The Boston Strangler (47 page)

“She was a strong girl. How come she went out so fast? Were you surprised? Did you expect it?”

DeSalvo shook his head. “I didn't expect anything,” he said dully. Whatever happened, happened.

After a moment he said, “She was doing some writing—studying or writing—on the coffee table. Afterwards I looked through some magazines there.”

“Were you taking your time?”

“I don't know how to answer you—” He searched for words. “You might say I seemed calm, but if you were there to see it, when this happened … There was no need for it to happen.”

“No need to kill her?”

“No,” said DeSalvo.

“You could have had her?”

“It wasn't the reason for having her. This is where the whole thing is messed up. There was no reason to be there, period. There was no reason for her to die. Nothing was taken away from her, no money, no nothing. How can I explain it to you? I'd sit there, looking to find something, looking through photographs like I was looking for someone … It didn't take no more than five, ten minutes. This is what I feel. It could have been half an hour, but it seemed like five or ten minutes.”

“When you left the building did you feel any remorse?”

Again DeSalvo shook his head. “All I can tell you is, it's like
What am I doing here? I got to get away
. I never ran when I left a building. Even when I saw people I nodded to them very politely. I never met anyone when I walked out. I was just plain lucky.”

But he took care: “When I came across a person I never let him get to see me and I don't get to look at him too fast. I don't duck, but I put my hand up to my face, I never let them see me directly.”

Little more than three weeks later, at 515 Park Drive, on a Sunday morning, Patricia Bissette. It was December 30.

“I knew this apartment,” he said. He had been in it “at least four or five times before” when other girls lived there. “I used to work this area regularly,” taking advantage of the fact that new girls moved in with each change of semester.

He had parked his car on Beacon Street, across the street from a laundromat, and it was around 8
A.M.
that Sunday morning when he found himself in front of Pat's door. He had no idea who lived there now. Expecting no one home on a holiday weekend, he slipped the lock; when he pulled open the door, he said, he heard the jingle of bells. Pat had hung a miniature Christmas log with five tiny sleigh bells on the back of her door. “I was so quiet opening it—but the bells woke her up.” She stood in the doorway of her bedroom, a blanket held to her, peering out at him. “Who are you? What do you want?” she demanded. “I gave her fast talk, I said I was one of the fellows living upstairs and where was her girl friend?—there were three names on the door, and I named one of them—

“She said everyone'd gone out of town, but she stayed home because she had to be at work Monday morning. We started talking.” She assumed he did live upstairs and knew mutual friends, and said, “Wait a minute—I'll put some coffee on.” Albert said, “Okay—want me to go out and get some doughnuts?” Oh, no, she said. He closed the door with its tinkling bells, they went into the kitchen, she brought out “two pear-shaped cups,” set a kettle of water on the gas range, and made instant coffee for them both.

“We sat in the kitchen for a few minutes. Then we moved to the living room.” He was too nervous to drink his coffee—he had never liked coffee anyway—so he sipped it very slowly. When they left the kitchen he took his cup into the living room, making sure he left no fingerprints on it. Patricia sat on a chair to the left of the Christmas tree; he on a couch on the other side of the room.

“She put a record, I think it was a Christmas song of some kind, on her record player—it was blue and white—and we listened. But I was looking at her and getting worked up. I went over to her, I was on my knees …” He stopped, but did not explain further. “She said, ‘Take it easy.' I said, ‘Nobody's here, nobody can hear you. I can do what I want to you—'”

At this Patricia grew angry. “‘If that's the way you're going to talk, you'd better go right now—'” She rose and turned her back to him. “Next thing, before she knew it, I had my arm around her neck, she fell back on top of me, and she passed out.” She had put on a robe; under it she was wearing “very sexy leopardlike pajamas. I ripped them off—I don't know exactly, but I did reveal her busts. I picked her up. I remember seeing her on the floor stripped naked. I took her into the left bed because the other one had Christmas packages on it. I had intercourse with her …”

The easy flow of words began to halt. “I don't know,” DeSalvo began vaguely, “if I did this—well, for a sex act, or hatred, or for what reason.” Obviously he had read various explanations for the Strangler's behavior. “I think I did this not as a sex act,” he repeated, “but out of hate for her—not her in particular, but for a woman. After seeing her body, naturally the sex act came in.” He sighed. It was hard to explain, but he did not enjoy his “sex relations” with her … “There was no thrill at all.”

