A Death in Belmont (17 page)

G
EORGE NASSAR
, MCI–Cedar Junction (formerly Walpole State Prison):

“Al's reason for killing his victims was so they wouldn't be witnesses. It was a rational criminal decision because he had already been convicted on eyewitness testimony. His first victim he had in a stranglehold, and it happened to be in her bedroom, and there was a large mirror, and he saw himself strangling her and he stopped. He made sure never to do it in front of a mirror again. When he had a stranglehold on a woman he would block her carotid artery. He did it to me once, he was playing with me one day and he put his thumb and forefinger on the carotid artery and I nearly passed out—it was only a matter of seconds. Once he got you in that stranglehold, one arm became the fulcrum for the other hand, and then he'd fall backward onto the floor. After the other person lost consciousness, only
then
would he apply the ligature. He said his sex urges would come over him suddenly and uncontrollably; he'd be walking down the street, and it would just come over
him. It was not the woman herself, it was the opportunity. If the situation—not her—looked good, he acted. It was truly the free floating of the diabolic.”

Nassar met DeSalvo in 1965 at MCI-Bridgewater, where they were both being evaluated by a state psychologist to determine if they were legally sane. DeSalvo was awaiting trial for four sexual assaults around Boston, and Nassar had been charged with shooting and stabbing a gas station attendant during a holdup in Andover, Massachusetts. He was also charged with trying to kill a woman and her fourteen-year-old daughter who had witnessed the murder; they survived only because the gun misfired. Nassar, now four decades into a life sentence, plays chess and speaks Russian and reads dictionaries and is rumored to have an IQ in excess of 150. It has also been reported that he is a diagnosed schizophrenic and sociopath with zero empathy for others.

“Al was insistent that Wiggins was the most important and fondly regarded male figure of his life,” says Nassar, referring to the old master carpenter on Blomerth's crew. “Al was so repetitive and mawkish about it that I was cloyed by it. I remember he either wanted to, tried to, or succeeded in a contact—through his brother, I think—after his exposure. And he seemed to hope beyond hope that Wiggins's wife, as I understood it, would still be warm to him. So I'm reconfirmed that that man and woman were his ideal surrogate parents, and now that I see the photo you sent, that that woman and her child would be ideally Al's wife and son.”

The photograph Nassar was referring to was the one that Blomerth took in the studio the day before the job was finished. Floyd Wiggins, who lived near DeSalvo in Malden, stands off his right shoulder with a claw hammer shoved in his front pocket. My mother and I are sitting in front of the two men. If Nassar is correct, that photograph represents DeSalvo's life as it could have been: A
gentle father, a loving wife, a healthy child. Instead, DeSalvo got a father who was a violent drunk, a wife who refused to have sex with him, and a daughter who was crippled from birth. That, DeSalvo told Nassar, was why his life had gone so wrong; that was why he was driven to kill.

Now he was facing hard time in prison, and the only thing he had going for him was an explosive secret—or lie—about his past. Nassar was savvy about the world in a way that DeSalvo was not, and DeSalvo eventually turned to him for advice. Could a man who claimed to be the Strangler, he wanted to know, make a lot of money off book and movie rights to his life story? Nassar said he'd find out, and the next time he saw F. Lee Bailey, his lawyer, he put the question to him. Bailey said that a man who confessed to being the Boston Strangler would go straight to the electric chair, movie deal or no movie deal, unless he had first-rate legal representation. Within days Bailey was sitting down with DeSalvo in a visiting room in Bridgewater State Prison.

True or not, DeSalvo's confessions promised to pay everyone quite well. DeSalvo hoped to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars from book, magazine, and movie deals, which he would then use to support his family. Bailey would be paid off for his services from what was left over. And George Nassar would attempt to collect reward money that had been offered by the governor of the state. The idea that a murderer, a rapist, and a high-profile lawyer were going to make enormous amounts of money on a series of gruesome sex murders was bound to arouse suspicion, however, and a rumor started that Nassar was the real Boston Strangler. He supposedly spent his time in Bridgewater tutoring DeSalvo in the details of the crimes, and DeSalvo retained almost all of it because he was thought to have a “photographic” memory.

