A Death in Belmont (15 page)

After DeSalvo was honorably discharged from the military he moved back to Chelsea with Irmgard, got a series of low-paying jobs, and embarked on a breaking-and-entering spree that would see him arrested four times over the next year and a half. Every judge he faced gave him a suspended sentence. His luck finally ran out on March 17, 1961, when a Cambridge cop fired his revolver into the air and stopped DeSalvo in his tracks as he was fleeing an apartment building near Harvard University. The police put handcuffs on him and searched him and found a screwdriver, a skeleton key, and a jacknife in his pockets and four more screwdrivers in his car. DeSalvo's explanation for his situation was disarmingly innocent if disturbing: Yes, he'd tried to break into an apartment, but he hadn't intended to steal anything, he'd just wanted to surprise the two young nurses who lived there. How did he know that two nurses lived there? Well, a couple of weeks earlier, DeSalvo said he had knocked on their door and passed himself off as a scout for a modeling agency—his old
Stars and Stripes
routine. He'd asked the two women if they were interested in working as models and they said no, but he had remembered where they lived. And he had gone back.

The police were well aware of this scam. For months women had been calling the Cambridge police department to complain that a dark-haired young man named “Mr. Johnson” had knocked on their door and asked if they were interested in working as models. If they were, the man would pull a tape measure out of his pocket and measure all over their bodies—their legs, their waist, their bust—and then tell them that a representative from the “Black and
White Modeling Agency” would be in touch with them. Of course no one ever called.

Just the week before, a man by the same description had tried to break into another Cambridge apartment where two young women lived. It was a Saturday morning, and, hearing a tapping at the door, one of the women had opened it to find a strange man standing there stammering that he was an artist's agent. In fact, the tapping had been his attempts to jimmy the lock with a screwdriver. Are you a model? the man asked. When the young woman said no, the man tried to interest her in the idea. He finally left, saying that someone from the office would be in touch with her soon. The date was March 11, two years to the day before Bessie Goldberg was killed on Scott Road in Belmont. The question he asked was the same one that DeSalvo had asked my mother's young art student, Marie, before grabbing her around the waist and pulling her toward him.

The police had started referring to this intruder as the “Measuring Man,” because he never attacked anyone, he just measured any woman who would let him. DeSalvo not only admitted to being the Measuring Man but boasted that some of these women had taken their clothes off so that their measurements would be smaller, and a few had even slept with him. “I'm not good-looking, I'm not educated, but I was able to put something over on high-class people,” he explained. “They were college kids and I never had anything in my life and I outsmarted them.” DeSalvo went on trial for assault and battery, for breaking and entering, and for lewdness and was convicted of the first two charges and acquitted of the third, which should have resulted in consecutive two-year sentences at the Middlesex House of Corrections. Judge Edward Viola first allowed DeSalvo to serve his sentences concurrently and then
reduced them to eighteen months; the parole board ultimately let him out after ten.

 

THE POLICE HAD
no cause to think about Albert DeSalvo for the next three years. Eleven women were strangled and sexually assaulted in Boston without his name ever coming up. DeSalvo got his job with Russ Blomerth and started working at my parents' house and did painting jobs on the side and by all accounts was a good husband and a hard worker and a decent neighbor. He and his family lived on a dead-end street in the working-class suburb of Malden, and the only tragedy in their life was a medical problem with their young daughter, Judy. She had been born with a hip deformity that threatened to cripple her for life, and the doctor fitted her with a brace and taught DeSalvo how to massage her. Every evening DeSalvo would place Judy on her back and unlace her brace and knead her thighs as hard as he could, and then tie the brace back up.

DeSalvo later claimed that his wife stopped having sex with him after Judy was born because she was terrified of having another deformed child. He even tried to get her to read the Kinsey Report so that she could see that his desire for sex was normal. Irmgard, for her part, told investigators that Al's sexual demands were so incessant that no woman could possibly have fulfilled them. Years later Al wrote Irmgard a six-page letter from prison explaining how much her rejection had hurt him. The letter is written longhand on notebook paper and is so filled with anguish that the sentences barely make sense. It reads, in part:

The year in jail DeSalvo referred to was his stint at the Middlesex House of Corrections after his Measuring Man escapades. He was released in April 1962, and apparently went home hoping that Irmgard would see his criminal behavior as a cry for help and change her own behavior accordingly. Judging by this letter, she didn't. If DeSalvo was indeed the Strangler, it may be significant that the murder of Anna Slesers happened two months after he got out of jail. She was the first woman to be killed, and it happened around the time that DeSalvo realized that nothing in his marriage had changed. According to him, at least, that was what had triggered his first, impulsive murder.

Al was known as a B&E man, not a sexual offender, so his name did not appear on a list of Strangler suspects until March 1965. By that time he was already back in prison for a series of sexual attacks in the Boston area. He'd been picked up the previous November because he strongly resembled a police sketch of a man who had
appeared unexpectedly one morning in the bedroom of a young Cambridge woman. The man wore aviator glasses and a dark waist-length jacket and green pants and his hair was stylishly combed back with grease, and he put a knife to the young woman's throat and tied her to the bed and commenced to molest her. Before he got very far, however, he seemed to have second thoughts and asked the woman how to leave her apartment. And then he was gone.

A detective who saw the sketch thought it looked like the old Measuring Man, and Cambridge asked police in Malden to bring DeSalvo in for questioning. He was put in a lineup and immediately picked out by the woman who had been attacked, who recognized his voice as well. The police knew of three other women who had been attacked in a similar way, including an old lady who managed to give DeSalvo pause by demanding to know what his mother would think of his activities. She wouldn't like it, DeSalvo admitted before masturbating in front of her and leaving.

