Jonathan Bandler

jbandler@lohud.com

The house on Mountain Road in Greenburgh sits on a small ridge above the Saw Mill River Parkway. So idyllic were the wildflowers that grew there it was known as Wisteria Cottage.

But 85 years ago it was the scene of one of Westchester's most horrific murders.

The crime

On June 3, 1928, Albert Fish strangled 10-year-old Grace Budd, then decapitated and dismembered her. He later wrote to her family that he roasted her body parts and spent nine days eating them.

The kidnapping of Grace from her Manhattan home went unsolved for six years before Fish was caught. He eventually confessed to two other child killings and was suspected in a dozen more, according to press accounts.

Fish met Grace when he answered an ad by her teenage brother seeking work in the country. He posed as a Long Island farmer and hoped to satisfy a "blood thirst."

But he turned his sights on Grace. The day he was to take the boy to his farm, he told the parents he was going to his niece's birthday and thought Grace would enjoy it. They must not have wanted to insult their son's new employer because they let Grace go with Fish — and never saw her again.

Lurid letter

Fish might have avoided detection — and lived out his years in obscure deviancy — if he hadn't penned a letter to Grace's mother six years later. In graphic, vulgar detail, he described how he came to enjoy the taste of human flesh.

He wrote of taking her to a house in Westchester, stripping naked as she picked those flowers outside and then calling her inside, where she screamed when she saw him.

"I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms," he wrote.

Police traced the envelope to an apartment where he had stayed and when Fish returned to pick up a check, they took him into custody. He confessed to killing Grace the day he'd abducted her — and accompanied them to the cottage where they soon found the skull, many small bones and a saw and cleaver, two of Fish's "implements of hell."

At the 1935 trial in White Plains, Fish's lawyer, James Dempsey of Peekskill, failed to convince jurors that his client was insane. Or maybe he did — but the jury decided Fish should be executed just the same. He was put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing on Jan. 16, 1936.

Fiendish legacy

Fish was a model for Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter in the 1980s. And true-crime writer Harold Schechter, a former Chappaqua resident, explored Fish's case in his 1990 book "Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer!"

Margaret Stein of Tarrytown has been fascinated by the case for years, ever since she heard stories from her in-laws, who had lived on Mountain Road and recalled occasionally seeing Fish walking around when he would stay there.

Years later, Stein said she lived in the home Fish had rented two properties over from the infamous cottage.

"It was just something people over there always talked about, something that happened in the neighborhood," Stein said. "It's no longer creepy or scary because it happened so long ago. But I'm glad I wasn't around when he was there."