The Boston Stranglers (13 page)

Did Donald Conn believe that Albert was the Strangler? Bailey today says yes. Ames Robey today says no. Conn died suddenly in 1986 at the age of fifty. Whatever his private beliefs may have been, they were buried with him.

George Nassar's retrial was a fiasco for Bailey. The prosecution produced eighteen witnesses, the defense three, far fewer than it had the first time around. One of the prosecution's witnesses came as a surprise to Bailey: a woman who claimed to have seen Nassar in Andover shortly before the murder of Irvin Hilton. Nassar took the stand—and admitted that in 1964 he had lied to his parole officer about being employed at the time. He also told the court that he had forged pay slips in order to foster this deception.

The jury took less than three hours to find him guilty. He was back in Walpole that night.

Bailey vowed to seek a third trial for his client. He also asked that the court appoint him as the now-indigent Nassar's attorney so that he could be fully compensated by the state for his efforts on his client's behalf. Judge Donald Macauley denied his request because Bailey hadn't been a member of the Bar for a minimum of ten years, which one had to be in order to qualify as a court-appointed attorney.

 

 

John Bottomly, the target of so much derision
⁴⁰
on the part of his colleagues in the criminal justice system, had long since returned to the private practice of law in Boston. One of his clients was a woman named Sonya Marie Anderson Nichols. In a previous life, she had been known as Irmgard Beck DeSalvo. In August, Bottomly would negotiate with Twentieth Century-Fox an agreement whereby Sonya (she had married one Earl Nichols and was now returned from Germany and living in Denver) authorized the use of the names Irmgard, Judy, and Michael DeSalvo to be used in the movie to be made of Gerold Frank's
The Boston Strangler.

The payment she received in return for this consideration was twenty-five thousand dollars.

As for agent Bottomly, he went to work for Twentieth Century-Fox himself, as a consultant to the Strangler movie. For the use of his name, and his services as a technical adviser, he was paid a reported one hundred thousand dollars.

The Bottomly character, played by Henry Fonda, would be the hero of the film version of the story.

On January 4, 1968, Albert DeSalvo's appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts for a new trial was denied. The justices found no basis for Bailey's and Asgeirsson's claim of “errors of law” in the standard of criminal responsibility to which Albert had been held. Neither did they agree that the guilty verdict reached by the jury in any way contradicted the psychiatric testimony presented at the 1967 trial. “Criminal acts have been committed,” the justices wrote, “and the evidence not being conclusive, a determination was required whether the perpetrator was responsible or irresponsible under the law. No better way appears to determine that than by leaving to the twelve citizens of the jury the application of a reasonable and understandable rule after a fair trial and under fair and full instructions. That is what happened in this case.”

On July 7, 1968, DeSalvo's appeal for a review of his sentence received this response: “The Appellate Division has ordered that no action be taken on this appeal for the reason that it was not filed in compliance with the provisions of the General Laws, Chapter 278, Section 28B, and, therefore, the Appellate Division is without authority to act.” A copy of this notice was sent to F. Lee Bailey.

 

 

Meanwhile, the Robert Fryer production of the movie version of Gerold Frank's
The Boston Strangler
had gotten under way. It would be filmed on location in Boston and Cambridge, providing the occasion for a great deal of media ballyhoo. Along with Henry Fonda as John Bottomly, actor Tony Curtis would portray Albert and actress Carolyn Conwell would play Irmgard. Sally Kellerman would have a small but crucial role as the only survivor of a Strangler attack. The director was Richard Fleischer, the screenwriter Edward Anhalt.

In January 1968, Phillip DiNatale, who had spent the last four years on special assignment to the old and new Strangler Bureaus, resigned from the Boston Police Department to work as a technical adviser on the movie. The department gave him a choice—us or them, according to former BPD Detective Sergeant James McDonald—and DiNatale chose the latter. McDonald adds that John Bottomly—who apparently was not merely acting as a consultant to Twentieth Century-Fox but trying to recruit other consultants for it as well—went to each member of the Boston homicide squad (including McDonald) to ask if he'd be interested in emulating DiNatale. He got no takers.

