Behind the Bastards - Descendant of the Original Boogeyman: Albert Fish

Episode Date: August 7, 2018

Albert Fish was a cannibalistic child-murderer who loved lighting his own butt on fire. In Episode 16 Robert is joined by comedian Maggie Mae Fish who is a descendent of Albert Fish.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends, I am Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now, normally this podcast features me and a guest who's coming into cold talking about a horrific person in history, and generally I pick dictators or people who have abused power in some very large-scale way. That's sort of our story. We don't really talk about serial killers usually, but today we are talking about a serial killer named Albert Fish, who was a cannibalistic child murderer who loved lighting his own ass on fire.

Now, we're doing this for two reasons. The first is that my guest today, Maggie May Fish, is a relative of said person. So, let's start there. What is the relation? Okay, so I contacted my uncle Terry, who did our family tree. And so, I have a bunch of names here. But basically, I'm related via his brother, became our direct family line. Albert Fish's brother ended up moving to Michigan, which is where the rest of his family came from. He ended up moving to Michigan, which is where the rest of that line ended up in where I was born.

Exciting. I know. Okay, so before we get any further, Maggie, you're not just a dead guy's relation. You are a wonderfully skilled comedian. No, I am. No, I am just this dead guy's... Gee, I mean, I'll never get out of his shadow, Robert. What are you talking about? Look at what he's done. I will never beat him on that.

No, that's... You have, for one thing, a wonderful YouTube video series where you... My favorite one is dissecting sort of the works of Tim Burton, that fucking guy. Oh, yeah, that fucking guy. I really like your video on Tim Burton. Thank you. You're a talented comedian, talented writer. You and I worked for the same site for a while, and my duties didn't generally intersect. Yeah, I think we met afterwards.

Yeah, I don't think I met you while you were, because they didn't let me into the videos. No, no, no. No, for good reason. For good reason. No one's saying that we're wrong in it. Yeah, basically, the weird thing about today is that neither of us is coming in hot or cold. I don't know what you know, and you don't know what I know, so we're just going to... We're just going to find out. Yeah, we're going to make Reese's Pieces peanut butter cups of knowledge, where it's like a knowledge truck, and then another knowledge truck backs into it.

And they collide? Exactly. And the drivers have to crowdfund their medical care, because it's 2018. Yeah, but then they become friends, and then the one falls in love with that guy's sister, and then they're all over a queer eye, you know? They just pitched a really upbeat movie about our failed medical system. Okay. All right, well, let's talk about a serial killer now.

Great. So I guess I'm going to... My research for this was mainly... I read a book called Deranged by Harold Schechter. Have you given that one a read? I've not given it, although it has been recommended to me several times. Yeah, it's good. If you're a fan of the books about serial killer's genre, it's a very solid entry into that.

I also watched a documentary called Albert Fish about Albert Fish that's terrible. Ooh, I have... I watched that on YouTube. Yes. We're going to get into that in a little bit, because we've got a couple of video clips from that, but I just... I got a... Just trying to light on, if you will.

Very excited for this episode. All right, so let's talk about Albert Fish's crimes. Yes. The ones that we know about. That we know of. Here's where I'm confused, and maybe you can try to light it. We know what he did, but I also know the rumors, and I don't know which is factually happened, and which is like, oh, man, what if?

Albert Fish also. Yeah, and I tried to stick mostly to stuff that we know, because we know there's three children that we know he killed. Yes. But he claimed to have killed a bunch of other people after he was caught. Right. But he also had, as we'll get into, a very rich fantasy life. Very rich, which seems like...

And also, he's not the only serial killer to have made up deaths. Yeah. So... So some of this is going to be up to the readers to the side, but hopefully you and I can lock down, will forever now be the ironclad history of Albert Fish. This is it. This is it. Right.

So on July 14th, 1924, eight-year-old Francis McDonald was playing on the front stoop of his porch in Staten Island, which was at that time the middle of nowhere. Yeah. Still... There were, like, trees and shit. Trees and shit. What's the rolly, tumbley little weed? Walls.

Yes, walls. There were walls. Walls and trees. So while his mother was watching him, she saw a strange old man with a gray mustache creeping down the street in exactly the sort of way normal people don't. If it had been 2018, she probably would have taken her kid inside and called the cops, or at least taken him inside. But it was 1924, and she was just like, oh, what a weirdo.

And he was white, so I'm sure it was. Like, oh, well, he's white. What's the worst that could happen? It's the 20s. Yeah. So Francis left after his mom went inside to play with his brother and some neighbor kids. They were playing some sort of ball game, probably something old-timey like stickball or... Yeah.

Or do you have a ball? Or do you have a ball? I've heard that's a game from back then. Polio ball. Yeah. I don't know, 1920 sports. But at some point, that weird gray man started watching them, and Francis ran over to see what he wanted, because, again, in the 20s, while his friends and brother were focused

on the game, Francis and the man both disappeared. Now, once people realized Francis was missing, search parties were formed, a trio of Boy Scouts found Francis's body. The newspapers described, yeah, bad time for the Boy Scouts. Yeah. What a troupe. What a troupe. Yeah, they're having some dark campouts after that.

Just these kids sitting around the fire taking drags of cigarettes and just staring. We've seen worse than death. The newspapers described Francis as having been, quote, atrociously assaulted. All of the clothing below his waist had been torn off. He'd been strangled to death with his suspenders, and it looked like he'd been cut up, too. Yeah. Which... So sorry, retroactively.

I mean... Not that I have any control over an ancestor, but, you know. None of us are responsible for what terrible people in our past. Yeah. Like, when you think about it, everybody's got a serial killer relative. I hope. If you go back far enough. Yeah.

Go find them, guys. Go find them. That's what you do after this episode. Go find your serial killer relative. Go find your mass murder. And spoiler alert, my relative who killed people is going to wind up having a camel in the story, so this is going to be fun. Yeah.

This is a massive crossover episode. So, yeah, on February 11th, 1927, four-year-old Billy Gaffney was playing with a three-year-old friend and his 12-year-old brother. The 12-year-old walked off because 12-year-olds aren't really good at babysitting. And the two little kids wound up on the roof because, again, there were no rules in the 1920s, and the kids could just go anywhere. Billy's three-year-old friend was later found safe on the roof, and when the adult who found him asked where Billy had gone, he said, quote, the boogeyman took him.

You are a descendant of the boogeyman. Yeah. The scariest thing is that the photo of Albert Fish on the Wikipedia website looks so much like my current relatives. Just his piercing eyes, like they run in our family, so it's terrifying to look at him. Yeah. I mean, I don't think you look like Albert Fish. Thank you.

But y'all do have piercing eyes. I was going to bring that up. So, both of these abductions caused sensations when they happened, right? It was not common for kids to be abducted in the 1920s. It was common for kids to die for no reason because of the 1920s, and medicine was whiskey. But this sort of thing was not common, and so it caused kind of a sensation, and local papers covered the cases breathlessly and even got some national coverage. And if you're feeling bad about the state of journalism right now, which who isn't?

Give me something to look forward to. This will make you feel better because it turns out it's always kind of in garbage. Here's how the New York Daily News wrote about Billy's disappearance. Somewhere in New York or nearby is little Billy Gaffney, or his body. An army of detectives, 350 strong, is hunting that somewhere. Watch for the results of that search in tomorrow's news, all caps. Hoping against hope, police continue their search for the missing Billy Gaffney. Follow the trail in tomorrow's all caps, news!

Will the seventh day bring joy or sorrow to the parents of little Billy? Read all the developments of the hunt in tomorrow's all caps, news! That's some journalism. That was an advertisement for the news! Coupled around a tragic story of a disappearing boy. Little boy's getting murdered, time to sell some papers. Yeah. So if you've paid attention to the last any length of time in American culture,

you may have picked up on the fact that we are a high strung bunch as a country. That was such a nice way to put it. Americans in the 1920s did not take the realization that kidnapping existed any more gracefully than Americans today take scary news reports about MS-13. According to Harold Schechter's deranged in the immediate aftermath of Billy's abduction over the course of a single week, three separate angry mobs assaulted different suspected boogeymen. Oh boy, to be that other man. And just to be targeted because everyone looked weird back then also, I'm assuming.

There's no way to fix any of it. Well no, you see anybody walking around in 20s clothing today and you're like, that's a pedophile. Yeah, that is a pedophile. But it's just how they dressed. The bowler hat just is so suspicious. You can get arrested for just a bowler hat today. Oh my God. And should.

You should. Yeah, it's not okay. So yeah, here's a quote from deranged about the first guy to be cornered by an angry mob because of Albert Fish's crimes. A 63-year-old salesman named Giles Steele was which? Giles. Oh, his precious poor man. Giles Steele was strolling down East 92nd Street when a four-year-old boy.

He was strolling. I'm gonna be alive. It's the only way people could walk in the 20s. I guess. You were either strolling or you had polio and could not walk. And then you were rolling. So he was strolling down East 92nd Street when a four-year-old boy stepped into his path. He's told the kid to move aside and reach down and took the kid by the shoulder.

