The Boston Strangler (50 page)

Bottomly said, “Mary Sullivan was the last one. It should be the easiest to remember in point of time but it's the hardest to remember because you don't want to remember. Isn't that right, Albert?”

“This could be possible,” he said slowly. “I mean, it's just as if you were coming out of something, you understand me? This is the hardest one for me because—well, I'm realizing that these things are true, and that these things that I did do, that I have read in books about, that other people do, that I didn't think or realize I would ever do these things.”

Where had he read about “these things”? McGrath asked.

In “detective books—I read a lot of sexy stuff.” When? The only time he read the “sexy stuff” was when he was in jail from May 1961 to April 1962.

McGrath, too, in the sessions he had attended, had been time and again affected by a sense of unreality. Here sat DeSalvo, now leaning forward, a hand across his brow, eyes closed, industriously trying to remember—murder. On one occasion he had offered a roll of mints to both men. “Anyone want a peppermint?” he had asked.

For fourteen years McGrath had been Chief Social Investigator for the Shelden and Eleanor Glueck Research Project in Delinquency and Crime, sponsored by the Harvard Law School. In his work then and since he had interviewed virtually thousands of criminals. Albert was atypical in that he never wavered in his story. This was not true of most criminals. Questioned, they were ready to concede this point or that, if only to avoid the stress of insisting on the truth. McGrath thought that DeSalvo talked both freely and convincingly; he was not dominated by Bottomly, he did not fawn, he was not trying to please either man.

McGrath, listening, recalled his first interview with him. It had been in Bridgewater on March 8, two days after he had been appointed his guardian. Joe, Albert's oldest brother, who had been simultaneously named guardian for Albert's estate, was visiting him when McGrath arrived. The three had talked together for several hours.

Joe, short, heavyset, quick-thinking, had said, “Al used to come over to see me. He could never sit still. He always had to be going. I knew he was going off—as far as sex was concerned, I knew his problem because I got it too—we both need a lot. But,” said Joe, “when I learned it got so he was carrying a knife, I knew he needed some kind of help, he was sick, he was dangerous.”

McGrath had come away then with a picture of Albert DeSalvo as a man who required an unusual number of sexual experiences to be satisfied.

Now, Bottomly asked, unexpectedly, “Ever strangle anyone in Germany, Albert?”

DeSalvo shook his head.

“But you had a lot of sex exercise over there?”

DeSalvo said in a matter-of-fact voice, “Anybody did who went to Europe. That was common for any GI … no more than what you can make out with. In Europe there was all you wanted.” Not only German girls—American girls, too.

In 1959 he and Irmgard had returned to Germany for a two-month vacation so that Irmgard could spend some time with her parents. In Germany, he robbed a number of cafes, so he had plenty of money. “I knew where they kept their cash and to me it was nothing—”

“Like taking candy from a baby?” Bottomly suggested wryly.

DeSalvo was not amused. “Irm made it a point while we were there that there'd be no sex, period. So you sure as hell know that I had my sex while I was there.” He had gone about the U.S. Army post exchanges posing as a representative of the
Stars and Stripes
, selecting girls for the Army's “Best Sweetheart of All” contest. The prize was a trip to Italy. There was, of course, no such contest. He would visit the post exchanges between eight and twelve o'clock, when the girls were on duty, take their measurements, and tell them, “A man will come down and take your photograph this afternoon,” adding, “If you really want to make out, I'll come down myself the first thing this afternoon and I'll make sure you get first prize.” He was kept quite busy, he said. While Irmgard stayed with her parents he had driven all over Germany. After he had worked one Army area, he went to another—“I moved right to the Russian border and all the way back.” He was never caught. I was always able to spot anybody spotting me. It always came to me if I was being watched, and then I'd do nothing.” He could not explain how he sensed such things.

