The Boston Strangler (49 page)

“Well, when you say you were ready—this word ‘ready'—any way you want to use it, it happened,” De Salvo said, with a hint of annoyance in his voice. “No matter how it happened, it happened.” Then he paused. When he grabbed her, he said, “at the same time the leotards came off and went tight around her neck.”

“This seems a blur in your mind?”

It was, he said. He added, “There is a possibility that a stocking was around her neck.” He remembered that when he was about to leave the apartment—it had all been so fast because of the visitor she expected—he opened the door just as a man was coming down the stairs. He closed the door silently, waited, then opened it, left the building, and drove home to Malden—about forty minutes. Then, “I had supper, washed up, played with the kids until about eight o'clock, put them to bed, sat down and watched TV—it came over about her.”

“Did you get any kick when news of Graff broke?” Bottomly asked, thinking,
I had supper, washed up, played with the kids, watched TV …

DeSalvo said no. “I knew it was me. I didn't want to believe it. It's so difficult to explain to you. I knew it was me who did it, but why I did it and everything else—I don't know why. I was not excited, I didn't think about it; I sat down to dinner and didn't think about it at all.”

He was vague about the date. Bottomly tried to lead him into an association between the date of Joann's death and the assassination of President Kennedy the day before. How had DeSalvo felt when he heard of the President's death?

“I cried,” he said. He was then employed by Highland Contractors, and had been sent with another workman to put in a new retaining wall in a factory near Andover. “I went across the street to the Dairy Maid to get two milkshakes” for himself and his companion “when people started talking about how the President was shot—then, that he was dead. I just stood there and cried.” He stopped for a moment now, thinking hard. “Could the President be killed that day and I went out and still did something? Could I have shot out that way toward Lawrence that day, that afternoon? I heard someone say later it wasn't bad enough the President died but someone had to strangle somebody …” He seemed confused. “To me, I think that day, it could be the Graff girl …” But later he realized that he had attacked her the following day, Saturday, November 23.

“That Graff thing—” Albert DeSalvo stared at the wall. “It was so senseless that it makes sense, y'know?” And again, the refrain: “To me it's so unrealistic as to why these things occur.”

Outside, in the corridor, one heard the footsteps of the keepers making their rounds—powerful, massive men with jangling keys at their belts—and the indistinct sound of hundreds of men shuffling all through the day in the huge wards. Bottomly had seen them—men vacant-eyed, lost in their own world, insane men, each in his faded gray denim shirt and trousers and slippers.

Who was next? Bottomly had asked, and DeSalvo, going through the list of the murdered, snapped his fingers. “That must be the one in Salem—Evelyn Corbett.”

To Bottomly, DeSalvo's repeated failure to get Evelyn Corbin's name right seemed the final indignity. The man had killed her and yet could not fix her name in his mind.

“Yeah,” Albert was saying. In essence he told the same story that had been elicited from him under hypnoanalysis, save that he now went into the actual killing. Twenty minutes before he entered Evelyn's apartment house at 224 Lafayette Street, Salem, that busy Sunday morning, he had walked into a nearby building. “I talked to an old lady on the second floor over a store but I didn't go in—I heard voices from inside, so I took off.”

Then he walked into No. 224. He glanced at the names under the bells, saw a single woman's name, rang her bell. A moment later, the door clicked open, he entered, walked down the hall, and knocked on Evelyn Corbin's door.

“Who is it?” came a woman's voice. “What do you want?”

“I have to do some work in your apartment,” DeSalvo said.

After a moment, the door opened a few inches and Evelyn peered out uncertainly. DeSalvo turned on his most winning smile. “There's water seeping through your windows, and I want to check for stains behind the curtains.”

She let him in, apologizing for her caution. “You don't know who can be knocking on your door these days.” Then she added, in an attempt at lightness, “How do I know you're not the Boston Strangler?”

