Department of Correctional Services standard of the period allowed the condemned to request any meal within reason. Fish requested — and was served — roast chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, and coffee. No dessert was requested. He ate a portion of the meal and left the remainder. The record is preserved in the Sing Sing warden's log for that date.

Fish's Age, Height & Physical Record at Execution

A condensed physical record from the Sing Sing intake examination of 31 March 1935:

• Age: 65 years old at execution (66 would have been reached on 19 May 1936). Fish was born 19 May 1870.
• Height: 5 ft 5 in (165 cm). Described in press reports as "slight."
• Weight: approximately 130 lb (59 kg) on intake, approximately 125 lb (57 kg) at execution — a modest loss over the ten months in the death house.
• Hair: grey-white. Fish had been grey since his early forties, which is the origin of the "Gray Man" press label. See the nicknames page.
• Prisoner number: 83909.

He was the oldest man executed at Sing Sing to that date and remained so until the execution of Morris Wasser in 1941.

The Autopsy & Burial

A post-mortem examination was conducted at Sing Sing the following morning. The autopsy report — preserved in the New York State Archives — confirmed the continued presence of a number of the sewing needles described in the 1935 radiograph. No formal count was made; the autopsy was a standard electrocution post-mortem, not a forensic re-examination.

Fish's body was claimed by his daughter Gertrude and interred without ceremony in the prison cemetery at Sleepy Hollow, Westchester County. The grave is unmarked. His official prisoner number was 83909.

The Westchester County trial file — People of the State of New York v. Albert Fish, Indictment No. 15-1935 — remains open to researchers under standard archive protocol. See sources for a full bibliography.

Further Reading

Independent, non-Wikipedia sources vetted at the time of publication. External links open in a new window.

• The Sing Sing electric chair — Open Window — Object record and physical history of the chair used on 16 January 1936.
• Albert Fish — Find a Grave memorial #7103 — Burial record, Sleepy Hollow prison cemetery.
• Sing Sing Correctional Facility — PrisonPro — Institutional profile of the Ossining facility.
• Death Penalty Information Center — Research reference on capital punishment in the United States.