Albert Fish Biography – Facts, Childhood, Family Life & Achievements
As a young boy, he started visiting public baths to watch boys undress. He also started writing salacious and vulgar letters to women from classified advertisements and matrimonial agencies.
Around 1880, his mother managed to get a stable government job and brought him home from the orphanage. Fish never received any formal education. At the age of 12, he got involved in a relationship with a telegraph boy, who introduced him to paraphilic practices, such as urolagnia and coprophagia.
Since he was frequently exposed to brutality, harsh beatings and torture during his growing up years, he began to associate these with pleasure. He was aroused by unmerciful whipping and flogging and began looking forward to it.
His father Randall Fish initially worked as a river boat captain, and he later became a fertilizer manufacturer. He died of a heart attack at Washington’s Sixth Street Station in 1875. Owing to his mother’s mental health issues, Fish was sent to Saint John’s Orphanage in Washington where he was often brutally beaten and tortured.
Many of his family members suffered from mental health issues; including his mother who had visual hallucinations. His uncle suffered from ‘mania’, his brother was sent to a mental asylum and his sister also suffered from ‘mental afflictions’. There were other relatives too who were dealing with several mental illnesses.
He was the youngest of his surviving siblings. He had two brothers, named Walter Fish and Edwin Fish; and a sister called Annie Fish. He started calling himself “Albert” after one of his dead siblings.
Albert Fish was born on May 19, 1870, in Washington, D.C., to Randall and Ellen Fish. His father had English roots, while his mother was of Scottish and Irish descent. His father, who was 43 years older than his mother, was 75 when Fish was born. His father passed away when Fish was only five years old.
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Early Crimes
Albert Fish moved to New York City in his early 20s and started working as a male prostitute. Around this time, he began to rape young boys.
He first lured them and then tortured them by smacking with paddles embedded with nails, eventually raping them. It was the beginning of his perverted obsession with children, which ultimately led to him becoming one of the most feared serial killers of all time.
In 1898, his mother arranged for him to marry Anna Mary Hoffman, with whom he went on to father six children; namely Albert, Anna, Gertrude, Eugene, John and Henry Fish.
He worked as a house painter in the year 1898. In 1903, he was arrested for grand larceny and incarcerated in Sing Sing prison. He regularly had sex with the prison inmates there.
Fish continued molesting children even after he was married and became a father. He admitted to being obsessed with mutilation after his male lover took him to a wax museum where he saw the bisection of a penis. He then became involved in self-mutilation, often putting needles in his groin and flogging himself with a nail paddle.
In 1910, when he was working in Wilmington, Delaware, he met a young man named Thomas Kedden. Fish and Kedden started engaging in a sadomasochistic relationship. While it is still unknown whether their relationship was consensual or not, he confessed to the fact that Kedden was intellectually disabled.
Fish lured Kedden to an old farmhouse to torture him under the pretence of a rendezvous. He kept him tied up for two weeks and cut half of his penis. “I shall never forget his scream and the look he gave me,” Fish recalled in his confession.
Initially, he intended to kill Kedden, but decided against it when he thought that it would bring unwanted attention towards him. He instead lathered peroxide on his wound, covered it with a handkerchief and left a $10 bill for his troubles. He never saw Kedden again.
By 1917, Fish had become severely mentally ill, and his wife left him for a man named John Straube. She left behind their six children under his care. Following her departure, he started to have auditory hallucinations. In his confession, he recalled wrapping himself in a carpet and saying that he was instructed by John the Apostle.