“Look, if you want me to leave, I'll leave—” DeSalvo said. But he kept talking, “and I won her confidence. She was a small woman, about five feet five—she had a thirty-four-A bust.… I went in with her and she said she didn't have much time, she was getting ready to go to church.” In the bathroom, as she was complaining of the peeling paint, he suddenly put his knife to her: “Be quiet and I won't hurt you.” He ordered her into the bedroom. She began to cry. “I can't do anything—I'm under doctor's orders.”

DeSalvo said, “I was going to do it to her anyway, but she was all in tears; she said she'd do it the other way.” He sat on the edge of her bed, she took a pillow from the bed, put it on the floor next to the bed and kneeled on it, and it was done. “She got up … the next thing I know I had strangled her.” He said it almost wonderingly. She had turned her back to him to replace the pillow, and he grabbed her. He tied her hands in front at the wrists with a pair of her nylon stockings. “I got on top of her, sitting on her hands. I put the pillow on top of her face so I couldn't look at her face … Her chin was partly showing … I strangled her manually.” Silence, for a moment. “She did try to bounce me off. She couldn't do it, and then she didn't breathe anymore. She didn't move anymore.”

“How did you keep her quiet when you tied her hands?”

“She promised not to make a sound. I told her when I left I'd tell someone she was tied up in there. ‘You give me time to go,' I said.” At one point, he thought he took another pair of nylon stockings from a dresser drawer and put them around her neck. “I must have cut her hands loose later—”

He left. No one paid any attention to him.

In the silence, Bottomly said, “You know, there is one you missed.”

DeSalvo looked at him uncertainly. He began muttering the names again. “Brown, Graff … which one … Oh, Jesus!” He remembered who it was. “I don't want to talk about her.” It was Beverly Samans, in Cambridge. She had been killed before Joann Graff and Evelyn Corbin. “I don't want to.” Was it because of the brutality, Bottomly wondered? Beverly had been viciously stabbed, again and again. Death had come from these wounds, not from strangling. Yet DeSalvo had talked about Mary Brown, beaten to death.

“I just don't want to talk about it now,” DeSalvo said stubbornly.

About Mary Sullivan, then? There were left only three—Beverly Samans, Mary Sullivan, and the unidentified eighty-year-old woman DeSalvo said had died of a heart attack in his arms sometime in 1962; and Mary Sullivan was the last one, the most recent one—January 4, 1964.

“I don't want to talk about her, either,” DeSalvo said. Why? “I say to myself it could of been my daughter, too. Mary Sullivan—oh, that bothers me a lot.” Suddenly: “I wish I was dead!”

“Albert, you must talk—”

He nodded, heavily. All right. Mary Sullivan. He knew her apartment at 44A Charles Street so well—“If you want to know, I knew every apartment on Charles Street, I been in them all, in and out, so many times in the last seven years—” It was the same as in Cambridge. New girls moving in every semester, and as the Measuring Man he'd been in every apartment house.

He knocked on Mary's door midafternoon of Saturday, January 4, 1964. Mary opened it. “She had on blue jeans, short ones, with little ragged edges on the border, and a yellow blouse.” She was preparing a meal, he thought, for when she came to the door she had a little knife in her hand, “like you use for peeling potatoes. I said, ‘I came up to do some work in the apartment.' She said, ‘I don't know anything about it. My roommates are out.'” But he could come in and show her what had to be done.

“We went into the kitchen—it looked like she was fixing the shelves there, but I didn't get too good a look at what was in the kitchen because that's where I put the knife to her. ‘Don't scream and I won't hurt you,' I said. I took her into the bedroom. There were two twin beds there with backboards. I brought her first to the bed just next to the parlor door and I tied her wrists with some long dark thing—”

“A necktie?”

“No, a scarf of some kind.” He described what might well have been the red ascot found in the toilet. “I tied her feet, also.” He stopped, and began to mumble. “This is what bothers me—to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it.”

“You've got to talk about it.”

“I know it.” He described how he put a gag in her mouth, then took a mustard-colored sweater and put it over her head. “I did it so she couldn't scream. Then she said, ‘It's hot under this—I can't breathe too well—”

“She talked to you all this time?” Bottomly's voice sounded incredulous. How could she have done this with a gag in her mouth?