This theory was particularly popular in the Cambridge police
department, which had always chafed under the authority of the attorney general's office. Cambridge believed that the one murder that happened in their jurisdiction—Beverly Samans, in early May 1963, was an independent incident, and it infuriated them that Ed Brooke's Strangler Bureau had come in and just taken it over. What these rumors about Nassar did not address, however, was whether a man who was capable of one kind of violence would be predisposed toward another. Nassar was twice convicted of murdering men in cold blood, but there was absolutely no sexual violence in his past. It was not at all clear that Nassar's apparent willingness to shoot a man in the chest during a robbery would make him, psychologically, a more likely candidate for raping and strangling old women. DeSalvo's past, by contrast, was a textbook case of how sex offenders are created. He grew up in an extremely violent household, he was exposed to deviant sex at a very young age, and he went on to develop a voyeuristic obsession with women that quickly escalated to assault and rape. None of this proved he was the Boston Strangler, but it certainly made him a good candidate.

And it also made for a great insanity defense. In January 1967 DeSalvo was put on trial for what were known as his “Green Man” crimes—his rapes and sexual assaults in Massachusetts—and out of DeSalvo's sordid past Bailey devised an odd and ingenious strategy. DeSalvo was innocent, Bailey would argue, because he was driven to commit his crimes by an “irresistible impulse,” which was the core of any insanity defense. The proof of that impulse, according to Bailey, was that he had murdered thirteen women, but DeSalvo could not be prosecuted for those crimes because he had confessed under condition of immunity. Bailey, in other words, wanted to use testimony that was beyond the reach of the law to reach back
into
the law and exonerate his client. During a pretrial hearing, Bailey
put DeSalvo on the stand and asked him whether he understood that he could be given a life sentence. DeSalvo said that he did.

“Mr. DeSalvo,” Bailey said. “Is it your purpose in this trial to deny the commission of these offenses?”

“No, sir, it isn't,” DeSalvo answered.

“And do you understand what defense will be raised in your behalf?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What will that be? Can you tell the court?”

“For the purpose that I hired you in the first place: Not to deny these charges but to somehow explain the truth and tell the truth of all this happening. I would like to know myself why all this took place.”

To give some backbone to his insanity defense, Bailey brought in a renowned psychologist named Dr. James Brussel, who had helped solve a famous serial bomber case case in New York City in the 1950s. Brussel had already seen service on the Strangler Bureau and was one of the few psychologists who thought that the stranglings were the work of one man. He had interviewed DeSalvo in depth about his compulsion to murder, and under direct examination by Bailey, he repeated what he'd heard.

“It would start the night before with a burning up inside, like little fires, little explosions,” Brussel testified. “And he would get up in the morning feeling hungry, yet he would not eat and he did not want to eat. And he would get in his car or truck and drive, sometimes not knowing where he was going, and on occasion he would suddenly look around and find that he was in Connecticut or Rhode Island and ask himself, What am I doing here? He would drive to an apartment house or a multiple dwelling that he knew, and he would go inside. He would indiscriminately punch doorbell
keys until he got an answer, and then he would go into the apartment and he would say that he had been sent by the super to repair a leak or to fix up some painting. It would be early morning frequently, and the woman who answered the door would be variously dressed in sleeping attire or a robe. Once her back was turned to him, the indescribable compulsion, as he put it to me—the feeling of hatred, the hatred of his wife having turned her back on him, the feeling that he was not being shown affection, which his mother had never shown him—simply swept over him. And these little fires and these little explosions within would mount to a pitch where he would…quickly use one arm around the neck.”

When the jury looked over, DeSalvo was sobbing quietly in the jury box. It was either great testimony or great theater, but the prosecutor, Donald Conn of the Middlesex DA's office, would have none of it. Conn was a classmate of Bailey's from Boston University, and he had a bold, aggressive style that made him well suited to the high stakes of the case. “This is a man who is going to turn certain conduct in his history into one million dollars!” Conn thundered at the jury during his summation. “Are you going to sit and acquit this man? You are going to have to live with your conscience when you leave here. You have a duty…to your wife, to my wife, to everyone who could conceivably be the subject of an attack of this type. And not to be manipulated and not to have a man come here and feign and fake symptoms and con you right out of this box.”

The jury retired to deliberate. Three hours and forty-five minutes later they filed back into the courtroom and the jury foreman, a brokerage-firm analyst named F. Hunter Rowley, declared that they had found DeSalvo guilty of all ten charges against him. Judge Cornelius Moynihan asked Bailey whether he had anything to say concerning the sentencing, and Bailey stood and said that he did.