For his services, DiNatale was paid a reported sixty thousand dollars. Actor Mike Kellin played him in the film. Later DiNatale would go on
The Tonight Show
to discuss his show business experiences with Johnny Carson.

Bottomly and DiNatale were virtually the only law enforcement (or ex-law enforcement) personnel in the state who would cooperate with the movie company. The Boston Police Department, which clearly hated the whole project, provided at best only one or two officers to divert traffic when scenes were being filmed at the city locations. Elliot Richardson flatly turned down a request from Fox for the assistance of the attorney general's office, citing his displeasure that the movie would actually name Albert as the Boston Strangler and expressing concern that the film might jeopardize any future trial in the case. Edward Brooke rejected first a five-figure and then a six-figure offer to portray himself. He too disliked the first script he was shown, for the same reasons as had Richardson. And neither the past nor the present attorney general was happy with what each perceived as the tremendous number of factual distortions in Edward Anhalt's screenplay. Nor did Brooke care much for the way his role had been written. He dropped a few broad hints that he might consider legal action if the part wasn't changed to reflect reality.

Brooke wasn't the only one to make such a threat. Edmund McNamara declared that he'd sue Twentieth Century-Fox if the shooting script so much as mentioned his existence. Detective Lieutenant Edward Sherry also declined to grant the moviemakers permission to use his name. The studio was going to get around this impasse by rebaptizing Sherry “Lieutenant Brandy,” but a wiser head at Fox fortunately prevailed. In the end, Sherry was incarnated as Detective Lieutenant Joe Corsi, a name not on the rosters of the BPD, and the role was filled by actor George Kennedy.

Casting director Marty Richard had problems of his own finding suitable extras to play crowd and incidental scenes. Some of the hundreds of aspiring bit players did not take kindly to rejection. One such woman, denied her chance at five seconds' worth of screen immortality, chased after the hapless Richard and bludgeoned him with her handbag. This made the headlines of the following day's Record
American;
the front-page story was illustrated with a cartoon rendition of the fracas.

Richard was also having difficulties finding women to enact the corpses of the Strangler's elderly prey. He issued a plangent appeal to reporter Marjorie Adams: “Do you know a lady with seventy-year-old feet? We are looking for one whose legs and feet will be right to portray a victim of the Strangler. Her face and body won't be shown.”

Film costumer Billy Travilla, favorite designer of Marilyn Monroe, lamented the dreary state of Boston fashion. But he was nonetheless game to do a great deal of taxing on-site research. “I've just come from the gutters of Cambridge,” he confided to
Herald-Traveler
⁴¹
writer Romola Metzner. “I've been living in a big parka, ski sweater, heavy underwear, and boots.” The designer envisioned “the atmosphere of Albert DeSalvo in low-tone green get-ups.”

It was breathlessly reported that Tony Curtis would definitely
not
undergo a nose job in order to resemble more closely the character he was playing.

The subject of
The Boston Strangler
may have been high tragedy; the circumstances of its filming were indubitably low farce.

 

 

As Brooke and Richardson had assumed, the movie version of
The Boston Strangler,
which had its U.S. premiere in the fall of 1968, bore little resemblance to the truth. It didn't even stay close to the book on which it was based. In the film, the murders are out of sequence and in the wrong cities—two, for example, take place in Cambridge. The Strangler Task Force is formed well before the death of Sophie Clark.
⁴²
The character played by Sally Kellerman is beaten into a coma by Curtis-DeSalvo. Albert is finally arrested in Boston after being chased by a man who spots him trying to break into an apartment. He is then committed to Boston City Hospital, not Bridgewater, where a psychiatrist diagnoses him as a multiple personality. He is shown attempting to strangle Irmgard when she and the children visit him in the hospital.