“Wait a second,” said DeSalvo, uncertainly. “She did talk to me—I'm trying to get this thing straight.”

“What did she say to you?”

He tried to remember.

“Did she plead with you, ‘Don't hurt me'?” Bottomly asked.

DeSalvo remained silent, thinking. Then, with an embarrassed giggle, speaking as if to himself: “I got to tell him—I got to tell him—” Aloud: “She did talk to me. I put that thing on her face, I covered it, I know she had no gag in her mouth, I just tied her hands in front of her and then while her hands were like this here”—he demonstrated, his wrists crossed on his stomach—“I got on top of her so she could not be in any position, you know, to reach up and scratch me.… I … strangled her.” His voice was dying away, but the last words were clear.

George McGrath, who had been forced to miss several earlier sessions, asked, “While she was lying on her back?”

“Yes.”

“You have the gag in her mouth now?” he pursued.

“No.” The word was hardly said, almost under his breath.

Bottomly: “You just have that thing over her head?”

DeSalvo sighed assent.

“She still has her clothes on?” Yes, he said. “And this is before or after you tied her feet?”

DeSalvo sighed again. “It was after.” Then: “This is what I don't like to talk about.” Silence. “The whole thing was … hands like this here”—again he demonstrated—“crossed, her feet tied right here, at ankles, right about here, her hands were tied here, and I straddled her so that her hands … I was sitting on them, really, because she was really fighting viciously, trying to get up … you know … for life …”

McGrath asked, “When did you get her clothes off, Albert? You strangled her with her clothes still on?” He said yes.

As the questioning by both men proceeded, he grew more nervous, more embarrassed. Finally he burst out, “You know—this is—I hate to confuse you people—this is what I hate to even talk about. This is killing me even to talk to you people. I'd just as soon forget the whole thing.” All this was said jerkily, with nervous giggles. “But listen, here's what it is.” Again he described how he had put her on the bed, placed the sweater over her head; she complained she could not breathe too well. “She was still alive when I had intercourse with her, she was alive, she allowed me to do it to her, y'understand me? I was mixed up at the time, but I did strangle her—with my two hands.”

McGrath: “Face to face?”

DeSalvo demurred. “Well, no—when you say face to face—”

McGrath: “Her face was facing you, but she has the sweater over her head—”

DeSalvo: “—so I couldn't see her—”

McGrath: “—and you strangled her by using your thumbs against her—”

DeSalvo: “—throat.”

McGrath: “—her Adam's apple, right? In the front?”

DeSalvo: “Yes.”

He was sure of it. But he was confused—had he had intercourse with her before or after removing her clothes? He remembered taking her to the other bed, “and I do recall ejaculating over there.”

Bottomly: “A second time?” DeSalvo said yes.

Slowly the full story came out. He tied her up on the first bed, using the ascot to bind her crossed wrists, ripped off most of her clothes, put the sweater over her head, had, intercourse with her with the sweater over her head “so I could not see her face,” strangled her, cut the ascot from her wrists with the paring knife, took the ascot—now in three parts—into the bathroom, flushed it down the toilet, returned to Mary, carried her to the second bed, removed her sweater, placed her on her back, straddled her facing her, masturbated so the semen struck her face, put the nylon stockings and blouse about her neck …

In the silence Bottomly managed to ask: How much time had elapsed? DeSalvo was not sure. “It could have been fifteen minutes, it could have been five.”

“Were you all heated up again?” Bottomly asked.

“I don't think I was ever unheated … It was just that a different person altogether—”

“Was it like Nina Nichols?”

“It was all the same thing, always the same feeling,” DeSalvo said. He spoke with resignation in his voice. “You was there, these things were going on and the feeling after I got out of that apartment was as if it never happened. I got out and downstairs, and you could of said you saw me upstairs and as far as I was concerned, it wasn't me. I can't explain it to you any other way. It's just so unreal … I was there, it was done, and yet if you talked to me an hour later, or half hour later, it didn't mean nothing, it just didn't mean nothing—”