Francis McDonnell

The Family & the Neighbourhood

Francis Xavier McDonnell was born in 1916 to Arthur McDonnell, a New York City police patrolman assigned to the 122nd Precinct on Staten Island, and Anna McDonnell, née Sullivan. The family lived at 321 Richmond Avenue, Port Richmond, in a small wooden frame house with a front porch facing the street. The neighbourhood in 1924 was semi-rural, with wooded lots running back from the main road and a dirt lane leading up to the nearby Lattingtown Wood.

15 July 1924

On the afternoon of Tuesday, 15 July 1924, Francis was playing on the porch with two younger siblings. His mother, in the kitchen at the rear of the house, noticed a man passing the porch twice within the span of half an hour. The man was later described by Anna McDonnell and by two neighbours as tall, elderly, grey-haired, shabbily dressed, and muttering to himself. Anna McDonnell described him to investigators as walking as if the act of walking required concentration.

Some time before 4 p.m. the stranger stopped at the porch and spoke briefly to Francis. Francis left the porch with him. Anna McDonnell, alerted by a younger child, came to the front door shortly after and saw the pair walking together up the dirt lane in the direction of the Lattingtown Wood. She called her husband, who was at that moment at the precinct house, and an immediate search was organised.

Francis was not found that night. His body was recovered two days later — on 17 July — in the Lattingtown Wood, hanged from a sapling roughly half a mile from the house. The cause of death was recorded as strangulation; additional injuries were present but were not detailed in the published portions of the coroner's report.

The Investigation That Followed

The McDonnell case was the responsibility of the 122nd Precinct detective squad and, given the father's standing, drew the direct attention of the Staten Island Borough Command. An initial suspect — a drifter apprehended near the New Jersey ferry — was held for four days and released without charge. The composite description of the tall grey-haired stranger was circulated throughout the five boroughs. It produced no further leads.

The case remained open for just under eleven years. It was resolved not by fresh investigation but by Fish's 1935 confession, given first to Detective William King and then corroborated against the 1924 Staten Island file. Fish's description of the porch, of the manner of Francis's removal, and of the approximate location of the body — all three confidential details from the original investigation — matched the file. The Staten Island District Attorney, Ignatius Lorenzo, formally closed the case in April 1935.

Why It Is Believed to Be the First

The McDonnell killing is the earliest of the three confirmed Fish homicides. It is also the first for which there is contemporaneous third-party corroboration of the description of the perpetrator. Earlier acts Fish claimed — in Washington, D.C., and in upstate New York — are not independently attested. Both Frederic Wertham and Harold Schechter treat the Francis McDonnell case as the documentable beginning of Fish's homicidal career, while acknowledging that earlier non-lethal assaults are likely to have occurred.

The Family Afterward

Arthur McDonnell continued to serve in the 122nd Precinct until his retirement in the early 1940s. He declined to give any public statement at the time of Fish's 1935 conviction. The family is buried at St. Peter's Cemetery, Staten Island. Francis's grave carries the inscription "In everlasting memory."