The Boston Strangler (54 page)

The social worker who interviewed her noted on his report that husband and wife had been in the courts repeatedly, making charges and countercharges against each other. “It is difficult to discover which parent is at fault.… The various agencies and the courts have had considerable trouble trying to straighten the matter out.… There is little here for the boy—only hardship and a loose-living environment. It might be well, and only fair to the boy, were he placed in a reasonable environment for the time being, or until the parents come to realize that they have responsibility to their children.”

Nothing had been done.

Now, in her home, Mrs. Khouri rose. She walked with her visitor to the door, smiled unseeingly at him, shook hands pleasantly, then closed and bolted the door.

On the second floor of Williams School, a weathered red-brick building at 62 Fifth Street, Chelsea, hurrying students filled the long corridor with their noise and chatter. Classes were changing. On the right wall, opposite the principal's office, hung a large blue-and-green pennant proclaiming the school's motto:
TRUTH
,
HONOR
,
COURAGE
. On the opposite wall, to one side, hung the class photographs of the nineteen-forties. Among the faces of the Class of 1948—142 boys and girls, graduates of the Junior High School—there was the smiling one of Albert DeSalvo, aged sixteen. He was older than the others, having been held back in the earlier grades, but the face was unmistakable, a youthful miniature of his police photograph: the black hair matted, almost like a wig, framing like a heavy black arch the low forehead; the nose, not so formidable but already threatening; the mouth smiling. It was a frank, open face, the smile confident, the eyes shining. Albert wore a light gray suit, a gray tie tied in a generous knot, larger, more rakish, than his fellow students.

There were teachers at Williams who had been there twenty years and more, among them Joseph A. Browne, now principal. Few recalled anything about Albert save his name. To Browne, Albert was one face in a sea of faces. Though all four DeSalvo boys—Joseph, then Albert, then Richard, then Frank, Jr.—had gone to Williams, one DeSalvo merged with the other. They had all been something of a disciplinary problem, but not so much as to stand out. No one really remembered Albert. He had passed through his classes and through his school as unnoticed and unremarked as he had passed through the streets of Boston.

Neither Justice MacLeod nor Principal Browne had in his files a copy of Albert's Army record. He had left their jurisdiction as soon as he could, for he had enlisted on September 16, 1948, three months after graduation from Williams School. He had just turned seventeen. He had been sent overseas with the United States Army of Occupation in January 1949 and assigned to the Military Police. On August 17, 1950—he had been in the service nearly two years-he refused to obey an order, was court-martialed, and fined fifty dollars. But his record from then on was excellent. He was promoted to sergeant, and received other commendations. He entered boxing competitions and emerged the middleweight Army champion in Europe. On December 5, 1953, in Germany, he married Irmgard, who lived with her parents near Frankfurt. He had met her at a dance three years before. In April 1954, he returned with his wife to the United States and was stationed at Fort Dix until February 15, 1956, when he received his honorable discharge.

Aside from his court-martial, only one other black mark was to be found against his name. This was his indictment while stationed at Fort Dix for carnal abuse, the molestation of a nine-year-old girl living in a nearby town.

The date of his alleged offense was Monday, January 3, 1955. A distraught mother had telephoned the police. That afternoon she had been preparing a roast for dinner. It was about two o'clock. She had to hurry out briefly to shop. She left behind nine-year-old Lucy and her two younger children, Billy, eight, and one-year-old Allan, asleep in the bedroom.

When she returned forty-five minutes later, Lucy told her they had had a visitor—a soldier “who said he was here for the rent.” This was puzzling, for the house was their own. Lucy said, “He asked if he could come in, I said yes. He talked to Billy and me, then Billy said, ‘Would you like to see my little brother?'” The soldier smiled and said he would. Billy went into the bedroom, picked up Allan, and carried him proudly into the living room. The man looked at the baby and said how cute he was. Then Billy carried Allan back to his crib. Here Lucy said, “And, Mommy, I don't like that man.” “Why?” asked the mother, still unable to make sense of the incident. “Because he touched me here and here.” Lucy indicated her chest and between her legs. “I said, ‘Stop it,' but he said, ‘I won't hurt you.'” At that point Billy had come back into the room and the man left quickly, “just like someone was chasing him.”