At that point, the kid's mother, Miss Sadie Bernstein, came out and saw him with his hand on the kid's shoulder and she just starts screaming. And so a crowd of neighbors immediately descended on Steele and began pummeling him. He just started, it's not even a restraining for the cops. He just beat the shit out of him. So Steele was saved by a cop who took him to the station. He was questioned and it became obvious that he had nothing to do with anything illegal. Miss Bernstein eventually agreed that she had overreacted.

Steele was still a rain and a kidnapping charge because the cops just thought he seemed shady. Poor Giles. I know you must talk about wrongly convicted people probably on this podcast. It comes up a lot, but I always feel terrible. Usually because dictators are just having people executed for crimes they didn't commit. The weird thing is the other two cases of people getting mobbed were dudes with prior convictions for, quote, impairing the morals of minors. And they were caught trying to trick young people into dark alleyways, probably to molest them.

So it was a movement and it was okay. Two thirds of the time the mobs were right, which is really pretty good for mobs. You see Boy Scouts go out and one out of one they find a dead body and then mobs are two out of three. One thing I learned in Indiana Jones is if you're a Boy Scout in the 20s you're fine and some dead people and you're probably going to wind up having a fight on top of a train. Oh yeah, those are the two things that I would assume. The two things that 20s Boy Scouts for sure do. So yeah, the mobs, mobs in the streets, people freaking out.

So up until May of 1928 these were just two scary, isolated, unsolved crimes. One with no body and both without a clear villain, right? So people get sort of riled up both times these kids get abducted but then it sort of fades, kind of like a shooting does. Only these are less common at this point. This all changes on May 25th, 1928 because Albert Fish saw an ad in the situations wanted section of a local newspaper that said young man 18 wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street. Now at this point the classified section was basically the equivalent of Craigslist today.

The main difference is that today everyone is so aware of the danger of creepy people that like if you buy a couch on Craigslist you joke like, alright I'll be back in an hour unless I get murdered. Right, yep, yep, yep, yep. Unless a guy eats me. And then there's that one case where that girl did go on a date and she didn't come back. Exactly, there's an expectation that danger can happen in this. It did not exist then. So an 18 year old boy would just be like, I want to work in the country.

Put out an ad and two days later the doorbell rang at Edward Budd's house. His mother opened it and saw a small elderly man in a suit. They were very poor, very, very poor family. His suit was not particularly nice but the fact that he was wearing a suit meant that he was above them on like the class rung. So they were very impressed by that. He was polite and genteel and like kissed her hand which she was super impressed by. He does all of like the upper class seeming stuff. He claimed to be a former interior decorator who had made a bunch of money and then started to farm upstate.

I like interior decorating. Do you like starting farms? Oh, I could. Well. I like farm video games. I don't know where I'm going with this because this is just a lie he used to abduct a child. Oh, I know, but I'm thinking, if that's what he wanted, what's in my jeans is basically what I'm trying to suss out. Well, he didn't work as an interior decorator.

No, no, no, but it seems maybe he wanted to. Well, maybe you can exercise that part of the fish jeans and not everything we're about to talk about today. He did use our head. So part of his lie was that he'd moved out to start a farm with his wife and kids and she'd abandon him because she was terrible and he had to raise his kids alone but they were doing great. But now his kids were out of the house and he needed some help. That's a good story. He was willing to hire 18-year-old Edward Budd.

He called himself Frank Howard too. Ah, yes. So have you ever found yourself wanting to go by the name Frank Howard? Only if I thought it would be better for my job like applications. That's a solid job application name. That sounds like a banker. But anyway, yeah, so fish's actual plan was to murder, eat and probably molest Edward. Yes.

In that order? Probably not. Well, it's kind of hard to say. I feel like he kind of had a dead body thing. I think he sort of did. Yeah. Although he claims he never fucked the dead people, which it's hard to say. Hard to say.

Yeah. At that point, that's like, you know. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get into the things that he masturbated about. Spoiler, there's a lot of masturbation in this episode. So yeah, Edward, the kid that he was going to hire is super excited. This guy's going to pay him like 15 bucks a week, which is a really good way just back then.

And he's like, hey, I've got a friend who also wants work on a farm. Do you need any additional work? And I think at this point, Albert Fish is just not that great at lying in the moment. And so he says yes, but he doesn't really... But he didn't want it, yeah. No, because number one, this kid's already kind of big. Like big enough that Albert's worried like I might not be able to overpower him because I'm like fucking 60. Right, or eat all of him.

Yeah. And I don't want to get rid of some of them. I want to eat all of it, you know. Okay. He's very resourceful. He's like retroactively like placing like good qualities on a murder. He wants to use every part of the boy he murders. Yes, yes.

Yeah. I mean, he is kind of a recycling guy. So Albert Fish says like, yes, but I think it's a panic thing. And he immediately comes up with an excuse to delay and says that like he's not quite ready to leave yet, but he'll be back the next day. And the next day, instead of coming back, he sends a telegram and says I'll be there the next day. When he does finally show back up, he brings pot cheese, which is what you'll find in every write-up of this that he brought. I didn't know what pot cheese was.

It's cottage cheese that people would bring to potlucks and pots. I don't know why. It just seems like a weird old-timey cheese. Wow, jeez. So if you read about Albert Fish, you're going to come across the phrase pot cheese a lot. And I didn't know what it was. Because I have a new password for all of my devices. There you go.

Pot cheese. So he brings like some cheese and claims that it came from his farm. And they have like a lunch and everybody's very impressed with this guy. He winds up like playing with their young daughter, Grace. And after the meal, he tells the boys he can't take them until later that evening, but he pulls out a big wad of cash, which is like 90 bucks then, which is a lot of money to these people. And he gives a couple of dollars to Edward and his friend. And he's like, go see a movie with your buddies or whatever.

I'll be back tonight. And then kind of as like an afterthought is like, you know, I'm heading out to this birthday party. My sister is throwing. Maybe your daughter, Grace, wants to come with me. Is afterthoughts in quotes? I think he kind of brought it up at the end of things. Right. And they say yes.

Because there's this old man, very classic, very genteel. He's helping out the family. So he takes Grace. And obviously you feel bad for the parents because like the dad is the one who makes the final call. Grace is a sickly kid. She's ill a lot. And he's like, she never gets to have any fun. Let her go have some fun, which it doesn't end well for Grace or the buds.

They get really pretty fucked over in this. So he gives them an address of where he's going to be, which they later find out is fake. And then he disappears and Grace never comes back. They never see Frank Howard again. On Tuesday, June 5th, the New York Times reports on Grace's abduction with the classy headline, Hunt Man and Child, He Took to Party. That is classy. It ends on party.

So I'm kind of like excited at the end, you know? Oh, a party. A party. Yeah. And you kind of forget. Hunt Man. Oh, yeah. That's actually not a bad, if I was going to start a superhero, Hunt Man and Child.

I'm Batman and Ron. Yeah, Hunt Man and Child. I immediately know what that's about. No questions asked. Yeah. So Depraved says, the book that I read for this says that the story unspooled in the tabloids in kind of the same way that the Gaffney abduction had. So there, first off, there's a shitload of false leads.

People start just sending lies into the family. And we'll get into that in a little bit. A lot of sketchy witnesses. And then there's just this big surge in anxiety over kidnappings for the people of New York. The tabloids make as much of this as they possibly can. And, you know, it's the same. Follow the search. It's a Nancy Gray's kind of situation.

Yeah, exactly. And these newspapers are all giving daily updates and like, follow this. Search tomorrow in the daily news and yadda, yadda, yadda. And we'll have a list of all of our sources on the website, behindthebastards.com. We're going to get to what happens afterwards and kind of how Albert Fish's crimes sort of started the idea of stranger danger. Like we're influential in that concept we were all raised with and to fear. Right.

And we sort of had an impact on that and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. But first, you know what goes great with discussions of the terrible things that serial killers do is products and services. I love it. You love products and services? I do. I use them all the time. Pull out all of your cards and throw them into the air and buy a product now.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told us that they had a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States? Let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic.

And occasionally ridiculous. Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. And we've left out of your history books, I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say for one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads? Or do we just have to do the ads from my heart podcast and school of humans?

This is let's start a coup. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that the stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back and we're talking about Albert Fish, the ancestor to my guest today, Maggie

Mayfish. And listeners, just as a heads up, Maggie's one of the nicer people that I have met in the city of Los Angeles. She's not a murderer as far as I'm aware. I mean, there's no trial. There's no trial. We've learned. You are wearing a red shirt.

I am. I thought blood. Yeah. And then I put on the shirt. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Although I think that before everything I wear. Blood, blood, blood, blood, blood.

That's just what's going on in my head. Like a cat. Yeah. Or a little dog. Okay. So years go by after the grace bud kidnapping, which is what we had just talked about in the end. And the case, like the other two gradually starts to fade from memory.