Bailey was an impressive-looking man who wore expensive suits and sported a gold pocket watch on a thin gold chain. His office, according to one reporter, was littered with full ashtrays and empty whiskey bottles and was run by a tall brunette named Terri, who had both a pilot's license and a Harvard Law degree.

“The evidence has made clear the defendant's desire to remain in a situation where society is protected from him,” Bailey told Judge Moynihan. “And I think if I were sitting in your position, I would give a sentence…that would incarcerate him for the rest of his natural life.”

It was perhaps the only time a defense attorney has ever requested the maximum sentence for his client. Shortly before seven o'clock on the evening of January 18, 1967, Albert Henry DeSalvo was led away in handcuffs to begin concurrent ten-year sentences and a consecutive life sentence. Under Massachusetts law, the earliest he could be released was 1993. The question of whether or not he had killed thirteen women in the Boston area had still not been answered. And the question of whether or not he had killed one woman on Scott Road had hardly even been asked.

R
OY SMITH WAS
thirty-five or thirty-six years old and facing natural life without hope of parole. Hopelessness, the Department of Corrections is well aware, breeds desperation, so incentives are built into the system to encourage even men with nothing to lose to obey the rules. If you obey the rules, you get privileges. If you break the rules, you lose them. If you break enough rules, you wind up in solitary confinement with only an hour of exercise a day. Man is a social animal, and the threat of solitary is usually enough to keep all but the most troubled inmates in line.

When Roy Smith was convicted, all adult men in Massachusetts were sentenced to what was then called MCI-Walpole or MCI-Concord and then dispersed throughout the prison system. Walpole had a murder a month and was one of the most violent prisons in the country. A weapons sweep in the 1970s turned up three guns hidden inside the walls at Walpole. Enough money would get you anything you needed in Walpole, including murder. There were prison riots at Walpole and inmate killings and inmate rapes and a
poisonous racial atmosphere that essentially divided the prison into two violent camps.

Despite the brutality of the crime of which he'd been convicted, Smith was not a man inclined toward mayhem—he was barely even inclined toward talking to other people—and it must have been immediately apparent to prison officials that he did not belong at Walpole. Within weeks of his incarceration Smith was transferred to MCI-Norfolk, which, by contrast, was one of the most progressive prisons in the country. Inmates at Norfolk lived in unlocked rooms and moved freely around in the dormitory halls. They were allowed to cook for themselves and they were allowed to buy food at the commissary store with money they earned at various prison jobs and they were allowed to keep vegetable gardens and the very best of them were allowed to work outside the prison. The punishment for persistent bad behavior at Norfolk was leaving Norfolk. That was a fate most inmates tried to avoid.

It was two days after Christmas when Smith made the trip from Walpole to Norfolk in the back of a prison van. A light snow was falling that would turn into a brief intense snow squall after dark. If he'd cared to, Smith could have looked out through the steel mesh that covered the windows and watched the dark pine forests of southeastern Massachusetts roll by. Dusted with snow against an iron sky, the forests would not have looked like a place Smith might escape into and hide; they would have looked like a place where he would die. Fields slid by, left over from when Massachusetts was mostly farmland, and then tidy little houses with shingled roofs and painted fences. Norfolk appears suddenly out of the woods, a nineteen-foot gray cement wall wrapped around a cluster of brick dormitories built by inmates the year Roy Smith was born. Smith would have seen the black slate roofs of the dormitories beyond the
wall and then the gray stone-block administration building that fronted the road. Across the road was an old farmhouse bracketed by huge chestnut trees; that was where the warden lived. Beyond the warden's house was a road that ran behind the prison and then the forest again, silenced now by falling snow. The van stopped in front of the administration building and the driver got out and unlocked the back, and Smith stepped out awkwardly in his leg-irons and chains. He climbed the granite steps to the entrance one at a time and paused while the guard got the door for him. Then he stepped once and for all into prison and out of the world.

The receiving room had a handsome slate floor and a high ceiling and a control center made of bolted steel plate that was painted battleship gray. Smith shuffled forward into the pedestrian trap and the first door closed behind him and then the second door opened and he stepped outside the trap and the second one closed behind him and the guard led him upstairs to a jail cell to be processed. Smith had his shackles unlocked and he was weighed and measured and given a medical checkup to make sure he wasn't bringing diseases like tuberculosis into the prison. Then he was handed his prison clothes: a pair of dungaree pants, a white T-shirt, a dungaree shirt, a black sweatshirt, visiting-day clothes, and a blue wool Eisenhower jacket. All his clothes would eventually have his name on the back, as if he were a basketball star.

