The Lives of Hamilton Fish

Life on Mars

It’s important to note that this graphic reads “Black Trans Lives Matter”.  The purpose of this, like the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, is to highlight the way that black trans people in particular are subject to a disproportionate amount of violence. This is an issue of black trans lives, not all trans lives, or all lives.

Photo by Benjamin Franklin Loomis.

"In 1928, a serial killer named Hamilton “Albert” Fish took a little girl named Grace Budd into the woods of upstate New York and she was never heard from again — and this sick destroyer’s own anguish was perhaps never heard the first time. Today few people would recognize his name upon hearing it — but multi-artform practitioner Rachel Mason was there a century later to note the strange counterpoint between that name and that of statesman Hamilton Fish II, whose obituary appeared on the same front page of a New York newspaper as the notice of the other Hamilton’s execution in 1936. Mason’s mission, over eight years, became to unearth their stories, and those of the people around them; to pay attention to what was untold and spin a story or her own from the pulp of ancient chronicles and the forgotten girl who fell in the woods."

JOE COLEMAN “Albert Fish”

In 1920s New York, children were mysteriously disappearing. Deborah Blum tells the haunting story of what happened to them in Angel Killer, a new enhanced ebook from The Atavist. 

Read Deborah Blum’s account of Fish’s crimes in Angel Killer.