But kidnapping did not fade. The disappearances of these three children had helped to spark a new crime epidemic in American history. The kidnapping craze. And I spelled craze with a K in that sentence. I know. Thank you. I was gonna ask.

I knew you'd appreciate that. Yeah. The kidnapping craze had come. Here's a quote from Harold Schechter's Deranged. In 1932 alone, there were 282 reported kidnappings in 28 states. And all but 65 of the perpetrators had gotten away scot-free with their crimes. By the summer of 1933, kidnappings were occurring so frequently that news readers required a scorecard to keep track of them all.

Oh my God. Yeah. So that's where we are. Yeah. That's where we are. And I feel like Albert Fish is so crazy that maybe just no one had really been like, oh, I could. I could just take people.

You could just take people. What? This is great. It was probably the guy who committed the first cyber crime. It was probably the same rush of, what have I opened? I'd love to see just a movie about the man who invented mugging, just like this poor guy on the street, seeing people pull money out of their pockets and like looking at a knife in his hand and looking at a rich guy and a knife and then just like, duh.

Eat the rich. Blood, blood, blood, blood, blood. He doesn't want to get stabbed and he has money. There's a connection between these things. I can figure this out. So yeah, most of the kidnappers, unlike Albert Fish, which again, we'll get to in a while, we're not doing it for sex or murder. They just wanted money, you know.

It became very clear that it was hard for cops to catch kidnappers. And as it became clear that that was the case, intelligent criminals realized that kidnapping was very safe and very profitable. In June of 1932, the New York Times reported on more than a dozen kidnapping cases. And one of them, Maggie, was actually committed by my ancestor, Charles Pretty Boy Floyd. No. Yeah. When I saw that in the book, I was like, huh, now I got a guy in the mix.

Wow. So Pretty Boy Floyd was a gangster. He was, he's generally considered to be the last of the big gangsters to die. Oh, Sarah's was cool. Well, he got shot in a field, but yeah. That's cool. It's a great place to get shot. So Donald Trump and I, our current president, have two things in common.

One of them is a literary agent, which is weird. That is weird. And the other is that Woody Guthrie wrote songs about both of our ancestors. He wrote a song about Donald Trump's dad because Donald Trump's dad denied tendency to black people. Yeah. And he wrote a song about Pretty Boy Floyd, my ancestor, because my ancestor beat a cop to death with a log chain. Oh, hey.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, in that year, 32, Pretty Boy Floyd tried to kidnap an actress from Malibu and ransom her. She was to be kidnapped and flown to Mexico, but the police found out about it and like ringed the street with cops at the last minute and Floyd somehow learned of the trap and never appeared. And that's the end of this digression, but I had to bring it up.

That was great. So, yeah, everybody's got murderous answers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so the kidnapping wave grew and grew in the 30s until it reached its apex with the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932. Charles Lindbergh was an aviator, first man across the Atlantic, national hero, potential presidential candidate, and anti-Semitic fascist sympathizer.

Yes. His wife and Lindbergh was an acclaimed author and also probably racist. Probably me. They probably talked about it. Probably racist. In their long time. Yeah, I would guess. Yeah.

Their baby, Charles Jr., was 20 months old and a baby. And maybe it would have grown up to be a racist. The time was just a baby. Yeah, at the time was a baby. The time was a baby. Okay. And he was kidnapped on March 1, 1932 and immediately pretty much killed by an accident. Probably fell off a ladder.

Yeah. We don't know. Now, up until this point, the only other crime in American history this famous had probably been the assassination of Lincoln. Like, this is like, it's big. And it inspired the creation of the Federal Kidnapping Act in, I think, 1934, which made transferring an unwilling person across state lines a federal crime. So, the Lindbergh Kidnapping was sort of the crest of a wave or a crime meme that was then

spreading through the culture. And that wave kicked off with the crimes of Albert Fish, although he would not be caught until 1934. Yeah. That is the other. He went a very long time without, you know, any sort of reprimand for what he'd done. And it's, some of that's got to be just the fact that like, we didn't know how to be detectives back then.

Right. And he doesn't, he's not glued to this reality in some way. Because he's not like a super smooth criminal or whatever. Oh, no, no, no. He's messy. Oh, real messy. Yeah. When he abducts Grace Budd, he keeps all of his knives wrapped up in like a kit that he

calls his implements of hell. And when he goes to pick her up, he leaves them at like a grocery store. He just hands them to the clerk and said, can you hold these? Here's a joker card. Oh, I'm kidding. Here's all of my knives. This is the 20s, so the guy's like, of course. I'll take your knives.

I've got some extra children you can take on the walk if you want. 20s. Yeah, what a time. So nowadays, when terrible things happen to the children of people, like the Newton shootings, when like 20 people lost their very young children to a mass shooter, they immediately start getting harassed horribly online by Alex Jones fans who think it's a false flag or whatever. It's important to know that that's not new.

Blaming the parents kind of is. But being incredibly shitty to parents who've just lost a child is at least as old as the 20s. Oh, this is a part of, I was not aware of, lay it on me, Robert. So all of these families, these people we've talked about whose kids get abducted, all of them get bombarded with crank letters from just hundreds of random people. Here's one letter the Gaffney family received, my dear friends, I will be fine to boy, my son in water's river cellars, look out, my God want back boy.

I might have gotten that exact same message on Twitter just in my DM. I was going to guess Tinder, but yeah. You want another one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait! Do not appear too anxious. Your son is in safe hands. We fought for him, but I got him now.

We will get the beaten boy for Billy to play with, for Billy is lonesome. Do not show this letter to anyone if you know what is good for you. Again, I say that Billy is safe and that we are experimenting on him. Can I say that that sounds exactly like when people tell their alien abduction stories, like what the aliens tell them, like almost verbatim. Yeah, like you can tell it's like someone actually hallucinating and their brain just firing words out into a waking dream or whatever. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like aphasia.

Some other asshole sent a letter to this grieving family saying, quote, I didn't mean to kill him, God forgive me, in giving a pan-drawn map of where his corpse was supposedly buried. Police found nothing there. Oh my God. You mean the Boy Scout troops found nothing. Those were the police back then. Yeah, they had Necker chiefs instead of guns. It's a lot safer for, yeah.

For murderers. Yeah, for murderers. It was a lot safer. The book depraved also notes that psychics pledged to aid in the efforts to no effect, obviously, along with an inventor who arrived with what he called a mechanical bloodhound. Well, that is cool. Yeah. A little bit.

Well, it was just a divining rod with a rubber tube attached to it filled with Billy's hair. I appreciate that. You appreciate the name. I appreciate it. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Why not?

Why not? Yeah, it didn't work either. The Budd family also received crank letters. Depraved claims they were receiving dozens every day for a while. Many of them were like this, quote, my dear Mr. and Mrs. Budd, your child is going to a funeral, I still got her, Howard. Whoa. Yeah, all caps.

And this. I have Grace. She is safe and sound. She is happy in her new home and not at all homesick. I will see to it that Grace has proper schooling. She has been given an angora cat and a pet canary. She calls the canary Bill. I am a keen student of human nature.

That's why I was attracted to Grace. She seemed like a girl who would appreciate nice surroundings and a real nice home. I drove with Grace past your house in an automobile several days ago. I saw several persons standing in front of the house and did not stop as it looked as though they were waiting for me. I will see to it in the near future that some arrangements are made so Grace will be able to visit you for a short time. Wow.

Why would you send that? What is, what is, I don't know. I don't understand this. I don't know. I don't know. Like at least one of those has got to be like one or two people being like, ah, if I say she's all right, maybe they'll feel better. But then like.

And I don't care. Yeah. And fuck it. I don't give a shit. And I'm not connected to this in any way. Yeah. I'm not connected to the people, the Alex Jones people who are harassing the parents of dead kids on.

Yeah. Because at least those people believe there's a crazy conspiracy. Right. You're just fucking with a family for no reason. Yeah. Man, it really makes me just like what people did for fun back then. Yeah. Just.

It was a very boring time. It was a very boring time. And one of the biggest sports in the country right now, the dollop does a great episode of this, was pedestrianism, which is just people walking in circles for weeks. Wow. Like days, hundreds of miles. Yeah. That's something to do at this point in time.

Right. Like World War One at least gave some people something for a while. Right. Make a victory garden. Yeah. Make a victory garden. Go die in the mud. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, both better options than life in the 20s. So yeah, the letters, however, were not all entirely negative. There was a detective named William King, who was basically your stereotypical lantern jaw chain smoking 20s detective. Lovely. Dick Tracy. I trust them.

Of course, of course. Of course. But he's the guy, if you just saw him walking down the street and you had a problem, you would run to him and be like, this is my chance to be a vaing. Fix all of this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. He's that kind of detective. Right. So he had gotten on the bud case right after Grace was abducted and spent six fruitless years trying to track down her killer. Wow. Now, 1934, because this was the year that had the Lindberg trial and the kid had been

kidnapped in 32, but the trial wasn't 34. It was a big year for awareness of kidnapping and Detective King decided to take one more stab at solving it. I love that. It's like a set up for a story. You're giving me a hold up face. It's great because he fucking solves this case, spoiler, but he does it in like the most unethical way.