Slowly Bottomly brought him back to Mary Sullivan. There was more that had to be told. It was not easy for DeSalvo to tell it. He squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. He struggled for words. It seemed to McGrath, as he listened, that DeSalvo had never really integrated these experiences, these murders, into his consciousness. He had kept them outside himself, and thus had been able to maintain a kind of mental health—had been able to report them as things done by someone whom he recognized was himself yet not done by himself. Now it was torture for him to relive these events: he sank back in his chair, he moved forward, he covered his face with his hands, perspiration broke out on his forehead … How far dare we push him, McGrath thought, before he cracks? Both McGrath and Bottomly realized they must guard against this for then it might never again be possible to interrogate him; yet they must learn as much detail as they could for purposes of verification.

Yes, said DeSalvo, finally. There was something else. He had “done something” with a broom. He did not understand why. “Still, I feel I did not insert it, at least I hope I didn't, to hurt her insides. You might say, ‘What do you mean, hurt her insides? She's dead anyhow.' But it still—it's—it's to me a vicious thing.”

He wore gloves. He went on reluctantly: “After I did everything to her, right, and as I put my gloves on so I'd leave no prints, so when I went by the door I wouldn't touch the door—as I was going out the broom happened to be there and I picked up the broom and did that …” His voice began to tremble. “Mary Sullivan was the last one. I never did it again. I never killed anyone after that. I only tied them up, I didn't hurt them … Once in Cambridge I was in three places in a row after that and I started to cry and I said, ‘I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm here,' and I took off.

“My wife was treating me better, I was building up, you might say, my better self, the better side of me, I was very good at my job, they liked me, I got two raises …”

22

Through the weeks DeSalvo had been telling his story.

Why had he confessed at all? Bottomly asked. And why had he waited so long? Why had he not confessed months before, when he was seized as the Green Man?

“I trust you now,” said DeSalvo, and because he did, he would tell him exactly how it was. He had read the
Record-American
series by the two girls, he had seen the earlier newspaper appeal to the Strangler to turn himself in, but—“I got a wife and children. I didn't understand what was happening to me but I also knew what happens to you if these things are brought out and how you can be put away for the rest of your life.” He had read a statement by Bottomly that the Strangler would be sent to a mental institution if he gave himself up, but he had also read another statement, made by Governor Peabody, who said that though he was against capital punishment he might consider the Boston Strangler “an exception.” So he did nothing.

Yet the need to tell was growing all the time. Once he had been about to confess to a detective lieutenant in Cambridge. “I thought he might want to do right by me but he could be pushed against the wall by a superior, thinking of promotions,” so he decided not to take the risk. “But you, Mr. Bottomly, I saw that nobody's going to push you around, so that's why I'm telling you everything.”

Bottomly nodded noncommittally and DeSalvo began with his arrest in November, 1964. One morning Detective Sergeant Duncan McNeill of Malden telephoned and left word with Irmgard to have him call back when he came home from work. DeSalvo did not know it but his photograph had led police to believe he was the man who had tied up and assaulted the twenty-year-old bride in Cambridge.

He had called back that evening. Sergeant McNeill said, “I'd like to talk to you, DeSalvo.”

“About what?” Albert had asked. “Well, you come down to headquarters tomorrow at East Cambridge and we'll discuss it,” McNeill said. Albert wanted to know again what it was about, and McNeill finally said, “It's about an assault on a woman.”

“When he said that,” DeSalvo said to Bottomly, “I looked at my wife. She was crying, sitting near me and the telephone. I knew she was crying and vomiting all day, ever since the call came that morning. I couldn't see her cry any more. She was crying her eyes out, all red—she said, ‘Al, are you in trouble again?'

“I held my hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Don't you worry,' I said. ‘I'll take care of it.' I remembered Irm standing at the top of the stairs so many times and saying when I came home, ‘Where were you?' and vomiting all day. I knew I couldn't go on any longer. I told the detective, ‘Look, I'm coming down tonight.'

“He says, ‘What do you mean?'

“I says, ‘I'm going to come down now. Tomorrow might be too late. I want to get it all cleared up.' He didn't know what I meant, but I knew. I knew deep down this was the way it must end, I think I knew it from the very beginning. My little girl was getting bigger. I couldn't stand seeing my wife in that state … It just wasn't worth it. These things happened, I knew it, yet I couldn't exactly make myself believe I did it.”

Bottomly asked, “Did you ever think of going to a psychiatrist?”