A few hours later New Jersey State Troopers were questioning the children. Did they know what happened to boys and girls who told a lie? The two nodded soberly. Lucy repeated her story. She did not change it.

Was there anything else either could remember about the soldier? Lucy giggled. “He had a Jimmy Durante nose.”

Albert might never have been seized had it not been for a woman living in another town near Fort Dix. One week earlier—Monday, December 28, 1954—Mrs. Alice B. Sloan (which is not her name) was reading in her bungalow about nine in the evening when she heard a knock on her door.

A young man stood there, dark-haired, dark-eyed, wearing a sport jacket and blue slacks. He doffed his hat. “Ma'am, did you see a prowler looking through your window?”

No, she said with some alarm. There had been reports of a prowler in the neighborhood some time before.

“Is your husband home so he can look for him?” her visitor asked. When she shook her head no, he went on, “Well, do you mind if I look around?”

“Please do, I'd appreciate it,” she said nervously. The fact was that she was separated from her husband, awaiting a divorce, and she and her three small children, asleep in the rear, were alone in the house.

The man vanished. A few minutes later he was back at her door. “No—don't see him anywhere now. He was a tall fellow in a dark suit.”

How had he happened to catch sight of him? she asked.

“I've been driving around the neighborhood looking for a house to rent,” he said. His name was Johnson, he added, and continued pleasantly, “When will your husband be home? I'll come back with my wife.”

Mrs. Sloan suddenly became suspicious.

He said, “Would you like to have my flashlight?”

“No, thank you,” she said, and hurriedly closed and bolted the door. She watched from a window as he walked down the path from her bungalow and got into his car. He sat there for nearly ten minutes before driving away. Then, after another ten minutes, she saw the car return and park, and the same man, sitting at the wheel, flash his light from his car now on this bungalow, now on that. Frightened, she awakened and dressed her children and hurried with them out a back door to stay with a neighbor. She had jotted down his license number and she called the police the next morning.

The license was traced to Sergeant Albert DeSalvo, United States Army, stationed at Fort Dix. Wrightstown State Police questioned him. He had done no harm, he protested; he had seen a prowler and simply wanted to help—he had been looking for a place to rent for his wife and himself. He was permitted to go. On the following Monday came the report of Lucy's molestation by a man with a Jimmy Durante nose. Though a soldier was involved in one and a man in civilian clothes in the other, the police acted on a hunch and brought DeSalvo before Lucy and her brother. The two children immediately identified him. Albert was not flustered. Yes, he had been in their house, he said easily—he'd been looking in that area, too, for a place to rent. The children had misunderstood him to say that he had come to collect the rent. He vehemently denied Lucy's story. He had touched her on the shoulder—as one patted a little girl—but that was all.

Would he demonstrate exactly how he had touched her on the shoulder?

He refused. And on the advice of counsel, he would say no more.

Next day, January 4, 1955, he appeared in court, was released on $1,000 bail, and was subsequently indicted on a charge of Carnal Abuse by the Burlington County, New Jersey, Grand Jury. But Lucy's mother, fearful of publicity, refused to press the complaint. County Judge Cafiero ruled that all proceedings against DeSalvo “be altogether and forever stayed.” The charge was nol-prossed. Accordingly, the Army took no action in the matter.

Irmgard was then pregnant with Judy, who was born at Fort Dix a few months later. Early in 1956 Albert returned to civilian life, moving with his wife and child to Chelsea. Then came St. Valentine's Day, 1958, when Albert broke into a house and stole a few dollars to buy a valentine for Irmgard and a box of candy for Judy.

Reading over the record, something about the date Albert first appeared in court in New Jersey—January 4, 1955—would strike an echo. On January 4, 1964—nine years to the day later—Albert DeSalvo would strangle nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan.

24

On September 29, 1965, the extraordinary recital made by Albert DeSalvo came to an end. In order to convince completely the Attorney General's office that he was who he claimed to be—the Boston Strangler, the murderer of thirteen women—he would now have to force himself to describe in detail the deaths of the two victims he had repeatedly avoided discussing: the woman, about eighty, who he said died in his arms of a heart attack, and Beverly Samans.

