Alfred Fellig was a police photographer with the New York City Police Department. He came under suspicion of being a serial killer when FBI agent Peyton Ritter realized that many of the photos he made at crime scenes preceded police arrival and took place almost immediately after the time of death, leading to a joint investigation between Ritter and Special Agent Dana Scully. (TXF: "Tithonus")
History[]
Fellig had been working with the Manhattan division of the NYPD for 35 years. Pass photos from his renewals from 1964, 1967, 1971, 1973, 1985, 1987, 1992 and 1996 show that he has kept the same elderly appearance since then.
Through research, Fox Mulder discovers that no Alfred Fellig existed before 1964, but is able to find two more records with matching fingerprints. One belongs to one Henry Strand, aged 53 when he applied for a press pass for the New Jersey Police Department in 1939. The other, L. H. Rice, is on record as having gone to the New York State civil service exam. Only L. H. Rice has his birth date listed, which is April 4, 1849 which would mean that the man the agents know as Alfred Fellig is at least 149 years old.
It is likely that Fellig is even older, as he mentions that he gained his immortality during a time when "[yellow fever] killed half of New York" and Washington Square Park was used as a public graveyard. This happened during the sporadic 1793-1804 epidemic, which killed 10% of New York City's population, likely making him over 200 years old.
According to Fellig himself, his longevity began after he contracted yellow fever and was placed in a make-shift ward. While his condition worsened, he was able to see Death from the corner of his eye, appearing whenever to beds where a person was close to death. Eventually, Death came to approach him, but as he was afraid of dying, he closed his eyes and turned away. In his desperation, he secretly wanted that Death instead took the young nurse who had been comforting him on his deathbed, and by the time he opened his eyes again, the nurse was being carried off in a tarp to a mass grave. As he became aware of his immortality, Fellig began to regret cheating Death, especially after his wife died and he ended up forgetting her name, growing obsessed with meeting Death again under similar circumstances, so that he may finally die in place of someone else. For this he took up photography, hoping to capture a shot of Death.
Scully finds yet another photo, signed by Louis Brady Photography, from 1928. A more in-depth background check reveals that a Louis Brady was convicted for double murder when he suffocated two patients at a Connecticut hospital in order to "catch up with Death", but escaped one year into his sentence during a work detail in 1929.
FBI investigation[]
Scully on an X-File of her own[]
Alfred Fellig had come to Ritter's attention while he was scanning old crime scene photographs onto a computer. Ritter noticed in one of the photos that the clock above the dead body showed a time forty five minutes earlier than when her death was reported to the police. Fellig then turned up at the scene later as the crime scene photographer.
Kersh sent Scully to New York to help Ritter investigate the case. Scully soon realised she was dealing with an X-File. She first started to believe this when she looked into Fellig's yearly renewal forms for his crime scene photographer license and saw that he had not aged in his ID photos going back to 1964.
Alfred Fellig watched a young man get stabbed by a thief, Malcolm Wiggins, and as the boy was dying he took photographs of him. What he hadn't realised was the thief was still in the vicinity, witnessing Fellig essentially taking evidence of his crime and stabbed Fellig multiple times in the back. Fellig fell to the ground and his camera was taken by the murderer. At first it appeared as if Fellig was dead but he soon started to move and pulled the knife from his back, got up and went home.
Scully and Ritter bring Fellig in for questioning when they find his prints on the knife used to stab him and the boy. As they were interviewing him Fellig appeared to be uncomfortable and Scully asked to see his wounds, she was shocked when she saw the extent of them. Given the stab wounds and having found a second set of prints on the knife Scully believed that Fellig did not kill the boy.
Scully spent some time with Fellig and was disturbed by the fact that he seemed to be able to predict when someone was about to die. They were watching a hooker argue with her pimp. Fellig knew she was about to die because when he sees someone who is about to die they appear in monochrome to him. Despite Scully's efforts to prevent her death, the hooker was hit by a truck.
Mulder had been intercepting Ritter's emails to Kersch and had done a deeper background check telling Scully that Fellig's prints matched the fingerprints of a man named Henry Strand. Mulder also looked further back again and another man named L.H. Rice's thumbprint matched Fellig's. L.H. Rice was born in 1849, making Fellig 149 at the time of their investigation.
The origins of immortality[]
Scully returned to speak to Fellig again, before Ritter got to him to arrest him. He told her how he came to be so old. When he was young, he had yellow fever and while out of his mind from the fever he saw death moving aound the room taking sick people's lives. When Death came to him Fellig closed his eyes and looked away, causing the nurse who was tending to him to be taken instead. After he stopped aging and continued to live beyond his normal lifespan, he became tired of his immortality and had been seeking death by photographing people as they died in the hopes of capturing a shot of death.
The long search ends[]
Fellig got his wish after Scully was accidentally shot by Ritter, who had arrived to arrest him after Mulder told him of his previous murders. Fellig held her hand as she was bleeding from the gunshot wound. He asked her if could she see Death and she indicated she could, so Fellig told her to close her eyes and not look at him. When Scully closed her eyes she stopped being in black and white and his own arm started to change to black and white, and a bright light encapsulated him. He was declared dead from a single gunshot. (TXF: "Tithonus")
Alfred Fellig was played by Geoffrey Lewis.
Trivia[]
- The title of the episode, "Tithonus", is in reference to the Greek mythological figure, who was similarly granted immortality without eternal youth.
- Arthur Fellig is the real name of American photographer Weegee, known for his black-and-white photography of fresh crime scenes in New York City, also active primarily in Manhattan. He was also well-known for his almost unnaturally quick arrival times alongside emergency services.
- Fellig implicitly transfering his immortality to Scully ties into Clyde Bruckman's predicition that Scully does not die, although Vince Gilligan has stated that this was, at first, not planned to be explored further.