Albert Fish came to New York in the 1890s, earning a living as a male prostitute and then a house painter.
He married and had kids, yet family life didn’t alter his many horrific compulsions, most disturbingly, to molest and murder children.
He’s been tied to one child murder in Staten Island and one in Brooklyn, hence his nickname.
But it was the killing of Grace Budd, who lived at 406 West 15th Street, that put Fish on the list as one of the city’s biggest monsters.
After going to the Budd home in Chelsea in 1928 to meet with Grace’s brother about a job, Fish spotted the 10-year-old girl. He offered to take her to a party he claimed to be going to that afternoon.
Grace’s parents said yes . . . and never saw their daughter (at right) again.
The case was solved after Fish sent a letter to the family in 1930 describing the terrible things he did to little Grace.
It took four years, but the NYPD traced the letter back to the boardinghouse on East 52nd Street where Fish rented a room.
Confronted by police, he confessed to strangling Grace in a cottage in Westchester and then cannibalizing her corpse.
At the end of his sensational 1935 trial, he was found guilty. He was executed at Sing Sing in March 1936, unrepentant and looking forward to the “supreme thrill” of the electric chair.
Decades later in the 1980s, another New York cannibal escaped execution.
Ephemeral New York 