Yes. It's super fun. He's like a lumbo, like whatever. His strategy for years had been to randomly call newspapers and lie about the bud case and just give them bullshit information so they would write a story based on his lies that like said that essentially there was been a break in the case. And he did this because every time it would happen, there would be a shitload of more letters sent into the police with tips and sent to the family.

And he felt that it kept the story fresh. So some people would say it's unethical to just repeatedly lie to newspapers about a little girl's abduction. But King was like, you got to keep people thinking about it somehow. So the guy he would do this most often with was a gossip columnist named Walter Winchell. Most listeners will recognize him as one of the rapid fire names spat out in Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire. He comes right before Joe DiMaggio.

Oh, I hear you. Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon's dude of big, yeah, okay. So before he was part of a classic song, he was America's most famous gossip columnist. His column on Broadway was probably the most influential piece of writing every given week in New York City. Wow. So he's a big deal. Some people say women gossip.

Well, this guy. Walter Winchell probably said that because I'm sure he was super misogynist. I mean, you just got to assume. I mean, it was a 20s, baby. The Wote guys have just gotten down to being okay with women voting at this point, but yeah. It's a long road. It's been a long road.

So Walter Winchell in early November included this line or paragraph in his column. I checked on the Grace Budd mystery. She was eight when she was kidnapped about six years ago. It is safe to tell you that the Department of Missing Persons will break the case or they expect to in four weeks. They are holding a cookie now at Randall's Island who is said to know the most about the crime. Grace is supposed to have been done away with in Lyme, but another legend is that her skeleton

is buried in a local spot more and on. So that's all lies. Right. That's all lies. It just so happened that Albert Fish was a habitual writer. Which again, I write Robert walking away from this cliff. This is when you step in and tell me that it's not about the same. You're a much better writer than him.

I don't know what you write in your private time. But it. Oh, I have all of my books right here. You don't want to read them. Oh, yeah. They're made out of skin. Blood, blood, blood, blood, blood. Is that a whole piece of paper made of Band-Aids?

Okay, so 11 days after this Walter Winchell column comes up, the Buds receive a letter in the mail. And one of the only mercies in this entire case is that Grace Buds' mother gets the letter and she cannot read. Which is the only time in history you're going to be like, oh, thank God for a literacy. Oh, thank God that she never learns her read. That is a mercy in this case. Her son read it and immediately goes to the police.

As soon as I start to read an excerpt from it, you will be aware this is not like the other letters and this was written by Albert Fish. And again, 11 days after Winchell's column, so it seems like Detective King's strategy worked. Yeah. It's like he knew beforehand, you know, the whole Zodiac thing. They like attention. They like attention.

Detective King does not play by the rules, but he gets results. He gets results. He gets results. You hear that? Police, do whatever you want. God, you know he pistol whipped a cookie. You know, that was like a weekly thing for Detective King is pistol whipping a cookie. That's his like one kick.

Yeah. And then he tried to stop it. He just loves pistol whipping. Yeah. And it's more of an art than anything. I agree. Yeah. Yeah.

A good pistol, a solid pistol whipping. Yeah. It'll change someone's mind. Yeah. It'll do something to their mind. Okay. So, yeah, the full text of the letter is available online. You can find it if you wish.

I'm going to read. If you wish. If you wish. If you do not wish, don't read it. Do not. I will read a part of it and I have, I'm reading not the worst parts because we don't need that, but I got to read some of it. Yeah.

Yeah. Have you read this letter? I have. Okay. Yeah. My dear Miss Bud, in 1894, a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the steamer Tacoma, Captain John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong, China.

On arriving there, he and two others went to shore and got drunk. When they returned, the boat was gone. At that time, there was a famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1 to $3 a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold to the butchers to be cut up and sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go into any shop and ask for steak, chops, or stew meat.

Part of the naked body of the boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girl's behind, which is the sweetest part of the body, and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John stayed there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to New York, he stole two boys, one 7 and one 11, took them to his home, stripped them naked, tied them in a closet, then burned everything they had on. Several times a day and night, he spanked them, tortured them to make their meat good

and tender. He then goes on into detail about how. Well, he gives a reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To make the meat good and tender. Yeah, to make the meat tender. Yeah, it's not just spanking for the sake of spanking. Right.

Yes. Albert Fish is not. Please. There's one that accused me of many things, but that. Not needless spanking. No. There's going to be a lot more spanking in this episode. So Albert Fish claims that this guy that he met turned him on to the idea of how good

human flesh tasted. So he made up his mind to try some of his own. And that's why he abducted Grace Budd in 1928. And he admits in the letter in pretty graphic detail that he murdered Grace, cooked and ate her. The letter ends on this line. It took me nine days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her though I could have had I wished she died a virgin, which is, I don't

know what your goal is with that line. I guess again, it's one of those things that's like, well, I did this, but I did not. You know, a lot of serial killers kind of do that. They'll admit to like a part of it, but then take a hard stance on another part they're accused of. Everyone wants to feel like there's that line in the wire and man's got to have a code. Everybody's wants to feel like that, even if you're eating children. Right.

Like him, like the goalpost is so far this way that don't worry, I'm still in the good. No, I mean, I murdered her and ate her and it gave me sexual gratification, but I did not fuck her. No, no, no, no. Yeah. I was pleased in every other sort of way. Yeah. Every other sort of way.

And he goes into the tale about that. So the horrible letter wound up being fishes undoing, which is again, one of those rare times where justice happens in the universe. That's another reason I do actually like this story, he gets caught and only that he got caught because he just needed to fuck with this family one more time. So the way he got caught is he sent letters that were stamped with a logo of the New York private chauffeur's benevolent association. So the cops eventually found a janitor for that very specific group who admitted to having

stolen a bunch of paper and envelopes from work and left them in his room when he moved out, the guy who moved into the room after him was Albert Fish. Since he had moved out, Fish had moved out by the time they found him, but his son was in the WPA, which is one of those New Deal organizations where you like, that's where we get national parks was these young men like building shit. So he would send his dad regular checks and Fish had moved out of the room, but he had one more check coming and he told his landlord that he would be back for it. So the landlord told the cops this guy's not here anymore, but he's going to be back in

a few days to get his check. So the cops waited for him and yeah, that's how he was caught. Detective King caught Albert Fish. He was eventually convicted of murder and sentenced to die via electric chair, which is exactly what happened. So that's the story of Albert Fish in broad. We've got a lot more to drill into. We're going to be talking some more about how Maggie found out that she was related

to this guy and then we're going to go a lot deeper into Albert Fish's psyche. So it's going to be very dark. My skin is crawling. Excellent. That's how you should feel on this podcast. All right. Capitalism. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told

you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt and I'm Alex French and our newest show. We take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts.

We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you

find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

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How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Now, we just now kind of got through talking about the broad strokes of the story of Albert Fish.

And now I wanted to sort of talk about your personal journey of figuring out you're related to this guy. My personal journey. Yeah, your own personal fish journey. Like a salmon swimming to return to Georgia. Yeah, keep going, Robert. Yeah, tell me about my life. What was it like?

Well, I know that bears are involved and I know that you swim upstream. And then we procreate and then we swim downstream? Yes. Well, I think usually you get eaten by bears. Oh, OK. Yeah, that's most of what I know about fish and we get redwoods because of fish. Oh, well, you're welcome. Yeah, well, that's my favorite trick.

So how did I find out? The first time that I heard this, I was five or six at my grandpa's cottage and my uncles were working on our family tree. I was playing like on the stairs or something and my dad came down and I have this as a memory on the stairs and was like, Maggie, you're related to someone from a long time ago who was a bad person and he went to jail. And as a kid, I was like, that is so cool. Like I'm related to like a old timey bad guy.

You picture Bonnie and Clyde or something. Oh, yeah. I was like, ah, an outlaw. For years, I lived under that delusion that it was just some sort of like nebulous. Probably rob banks to give it to poor people. Yeah, that kind of thing, like supporting, you know, his daughter that he loved and he put her through a higher education. He had to take that hospital by armed force so that his kid could get the surgery he needed.

Yeah. And boy, I respect him for it because, you know, we don't want to think about it. He followed the law in his heart. Much like the detective. The detective. Yeah. I would be really proud to be this guy's relative. Yeah.

Which is the only cop I'll say that about. Yeah. Really? Actually, though. Yeah. So for just, and then I just kind of like forgot about it until, I was actually pretty recently, maybe two years ago, I was listening to my favorite murderer. Oh boy.

