He wished to be known as "Albert" after a dead sibling and to escape the nickname "Ham and Eggs" that he was given at an orphanage in which he spent much of his childhood.

[9][10] On October 16, 1875, Fish's father, a fertilizer manufacturer and former riverboat captain, suffered a fatal heart attack at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station.

Fish later recounted an incident in which a male lover took him to a wax museum, where he was fascinated by a bisection of a human penis and subsequently became obsessed with sexual mutilation.

[10] He also hit himself repeatedly with a nail-studded paddle, and inserted wool doused with lighter fluid into his anus and set it alight.

[20] Fish tortured, mutilated, and murdered young children with his "implements of Hell": a meat cleaver, a butcher knife, and a small handsaw.

[10] Shortly before he abducted Grace Budd, Fish attempted to test his "implements of Hell" on a 10-year-old child he had been molesting named Cyril Quinn.

While the two boys were wrestling on Fish's bed, they dislodged his mattress; underneath was a knife, a small handsaw, and a meat cleaver.

[25] On May 25, 1928, Fish saw a classified advertisement in the Sunday edition of the New York World that read, "Young man, 18, wishes position in country.

He persuaded the parents, Delia Bridget Flanagan and Albert Francis Budd Sr., to let Grace accompany him to the party that evening.

[28] The unaltered letter reads:[10] My dear Mrs. Budd, In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt.

A janitor at the company told the police he had taken some of the stationery home but left it at his rooming house at 200 East 52nd Street when he moved out.

Fish made no attempt to deny the murder of Grace Budd, saying that he meant to go to the house to kill her brother Edward.

[notes 2] Fish said it "never even entered [his] head" to rape the girl,[32] but he later claimed to his attorney that, while kneeling on Grace's chest and strangling her, he did have two involuntary ejaculations.

[33] During the night of July 14, 1924, 9-year-old Francis McDonnell was reported missing after he failed to return home after playing catch with friends in Port Richmond, Staten Island.

[9] According to an autopsy, McDonnell had also suffered extensive lacerations to his legs and abdomen, and his left hamstring had almost entirely been stripped of its flesh.

Fish refused to claim responsibility for this, although he later stated that he intended to castrate the boy but fled when he heard someone approaching the area.

A neighbour also told the police he observed the boy with a similar-looking man walking along a grassy path into the nearby woods.

[9] Francis' mother, Anna McDonnell, said she saw the same man earlier that day, telling reporters, "He came shuffling down the street mumbling to himself and making queer motions with his hands ...

[9] When several eyewitnesses, among them the Staten Island farmer Hans Kiel, positively identified Fish as the odd stranger seen around Port Richmond on the day of McDonnell's disappearance, Richmond County District Attorney Thomas Walsh announced his intention to seek an indictment against Fish for the boy's murder.

When the McDonnell confession was made public, the New York Daily Mirror wrote that the disclosure solidified Fish's reputation as "the most vicious child-slayer in criminal history".

Detectives of the Manhattan Missing Persons Bureau were able to establish that Fish was employed as a house painter by a Brooklyn real estate company during February 1927, and that on the day of Gaffney's disappearance he was working at a location a few miles from where the boy was abducted.

This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to North Beach.

Several psychiatrists testified about Fish's sexual fetishes, which included sadism and masochism, flagellation, exhibitionism, voyeurism, piquerism, cannibalism, coprophagia, urophilia, hematolagnia, pedophilia, necrophilia, and infibulation.

Dempsey in his summation noted that Fish was a "psychiatric phenomenon" and that nowhere in legal or medical records was there another individual who possessed so many sexual abnormalities.

[9] The defense's chief expert witness was Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist with an emphasis on child development who conducted psychiatric examinations for the New York criminal courts.

During two days of testimony, Wertham explained Fish's obsession with religion and specifically his preoccupation with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22:1–24).

Wertham said that Fish believed that similarly "sacrificing" a boy would be penance for his own sins and that even if the act itself was wrong, angels would prevent it if God did not approve.

When asked whether Fish's causing himself pain indicated a mental condition, Lichtenstein replied, "That is not masochism", as he was only "punishing himself to get sexual gratification".

The next witness, Charles Lambert, testified that coprophilia was a common practice and that religious cannibalism may be psychopathic but "was a matter of taste" and not evidence of a psychosis.

[21] At a meeting with reporters after the execution, Fish's lawyer James Dempsey revealed that he was in possession of his client's "final statement".