The Werewolf of Wisteria Cottage
Could Confessed Child Killer and Cannibal Albert Howard Fish Been Responsible for the Murder of Two Connecticut Children in 1907 and 1934
****This story contains graphic and disturbing language Fish used to describe his own crimes. In the interest of showing the depravity of the monster and his propensity for unspeakable horror and cruelty we have decided to include it unedited. Reader discretion however is advised *****
By Shawn R. Dagle
The horror of war could not prepare 39-year-old George Calbe for what he discovered in a field near Mansfield Avenue in Darien in June of 1934.
After stepping over a fence at the edge of a field just 60 feet from the roadway the veteran of the First World War noticed the decapitated body of a young child lying face down in the tall grass and underbrush.
Dead approximately four months the body was so decomposed investigators were not able to positively determine the child’s sex (though they believed the skeleton was most likely that of a young female).
A prominent New York dentist - who resided in Darien - was brought in by investigators and made an examination of 20 teeth found in the child’s skull and estimated the victim’s age to be somewhere between three to five years old.
The skull had been severed from the child’s body according to one account and there were no obvious injuries to it that would have indicated blunt force trauma.
Near the body police found a pair of tattered blue trousers.
Two days later another officer discovered a three-foot-long cardboard box in the same field. Inside were newspapers and a “wisp” of hair that matched hair found on the child’s skull.
Inside the box police collected a sales slip with the name of a man from Middletown. The box appeared to be the type bread was carried in at the time.
Investigators theorized that the child had been murdered elsewhere, transported in the box and discarded in the field.
Police were able to track down the man whose name appeared on the sale’s slip but ruled him out as a suspect.
Fortunately there were other leads. A “reputable citizen” from Westport had told police that a month earlier – on May 9 at approximately 5:30 p.m. while on business in Darien - he had seen a coupe (about 1927 make) with an elderly African-American gentleman seated inside with his arm around a young white girl who appeared to be about three years old. The man told police he saw the vehicle in the area where the body of the child was found. When the man read about the discovery of the body in the newspapers three days after it was discovered he was reminded of the coupe and contacted authorities.
The witness claimed the elderly gentleman he had seen in the coupe had some type of “characteristic” or feature that he was confident he would recognize if he saw him again.
Police planned on bringing the man to New York City to look at potential suspects. What came of that informal lineup is unknown.
Police had another lead as well. In February two hunters from Norwalk claimed they had been hunting approximately one mile from where the body was found when their dogs began to bark and led them to the area where they saw a man and a woman running off toward the road – the woman carrying a bundle.
Nearby the hunters discovered a freshly dug hole – approximately two feet wide, two feet long and four feet deep – which they theorized could have been intended as a grave. Nothing however appears to have come from this lead.
As police continued their investigation the child’s body was brought to the Yale Medical School in New Haven for safe keeping. Authorities in New York did not have any missing persons cases matching the description of the child and neither did Connecticut.
Months went by with no resolution. Then in December police had a major break. An elderly house painter named Albert Fish confessed to kidnapping, strangling and cannibalizing a 10-year-old girl in New York after sending a letter to her mother describing his horrific crime.
Fish had lived 20 miles east of Darien in Bridgeport for a short period of time with his family decades earlier. Several papers found in his home also had Darien addresses on them according to the New York detective who arrested him for the murder of the 10-year-old girl.
On December 15 investigators from Connecticut traveled to the Tombs to interview Fish about the child’s body discovered in Darien.
The interview lasted for a half hour. When investigators from Connecticut left they initially declined to comment to the press. Back in Connecticut however they told reporters they had obtained “considerable information” from their interview with the confessed killer that warranted further investigation.
According to investigators Fish had admitted that he was in Fairfield County in February or March of that year (just months before the body in Darien was discovered).
In a letter to a New York investigator Fish said he had lived on Main Street in Bridgeport with his wife and two children Albert and Anna in either 1906 or 1907. He recalled his kids had taken part in a play “Little Orphan Annie” at the Polis Theater (most likely the play was “Two Orphans” that was showing at Polis Theaters at the time). His son-in-law’s parents also had a small house in Stamford though he claimed he never had been there.
In April or May of 1933 Fish also claimed his son Henry drove him in his car to New Haven to see a widow who had an advertisement in the Friendship Magazine looking for a husband.