“I went to one in 1961,” Albert replied. “It was the hardest thing to go look for help. I told him about the drive I had and he told me it's up to me. I couldn't help myself. I was the Measuring Man then. I'd go into apartments day after day. I used to know the police were right there—some of the women complained—three or four patrol cars shooting right by me, looking for me, and yet I still got out of my car and walked right in front of them and did these things, knowing they were there.”

Wasn't he afraid of being caught?

“I didn't think of being caught. As the Measuring Man I wasn't really doing anything wrong. When I started, I went all through Boston, Back Bay, inside and out. I used to go up these streets so many times, I knew every apartment inside out and backwards. I'd walk in, early in the morning, there'd be three or four girls just waking up, half-awake. I'd say, ‘Let's go! Wake up!'” He clapped his hands smartly. “I'll go down and get the doughnuts, I'll be right back, get the coffee on, girls, get the coffee on!' I'd shoot down the street, bring back half a dozen doughnuts. By the time I got back they'd have the coffee going. They'd be jumping around just scanty, or wearing baby dolls—and I was enjoying myself.” He would go from one apartment to another, talk to them about modeling. “One girl would send me to another, I'd start measuring her, playing with her—soon I had her.” Pause. Modestly: “I got a lot free.”

He was then working the three to eleven
P.M.
shift at the American Biltright Rubber Company in Chelsea. When he found himself put on the seven
A.M.
to three
P.M.
shift, he was just as successful in the afternoon. “From work I'd shoot over the Mystic River Bridge, took me into Boston in five minutes. I'm not there more than an hour—I'd shoot right back, so I'm home in Malden by four. All my things were done in a matter of ten or fifteen minutes—bing! bing! All apartments, all young girls. Be there about three ten—work that area in twenty minutes—I'd get a piece right away—be back home by quarter of four sometimes.” Irmgard, he said, was keeping a close watch on him, “so I had to work fast.” If he spent too much time in Boston, he would get caught in the bridge traffic going home—“and I wanted to be home before four or four fifteen, latest.”

He had been speaking animatedly. But now, as though suddenly remembering, his voice dropped. “Still, I could not stop what I was doing. This thing building up in me—all the time—I knew I was getting out of control.”

“Were you ever afraid you'd hurt your wife?” Bottomly asked, thinking of the extraordinary exchange months earlier between DeSalvo and Dr. Bryan, the hypnoanalyst.

“You mean, like strangle her?” If his reference under hypnosis to Irmgard's great fear of being touched about the neck was any key to his motivation, he was not reacting here. He simply shook his head. “In her own way she was hurting me more than anything. If she'd given me the proper sex I wanted, at least treated me like a person and not degraded me all these times, I wouldn't be going out to find out if I was a man or not.” Why had he not taken it out on her? Bottomly asked. Was he afraid he'd lose her?

He nodded. “Even at this moment, I love her more than anything else in this world. I'm willing to do anything to see she's well taken care of. The most important factor—I treated her too good. The worse she treated me, the more I did, the less she respected me. If she only gave me her love … ‘I used my sex to hurt you,' she told me. I couldn't understand why she, who I loved, treated me like dirt. She'd say, ‘Don't go out at night—' For two, three years, I didn't. I stopped bowling. She once said, ‘Don't ever leave me—you're the only one I know in this country.' I did everything for her.” He mused silently, wretchedly.

“In 1955 Judy was born when we were at Fort Dix. My wife called me to her bed. She had what they call natural childbirth. ‘The pain I went through,' she told me. ‘Al, I'll kill myself if I have another baby. Promise me, Al, no more babies.' I promised her. “Six weeks pass and I notice one of Judy's legs is shorter than the other, and her legs wouldn't open. Then we brought a doctor in. He told my wife—she was alone, I wasn't with her, she couldn't understand English too much—he says, ‘Your daughter will never walk again in her life.' You can figure out how my wife felt. They put Judy in a frog-type splint, the doctor says, ‘Take your thumbs, put them between her legs and keep massaging them.' We did this for the first two or three months until my thumbs almost went right through her body. Her skin was so raw. We kept doing this night after night, staying up, changing her diapers … My wife and I worked together.”