“What did you strangle her with?”

“Some gloves were hanging up there—nylon stockings … At the end, I covered her up.”

“Why did you cover her up, Albert?” Bottomly asked. He had been reluctant in the earlier sessions to press DeSalvo as to motivation, lest it inhibit him from telling his story. But now, as DeSalvo felt increasingly at ease with him, Bottomly began to venture into areas that he knew must ultimately be probed by the psychiatrists.

DeSalvo searched for words. “She was so different … I didn't want to see her like that, naked and …” He was silent. “She talked to me like a man, she treated me like a man—I remember I covered her up all the way. She was still breathing, her face was swelling up, I put the blouse and stocking around her neck, her face still kept getting bigger.… Whew!” After a moment: “That Sunday morning we had coffee. I don't know why I did it. She did me no harm—and yet I did it. Do you follow me? Why did I do it to her? Why did I do it?”

Bottomly said softly, “She must have got to you.”

DeSalvo continued in the same wondering voice: “We talked for about an hour. I asked if she was married or going steady. She said, ‘No, I'm not, but I do have friends.' I asked, ‘Do you have a car?' and she said, ‘No, but somebody picks me up …'” His voice trailed off.

How had he been able to get out of his house so early on a Sunday morning? What did he tell Irmgard?

“What
did
I tell her?” DeSalvo asked himself, aloud. “Did I tell her I was going fishing? No …” Then: “That's it! I know.” He was employed at the time by Russell Blomerth's construction firm as a maintenance man, and it was his job to keep kerosene heaters burning over the weekend at construction sites so that newly poured cement would not freeze and crack. “I volunteered to go down and keep them lit—this was in Belmont. I'd go out early Sunday to Belmont, get the burners going, then shoot into Boston. I came to this building … it all happened before eight
A.M.
I was home before nine
A.M.
” Then again, as if to himself: “Why did I do it to her? She treated me like a man.” He looked up, his eyes met Bottomly's; he seemed on the verge of tears, but he controlled himself and was returned quietly to his cell.

On their way back to Boston Bottomly, Tuney, and DiNatale were silent for some time. How relentlessly the conviction was growing that DeSalvo was indeed the Strangler! Ida Irga, Sophie Clark, Patricia Bissette. Ida Irga's bureau drawers
had
been empty. Her son had told the police this fact; it had not been published anywhere. DeSalvo said he had gagged Sophie Clark with her underpants. Every published report had stated that a handkerchief had been used. This had been taken from the original police report, but the report had been wrong; DeSalvo had not been wrong.

Yet if he had entered Mrs. Lulka's apartment, and had spoken with her, why had she not identified him? That could be attributed to human error. Detectives knew by experience how uncertain identification is: experiments had been carried out in which one man, brandishing a gun, pursued a second through a huge room while fifty detectives watched. Interrogation of the observers only moments later showed an astonishing variance: the tall pursuer was described as short, the man without a gun was seen to have a gun … Through fear, apprehension, whatever, Mrs. Lulka could have carried away from her encounter with Albert DeSalvo the impression of a man who looked nothing like him.

DeSalvo had said he drove to Patricia Bissette's apartment direct from Belmont where he had been tending kerosene heaters. Tuney spoke aloud: “That explains the soot.” Traces of soot had been found on Patricia's ligatures by police chemists. At the time this seemed to implicate the janitor of Patricia's building, and the man had gone through a grueling examination, complete to lie-detector tests. Where else, police had thought, could the soot have come from save from the hands or clothes of a janitor busy with a furnace that cold December day?

In Patricia's kitchen a coffee cup in its saucer had been found at one end of the table; opposite it, only a saucer. A man, taking his coffee into another room, is likely to take his cup only. Women, less careless, more conscious of moisture stains on furniture, will take cup and saucer.