A very fun podcast, which if you guys listen to this, maybe you also listen to them. They're great. But they had an episode on Albert Fish, and just from the title, I was like, oh, fish. Oh, I'm related to, oh, no, oh, no. So you learned the details about this guy from a podcast. From a pod to lovely women, just describing the horrors of what he'd done. So I'm putting together in my head a story about what happened with your dad that day in your family cottage, and the story in my head is that he's with some other member of

your family doing genealogy, and they're like, we're related to somebody famous, and without waiting to hear more, he runs downstairs, just belts down there, and then goes back up, learns the second half of the story, and is like, oh God, what if we just don't say anything else? Let's just let this be a dream in her head. Yeah, let's just, she's young, right? She will forget this question. What do you think the odds are of a global information network arising and then leading

to a new replacement for radio that spreads even wider and involves long-form stories about that'll never happen, right? Never, we'll be fine. No. Let's just not tell her anything else. Oh, boy. I like, knowing my father, that kind of fits, he's a very jovial man. Just got so excited.

Yeah, so excited. So you learn about Albert Fish from a podcast. Yes. It was very surprising, because I was into true crime, like, a long time before that, and I had just never come across Albert Fish, maybe because he was so old, and I was more interested. He was more obscure. Yeah, he's not like your Bundy or whatever.

Yeah, and I had just moved to California, so I was more interested in like, ooh, like the Sacramento kill. Oh, we've got so many. It's so many. Oh, yeah. It's so rich. So for just some reason, I'd never come across it until that day, and then I read the Wikipedia article, and then I called my father, and he was cooking potato soup.

And I asked him, I was like, Dad, so is it Albert Fish that we're related to? And very calmly, like, my father is very calm, level-headed, he's like, oh, let me just check my email real quick. Yeah, yep. Yeah, it's Albert Fish. Yeah, that's the guy. Oh, God. So he didn't know, actually.

I guess, yeah, I think a similar thing. He kind of knew, or at least didn't know all of the details, or at least had just forgotten, and then was like, re-excited by like, yeah, it's Albert Fish, man. Killing eight children. Killing eight children. Killing eight children. It was called the werewolf of... Wisteria.

Wisteria, the gray man, the boogeyman. So I have very mixed feelings about true crime in general, because the book that I love the most that I read in high school was probably in cold blood, which I still think is really good. It's good. I mean, it started the genre. But I also, there's definitely an extent of, and I know that my own show, because of our focus, runs the risk of crossing this territory too, of just like, it's important to study

these people, because it's always important to study the worst and most dangerous people, for the same reason that you look when you hear a car crash. But there's a line, and I... Yeah, tickle the line, ready to tickle. Doing these like film analysis, there's a lot of that of people like having their cake and eating it too, of like what you want to say, but then what ends up happening. And a lot of true crime can end up glorifying as a strong word, but making a party as it is.

Yeah, yeah. And this is definitely not a party story, and neither are any of the other stories we have on here. I do think, like one of the things that I think is the, in terms of like useful lessons that we get from this is less about how Albert Fish actually acted, because he was a monster. But more about how everyone else, like the fucking crank letters and stuff, like just how people fuck with the families, and that's always been a thing. Right, and that it is still happening.

Yeah, and that it's just evolved with the mediums, that's really interesting to me. And I think there's a lesson in there about like sort of human nature, which is that we're garbage. We are garbage. We're garbage. We'll jump on anything. And also, I guess like a lesson from like the mob and like that kind of mentality that like, yeah, you know, it's okay to have very strong feelings and be afraid.

Yeah. Like I think that is totally okay. I am curious as to like, how did you feel like is there, because this is a story of, and we'll get to it, mental illness. What was the like the thought process of accepting that this is a part of your past, like your family's past? Great. It's weird.

It does also seem like a cautionary tale, obviously for mental illness and what it can lead to if it is not addressed, which I kind of blame the rest of the family for. Yeah, probably. Only because there are just so many stories of him doing just crazy shit, like rolling around in rugs. Yeah. Yeah. I am Christ while beating his own ass with a metal paddle.

Yeah. We'll delve into that in a minute here. Which again, you know, in the 20s, what language do you use for a family member who would like eat carpet if you left them alone, you know? But again, like they didn't do anything to stop or help or, and like his son kind of just like kept giving him money, which, you know, in a lot of ways we didn't have protocols to follow, people also didn't want to talk about mental illness. So it's rather let's not talk about it and just let our crazy uncle just be.

Yeah. Which I think is still dangerous if we don't talk about, you know, the mental illnesses that we have. Yeah. It's hugely important to talk about mental health in general because people need that sort of vocabulary and need to, I do think, and this will make a little, like once we get a little bit further, I'm sure we'll talk about this more, but I do think this is a case of a guy who very likely it's possible that he'd been killing people for decades.

It's also possible these are his only three killings and if he in his 40s or 50s even could have been potentially stopped from hurting anybody. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard. It's like, we can't know for sure, but that is a possible avenue here. Yeah.

That if his family members who clearly loved him had like been like, what the hell, man? Instead of just not talking about this, let's talk about this. Let's talk about Kevin, but with a crazy deranged. It's always like everybody knows, like you and I are both white people, so like there's this assumption and with everybody it's true that like someone who you're related to far enough along the line did something terrible, whether it was slavery or something else. That's just the world. But there's something different when it's someone who is recent enough that like, no,

we have a specific name, we know this guy is in our line, here's where he is and here's what he did. Yeah. Yeah. That's the moment because pretty boy Floyd, like my family has always talked about that. My grandma, who was otherwise a very conservative lady, was super pressured, always tell us, you know, you got outlaw blood in you. She was proud too.

Just like me. She was super proud. And I read about him. He's like, this guy was robbing banks and murdering cops. Like the Woody Guthrie song is about, he's riding into town with his wife and a cop curses in front of him. And so he just beats the man to death with a lock chain. That's a fun song.

It's interesting the way like families talk about these kind of people. And then when you actually dig into their lives, you're like, oh man, this guy was not a good person. Not a good person. There is definitely kind of like a little bit of hangover guilt, but really, I, you know, there's something you can really do. No. And you're like, you're just sitting out of his brother.

Yeah. Yeah. Who didn't do anything that I'm aware of. Right. And it's like, well, if they're going to hide Albert Fish, then like, I won't, I'm related to him. But there's some fucking Hitler people around here with lines to Hitler and like they didn't do anything wrong.

Right. His nephew just ran over here during the war because he was, he had a nephew who like joined the Navy and stuff. Aw. Yeah. It was just like, felt real bad about having Hitler as an uncle. Yeah. Sorry guys, really sorry.

No, you're not responsible for your family's crimes. Yeah. But you can inherit their wealth. Hell yeah. You've got a great system going here. Blood, money. Okay. So in addition to reading deranged, which is a legitimately good book, I also want

to watch this documentary, Albert Fish, when I was prepping for this. It's directed by a guy named John Borowski and it is one of the worst documentaries I've ever seen. Good job, John Borowski. It is very ugly, very little creativity involved, creepy voice acting, but bland recreations of aspects of the crimes. Right. But then, then Maggie, 15 minutes into this excruble documentary, we meet John Coleman.

John Coleman is an artist who collects serial killer memorabilia and dresses exactly like you'd expect based on that description. Extremely ornate waistcoats. I'm going to have you describe him in a minute. I kid you not, that is what I pictured. 100%. Yeah. 100%.

Whoa. He has Albert Fish's original letter framed in his house and I'm just going to put him on. We're going to play him for a couple of seconds. I'm going to have you describe him and then we're going to play the rest of his story about how he came to own that letter. Okay. This is, what I've always said is the Magna Carta of Crime Artifacts, this is the Albert

Fish letter. This is the most, you want to, you want to take a shot at describing John Coleman? I describe his face or my face watching his face. I will describe your face watching his face, because you look like you just saw a dog like start to tap dance, like that like slack jawed, but not in a positive way. He looks like he's licked that letter, like several times. Like before he framed it, he tried to get as close to that ink as possible. Yeah.

He has definitely stroked that letter while tweaking his own nipple. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. And 100 times for sure. Yeah. And he's super ornate waistcoat. Yeah.

Yeah. Super ornate waistcoat. All right. Here's him describing how he came to have Albert Fish's original creepy murder letter. Tragic and painful document to a monster that's ever in print, and I have it, so I'm honored to have it. As I've always felt that the objects themselves have desires of their own, and they come here for their own reasons.

Did he make, didn't he draw that? Oh yeah. Yeah. He drew that picture of Albert Fish and a severed head of a little girl. The horrors of the world, it's not about trying to, oh my God, it's the same act that Jordan Peterson used to use. Yeah. But yeah, like the creepy paintings that he makes, that like the painting listeners is

a painting of Albert Fish, very, it almost looks like a mad magazine illustration. Yeah. Yeah. Very like grimy, and it almost looks like an art crumb drawing. And so it's, but it's the picture of Albert Fish, and he's holding the severed head of little Grace, and it's terrifyingly creepy. The way he says the word monster, it's with awe. Yeah.