When Fish got to the woman’s home however he said she had gone to town.
On the way back Fish said he and his son passed through many towns in Connecticut before returning to New York.
Four years earlier Fish had begun to correspond with women looking for husbands through the Friendship Magazine.
“He preferred widows with children. He said that he might not only have the relationship with the widow but that the children were of primary interest,” a doctor would explain following Fish’s arrest in New York.
His interest in the children of widows was far from innocent. The brutal killer would confess to hundreds of incidents involving the sexual molestation of young boys and girls following his arrest in New York.
His deviant behavior had its roots when as a young boy he was placed in an orphanage in Washington, D.C.
Born on May 19, 1870 in the District of Columbia to Randall Fish and Ellen Howell - Albert’s father had died when he was just five-years-old. Shortly thereafter his mother placed him in St. John’s Orphanage where he would spend the next year and a half to two years.
“There I learned to lie-beg-steal and saw a lot of things a child of seven should not see,” Fish later recalled. “I saw so many boys stripped naked in that home and whipped it took root in my head.”
There Fish said he witnessed various perverted acts committed on other children and was a victim himself.
He eventually returned to his mother and attended public school until the age of 15 when he was in eighth grade. That year he began an apprenticeship and learned to paint.
In February of 1898 – at the age of 28 – Fish married Anna (nine years his junior). The couple would have six children.
Five years later - in December of 1903 - Fish was sent to Sing-Sing prison for grand theft and was sent back to prison again in 1906.
After living in Bridgeport with his wife and two children Fish moved on to Springfield, Massachusetts and then to New York City.
In 1910 he returned to Massachusetts taking on the alias of the Rev. J.A. Hall. Dressed as a clergyman, Fish claimed to be seeking donations of money for a home for orphaned children. He was able to “swindle many philanthropic wealthy society women” out of their money according to the papers and was arrested in May of 1910 after Brookline police became wise to his scheme.
In custody Fish claimed that he had traveled to Massachusetts to find work as a painter but there were no jobs so he decided to attempt his con.
Fish threw himself upon the mercy of the court and pleaded with the judge to be lenient. He pled guilty to obtaining money under false pretenses and was sentenced to two months in prison.
After his imprisonment Fish returned to New York where in 1917 - while working in White Plains – his wife Anna packed up all the furniture in their New York City apartment, took off with another man and left him with their six children.
Following the departure of his wife, Fish’s mental state began to rapidly deteriorate. He began to hear voices and hallucinate. He also struck himself with a nail studded paddle, pushed needles into his skin and even claimed that he lit his rear end on fire over the ensuing years. After his confession to the murder of 10-year-old Grace Budd 29 needle fragments were found in Fish’s body.
By 1922 Fish was living in a bungalow in Worthington, New York with his children near an abandoned old home called Wisteria Cottage. There his bizarre behavior continued. In an apple orchard near his home Fish was heard screaming “I am Christ.”
He eventually left Worthington returning to New York City where he got a job as foreman painter. It was while living here that Fish would commit his most horrific crime.
On May 28, 1928 – dressed in a $10 hat and diamond ring – Fish (using the alias Frank Howard) arrived at the tenement apartment where 18-year-old Edward Budd lived with his parents and siblings in New York City.
Edward had recently placed an advertisement in the newspaper looking for farm work. Fish claimed to have a farm on Long Island. His real plan however was to murder the teenager. He had purchased from a pawnshop a saw, cleaver and butcher knife to carry out his crime.
The Budds suspected nothing when they met Fish - who never smoked or drank, regularly attended church and knew his Bible.
Fish was adept at concealing his dark and twisted nature beneath the thin veneer of a gentle, kind hearted old man - playing the part as he had years earlier when he claimed to be a benevolent priest in order to con wealthy society women out of their cash.
In the Budds’ apartment however Fish’s plans took an unexpected turn when Edward’s 10-year-old sister Grace walked into the room.
“When I saw her something over took me. I can’t explain the feeling. I had intended to kill the brother but something overpowered me,” Fish later recalled.
The cunning killer quickly put Grace and her parents at ease - inviting Grace onto his lap to count a wad of cash - $90 in total - that he was carrying with him that day.
