The Letter to Elizabeth Gaffney
Albert Fish's 1935 confession by letter to Elizabeth Gaffney, mother of the four-year-old Billy Gaffney, who had disappeared from a Park Slope hallway in February 1927.
Image: New York Daily News, 23 October 1931. Public domain in the United States (published 1931–1963 without copyright renewal). Via Wikimedia Commons.
When and Why It Was Written
The Gaffney letter was written in early 1935 — some accounts place it in February, others in March — from the Westchester County jail at White Plains, where Fish was awaiting trial for the Grace Budd murder. It was the second of the two known confession letters Fish sent to grieving mothers after his arrest. The Budd letter, written from outside before his arrest, was anonymous; the Gaffney letter was signed.
Fish's motive for writing is not entirely clear and has been interpreted differently by the two principal commentators on the case. Dr. Frederic Wertham, in his 1949 monograph, read the letter as a further expression of the same compulsion that produced the Budd letter — a need to describe, to narrate, to confront the bereaved mother in writing. Harold Schechter, writing in 1990, considered it as strategic: a public act of confession intended to support the insanity defence by demonstrating a pattern of irrational compulsion extending over years.
What the Letter Contained
The Gaffney letter is considerably shorter than the Budd letter. It runs to two pages, written in the same careful pencil hand, and is addressed to "Dear Mrs. Gaffney." It opens by acknowledging that the writer is "the man who took Billy" and then describes, in a sequence of four short paragraphs, the afternoon of 11 February 1927 — the approach in the hallway, the manner in which the child was led from the building, the trolley ride, and the final destination in Greenpoint.
Two details in the letter matched the 1927 investigative file in ways the police considered decisive. The first was the identification of the specific trolley motorman (Anthony Barone) who had carried Fish and Billy from 15th Street that night — a detail that had been recorded in the case file but had never been reported in the press. The second was the description of the stairwell at 99 15th Street, including a small gas-lamp fixture on the third-floor landing that was removed by the landlord in 1928.
The letter ends, as the Budd letter had, with a form of apology. The Brooklyn District Attorney's office recorded its full text and included a verbatim transcription in the trial exhibits.
The Mother's Response
Elizabeth Gaffney gave the letter unopened to the detective who called on her in March 1935. She asked that it not be read aloud to her. She never, in any subsequent communication, gave an account of its contents. She spoke publicly about her son only once — to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the same week as the Budd trial verdict — and did not return to the subject.
Where the Letter Is Now
The original letter is held in the Brooklyn District Attorney's archive, case file Investigative Record: Gaffney, 1927. A facsimile of the first page was reproduced as Plate 17 in Harold Schechter's Deranged (1990). The letter is referenced in Wertham's case notes but is not reproduced in The Show of Violence (1949), which concentrates on the Budd correspondence.
See: Billy Gaffney — victim dossier, the Grace Budd letter, all letters. Or return to the main archive.