Norfolk was designed in the 1920s by a penologist named Howard Gill, who had a reputation of being idealistic almost to the point of craziness. He is now thought simply to have been way ahead of his time. Gill designed Norfolk to look like a college campus—he possibly had Yale in mind—with a dozen or so brick dormitories and administrative buildings arranged around a huge grass quad. Inmates could only walk counterclockwise around the
quad. Walking around the quad for the first time, Smith would have looked up to see the tops of the white pines that came almost to the edge of the prison walls. Inside those walls was a dead zone of mowed grass and then an electric fence topped with barbed wire. Norfolk is a medium-security prison with maximum-security walls. No one has ever escaped over the walls, though inmates have occasionally made it out through the vehicle trap, hidden in a barrel or a bag of trash.

Hanging from two I beams at the far end of the quad was a steel train wheel with a small section hacksawed out to produce a better tone. When the wheel was hit with a sledgehammer, it rang with a sound that could be heard everywhere in the prison, and that was how inmates knew it was time to return to their dorms. The first ring meant, Start moving, and the second ring came five minutes later and meant, You'd better already be where you were going. Meals were prepared in an enormous basement kitchen and wheeled on carts through a system of tunnels to the inmate dorms. The tunnels linked every building in the prison with every other building and allowed prisoners to eat in their own dining room rather than in a prison cafeteria with men they didn't know. The tunnels and group meals were an essential part of Gill's vision of community-based prison life.

Evaluations of Smith written years later noted that he was “slowly coming out of his shell.” According to other inmates, however, he had almost no friends at all. At Walpole he had worked in the machine shop, and at Norfolk he did a year in the clothing shop before requesting kitchen duty. He soon found himself cooking for almost eight hundred men. Meal preparation was the least-favorite job in the prison because the kitchen was hot as a sauna and the work was so hard, but Smith may have found some solace in it. Each
meal was a massive undertaking under tremendous time pressure, and maybe that was something he could lose himself in. Much of the food was cooked in eighty-gallon steel-jacketed cauldrons that were stirred with wooden blades big enough to paddle canoes. It was brutal work that, if nothing else, might have put some muscle on the skinny Smith.

He must have done well in the general kitchen because after some years he was promoted to the smaller gatehouse kitchen, outside the prison walls. He worked there without supervision—he could have walked away anytime he wanted—and was eventually put in charge of a six-man staff. There was an inmate council at Norfolk made up of elected representatives from each dorm, but Smith saw no reason to involve himself in that. Nor did he play football or basketball or softball or join the debate team. In the 1970s the Harvard debate team took on the Norfolk debate team in the prison auditorium and lost. Semiprofessional sports teams also came to Norfolk to play the inmates and—for the most part—to lose. Smith was a heavy smoker and showed every sign of being deeply depressed, both of which would have kept him off the field, but he certainly would have watched the games. They were exciting, savage events—the football in particular—and even the prison staff found themselves cheering from the sidelines.

 

ONE OF THE
truisms about prison is that every prisoner claims he is innocent; the other is that only the prisoners know which ones really are. The truly innocent are both a kind of prison royalty and uniquely damned, and for one reason or another, Roy Smith joined their ranks. It may have been because word got out that he had refused a plea bargain before his trial. The Middlesex
DA's office had offered Smith a deal in which he would plead guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for a fifteen-year sentence. For a first-time murderer facing the death penalty it would have been a deal worth considering. He didn't. Smith's reputation as innocent could only have been reinforced by his first clemency hearing. Because parole boards generally insist that an inmate express regret for his crime, the hearings present an excruciating choice for the truly innocent. Do you salvage something of your life by mouthing regret for a crime you didn't commit, or do you insist on your innocence and stay in prison until you die? For what it's worth, Smith again refused to admit having anything to do with Bessie Goldberg's murder.

“Roy was extremely polite,” says George Bohlinger, superintendent at Norfolk while Smith was there. “He was not an ass kisser under any circumstances, he was just a gentleman. And you knew it right away. There's probably not a person in that institution that doesn't say, ‘I'm innocent,' or, ‘I committed four murders but I'm in here for one I didn't do.' But I remember Roy telling me he didn't do it, and he was one of the few people—and there
were
some—where you had to think, ‘He didn't do it.'”

