The Boston Stranglers (12 page)

Bailey asked another lawyer to assist him in addressing the questions the Bar Association's grievance committee had raised about his conduct. That lawyer was Joseph Balliro, counsel for the Cambridge corporation producing “Strangler in the Night.”

Bailey and Balliro met with the grievance committee, and, Bailey writes, it accepted his explanation of “the matters of concern.” He received his certificate of good standing.

But documents on file in the Massachusetts State Record Office clearly suggest that the Boston Bar Association had in mind issues somewhat weightier than book contracts and guest shots on late-night talk shows.

On March 15, Hiller Zobel, then an attorney with the firm of Bingham, Dana and Gould and now a superior court justice, had the following letter hand-delivered to Attorney General Elliot Richardson:

At the bottom of the page is this handwritten note: “I talked with Zobel on 3/15/67. He is particularly interested in the actions of Sandra Irizarry and Lt. Tuney [former Strangler Bureau members], who went to work for Bailey. HFT [Herbert F. Travers, Jr.].”

On April 24, Zobel requested access to the attorney general's files on the strangling murders, in particular a long memo dated February 2, 1967, and written to Travers, head of the Criminal Division of the attorney general's office, by Tuney, Irizarry, and Phillip DiNatale. This document furnished a history of the Task Force and an account of how Gerold Frank had been permitted access to the volumes of material it had gathered on the homicides. It also mentioned that the Task Force personnel had objected vehemently to Frank's constant presence in the Bureau offices while he was doing the research for the book that would become
The Boston Strangler,
which they felt inhibited their discussions on how to proceed with their investigations of the murders. In late April of 1964 Bottomly had, however, ordered them to cooperate fully with Frank and permit him to read and make notes on even the most top secret police files.

Travers passed Zobel's request for a copy of this memo on to Richardson, who replied:

The reason Richardson was loath to surrender the Strangler files to an outsider was simply that while the Bar was investigating Bailey, Donald Conn was investigating the possibility of prosecuting Albert for at least some of the stranglings.

To this end, sometime around May 8, a new subdepartment was created in the Office of the Attorney General. It was called the Trial Section of the Criminal Division; in reality, it was simply the old Strangler Bureau under a new name. It would be headed by Conn and staffed by Detective Lieutenant John Butler and Corporal Paul O'Brien of the Massachusetts State Police and Phillip DiNatale, the lone holdover from the original Task Force.

The new bureau was formed just after Richardson and Conn met with Bailey—a meeting at which Bailey said that he'd be willing to have DeSalvo questioned about his role in the Strangler murders provided certain conditions were met. These were that Albert be examined by two qualified psychiatrists about his competence to make a voluntary confession; that he be given a lie detector test; and that the investigation and prosecution of any case against him be controlled by the attorney general's office.

Richardson and Conn agreed.

Conn, as chief of the new Strangler Bureau, had the chore of gaining the consent of the district attorneys of Middlesex, Essex, and Suffolk counties to Bailey's demand that the prosecution of any case against Albert be overseen by Richardson. Almost immediately he ran into some serious obstacles. Conn and Richardson met on May 11 with Conn's former boss, Middlesex County District Attorney John Droney, to discuss the possibility of proceeding against Albert in the Beverly Samans murder. They explained to Droney the conditions Bailey had laid down as a part of the deal. Droney was not, to say the least, enthusiastic. As Conn would later write, “Mr. Droney was not receptive to the idea of homicide prosecutions and the control of the Attorney General's Office in a consolidated prosecution.” Droney also felt that such a move might disrupt Albert's pending appeal of his Green Man conviction. And Droney also objected on the grounds that “Mr. Bailey's motives were purely financial and that $110,000.00 of reward money [for the Strangler murders]
³⁹
was still uncollected” and that “Mr. Bailey's motives, if not financial, were purely for publicity and that [the] Attorney General's and the District Attorneys' Offices of the respective counties involved could be greatly criticized for becoming a party for an attorney ‘throwing his client to the wolves.' ”

When, on May 17, Conn and Richardson met with Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett Byrne to confer with him about indicting Albert, they got a similar response. Any murder cases that had taken place in his jurisdiction, Byrne said,
he
and not the attorney general would prosecute. Byrne also conveyed, to use Conn's own words, “a distrust for Bailey.”

The next day, Conn got together with Essex County District Attorney John Burke. Again Conn proposed what he'd proposed to Droney and Byrne. And again, he got the same answer. Burke was no more taken with the idea of a consolidated prosecution of DeSalvo under Richardson's aegis than had been Droney and Byrne.

Like Droney, Burke claimed not to want to do anything that might boomerang on Albert's Green Man appeal. He also suggested that DeSalvo's attorney was motivated by a desire for money and publicity. And he concluded by stating that Albert wasn't the Strangler anyway, although he did have a good idea who was.

