Pretty home was the site of serial killer Albert Fish's monstrous murder

Wisteria Cottage has a grisly past as the site where Albert Fish murdered and ate 10-year-old Grace Budd. Photo / Google

Cannibal and serial child killer Albert Fish chose the house for one of his most infamous crimes, the murder and consumption of 10-year-old Grace Budd.

Called Wisteria Cottage, it was empty when Fish picked it out ahead of selecting his next victim.

Pretty little Gracie sat on Fish's knee in her parents' home and, posing as a harmless old man, history's most vile child predator decided to kill her in the abandoned house and eat her.

In 1928, the house was in an area described as East Irvington, in Westchester County, upstate New York.

In the crime scene photographs, the house looks as if it is set in woodlands.

Today, surrounded by houses, 379 Mountain Rd in Irvington, an affluent suburban village in the town of Greenburgh, is just a 45-minute drive north of New York City.

Clad in modern siding and backed by remaining woodland, the house was advertised for sale this year for $1 million.

When real estate agents declined to reveal the property's history, Westchester County Historical Society librarian Patrick Raftery confirmed the house's grisly past.

The distinctive chimneys, ornate eaves and windows of the spruced-up modern dwelling match the house seen in the background as detectives swarm the property, digging for Grace Budd's bones and those of Fish's other victims.

It was 1934 when Westchester Police discovered the girl's skull and finally brought an end to Fish's reign of terror.

And it was only a fit of egomania on Fish's part that brought him undone and led to his execution in 1936 at Sing Sing Prison, a further 20km north in New York state.

By the time Fish came to meet the unfortunate Grace Budd, he was 58 years old and had already tortured and killed several children and molested hundreds.

A small man of benign appearance who became a cruel monster once alone with a child, Fish's perversion went back to his childhood.

Born Hamilton Fish to a 75-year-old father and 32-year-old schizophrenic mother, he discarded his hated first name for Albert early on.

Placed at a young age in an orphanage where he was whipped, Fish began to enjoy the pain.

Back home with his mother, he began a sexual relationship with a boy when he was 12 and began eating and drinking human waste.

Aged 20, he became a male prostitute in New York City, then a house painter and entered an arranged marriage, which produced six children.

He was 47 when his wife left him, and he began having auditory hallucinations and satisfying his masochistic desires by inserting needles into his groin and abdomen and hitting himself with a nail-studded paddle.

Fish developed an obsession with cannibalism and began eating raw meat. He began molesting and torturing children and disabled young people.

Under his bed he kept a meat cleaver, a butcher knife, and a small handsaw. He later said he "had a child in every state" of the US, but it is unclear whether this meant murder or just torture and molestation.

On May 28, 1928, Fish answered a newspaper advertisement placed on behalf of Edward Budd, an 18-year-old New York boy looking for work in the country.

Arriving at the Budd family house in Manhattan, Fish planned to kidnap and mutilate Edward and let him bleed to death.

But when Fish, who called himself Frank Howard, returned to collect Edward, he met the boy's younger sister Grace and changed his plans.

Inventing a story about a niece's birthday party, he convinced Delia and Albert Budd to allow Grace to accompany him to the party.

There was no niece and no birthday party and the Budds never saw Grace again.

But in November 1934, Delia Budd received a letter, which she had one of her sons read to her because she was illiterate.

The letter was unsigned, but Fish made it clear it was written by Frank Howard who had taken Grace more than six years earlier.

Writing "my dear Mrs Budd", Fish told the story of a ship's captain named "John" who began eating boys in New York after getting a taste for cooked children's flesh in China.

Fish described arriving at the Budd's house and making up "my mind to eat" Grace and how Mrs Budd had allowed the girl to go with him.

"I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers," he said in the letter.

"I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I went to the window and called her.

"When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run."

Fish went on to describe, in shocking detail, how Grace fought back and how he eventually overcame her.

He choked her to death, cut her body into pieces and cooked them.

He consumed the remains over the next nine days.

Police found the letters NYPCBA, representing "New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association", on the envelope and tracked Fish to a rooming house.

After Fish's arrest, officers searched Wisteria House and dug up the basement and the property. They also searched a ramshackle house nearby where Fish had lived.

Grace Budd's skull was discovered buried with other pieces of her skeleton beside a wall behind the cottage.

Detectives uncovered the murders of at least two of Fish's other victims, and five probable others of four girls and one boy aged between 5 and 17 years old.

Fish murdered 4-year-old Billy Gaffney in 1927 after abducting him and torturing him with a homemade cat o' nine tails.

Fish later dismembered and ate the body.

Three years earlier, he kidnapped and sexually assaulted Francis McDonnell, 9, and hung him from a tree before lacerating his legs and abdomen.

Psychiatrist Dr Fredric Wertham, examined Fish in his prison cell and found a "meek, gentle, benevolent and polite" man who described the significant strain of mental illness running through his family.

Fish said he believed that God had ordered him to torment and castrate little boys.
Wertham believed that Fish had actually killed 15 children and mutilated a hundred others.

Fish confessed his self mutilation and an X-ray of his pelvic region showed up at least 29 embedded needles.

At his March 1935 murder trial, Fish pleaded insanity. His psychiatrists listed at least 14 perversions and his defence lawyer said no other individual possessed so many sexual abnormalities.

During the 10-day hearing, Fish shrank in his seat the afternoon when Grace Budd's mother pointed at him, crying "That's Howard, I'll know him anywhere".

One witness was Fish's 17-year-old stepdaughter who described the games involving masochism and child molestation he taught his children.

The jury found him sane and guilty and at 11.06pm on January 16, 1936, Fish was taken to the death chamber at Sing Sing prison and strapped into the electric chair.

Two burst of electricity later and he was dead.

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