About the dispatches
The dispatches are short editorial notes published weekly by the Albert Fish Archive. Each one is a single-topic reading of one document, one anniversary, or one small question in the Fish file — the letters, the 1934 arrest on East 52nd Street, the Westchester trial, the Sing Sing execution, and the press-mythology that grew around the case in the decades that followed.
Dispatches are meant to be read in under three minutes. They sit alongside the longer archival pages — the biography, the victims, the letters — and cite back to them. If a dispatch references a document, the full archival description is always one click away.
Each dispatch is written from the primary sources held in the archive — trial exhibits, press reports from the New York Herald-Tribune, the Times, and the Daily News, the Wertham papers at Cornell, and the Westchester County Court record. Where a claim rests on a single source, we say so; where the evidentiary picture is contested, we say that too. The sources page lists every document the archive draws on.
Dispatches are versioned. If new material emerges — a declassification, a reattribution, a correction from a reader — the dispatch is updated in place and the revision date recorded in its header. Historical accuracy matters more than fixed text.
New dispatches are posted every Monday at 0900 Eastern. Subscribe via RSS or bookmark this page.
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