Burke's favored suspect was George Nassar.

That same day, Conn met with Hiller Zobel, who was still attempting to wrest from the attorney general's office the documentation he needed to pursue his investigation of Bailey. Conn wrote an account of this meeting two weeks later:

The Bar Association complied with the request. Bailey may never have known how close he came to getting his request for a certificate of approval rejected as well as losing his privilege of practicing law.

 

 

Having persuaded the Bar Association to call off its grievance committee dogs—at least temporarily—Conn had surmounted one of the roadblocks in the path toward indicting Albert for some if not all of the stranglings. The next day he interviewed a polygraph operator from Chicago who appeared to have the proper credentials for administering a lie detector test. The expert wanted the new Strangler Bureau to turn over virtually all its data on the murders to him before he questioned Albert. Although Conn was fairly impressed by the man and his qualifications, the assistant attorney general nonetheless felt that the polygraph operator would have to be “controlled” so that whatever case there was against Albert would not be jeopardized.

On June 2, Conn, Richardson, and Butler had a meeting in the attorney general's office with Garrett Byrne, John Droney, and John Burke. After a lengthy wrangle, they hammered out a tentative agreement, and it is obvious from reading Conn's record of the session that concessions on both sides were made only very grudgingly.

No one had a problem with the suggestion that Albert be moved from MCI-Walpole to MCI-Norfolk (a medium security prison a short distance from Walpole) before any interrogation of him took place. Everyone was amenable to the idea that Albert submit to lie detector tests. They all even eventually agreed to a consolidated prosecution, and that any indictments against DeSalvo not be sought until after his Green Man appeal had been heard and decided.

The real struggle took place over the issues of who would question Albert and when any psychiatric evaluation of him would be conducted. Burke, Droney, and Byrne insisted that their own representatives be allowed to interrogate Albert about the murders committed in their jurisdictions. Conn was violently opposed to anyone other than the attorney general's designate handling any part of the questioning. To keep the political peace, Richardson decreed that a compromise between the two positions be worked out at some future date.

Conn, the irresistible force, wanted Albert checked out by the psychiatrists before he confessed. Burke, Byrne, and Droney, the immovable objects, wanted the examination to take place
after
Albert had said his piece. Again Richardson interceded with the suggestion that the psychiatric testing be done midway through the interrogation.

Droney again made it plain that he didn't believe Albert had killed Beverly Samans. Burke, who was also still maintaining that Albert wasn't the murderer of Helen Blake, Joann Graff, Mary Brown, or Evelyn Corbin, didn't want to make any kind of legal move until George Nassar's second trial had concluded. Burke's assistant John Jennings—who would three months later prosecute Nassar—furthermore expressed grave doubt that it was even worthwhile to question Albert at this point. Or, as Conn phrased the comment, “Jennings raised the legal issue of whether or not Bottomley's [sic] abortion so confused the legal rights of DeSalvo as to make it impossible for anyone ever to procure a valid confession from the said DeSalvo.” Whether Conn in using the word
abortion
was referring to his own or to Jennings's estimate of Bottomly's interrogation of Albert two years previously is impossible to say.

The atmosphere at this meeting must have been thick with hostility. The district attorneys, Conn wrote, “repeatedly made reference to the old strangler bureau and the lack of trust they have for the Attorney General of Massachusetts. They repeatedly talked about money motives of Bailey and DeSalvo. Particularly stressing movies and releases. They particularly were concerned about reward money feeling that Nassa [Nassar] would make a move to collect the reward money if DeSalvo was indicted. Their hatred for Bailey seems to be matched by their hatred for the Brooke Administration and the strangling bureau. The only point of importance which revolved [sic] from this continual discussion of past events was that they were assured by the writer and the Attorney General that both Bailey and DeSalvo would be interrogated on a public record about a financial involvement in movies and other rights pertaining to the story of the Boston Strangler.

“Repeated reference was made to the fact that many people apparently are in possession of records of the strangling bureau including John S. Bottomly and [they] asked the Attorney General when he was going to make some definitive moves to get those records back. As a good faith position [I] suggest it would appear wise that the Attorney General should make a serious attempt to get those records back.”

Conn had one of his assistants research various legal issues relating to the possible prosecution of Albert. One question that might arise was whether Albert could claim that Bailey had been incompetent as a defender in allowing him to make his initial confession. Another gray area was whether separate indictments—in the case of the stranglings, one for each killing—could be prosecuted jointly. And would a joint prosecution deprive Albert of his constitutional rights?

The points were all ultimately moot. The drive to prosecute Albert for the strangling murders lost momentum over the summer and on into the next year, slowing, sputtering, and finally grinding to a halt. The matter never went to a grand jury. No indictments were ever handed down in any of the murders.