After his capture, Fish would blame the conditions of his childhood for his crimes. Although he was related to ancestors who fought in the American Revolution, Fish was abandoned at an early age and placed in an orphanage, where he saw and experienced his first brutal acts of sadism. He had been born in 1870 in the Washington D.C. area and later married and raised six children. He had minor public education and mostly worked as a handyman and a painter. It’s likely that his psychosis actually manifested much earlier but according to the testimony of one of his children, his weird and unpredictable behavior did not begin to surface until January 1917. It was at this time that his wife ran away with John Straube, a slow-witted handyman who boarded with the Fish family. Fish returned from work one day to find the house deserted and stripped of its furniture.
Mrs. Fish was apparently a bit odd herself. She once returned to her husband with Straube at her side and asked if they could move in with the family. Fish said that she could but that her lover could not and so she agreed and sent Straube away. Days later, Fish discovered that his wife had actually secretly hidden Straube in the attic and he lurked there while she smuggled food up to him. Again, Fish told her that she could stay but that Straube had to leave. They both departed this time and the family never saw Mrs. Fish again.
Soon after, Fish began to behave very strangely. He took his family up to their summer home, Wisteria Cottage, in Westchester County, New York for outings and they would watch, terrified, as he climbed a nearby hill, shook his fist at the sky and repeatedly screamed, “I am Christ!”. Pain seemed to delight him. Whether inflicting it on himself or others, he took strange pleasure in being whipped and paddled. He encouraged his own and neighbor children to paddle his buttocks until they bled, often using a paddle that was studded with inch-and-a-half nails. He also inserted a large number of needles into his body, mostly in the genital region, and burned himself constantly with hot irons and pokers.
On nights of the full moon, his children later testified, Fish would consume huge quantities of raw meat. Over the years, he collected a great amount of published material on cannibalism and he carried the most gruesome articles with him on his person at all times. Before he ever turned to murder, Fish was examined several times by psychiatrists at Bellevue but he was always released and judged “disturbed but sane.”
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