None of these four women had been raped or seriously molested, and again, the timing of this may be significant. In his letter to Irmgard, DeSalvo added a postscript that said, in part: “Our last two months together you made me feel for the first time like a man. You gave me love I never dreamed you had to give.” The two months he referred to were September and October 1965, immediately before he was arrested. If DeSalvo was indeed the Boston Strangler, as he claimed, the timing would make sense. According to him he killed because of rage at his wife, and now that things were better at home, he could continue his lifelong compulsion of breaking into women's homes and still catch himself before things got out of hand. He even apologized to one woman as he left.

DeSalvo was arraigned and again charged with B&E, assault and battery, and engaging in unnatural and lascivious acts, though this
time the court added confining and putting in fear because he had tied his victims up. He was released on eight thousand dollars' bail, but was rearrested almost immediately because his photograph—which had gone out by teletype to police departments across New England—matched descriptions of a man who was wanted by the state police in Connecticut. Maybe DeSalvo hadn't raped anyone in Massachusetts, but the previous spring and summer a man who looked exactly like him had raped dozens of women in other New England states—including four women in one morning in the Hartford–New Haven area. In almost every case a dark-haired man wearing green cotton work pants had broken into a woman's home, tied her to her bed, and then raped her. None of the women were killed. Because of his clothes the rapist was known in Connecticut as the “Green Man.” Women who were shown the teletype photograph of DeSalvo said they were absolutely sure that he was the man who had attacked them.

DeSalvo now had out-of-state warrants against him and a bail of one hundred thousand dollars. He was sent to Bridgewater State Hospital for pretrial observation and was quickly diagnosed with “sociopathic personality disorder marked by sexual deviation, with promi-nent schizoid features and depressive trends.” His mental health appeared to deteriorate over the next couple of months, and at his pretrial hearing the judge ruled that he was incompetent to stand trial and sent him back to Bridgewater indefinitely. The date was February 4, 1965.

One month later DeSalvo met with a well-known lawyer named F. Lee Bailey and spent an hour in an interview room trying to prove that he, Albert DeSalvo, was in fact the Boston Strangler. Bailey took the information and went straight to Ed Brooke, state attorney general.

A
LBERT DESALVO
, Bridgewater Correctional Institution:

“Well, I been riding around all day like in the middle of the world and I got to this parking lot down on Commonwealth Avenue and I left my car there and I walked to number 1940. It was awful hot and I could feel the sweat on me and smell it, too, and I don't like that because I like to keep my body very clean. I look at the names on the mailboxes and the bells inside number 1940 and pick out a couple of women's names and press the first one. I stand there waiting, feeling the image build up and not thinking about what I'm going to say to her because I know something will come to me like it always does. Nothing happens. I press the second doorbell and in a few minutes she buzzes the door, twice, and I walk into the hallway. The stairs are curved around an elevator and to the right and I go up them, not in a hurry or nothing, just taking them one at a time. Its funny, isn't it, how the first woman didn't answer the bell or wasn't home or something and just that little chance, you understand what I mean?

“She had on a robe, you might say a housecoat, the color was reddish to me, pinkish. She was wearing glasses and blue sneakers, I remember that, don't I? What do you want, she said, and she sounded kind of mad, kind of impatient, as if I was a bother to her. I said, ‘We been wanting to check your apartment for leaks.' It always came to me what to say and it was always something simple and easy and that could happen natural, you know? And she said, ‘Oh, all right, come in but make it fast I'm just getting ready to go out.' But I already know she aint going nowhere after I close that door behind me even though I fight it all the way. It's funny, I didn't want to go in there in the first place I just didn't want it to happen. I go in and go from one room to the other with her. In the bedroom she turned her back on me and I see the back of her head and I was all hot, just like my head was going to blow off as soon as I saw the back of her head, not her face. I got her from behind and both her and I fell backward on the bed. Now I am not telling this as it happened. I don't like to talk about this. I grabbed her and she fell back with me on the bed, on top of me. We just missed one of the bedposts, I guess you call them, and I was in this position—here, you see, my arms around her neck and my feet around the bottom of her legs, do you understand?

“This is very hard and I'm sorry to be mixed up like this but what come later was something I don't like to talk about, you understand me? I mean about the bottle and her privates—what was the word you said?—yes, that and her lying there and the thing with the bottle, you know? That's very hard for me. I thought I remembered at first she had shoes on, she may have had shoes on or house slippers or something on. Just until now I wasn't sure about that. I'm trying to respond to your questions, sir, in a way that will make it all clear to and help me to clean myself inside which is
what I wish to do and I answer, yes, as she fell she fell back on top of me and she was still conscious and I took her off the bed and I don't know, did I put her on the floor? I would say that I lied her on the floor, I don't know if it was a wooden floor or if it had a rug on there, and I opened her housecoat, tearing some of the buttons and she was wearing something underneath. I believe that it was at least a bra and panties and that I lifted them off—no it was just a slip and I lifted it above her waist and I had intercourse with her there in the floor and for a minute I felt good and then I looked at her and she still looked alive and so I went and got two nylon stockings, I put a silk stocking around her neck and knotted it, tight, three times like this and all the time the thing is building up in me again and I'm getting mad, very angry as I look at her there without her glasses on and her eyes wide open which she might be dead or not but she aint moving and it gets me mad, very very angry to see her like that so I take another silk stocking and put it around her neck, hooking it and twisting it with the other one and knotting it and pulling them so tight that they cut into her neck and I know she aint about to breathe no more.”