It's not with judgment. Yeah. This is not a guy who is like, I don't sense respect for like the gravity of the crimes here. He's a creepy dude. I should email him and be like, dude, that is my relative, I would like that letter. I think it wants to be with me. I think that object wants to travel to me.

So the creepy house that he's in, he calls it the auditorium. I'm going to, one guess as to how he spells auditorium. The way. Yeah. That way. Yeah. Yeah. The way that a creepy dick would spell it.

Yeah. And here's how he describes the auditorium in his website, quote, Joe Coleman is a collector. He collects fascinating friends. He collects artifacts related to infamous historical events. He collects sideshow and serial killer ephemera. He collects religious artifacts that call to his obsessions with violence, with twinning and with power. Like his art, his collection is filled with reliquaries containing the twinned power of

both the sacred and profane. Welcome to the auditorium. Wow. So yeah, that's Joe Coleman. Wow. Twinning. There has definitely been like secret societies that just have their meetings there. Yeah, but not the good ones.

Oh, no, no, no. The ones that it's like, oh, you guys are. Yeah. This is you. This is where the Masons are at these days, huh? Oh, I think I'm just going to go grab a beer. Yeah. Over anywhere.

Just go out on the street. Yeah. Maybe join the Mormon church. I'll just walk around for weeks on end because I'd rather do that than attend this meeting. Anything sound better than sitting around here with you people. Now, Joe's a painter, as we already got into, and he believes he was put on this earth to express the pain of the world through, for example, elaborate paintings with the severed heads of small children.

Now he believes the objects he collects want to be his, and we're going to play the excerpt now that actually does explain how he wound up owning that letter because a spoiler alert, he kind of stole it from the government. Oh, right. Yeah. Life. I was trying to get, like, the police records and stuff, and I go into Westchester and I'm trying to get a Xerox copy of the letter, the infamous letter that Albert Fish wrote

to the mother of Grace Budd. And that's all I want. I just want a Xerox copy of the letter for my research. And as fate would have it, the secretary there takes the letter, Xeroxes it, goes over to me and gives me the actual letter. I looked at it. He came as soon as that happened. Oh, my God.

He then walked away with the Xerox copy, put it in a file, and put it in the cabinet. Okay. Then I knew that Fish wanted me to have it. He didn't want anything. Fish doesn't want anything. He didn't, and he doesn't. He piece of shit. I'm going to tell you something I know has happened in that guy's life on a weekly basis,

he has opened a door for a woman with a very exceptional flourish and then said, after you, Milady. Oh, yes. And then kissed her hand. Oh, my God. So many times. So many hand-kissing. So many times.

And so many complaints from coworkers for the hand-kissing after he's been asked to stop. He's that guy. He's a thousand percent that guy. I don't like Joe Coleman. We're going to play one more segment from later in the documentary. Where Joe Coleman tries to explain why Albert Fish did not sexually assault Grace. Oh, this would be great to hear him explain that. That would be great.

I could see it on your face. You were waiting for him to weigh in on why Albert Fish didn't rape a child. Fish embodies this kind of pathology, that there is something saintly and beautiful about suffering, but there's something ugly and repugnant about sex, because he saved little Grace Budd from this terrible crime, you know, and he kept saying, I did not defile her. She died of virginity. And I know from my Catholic upbringing, there's a certain truth that he's saying that any Catholic is going to know.

Albert Fish, by mutilating and cutting this little girl up in pieces, doing this horrible thing to her, he's made her into this martyr. You know, he's made her into this creature that's going right to heaven. Actually defiling a body is against, well, the Catholic Church, so cutting it up, actually, not that he cares about any of this. No. Yeah, I don't think. It's definitely true, we're going to get into this a little bit, that Fish's peculiar

personal brand of Christianity super had an impact on his crimes, but I think what Joe was saying there is full of shit, because, yeah, any Catholic knows that there's a way in which he became a martyr, what are you talking about? What? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, okay. So Albert Fish had a fan history known to his family of very creepy religious behavior. In 1934, his son, Albert, Jr. was living with him in a small apartment. One day he came upon his father, bare ass naked, in the middle of the living room holding

his erect penis and paddling himself on the ass with a nail filled paddle. His ass was red and bloody and he was drenched in sweat. This made Albert, Jr. recall an incident in 1922 when he was playing football with his two brothers. Here's how depraved describes it. Albert had just bent down to catch a low kick, Albert, the younger, not the murderer. And as he straightened up to boot the ball back to Henry, he caught sight of his father standing in the apple orchard on the little hill behind the bungalow.

The old man had his right hand raised high in the air and was shouting something over and over. Albert had strained to listen. The old man was shouting, I am Christ. Which is like his catchphrase, he would shout I am Christ a lot, particularly while beating himself. He also had a habit of lighting his own ass on fire. He was a huge fan of lighting his own ass on fire.

Once you hit it with nails, that's like a sharp pain, you're like, ooh, what's a doll overall pain? Yeah, what else can I do with my ass, burn it, burn it. So another time Albert, Jr. found several of his dad's homemade nail studded, bloody and rusted paddles. He asked his father for an explanation, which is the start of the conversation that you should be having. And Albert Fish, his dad explained, quote, I use them on myself.

I get these feelings that come over me and every time they do, I have to torture myself with those paddles. Period. Yeah. Should have been a longer conversation. Duh son. Duh. Yeah.

This should have been longer. I'm punishing myself with paddles. Because I'm Christ. Because I'm Christ. So Albert Fish had a very, very long, very, very long history of writing insane and unbelievably creepy letters to random women. He would find them in newspapers through matrimonial agencies, classified ads. A lot of times there were women letting out rooms who were like landlady's and he would

just like start, yeah. He would start. He would start. He would just send them these crazy letters and they would, some of them would start kind of reasonable and then would descend to him asking for paddlings. Usually they're paddling focused one way or the other. He would pretend to be a Hollywood agent in some cases. Oh.

We're teetering towards that cliff again. Here's a quote from one letter he sent to a woman while he was pretending to be Mr. Hollywood. I wish you could see me now. I am sitting in a chair naked. The pain is across my back, just over my behind. When you strip me naked, you will see a most perfect form. Yours, yours, sweet honey of my heart.

I can taste your sweet piss, your sweet shit. You must pee pee in a glass and I shall drink every drop of it as you watch me. Tell me when you want to number two. I will take you over my knees, pull up your clothes, take down your drawers and hold my mouth to your sweet honey fat ass and eat your sweet peanut butter as it comes out fresh and hot. This is how they do it in Hollywood. Yeah.

You know, part of me is like, maybe he got some kicks off that way with some other. She was definitely getting kicks off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you think, yeah, it probably did work with some people. Like statistically, you send a lot of letters out. So there are a ton of his creepy letters that you can read if you want to read Deprave or you can just look them up online. We're not going to read every piece of correspondence he sent.

I do want to go over a little bit more of it though. A number of women came forward after he was arrested when he was like in court and his letter was made public. And these were people who had been freaked out by his letters before and in some cases had kept them and hadn't known what to do because like nowadays, if you're a woman because of the internet, men are going to send you terrifying things. That's just what happens. But back then, some lady would just receive a letter that's like 16 pages in the mail.

Yeah. Of a guy talking about wanting his ass paddled or wanting you to poop on him. And you just didn't have any, what do you do? And you don't tell your girlfriends because you don't know if they, like... Is this normal? Yeah. What? Is this part of being a person?

Yeah. He's a real dude in the Hollywood that way. I just imagine like looking out at mailboxes and just thinking, is everyone getting letters like this? Yeah. What? Is this just life? Why isn't no one talking about this?

So he sent the other kind of families of letters that he would have is he would, he would message women, generally landlady's, telling them that he had an adult son who was mentally ill and needed to be spanked regularly. Right. And sometimes he would send them like a dozen letters, like very long conversations where they would agree like, okay, I can spank him if he's bad. And then he'd like go on to specify, no, it needs to be done. Right.

Are you reading it? How I like it. Yeah. This is how I like it. This. The doctor says three or four good spankings a day on his bare behind will do him good as he is nice and fat in that spot. It will be an aid to him.

When he don't mind you, then you must strip him down and use the cateau nine tails. Say you won't hesitate to use the paddle or cateau nine tails on him when he needs it. Now that's one paragraph. There are pages of him detailing how to spank his fake son. He was very concerned about making sure it was the right way. His fake son might not get spanked the right way. And he's clearly doing this to get off, which is creepy and not okay. But this is what I suspect this is most of what he did up until he committed those murders.

Yeah. It feels like this was him, you know, the escalation. Yeah, exactly. Starting with letters, doing that, always the fascination with the butts, though. That's. Fat butts. Fat butts. Fat butts.

Fat butts. You know, in a different timeline with like right medication, he would have just liked fat bottom girls rule the world. Well, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Different person, you know. If Freddie Mercury could have saved him and all of those people. He could.