On June 3 Fish returned to the Budds’ apartment for lunch bringing with him some strawberries and pot cheese. During his visit he asked if he could bring Grace to his niece’s birthday party.
At first Grace’s mother was reluctant but eventually agreed to let her daughter go. Fish gave Grace’s parents the address to where they were going and the two of them left the apartment. Grace was never seen alive again.
Later when Grace did not return the Budds reached out to police who informed them that the address their visitor had given them was bogus. It was clear something terrible had occurred.
What the Budds didn’t know was that Fish and Grace had taken a train to Westchester, County.
Wrapped inside a bundle Fish carried with him was the saw, cleaver and butcher knife. When Fish almost left the bundle on the train it was Grace who ran back to retrieve it.
In Worthington Fish and Grace – dressed in her blue coat, light pale blue hat, white dress and white stockings – walked along the train tracks toward Wisteria Cottage still vacant as it had been the last time Fish had seen it.
It was a warm spring afternoon. “Take off your hat and coat,” Fish told Grace after they arrived at the abandoned cottage.
While the young girl picked wildflowers in the yard, Fish laid out the cleaver, knife and saw – or the “implements of hell” as he would later call them – on the floor of an upstairs room. There he stripped naked and went to the window and called for Grace to come upstairs. As Grace climbed the stairs he hid in a closet.
When Grace came into the room and saw the wrinkled old man naked she began to cry and said she would tell her mother. She attempted to run for the stairs but Fish managed to grab and subdue her. He strangled his young victim and cut her throat.
In the upstairs room Fish proceeded to cut up her body, severing her head. He hid Grace’s remains behind the door and in a privy and took away with him flesh from her limbs and torso. On his way out he wiped his blood covered hands in the grass.
Back in his New York apartment Fish ate the young girl’s remains. A doctor would later recall how Fish told him he had prepared her flesh “with carrots, onions and gravy.”
According to the doctor for the nine days it took Fish to consume Grace’s remains he “lived in an absolute state of sex excitement about this matter.”
Several days after the murder Fish returned to Wisteria Cottage. “The body had just began to have a noticeable odor,” he later told police.“I raised the window, threw the legs and [the] little part that was attached to that out the window.”
Fish then carried what remained of Grace’s body out of the house depositing her skull and other remains on the cottage grounds – including near a stone wall.
Grace’s murder would remain a mystery for years. Another man was eventually arrested for her murder but was acquitted.
Following his gruesome crime Fish began to spiral out of control. He was arrested multiple times by police in New York for larceny related and other crimes and was caught writing vile, sexually explicit letters to women.
Like many serial killers in the years following Grace’s murder Fish would visit Wisteria Cottage to relive his brutal crime – on more than one occasion being driven out there by his son.
However unable to satiate his lust for pain and cruelty, six years after her murder Fish penned a grotesque letter to Grace’s mother Delia detailing what happened that afternoon without revealing his identity. It would prove to be his undoing.
Dated November 11 the letter began with a strange tale about a deckhand aboard the Steamer Tacoma (who Fish alleged later became his neighbor). The sailor on a drunken binge had been stranded in China along with another sailor during the famine there Fish wrote.
The sailor had returned with tales of cannibalism and a taste for human flesh. Back in New York City Fish wrote that his neighbor kidnapped two boys and murdered them. “Several times every day and night he spanked them – tortured them to make their meat good and tender,” Fish wrote the Budds in his letter.
The sailor he claimed first killed the 11-year-old, “because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it.” The sailor then consumed the young boy’s remains.
“Every part of his body was cooked and eaten except the head – bones and guts. He was roasted in the oven (all of his ass) boiled, broiled, fried, stewed,” wrote Fish.
His neighbor told him so often about how good it had tasted that Fish wrote the Budds that “I made up my mind to taste it.”
Fish then goes on to tell the Budds that he was the older man who had visited them the day Grace went missing.
“Brought you pot cheese – strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her,” Fish wrote them.
Fish then wrote the Budds that he took Grace to an abandoned house in Westchester that he had already picked out for her murder.
“When we got there I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did I would not get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in the closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick-bite and scratch. I choked her to death then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her entire body. I did not f—k her though I could have had I wished. She died a virgin.”
On the back of the envelope Fish had sent to Grace’s parents police found the initials NYPCBA which stood for the New York Private Chauffers’ Benevolent Association located in Manhattan.