Tuney and DiNatale, checking the death reports of aged women, had come upon a Mary Mullen, eighty-five, found dead on her sofa in her apartment on June 28, 1962. Her death, which had occurred two or three days before, had been listed as caused by heart failure. She lived alone at 1435 Commonwealth Avenue, not far from Anna Slesers, who had been strangled less than two weeks earlier.

Bottomly had brought with him at this, their last session, a number of police photographs of apartment interiors. Yes, said DeSalvo, he recognized one as the old lady's apartment—he recalled the black rocking chair, and under it, articles from her purse. “See, there's the key from her safe-deposit box—I remember dumping everything out of the purse, and that was there.”

A moment before he saw the photographs, he had drawn his wavering line sketch of the apartment. Sketch and photograph complemented each other.

“I walked up to the second floor of this building, and I knocked on the door of the corner apartment. This old lady opens it—I said, ‘I got to do some work in the apartment.' We went in together and sat down; I was in an armchair, she in a rocking chair. I—well, I—” He stopped, as if he had difficulty with his words.

“Does this bother you more than the others?” Bottomly asked.

“It all bothers me,” DeSalvo said suddenly, passionately. Since the confessional mood he had struck in his last session, he spoke with much more emotion. “It's like a double nightmare, going back. She looked like my grandmother, my mother's mother … Last time I saw her was in Danvers,
*
when I came back from Germany. I went to see her with my mother. She was out of her mind, just talking …” His voice rose. “It does something to you, remembering how she used to make apple pies for me, she used to care for me when I was small, when my father wasn't living with us. She reminded me … She died in my arms, this woman—” He stopped. “Man, this is too much! I'm getting sick of it, talking about it—” He seemed on the edge of tears.

Bottomly said, “We're almost through now, Albert—”

“She got up from the rocker, turned around—she was talking nice—and I don't know what happened. All I know is my arm went around her neck. I didn't even squeeze her … and she went straight down. I tried to hold her; I didn't want her to fall on the floor.…” He said, slowly, despairingly, “It's not a dream anymore—it's true—
all these things happened!
”

Suddenly he buried his face in his hands and began to sob, unable to catch his breath. It was the first time he had broken down in the long interrogation that had now lasted several weeks. Bottomly sat quietly, watching DeSalvo, who was crying, his head cradled in his arms on the table. “I didn't mean to hurt nobody,” he said brokenly, again and again. “I didn't mean to hurt nobody.” Then for a moment he was silent save for his sobs.

In this silence, incredibly, music began to sound. Someone had turned on a radio in an adjoining ward, and the strains of a sentimental melody, plucked on a guitar, came filtering tinnily through to this room in which Bottomly and DeSalvo sat. The music sounded like an insane obligato playing counterpoint to his sobs—as though it all were a Tennessee Williams play, with the music far off-stage, and DeSalvo's broken words, “I didn't mean to hurt nobody, I never wanted to hurt nobody. They all think it's a big joke, they think, ‘Oh, he's trying to make money on this'—I don't want a God damn dime!” He sputtered through his tears. “I got feelings as well as anybody else. It's too much! These people … I stay awake, I wonder, my grandmother, my daughter … These things did happen. Why? Why? Why does it have to be me?”

Bottomly said, “You've come a long way, Albert. You couldn't even talk about this before.”

“I have a daughter, and I have a son and a wife, but when my children grow older, I want them to get an understanding of me …” He blew his nose. “I never really wanted to hurt anybody. Why didn't I do this before, and why didn't I do it after? I had these other ones the same way, the ones that followed these, and I didn't do anything more to them. What drove me to do these? There's got to be a reason. I don't think you're born like this. Why did I start? Why did I stop?”

It was not so much the shame of what people might be saying, he said, trying to control himself. It was his children. “I don't want Judy and Michael to live as I did with no father, which I know they must because they're separated from me, but I left them with love, not like my father left us. I never beat them. I just feel these things should never have happened. I want them to find out why I did these things so my name will be cleared for my children.”