When George Bohlinger took over Norfolk in the early 1970s, he was thirty-two years old and the youngest state prison warden in the country. His philosophy about discipline was that he could bring an inmate to his knees faster with a pencil than with a billy club. Bohlinger lived for a while in a room in one of the inmate dorms and walked freely around the quad and would stand and talk to groups of inmates as long as he could keep his back to something. He still cannot be in a group of people without having his back to the wall. At any given time there were a hundred or so unarmed officers at Norfolk supervising about eight hundred inmates. A
hundred men cannot get eight hundred men to do
anything
without their consent, and in a prison as wide open as Norfolk, that required a delicate balance of power.

“You run the prison with the cooperation of the inmates,” says Bohlinger. “The way Norfolk was set up, it was the hardest prison to control inside the walls that I knew of in the country. We were the first operation in the country or the world to follow the UN guidelines for prison reform. We signed it inside the yard at Norfolk.”

For the most part Gill's vision worked, though Bohlinger had constantly to be on guard against scams. Swallowing razor blades wrapped in tin foil was briefly in vogue among inmates, for example, because the razor blades easily showed up on an X-ray and required a trip to Shattuck hospital. On the fifty-minute drive the lucky inmate could feast his eyes on everything—cars, houses, trees, and of course women—that was missing from his life. This was not just an amusing little gambit; one inmate went on to escape from Shattuck by carving a pistol from a bar of soap and coloring it black with shoe polish.

Unlike his life on the outside, Smith left little record of his time at Norfolk because he almost never got into trouble. In 1967 he got into a fight with another inmate over a chair, and in 1971 he was caught smuggling yeast out of the kitchen to use in making home brew, but that was it. (The inmates fermented cafeteria ketchup into a primitive moonshine known as Big Red that tasted like hell but produced the desired effect. Corrections officers could smell it fermenting up in the attics and were constantly rooting around up there trying to find it.) Smith's behavior was so good that his record was described as “nearly flawless” at later clemency hearings. In addition to working in the kitchen, he eventually completed college-level courses in abnormal psychology, biology, cultural
anthropology, and Western civilization. He also helped other inmates study for the high school equivalency diploma. For a black man from Mississippi who quit school in eighth grade, it was an impressive accomplishment. It is possible that at some point during his long incarceration, Roy Smith had the strange thought that he'd made more of himself in prison than he ever had on the outside. This was exactly what Howard Gill had envisioned when he built Norfolk; this was exactly what the Massachusetts Department of Corrections meant when they stated in a report: “If a man is returned to society more embittered, vengeful, demoralized and incapable of social and economic survival than when he first came to prison, then we certainly…have failed to protect society.”

Still, Smith's life was going by, and at times the thought of it left him shaking with rage. While in prison he learned that one of his brothers had died, that Carol Bell had taken his son to live in New Jersey, and finally that she had died as well. Scooter moved in with Carol's parents and eventually stopped communicating with Smith altogether. He was helpless to do anything about any of it. Occasionally he called home to Oxford and talked with his parents, and occasionally he sent them money from his prison jobs. He also tried to maintain a relationship with his sister's son, Coach—named after one of Roy's brothers—but it was almost impossible on the phone. Roy Smith, who had drifted through his life avoiding, or destroying, any kind of domestic attachments, was now in the odd position of trying to reach out to people, and failing.

Several years into his term he started exchanging letters with a woman named Nanette Emmanuel, who wrote him after reading about his case in the
Boston Globe
. Smith's first letters to her talked about prison life and his efforts to get a new trial, but as the years went by, they got angrier and angrier until they were almost
unreadable. He wound up accusing virtually everyone trying to help him on the outside of not doing enough and, ultimately, of sabotaging him. “I ain't seen or heard from Cohen since December 25, 1967,” Smith wrote about his lawyer in the fall of 1968. “I don't know if he's working on my case or not, I can't understand it but I do know it's driving me crazy. Four years waiting on that man, I just get so mad I could scream.” One month later he wrote: “Cohen lie for the fun of it, I don't trust him, I just can't let that man fool me again for a year I couldn't stand it. I'm too depressed. And you were right, Nixon did win and he's another Wallace just as low and dirty. Nixon never did anything for no one, this world are truly a mess.”