A boy who was often at their headquarters recalled leaving envelopes in a roach infested room he had been staying at in the city.
When investigators visited the building where the boy had been staying they discovered one of the former tenants handwriting matched a telegram the Budd’s had received from the strange Mr. Howard before Grace’s murder. The writing belonged to a man named Albert Fish.
Police tracked Fish to another apartment but he had already left. He was expected back however at some point to pick up a check. An investigator in the case staked out the apartment. When Fish returned he was arrested.
Within hours of first being questioned Fish confessed. Police traveled to the cottage and found Grace’s remains on the grounds.
When asked why he had decided to write the letter that eventually proved to be his downfall Fish wasn’t completely sure.
“I write as a habit – just can’t seem to stop,” he told police. Fish didn’t appear to know exactly why he had done it. “I don’t know, just reading some books and things such as that and just had a mania for writing,” he told them.
While Fish in his letter denied having sexually assaulted Grace he eventually admitted to an alienist that he had molested the 10-year-old at the cottage.
In the aftermath of his confession investigators began to question whether he had been involved in other child murders in New York and elsewhere.
While Fish would confess to other unspeakable acts it does not appear that he ever admitted to being involved in the murder of the child found in Darien.
Nearly as soon as reports appeared in the newspapers potentially linking Fish to the crime they stopped and the case slipped from public interest.
It doesn’t appear the crime was ever solved.
I did however discover another murder that raises the possibility that Fish may have had one or more victims in Connecticut.
On October 9, 1907 brothers Louis and Columbo Spada and their cousin Antonio were walking through the brush while searching for apples or chestnuts in northern Bridgeport.
100 yards from the Union Metallic Cartridge Company (not far from the Trumbull town line) they noticed a woman’s dark tattered skirt and blue calico wrapper with “ragged sleeves” in a small, swampy clearing surrounded with dense, nearly impassable thicket.
Antonio moved the garment to find the beaten, bruised, naked body of murdered 10-year-old Philip Mastriano lying face down in the mud (some accounts say he was nine).
The oldest of four children, Philip was the son of Nicholas Mastriano - a well-known laborer in Bridgeport’s Italian community.
Depending on the account Philip’s parents were either poor or of moderate income.
The young boy was last seen three days earlier by some of his friends he was playing with in the neighborhood. Philip was last spotted clinging to the back of a wagon as it disappeared in the distance.
In the thicket police discovered that Philip had been strangled with a shoelace and his arms bound to his side. The shoestring was wrapped so tightly around his neck it became embedded into his skin.
Along with his clothes located nearby, police discovered a pair of woman’s underwear.
While none of the reports definitively state that Philip was sexually assaulted before or after his murder it appears that he was based on how the papers described the crime.
The Meriden Daily Journal referred to the murder as one of the most “unnatural” police had yet encountered. While The North Adams Evening Transcript reported the theory that Philip had been “maltreated and for fear of detection was killed.”
The Meriden Morning Record called the crime “the most revolting murder that has ever occurred in the County of Fairfield” – referring to Philip as “the victim of degeneracy in its basest form” having been “maltreated shamefully and afterwards choked to death with his shoestring.”
From what we know about Philip’s family tragedy seemed to hover around the Mastrianos like a black cloud - or hand - depending on who you spoke with.
Philip’s paternal aunt had frozen to death after disappearing from her home and his father’s other sister and brother had been murdered in South America according to press reports.
Rumors began to circulate around Bridgeport’s Italian community that Philip’s killing had been in reprisal for a murder his grandfather had committed in Italy that had earned him a life sentence.
There were also theories that the crime may have been committed by the “Black Hand” – a shadowy early criminal secret organization and pre-cursor to the Italian Mafia.
Police however initially at least ruled out the Black Hand’s involvement telling reporters that the theory had been “completely exploded” by an autopsy performed on the boy – lending further credence to theory that the boy had been sexually assaulted – not something the Black Hand would have done as an act of revenge against his father or family.
Just when it appeared as if the case would go unsolved a small item appeared in the Harford Courant’s “City News in Brief” section in November of 1907.
Two men – Dominic Ciccio and Giuseppe Mantello – had been arrested in Dayton, Pennsylvania in connection to Philip’s murder. They were to be extradited to Connecticut to face justice.