Freddie Mercury could have done anything. He could have done anything. I love Freddie Mercury. This is yet another case where if we had a time machine, you get Freddie Mercury and you just travel around time. You'd fix a couple things here and there. You'd fix a couple things here and there. So in 1930, though, Albert Fish sent his insane creepy letters to the wrong damn woman, a

housekeeper named E. Solarid, she sent the letter to the police and since he had included a return address because he was hoping to keep up this con. Of course. Yeah. They were able to find and arrest him because it's not legal to send horrifying letters like that to strangers. Wow. Even back then.

Yeah. Even back then, he was sent to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital to be diagnosed and he spent a few weeks there. He was found to be sexually psychotic, which seems fair. Yeah. There seemed to be a cross wire between sex and pain. They also, though, found that he was quiet and cooperative. They said he conducted himself in an orderly and normal manner and his bad behavior was

mostly chalked up to the fact that he was old and probably senile. So he was released after too long. Now in 1931, he was arrested again for sending obscene letters to a woman who owned a boarding school in the area. This time, the police searched his home and found his homemade cat and nine tails as well as a frankfurter and a carrot, both really gross looking. Gee. I wonder where those were have been.

Well, the cops asked him why he had these in his dresser and Fish replied, I stick them up my ass. Oh. Mystery soft. Yeah. To his credit, he was honest because he was crazy and doesn't realize. Was not hiding it. No.

Yeah. So during the trial, when he was finally caught and stuff, it was revealed that Fish's original plan had been to abduct a teenage boy rather than Grace. He'd planned to tie up Edward, slice off his penis and then skip town while the boy bled to death. Right. Because he didn't want to kill him. He just wanted the penis and well, he wanted to kill him, but he wanted it to take a long

time. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Grace was a consolation murder victim. And he usually he would sometimes refer to Grace as a hymn just because I guess that's what he said. He wanted it that way.

Yeah. He wanted it that way. Yes. So in interviews with the police, Albert Fish reported a general sort of bemusement and confettlement over why he had killed Grace saying, first, you know, I never could account for it. He would later claim that his brother had served in the Navy in China because he'd claimed it before it was a friend of his.

Yeah, it was a friend. Later he said it was his brother. I don't think it was either. Yeah. I don't think it either was. The rest of the family was kind of just like doing normal things, which is so and all these kids turned out really normal. Yeah.

And they seem in the story, they seem pretty normal. Yeah. They had a range of different reactions to this because his daughters are kind of in his court and say he was always a good dad. Like he's a normal guy. Yeah. All the kids are like he was a good dad. Yeah.

And he never even hit his kids, which is weird for that period of time because everybody hit kids back in the 20s. But not Albert Fish. He would just hit himself. Yeah. Again, the goalposts are. And the kids that he murdered. Yeah.

The goalposts are. The goalposts are. Yeah. All over the place. So he would later tell Detective King that he traced his problems back to the fact that when he was five years old, he was placed in an orphanage by his mother. His dad was 75 when he was born and his dad had died when he was very young. And as soon as that happened, his mom put him in the orphanage.

He said he saw a lot of things a child of seven should not see. I. Yeah. Not to say that there's not truth to I'm sure some either it was he's always like had, you know, this mental problem or. Yeah. There's usually an inciting incident. Yeah.

He says they were whipped in the orphanage, which definitely happened in orphanages back then. So maybe that's where it started. Yeah. And if you're, you know, developing sexually and something's a little. Yeah. Yeah. And you're getting hit on the butt.

All the time. That's your thing. That's how it works. Yeah. We're amazing machines. We're amazing. We're so. We should be trusted with so much.

Isn't it great? We have missiles. That was a real solid development for species with our sorts of impulse control. Yeah. So further investigation determined that fishes legal troubles had actually started back in 1903 when he'd spent 16 months in prison on grand larceny. He'd been arrested six times just since Grace Buds abduction. Sometimes for sending horrible letters to people, sometimes for vagrancy or for passing

bad checks. In court, he was no clearer on why he'd killed Grace saying, quote, the temptation just came over me. That's all I can say. I can't account for it. I don't understand it. But he was always emphatic that he had not had sex with her saying, no sir, no sir, no sex at all.

I did not outrage her, which I think murdering someone outrageous than probably, I guess. And also, I think he was probably gay. So that's probably a huge reason why he didn't with grace. Yeah. It does seem to be the, who we'll talk about in a minute here, the psychiatrist who diagnosed him did come to the conclusion that he was homosexual. But he was a lot of things. And that's almost like why I even mention it because.

His sexuality is like a Pollock painting. It is a mess. It's all over the place. So the media was as gross as you would expect from everything we've talked about in this story when they covered the trial, depraved the book notes that a single article in the mirror called fish, the ogre of murder lodge, the vampire man, an orgiastic fiend and the werewolf of wisteria, all in the same article. Wow.

The same. That's too big one. That prose is so purple. It's red. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a quote from that article, out of the slime of the sadistic butchery of grace but by the benign looking Albert Howard Fish, there emerged last night the hint of an even

greater horror, a horror of multiple killings, revealing a new type of Jack the Ripper in the guise of a kindly old gentleman. Wow. Yeah. That's weird that they describe him as kind and like normal looking because he wasn't. Because he looks creepy as fuck. He looks creepy as fuck. Yeah.

And it's clear, like at the time when you talk about his first crimes, people noticed him. Yeah. Yes, looking gray dude walking around. That must be who abducted the child. And they were not wrong. No, no. He was the guy.

Like, yeah. He looks like the guy that if you like see him walking around a playground, you're like, I'm just going to call the cops. Like this. I know. I feel like there should just be some armed men around. Which I like, I hate doing that because there are plenty of wonderful people who do look creepy and vice versa.

But he is one that you look at and it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. Yeah. And in fact, go to our website to look at those pictures. Yeah. Fish's case was confusing as that last quote to people of the time because he, aside from his criminal record, he didn't fit society's profile of a sex murderer. He was a descendant of American aristocracy, which I guess you are too.

Yes. Yeah. Some famous revolutionary dude, right? Yeah. Famous revolutionary dude. And he was also related to, I guess he was like in the treasury in DC, Hamilton Fish. Oh. Yeah.

That sounds like a treasury name. Yes. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. There's a lot of official checks with his like ostentatious signature on it. And Hamilton Fish actually deleted some historical records that connects them as, yes, which we ran into that big gap while doing our family tree.

It's like, gee, why did he? Sure seems like a well-connected dude tried to cover up he was related to this man. That's amazing. He didn't even mention his last name. Oh, man. Yeah. That's fun. Yeah.

Okay. So who's worse? No. Albert Fish was. It came out during all this that his wife had abandoned him when the kids were very young and left the kids with him. And again, as we said, he'd been a decent dad. And you can't blame when you, because the wife gave testimony at the trial and we're

just talked about the same things the kids had seen, they'd seen, but they were not okay with it. They were fucking terrified of him. Right. And they left. Which, fair. Yeah. Especially in a time when no one has a vocabulary to discuss something like this.

Not cool to leave the kids with him. I know. That's a questionable move. I don't agree with that choice. Which is made weirder by the fact that he was apparently fine as a dad. Yeah. But there's no way that woman could have known that. No.

No. They just ran. Yeah. And I imagine at that time, if you went to court for custody of the kids, it was probably easier for the man to win back then. Probably. I don't know enough about how the laws were, but. Also, maybe she was a little homophobic and saw something like that she didn't like.

So it was just like, you know. Or maybe, yeah. Maybe it was oddly woke and that they just thought he was gay and were like, well, gay people can raise kids just fine. Right. Right. I just don't want to be here. Yeah.

Who knows? Who knows. But he was clearly very angry at his wife for leaving. And he, in fact, stated a number of times, yeah, he wrote a letter to his daughter Gertrude and said, all I hope for, all I want to live for is to be able to go in court that I may tell what a bitch of a mother you all had, the kind of wife I had. Wow. And you know what?

I bet he got it. Like, I bet he got to say. He sure did. He wrote a letter to his daughter, Annie, and said, tell old Pegleg, you're a bitch of a mother. The day I go into court and take a stand will be a sorry one for her. It's weird. And when he sounds like a normal guy, it's when he's being really angry at his ex-wife.

He reaches clarity, because I'm sure it's a clear solid thing on this earth that he can be mad at, and then everything else will just spiral in a fantasy land. But he's got this anger point of being pissed at his wife. So there are also a bunch of stories from his kids who had all just sort of chalked up his weirdness to dad being weird. In court, Fish Express deep concern for his children, and at one point asked a reporter to send them Christmas baskets. Aw.

That's sweet. Yeah. He claimed he regretted the murder of Grace Budd as soon as he committed it. Depending on the day of the trial, he would veer from asserting he was ready to die for his crimes to try to get a lesser sentence, so it was not totally consistent. Fish was a very religious guy. He had a lot of the Bible memorized, and his favorite Bible passage was Isaiah 36-12. I'm going to read it, and you try to figure out why he might have liked it.

