What is the most important lesson in life?

 

Albert Fish was put to death on January 16th, 1936.

His final words were, “I don’t know why I’m here.”

Anticlimactic, right?

Albert Fish was born in 1870, in Washington D.C.

His father died when he was five. His mother and other relatives suffered unspecified psychiatric illnesses. And his early years were spent in various workhouses, where he was physically, sexually, and emotionally abused, and subjected to various forms of torture. This maltreatment would later manifest as a bricolage of perverse sexual attitudes, including pedophilia, self-harm and cannibalism.

He spent his life doing menial jobs, molesting children and sticking needles in his groin. Along the way, he took the lives of at least five children, whom he sexually assaulted, dismembered, and sometimes consumed. He even described his crimes in far too much detail in letters sent to the parents of the victims.

He said he had killed and molested “children in every state.” He claimed he abused children who were disabled or African-American, because it was easier to take advantage of them

Fish sometimes had to stop interviews in tears, because he was so tormented by what he had done.

Albert Fish’s real name was Hamilton, after a brother who had died. In a way, Albert Fish was that dead brother. He never got to have any kind of life. As an uncaught killer, his name was “The Gray Man” because everything about him was dead and gray, according to witnesses.

At his trial, the jury concluded that he was insane, but that he should die anyway.

When Fish was saying he didn’t know why he was here, he didn’t mean why he was in the execution room. He meant why he was on this earth. He genuinely asked why somebody like him would be created and allowed to live. Why his life had been nothing but trauma and abuse, given and taken. It wasn’t confusion, it was a final wail, a cry for purpose that he was never given. And utter disbelief at the abomination his life was.

Atrocious.