Interestingly, no mention of F. Lee Bailey is made in the film. Albert's lawyer is instead identified throughout as Jon Asgeirsson. Harold Banks reported in the Record
American
that Bailey had been dropped from the movie because he didn't care for the script, nor for the payment he was offered for the use of his name.

The meatiest and most sympathetic role in the film goes to Fonda-Bottomly. He is initially reluctant to take on the responsibility of Strangler Bureau chief, but is talked into it by the Brooke character, who tells him he is “uniquely qualified” for the post because he has one of the finest minds the attorney general knows. Bowing to this pressure—and flattery—Fonda-Bottomly throws himself wholeheartedly into the undertaking, going so far as to prowl the mean streets of Boston at night in search of the killer. He spends sleepless nights brooding in his book-lined study. He even directs the interrogation of a suspect at Boston police headquarters, and when the man being questioned becomes violent, he lunges across a desk and punches him into submission, thus rescuing the armed cops in the room.

“If you ever met Bottomly,” says a retired Boston police detective, “that scene would make you cry laughing. Bottomly had to get permission from his mom to swat a fly.”

The movie ends with Fonda-Bottomly taking Curtis-DeSalvo's confession to the murders. The Task Force chief urges the Strangler to unburden himself because if he does he'll “feel better.” And the Strangler complies in a series of stream-of-consciousness revelations punctuated by catatonic fits.

A former Cambridge police officer gives a succinct two-thumbs-down to the production: “It was a crock of shit.”

Later that year, it would also become a bone of contention.

 

 

George Nassar's appeal for a third trial in the Irvin Hilton slaying was rejected by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts on May 6, 1968. Bailey had contended that at Nassar's 1967 retrial, the defense had not been given sufficient opportunity to question potential jurors; that Nassar's constitutional rights had been violated by excluding as jurors people opposed to capital punishment; and that the judge had erred in not instructing the jury that eyewitness identifications were often unreliable. Bailey lodged eight other complaints; the Supreme Judicial Court justices found no basis in the record for any of them. They did, however, authorize the Superior Court to compensate Bailey for his efforts on Nassar's behalf.

Nassar moved immediately to get himself a new lawyer: William Homans of Boston. Homans would take the case to the United States Supreme Court in October of 1968.

That summer Albert, perhaps following Nassar's lead, would also fire Bailey. To represent him he retained Thomas C. Troy.

Bailey says today that he and DeSalvo remained firm friends until the latter's death. Events subsequent to the summer of 1968 seem to indicate otherwise.

Today, at age sixty-five, Tom Troy is no longer the “two-fisted drinker” he describes himself as once having been. Heart surgery and diabetes have drastically altered his habits; the only bars he frequents now are the ones in the gym he had installed in his home. Six-feet-two-inches tall and trimmer than he was a decade ago, he can still fill a large room by himself. And he has lost not a whit of the color that has made him a Boston legend.

Born in 1930, Troy was the son of a Boston detective killed in the line of duty. After a stint in the Marines, Tom followed his father's career footsteps, first into the Wilmington, Massachusetts, police department and thereafter into the Metropolitan District Commission police. What might have been a lifetime in law enforcement was ended when he suffered a work-related injury. He retired with a pension from the force and enrolled in law school, from which he graduated in 1967. His specialty: defending the kind of people he'd once arrested.

When Troy passed the Massachusetts bar in 1967, he celebrated—and announced—the occasion by renting a helicopter to fly him over Boston. He had the pilot land on the front lawn of the District Court in Dorchester. The gesture accomplished exactly what Troy intended it would—it served notice that a major presence on the legal scene had arrived, one who had quite literally descended from the heavens.

Although Troy's extravagant personal style would grate on some of his more conservative brethren, it won him a great deal of amused admiration from others—and considerable publicity. In 1983,
Boston Magazine
would designate him one of “The Toughest S.O.B.s in Town.” Troy accepted the accolade graciously.