But Rab Shachath, and apologies to listeners named Rab Shachath if I pronounced that wrong. But Rab Shachath said, hath not my master sent me to thy master and to thee to speak these words, hath he not sent me to the men that sit upon the wall that they may eat their own dung and drink their own piss with you? Aw. Do you think it's that he's a big fan of Rab Shachath? Yeah. Yeah, that's why you like that quote.

When he was in jail one Sunday during a mass for prisoners, a guard, her grunting coming from his cell, and walked over to look, he saw fish with his pants down and just enormous erections stroking his, you know, to the sounds of the Lord's Prayer. Oh, so he loved God. He really into God. He loved God. Super into God. Frederick Wortham, a distinguished psychiatrist who comics fans will know and hate for originating

the comics code. That guy was the guy who assessed Albert Fish's mental state for the court and just tried to decide whether or not he was too crazy to be convicted. He wrote, quote, there was no known perversion that he did not practice and practice frequently, which yeah. Wow. In a way, an accomplishment? Yeah.

Normally that's a positive thing when you haven't murdered people. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wortham linked all of Fish's weirdness back to a desire for pain. And Fish did tell him that, quote, I always seem to enjoy everything that hurt, the desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost, to Wortham, Fish explained the details of what he did to Grace Budd.

He claimed that he'd first tried to drink her blood, but had not been able to handle it. Instead, he'd cut off four pounds of flesh from her buttocks, breast, belly, and ears and nose. The ears seem odd. Not a lot of. I think he just wanted them. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he wrapped them up in newspaper and took them back to his homes. This excited him so much that he ejaculated while riding the train back home before he even got home. Yes. Of course.

Once he was back, he used Grace's flesh to make a stew with carrots, onions, and strips of bacon. He said he'd eaten the stew for nine days. Oh no, is that our family recipe? Oh dear God. My father was making soup when I called. I know. And when he talks about eating the boy, he talks about the potatoes that he used in

the room. No, not potatoes. Like he makes like a bisque. Yeah. We do have a really good potato soup family recipe. I kind of want it. It's, they're spamming it. It's spamming.

Oh no. Oh no. It's just meat to people. I know. We all know that. I mean, taste buds, it's inherited to an extent. You want to come over for dinner? Kind of, yeah, actually.

I can tell you that burning human flesh smells almost exactly like cooking bacon. Okay. Yeah. I would absolutely buy that. So yeah, he ate her for nine days and pleasure himself and stuff. We all know where this is going. We're all adults. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So it was also in prison where Wertham and Detective King discovered Albert Fish's other favorite hobby. Oh. He loved shoving needles inside himself. Oh, he did. Yeah.

I love it. Usually pushing them into his taint or somewhere else around his pelvis. The doctors actually gave him an x-ray because he had chronic pain and he came back just filled with needles. They found 29 needles inside of him. There's the x-ray. Have you seen it? I think I have, but I love it so much because.

He's just full of needles. He's just full of needles. They're just everywhere. He's an industrious fellow. You got to give him that. There's one right there, like in the lower butt cheek, just kind of dangling. Yeah. Because he would try to get them out, but a lot of times he just got them in too deep.

Yeah. Which, yeah. Cool. That old Ian Malcolm quote from Jurassic Park, he didn't stop to think of if you should. Oh. Yeah. No, I bet he did. He decided, yes.

He decided, yes. This was a reason decision for Albert Fish. They also found that Fish liked to soak cotton and alcohol, shove it up his ass, and light his ass on fire. Yeah. He claimed to have tortured many children the same way. He did claim there were many children, a life full of victims. Wortham said, quote, he started his sexual career, so to say, at the age of 17, at the

time he became a painter. Now, that profession of painter, this man, has used as a convenience. He worked in many different institutions. He worked in YMCA's. He worked in homes for the tubercular. He worked in any kind of home where there were children, where they thought he could get children. In his places, he made his headquarters the basement or the cellar, and he had a habit

of wearing painters overalls over his nude body, because he could get naked. So either it's true, and this guy killed a shitload of people, or he's lying. And I think it's totally credible, because it definitely was important to him to be a good father. I think it's totally possible. He spent all of his time working and doing masturbating in weird ways and sending letters to people. And it was when he was no longer working and his kids were supporting him that he really

got the time to actually commit horrible crimes. Right, to enact his fantasies. We'll never know. That's my read on it, that he was getting off on talking to the psychiatrist about stuff he hadn't done. Yeah, I think that was also part of it. Because he told him lurid stories about seducing kids into basements with bribes of candy and money, and then doing terrible things to them.

He did claim that most of his victims were colored, because the authorities didn't care if black kids went missing. Damn. That part's true. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if he actually did that, but I'm gonna bet it was easier to get away with. And is still today. So we'll never know how many of these victims are real or not.

Wortham did uncover more religious influences. He found out that Fish was obsessed with the story of Abraham and Isaac, which he claims convinced him he needed to sacrifice a child. He figured that if God didn't want the boy to die, he'd send an angel down to stop Fish. Oh. Yeah. So, God's the real bad guy in the story. Yeah, okay, alright.

Come on, God. Don't write a book like that and just leave us to interpret it, and we'll do things like this. Send some angels down. Yeah. You made us. You know we're not smart enough to figure this shit out. We're sticking needles in our asses.

Come on. On purpose. On purpose. In the end, Wortham concluded that Fish was, in fact, far too mentally ill for the state to execute. He is, in my opinion, a man not only incurable and unreformable, but also unpunishable, which is probably accurate. Probably.

I don't think there's anything anyone could have done to be like, do you realize what you've, I mean, at that point, who are you talking to? And the court didn't disagree with this guy. Nobody, none of the jurors thought that Fish was not criminally insane, but they all wanted him killed anyway just because they thought he needed to die. I mean, and I don't really disagree with that either. Quality of life, if that is a factor, he's not leading. He's hurting himself.

Yeah. He's, yeah. So he was taken to the electric chair and he was killed on January 16th, 1936. He left behind a final statement to his lawyer, Jack Dempsey, who stated, quote, I will never show it to anyone. That was the most filthy string of obscenities that I have ever read. One last creepy letter. One last creepy letter.

One last to my dear lawyer. So that's all I've got on Albert Fish. Is there anything else that you brought to the table that we haven't gotten to yet? I really, you covered a good amount of it. I think, yeah, just the kind of the rest of the family and the Hamilton Fish, like not only trying to not talk about it, but like, you race records of being. I want to destroy the evidence. Yeah.

Destroy the evidence. I think, yeah, it kind of speaks to the, I guess, shame of it all, which again is tied into mental health, which is tied into like sexuality and just, yeah, I'm glad that we have at least a couple more nets to catch things like this before. And now in a society where maybe a guy who grows up like Albert Fish and wanting to have his ass paddle bloody and wanting to paddle other people and be lit on fire, now that guy can just go to a dungeon and light his own ass, have his ass lit on fire, light other people's asses on fire, and there can be consent and it's all fine.

Right. And he does not, and not to say that he didn't choose to also. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But he's not a monster because he shoved needles up his ass. Right. It's a whole way to pass the time, like you want to, you do whatever you want to your

own ass. Right. This is America. Yeah. Just don't eat children. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe eat adults.

Maybe. Maybe the rich. Maybe the rich. Maybe eat the rich. Maybe eat the rich. Doritos? Doritos. Doritos.

Doritos. Yeah. The only thing tastier than the flesh of the rich. The only thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the only thing holding society together right now is that Doritos are tastier than the... They never dip in quality, which they never will. Which they never will. Doritos are amazing, but if they ever did society would collapse because we would start eating the rich. We would. We would.

We would go right for the bangers. Really? We just owe a lot to Doritos, don't we? We do. We do. And that's a positive note to end this horrible, horrible episode about a terrible criminal on you. Maggie, you want to plug your plugables.

Yes. Yeah. You can find me, Maggie May Fish, that's Mae, M-A-E, also named after my great-great-grandmother who is in the same line. Oh, good. Yeah. I bet she was really horrified when all this came out. Oh, I don't know if she ever knew.

And thank God. I'm just imagining members of your family picking up the news over in Michigan and reading about the trial and going, oh, I'm going to throw this newspaper in the trash. I don't want the kids to see this. Call our cousin in DC. I think we need to have some files burned. Yeah. Yeah, so find me on Twitter.

I have a podcast about friendship called My Top Eight of the Small Beans Network. And you can catch my videos at Breakdown Filming Society on my YouTube channel. They're fantastic videos. Check them out. Check out Maggie's work. She's one of the most talented people I've ever worked with. I'm Robert Evans, and next week, next Tuesday, we'll be back as we are every week with another story about someone terrible.

So please tune in for that. It will probably be a dictator rather than a mass murderer. But you know. One and the same. Yeah, one and the same. Not as different as you might expect. Yeah, you can find this podcast on Twitter at atbasterspod, Instagram too. You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com.

Have a cool ranch day, and I love about 40% of you. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. Getting inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

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