And a cup, still with coffee in it, had been found in the living room, its handle facing left. Albert DeSalvo was left-handed.

How could it not have been DeSalvo for these three victims, too?

Phil DiNatale snorted. “I told you!” he exclaimed. “I said he'd be sitting somewhere, laughing at us all the time—”

On June 26, 1965, a jury found George Nassar guilty of murder in the first degree in the shooting of Irvin Hilton, the Texaco station owner, the previous September. There was no recommendation of mercy. Nassar's attorney, F. Lee Bailey, having taken nearly one hundred exceptions to the court's ruling, announced he would appeal the verdict. Nassar was placed in a cell in death row at Walpole State Prison.

But by this time, to those reading the news in the Attorney General's office, Nassar as a suspect in the stranglings had dwindled to a smaller and smaller size.

DeSalvo loomed larger and larger.

*
Hurkos, it will be remembered, also said the Strangler would have a scar on his left arm from an injury, and would have worked with diesel engines—both true of Albert DeSalvo.

*
The superintendent was Mr. Bruce. It was possible, thought Bottomly, that DeSalvo heard it as “Burke.”

21

Slowly through the summer and early autumn of 1965 the sessions between Assistant Attorney General John Bottomly and Albert DeSalvo continued. The two men, although separated from birth by less than ten years and the width of a city, were by nature and background worlds apart. Bottomly was the result of everything our society has to offer a fortunate and gifted man; DeSalvo, the reject and misfit, the juvenile delinquent, the child molester, the housebreaker, rapist, and possible murderer, was the result of the failure of the same society.

The two men met in secrecy. Once every week or so Tuney and DiNatale drove Bottomly to Bridgewater, where he vanished into a room with his tape recorder and awaited DeSalvo; McGrath would join them; the three sat down; the incredible story unfolded, growing more bizarre as it continued. In an anteroom, waiting restlessly, Tuney and DiNatale sat, talked, smoked, played gin, studied maps of the city, consulted with Bottomly as he emerged to check a fact, to formulate a question. When the sessions were over, transcripts were made and the two detectives studied them in detail with Lieutenants Donovan and Sherry in Boston, and with their colleagues familiar with the stranglings in Cambridge, Lynn, Salem, and Lawrence.

Sometimes Bottomly felt himself a participant in an unbearably tragic drama. Only the man before him knew the last hours of these women; only he knew the last words they uttered, the way their lives ended. And only now were these victims, whom Bottomly had studied and knew so well, really coming alive for him—this, in the final hours of their lives. Sometimes as DeSalvo revealed new facets of himself, Bottomly felt himself a participant in a grotesque masquerade, a mad parody of an inquisition. Surely it could not be real, this conversation, the words he heard, DeSalvo suddenly giggling, conspiratorial—

“This is going to be comical,” he was saying. “We're all at a New Year's Eve party, the family, see? Well, I find out one of my sisters is taking judo to protect herself—against the Strangler! She and her friends, they all get together and they're taking lessons at a gym. I says, ‘Sure you can handle the Strangler if you get him?' She says, ‘Oh, I'm pretty well prepared for him.' I says, ‘What would you do if he got you in this hold?' And before she knew it I had her in that hold. She couldn't do nothing. She says, ‘Well, I'm learning.'”

He looked up with his boyish grin. “Her husband has eleven sisters, all beautiful—fabulous! I tried to make all eleven of them.”

He began to chuckle. “One of them says to me one day, ‘You know what I think you are? I wouldn't be surprised if you ain't the Boston Strangler. The way we remember you as the Measuring Man, and how fast and sharp you were with all those women, and now this guy is operating the same way … Bah, it can't be you!'” Hugely delighted, he mimicked her.

Or, commiserating with Bottomly because the police had never been able to catch him. “I never knew where I was going, I never knew what I was doing—that's why you never nailed me, because you never knew where I was going to strike and I didn't either. So we were both baffled. You didn't know and how did I know? I didn't know so how could you know?”

Or, in a sudden change of aspect, he spoke as if he were the impersonal tool of fate. He told of Gertrude Gruen, the German waitress who escaped him: