Search for the Strangler (24 page)

Now, suppose the fiercely jealous Moss suspected that Delmore was having an affair with this soldier. He needs proof. He steals
the apartment key, and when he enters to find those letters, Moss doesn’t know that Mary is there, moving things into the
apartment. Mary sees him, and he snaps; he loses control, ripping her sweater off and strangling her. This becomes a murder
of passion. He sees her naked body and becomes aroused. His sexual frustration is unleashed and he ejaculates on her body.
He stands there exhausted, trying to collect his thoughts. Now he’s got a dead woman on his hands. He decorates the crime
scene, grabbing the broom and the Happy New Year card. He wants the police to believe the murder was the act of the Boston
Strangler.

Over the next several weeks, the caller from New Hampshire would check in and recount his conversations with Moss. “He’s scared
shitless,” he told me. “He knows what’s goin’ on down there.” At one point, the caller asked Moss point-blank whether he had
killed Mary. Moss did not say yes or no; instead, he stared off into space and said, “I was nineteen. I was nineteen. Why
is this all coming back to me now?” The caller then asked him, “What are you worried about? You didn’t kill her. It’s not
your DNA, right?” Moss replied, “They’ll sabotage it. That’s how my DNA will show up on her body.” The caller was even more
convinced now that his colleague was guilty of murder.

When the caller broached the possibility of DNA testing, I made my move. “Can you get me Moss’s DNA? Can you send me a glass
he drank from or, better yet, some strands of hair?” He wasn’t sure. “I felt it was my duty to tell you what’s going on,”
he said. “I don’t know about stealing the guy’s DNA.”

“Look, there’s strong reason to believe he killed my aunt. But we can’t bring him to justice if we don’t have solid proof.
His DNA would provide that proof,” I pleaded. After more coaxing, he finally agreed. I passed on some tips Jim Starrs had
given me about the handling of DNA evidence. “Place the evidence in a paper bag, not a plastic one,” I said. “Condensation
that builds up in a plastic bag could contaminate the evidence.”

“I’ll try, but the guy’s meticulous. When he has a drink, he washes the glass out, like, two seconds later. The same thing
with food. He usually eats everything in front of him, but when he doesn’t, he sticks the leftovers in the bottom of the trash
bag and takes the trash out.”

I told the caller to do his best. “Wait for the opportunity; don’t try to force anything,” I advised.

The caller’s opportunity came quickly. He found a beer glass Moss had been drinking from, wrapped it in a brown paper bag,
and sent it off to Professor Starrs.

Two weeks later, Starrs called me in the newsroom with the results. “I’m truly sorry, but there’s about twenty different DNA
profiles on this beer mug. It’s got to be the dirtiest glass I’ve ever seen,” he chuckled. “Ask your man in New Hampshire
to get me a hair sample. And tell him to get a new dishwasher for the bar.”

While the caller was waiting for another opportunity to get a sample of Moss’s DNA for testing, I set out to find Mary’s roommates.
Pat Delmore and Pam Parker had never shared their story with anyone. Both women were from Massachusetts, but they seemed to
have vanished after Mary’s murder. I sought help from my colleagues on the WBZ I-Team, giving them the names of Mary’s roommates
as well as the name of Nathan Ward, Mary’s former boyfriend. I didn’t think he had killed Mary, but it seemed worth talking
with him. Their volatile relationship still disturbed me, although the evidence against Moss and his recent behavior made
him a much stronger suspect in my eyes.

The I-Team found out that Nathan Ward had died of a heart attack in the Seattle area in the early 1990s. They also tracked
down a Patricia Delmore who was living in Florida. When I called the Florida number, the man who answered told me I had the
right Pat Delmore but the wrong state. She now was living in California. I located a number for Delmore in Santa Barbara.
When I got her on the phone, she told me she was paying close attention to our reinvestigation. She said, “For years, I thought
it was Albert DeSalvo, but you’ve certainly made me rethink that. Poor Mary, it was such a horrible time. It was something
I couldn’t talk about for years. She was such a sweet girl. I had met her in the Filene’s cafeteria. She had a sad look on
her face. When I asked her what was wrong, Mary told me that she needed a place to stay in Boston or she’d have to move back
home to Cape Cod. Of course, I told her she could stay with Pam and me. It would be crowded, but it would be fun. I now wish
that Mary had said no. We never went back to that apartment. This has affected me for years. I have a daughter, and when she
told me that she was moving in with two girls, I almost cried, I was so scared about what could happen to her.”

Pat Delmore had a lot to get off her chest, so I just let her talk. But eventually I turned the conversation toward Preston
Moss. “What was he like?” I asked.

“He was a very sharp dresser and acted like a perfect gentleman with me. My sister, however, thought he was kind of strange.”

I asked Pat if Moss could have been capable of murder. “Oh, God, I hope not,” she replied.

Delmore also told me she had not spoken to Pam Parker in ten years, and I was having no luck finding her on my own, but around
that time, I did locate a relative of another strangler victim. Major Tim Palmbach of the Connecticut State Police, a Starrs
team member, gave a speech on forensic science in New Haven during which he mentioned the Mary Sullivan case. Palmbach had
attended Mary’s exhumation and had worked with the famed forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee on some of the tissue samples. Following
the speech, an African American man in his mid-sixties approached Palmbach. “Is it true?” he asked. “Can you find the man
who really murdered Mary Sullivan?” Palmbach said it was a distinct possibility. The man began weeping. “Sophie Clark was
my cousin,” he told Palmbach. “She, too, was killed in the Boston Strangler case, and our family never believed it was Albert
DeSalvo.”

Palmbach put me in touch with the man. “I was Sophie’s only relative living in Boston,” he told me. “I promised her parents
that I would look out for her. It was me who had to identify her body and bring her back to New Jersey for burial.”

“I’ll help you find her killer if you come forward and help us,” I pledged.

Sophie Clark’s cousin was in a difficult position, as it turned out. He knew that authorities had lied by claiming DeSalvo
was the Boston Strangler, but he was now a member of the law enforcement establishment himself. “Sophie’s family to me, but
so are my brother cops. I just can’t go public right now,” he said. “I will say good luck and I’ll be watching.”

So here was another relative telling me how much he appreciated our work but that he wanted no part of it. Who could blame
him? And if relatives of the victims were reluctant to join me, I doubted that family members of those who had perpetrated
the great charade of a guilty DeSalvo would be willing to help, either. Still, I had to push on. Reading over John Bottomly’s
obituary, I noticed he had moved his family out west after his legal career had ended in scandal in Massachusetts. I knew
that DeSalvo’s original confession tapes had never been turned over to the state. Did his children have the tapes? What else
might they have? If there was a deal to deliver DeSalvo to the public as the Boston Strangler, perhaps Bottomly had kept a
record of it. I tracked down a Utah telephone number for his daughter, Holly Bottomly. I called her and explained our battle
against the Massachusetts attorney general’s office. At first, she sounded unfriendly, probably offended at the idea that
her father had not caught the Boston Strangler. I could see I was using the wrong approach. Quickly switching gears, I said,
“Holly, your dad may have been an honest man, but he was duped by those around him who looked to profit off the case. Do you
think your father would not like to finally set things straight?” Of course, I said this believing that her father was one
of the masterminds behind DeSalvo’s false confession.

Bottomly broke down on the phone. She told me the family had kept all of her father’s documents from the Boston Strangler
case. “What about the confession tapes?” I asked. “We have everything!” she replied. We continued to talk over the next several
days. We were getting along so well that I figured it was only a matter of time before I booked a flight to Salt Lake City
to retrieve the evidence. But then our conversations took a different turn. She began to ask for money. Money for her mother,
money for her, and money for the other Bottomly children. With a new baby, I couldn’t afford to pay the Bottomly family, but
Elaine and Dan Sharp offered to buy everything the family had kept from their father’s past. A deal was about to be made when
suddenly Holly Bottomly no longer wanted money or anything to do with our case. “I’ve been told not to cooperate with you,”
she said. She wouldn’t give us a name but said that a friend of her father’s had demanded that she stay away from us. What
forces were working behind the scenes to keep us from the truth?

In July 2001, Reilly publicly challenged our motive for getting involved in the case and our commitment to it, telling reporters
that Richard DeSalvo had refused to give a sample of his DNA to be used in the attorney general’s investigation. What Reilly
didn’t tell the media was that DeSalvo had offered his blood to the state many times over the preceding two years on the condition
that independent scientists test the evidence. Richard did not trust the government, and after reading Gerry Leone’s affidavit,
I could hardly blame him.

News of Reilly’s latest chess move infuriated Elaine Sharp. “Why do you have to rule out a dead guy in order to go after a
living suspect?” she asked reporters. Sharp was referring to my previous statements to the press about a suspect in Mary’s
murder, whom I did not name, living in northern New England. “Fine. They want Richard’s DNA, we’ll give it to them. In public!”
she swore.

This set the stage for a public bloodletting. Elaine Sharp called in a physician friend of hers to take DeSalvo’s blood and
saliva before the cameras on July 18, 2001. At first, I opposed the idea of a staged event, and Richard appeared embarrassed
by it. “It doesn’t matter what the press writes,” Elaine promised. “People will see Richard giving his DNA, and that will
put the ball back squarely in Reilly’s court.” Reporters from all the local television stations and newspapers came to cover
the event. The cameras clicked away as Dr. Stephen Miller pricked Richard’s finger and ran a cotton swab along the roof of
his mouth. I could sense the disdain coming from members of the media. We had worked very hard to get the public on our side,
and I hoped we were doing the right thing. A stoic figure in short sleeves, Richard turned in the direction of the gang of
reporters, but he could not see them. Blindness had robbed Richard of his eyesight, but it did not rob him of his pride. He
looked uneasy and I could tell he hated every minute in the spotlight. “I honestly swear on a stack of Bibles that Al wasn’t
the Boston Strangler,” he told reporters. “If I ever thought he even killed one, I wouldn’t be sitting here today.”

As our media event made clear, we were fully ready to swap evidence, but the attorney general wasn’t. Tom Reilly’s office
released a statement that day saying, “It is critical that it [the investigation] be conducted impartially and that the integrity
of the evidence be preserved.”

Most press reports treated the exercise fairly, but Reilly had his supporters, especially the
Boston Globe
columnist Brian McGrory. McGrory had been given a major scoop when Reilly told him and only him that his office had reopened
Mary’s murder case. This was payback time. In a column titled “Not the Way to Help Out,” McGrory wrote, “Enough already. That
stunt pulled by Richard DeSalvo last week when he called a news conference and sought to barter his freshly drawn blood to
the state Attorney General was at once shameless and shameful. . . . What Reilly seems to want is a by-the-books investigation,
and so far, so good. What Sherman and DeSalvo seem to want is a circus, with hokey press conferences and televised exhumations.”
What McGrory didn’t mention was that the state could afford to fight our lawsuit and bury us under a blizzard of paperwork.
If we as families couldn’t get authorities to do their jobs, at least we could utilize our biggest strength, media coverage,
to change public opinion.

But not everyone on our side agreed with this assessment. For the first time, my mother voiced her strong disapproval about
the direction in which the case was heading. “Mary was a dignified girl,” she told me. “These public displays only make a
mockery of her life—and her death. Show the world the real evidence, Case; you don’t have to resort to this.” It had been
nearly a year since Mary’s exhumation, and we still had no idea about the results of the forensic work being conducted by
Jim Starrs and his team. Sharp had flown down to Washington on several occasions to see if Starrs had found any trace of Mary’s
killer on her remains, but the professor told her his team was still months away from releasing its findings. I worried that
Starrs was merely putting off the bad news that the forensic investigation had been a colossal waste of time.

I began having doubts about Starrs’s work at the same time that Richard DeSalvo was making the painful decision to have his
brother’s body exhumed. Richard held out hope that if Starrs had found evidence of Mary’s killer on her body, it would be
possible to find evidence of Albert’s killer on his remains. The attack on Albert DeSalvo had been carried out at close quarters,
so it was conceivable that the murderer’s blood, hair, or saliva had passed onto the victim’s skin.

In October 2001, a full year after Mary’s exhumation, Starrs’s team and members of the DeSalvo family gathered at Puritan
Lawn Cemetery in Peabody to watch as Albert’s casket was hoisted out of the dirt. The team worked fast, and the exhumation
took less than an hour. Starrs did not inspect the remains at the grave site; instead, DeSalvo’s casket was placed in the
back of a hearse and driven to a laboratory in York, Pennsylvania.