I could find however no subsequent reports about what happened in their arrest – if they were ever formally charged in Connecticut, let alone if they were ever brought to trial and convicted.
A newspaper article that appeared in the Bridgeport Times and Early Farmer six years later in April of 1913 casts doubt on whether the crime was ever actually solved.
According to the Times police were investigating that spring a rumor that Edward Mills – a former inmate at the Bridgeport Orphan Asylum – had confessed to murdering Philip. They were able to rule out his involvement when it turned out he was in the asylum at the time of the murder.
By his own account we know that Fish was living in Bridgeport with his family around the time of this murder. We know he was capable of as heinous a crime as the newspapers depicted Philip’s murder in their reports. We also know he liked to strangle his victims.
The location where Philip’s body was located is also of interest. Press reports described it as a thicket. That is also how the papers described the area where the child in Darien was found and at least one newspaper described an area where part of Grace Budd’s remains were discovered.
It is also interesting to note that the witness in the Darien case who described seeing a coupe with a young girl inside near where the body was discovered claimed to have seen a three year old girl in the car with an elderly man which fits the description of Fish at the time. The witness of course also described the man as being African-American which Fish was not.
There is no indication that Fish was ever looked at in connection to Philip Mastriano’s murder.
Put on trial for the killing of Grace Budd it took only 5 ½ hours for a jury to find Fish guilty despite his attorney’s claims of insanity.
On January 16, 1936 – at the age of 66 – Fish was led to Sing-Sing’s electric chair – nicknamed “Old Sparky.”
Earlier that evening Fish ate little of his final meal – a special chicken dinner – and spent his final hours listening to a Protestant chaplain recite passages from the Bible.
“This is a sad day for me. I don’t know why I’m here. Everything seems so hazy,” he reportedly told his daughter and two sons when they came to visit him in the prison prior to his execution.
Before being taken from his cell to the death chamber, Fish reportedly told the prison’s warden that he loved children and “must have been out of his mind when he killed the Budd girl.”
At 11 p.m. that night a one-legged African American restaurant operator named John Smith (who had shot and killed a man during a quarrel) was brought to the electric chair to be electrocuted. Three minutes later Smith was pronounced dead.
Next came Fish - dressed in a “blue shirt and black trousers”, “old and stooped shouldered” shuffling as he walked – according to the Associated Press.
At 11:06 – just three minutes after Smith had been pronounced dead – an electrode was attached to Fish’s right leg and he was electrocuted.
Fish was pronounced dead at 11:09 p.m.
-August 22, 2022
Sources
Hartford Courant “Mystery Man Adds Tale to Darien Case” AP June 28, 1934
Hartford Courant “Search for Child’s Death Clue” AP June 26, 1934
Hartford Courant “Slain Child Is Found in Darien Field” June 24, 1934 AP
Hartford Courant “Budd Death House Yields More Bones” AP December 16, 1934
The Meriden Daily Journal “Police Digging for Bones of More Victims” December 15, 1934 AP
North Adams Evening Transcript “Think Woman Murdered Ten Years Old Boy” October 9, 1907
The Bridgeport Times and Early Farmer “Mills Not Slayer of Philip Mastriano” April 9, 1913
Meriden Morning Record “Little Boy Victim of Degenerate” October 10, 1907
New York Daily Tribune “Murder Due to Feud” October 13, 1907
The Meriden Daily Journal “Little Boy Strangled” October 9, 1907
Hartford Courant “City News in Brief” November 11, 1907
Spirit of the Ages “By a String” October 12, 1907
New York Court of Appeals 1935 People v. Fish NY pgs 1220-1689
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle “Slayer of Grace Budd Believed by the Police to be Cannibal” December 14, 1934
The Scranton Republican “Letters of Sadist In Vivid Contrast AP March 19, 1935
The Boston Globe “Two Months In Jail” May 11, 1910
The North Adams Transcript “Bogus Pastor Jailed” May 12, 1910
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle “Slayer of Grace Budd Believed by the Police to be Cannibal”
The Daily Times “Slayer Points Out Her Tomb in Timberland” December 14 1934 AP
The Morning Call “Self Confessed Killer of Girl Found Guilty” March 23, 1935 AP
Standard Speaker “Two Electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison” January 17, 1936 AP
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