All this attention brought him a steady stream of clients. He rapidly developed a reputation as the defender of the indefensible. By March of 1984, when Troy received a court appointment to represent William Douglas, the Tufts University Medical School professor charged with bludgeoning to death the object of his sexual obsession, prostitute Robin Benedict, the lawyer had already tried about fifty-five murder cases. He had lost none of them.

As it is for all successful litigators, the courtroom is Troy's theater. The drawled sardonic remark or question is his most potent rhetorical weapon. Representing the accused in a notorious rape case, he demolished a prosecution witness with substance abuse problems by asking her if she chased the pills she took with the alcohol she guzzled. In his closing arguments, he traditionally includes a poem of his own composition.

His philosophy as a defender has been honed by time and experience: “If somebody throws down the gauntlet, pick it up and beat the shit out of them.”

Albert retained Troy as his attorney on September 4, 1968. The first meeting of client and lawyer took place under epic circumstances. Since Albert obviously couldn't leave Walpole to visit Troy at his office, the mountain went to Mohammed—by helicopter. As the craft settled to the ground inside the prison wall, it was approached by machine-gun-toting guards unhappy, to say the least, with this intrusion. Troy emerged from the helicopter and pushed past the official greeters, barking, “Get the hell out of my way. I'm a lawyer.”
⁴³

They let him through.

Albert was thrilled with the bravura performance of his new attorney. In F. Lee Bailey he'd had a jet-plane lawyer. In Troy, he exulted, he now had a “helicopter lawyer.”

 

 

Troy's first legal move on behalf of his new client was to try to obtain a preliminary injunction preventing the local premiere of the movie
The Boston Strangler.
His primary argument was that a public screening of the film would make it impossible for Albert ever to receive a fair trial should he be indicted for any out-of-state criminal offenses or indeed for the Strangler murders. But the attorney's real purpose, as he remarks today, was to demand an accounting from F. Lee Bailey. “Albert was due a reasonably substantial amount of money [from the sale of the rights to his life story],” Troy says. “And where was it?”

The lawyer proposed to find out.

Another crucial issue for Troy was whether Albert was competent to sign the various releases and contracts he had in 1966. Troy maintained that he was not, and that any agreements Albert had made then were invalid.

The matter of
Albert H. DeSalvo versus Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation and the Walter Reade Organization
(the movie's distributor) came before Judge W. Arthur Garrity in the United States District Court in Boston on October 10, 1968. Attorney James P. Lynch appeared for Fox and Attorney Jerome P. Facher for Walter Reade. The first witness to take the stand was the plaintiff himself. Troy came right to the point by asking Albert if he was the notorious Boston Strangler. Albert replied that he really didn't know who he was. Troy requested a clarification of this statement. Albert gave one:

Troy then asked Albert if he'd ever discussed with Bailey the publication of the book
The Boston Strangler.
Albert admitted that he had, sometimes. Troy asked him to describe these conversations:

Albert demurred on the grounds that he'd promised his brothers he wouldn't sign anything. Bailey insisted. Albert still refused to put his signature to the papers. Then Bailey delivered an ultimatum: If Albert didn't do as he was told, Bailey wouldn't get him a civil commitment (to a mental institution rather than a prison) when he went to trial.

At this point, in the early summer of 1966, Albert was seemingly unaware that he
would
go on trial as the Green Man in January 1967. (Bailey says he and Edward Brooke had decided this in April 1966.) Shocked, he reminded Bailey that the lawyer had assured him this would never happen. “Well, things are changing now,” Bailey had replied, according to Albert, which if true is a cavalier way for an attorney to break such news to a client.

Under this pressure, Albert told the court, he signed the documents. Did he know what was in them? No—Bailey had held them folded in such a way that their contents were invisible. All he could see was the lowest part of the page, where he was to append his signature along with those of F. Lee Bailey and George McGrath.

A year or so afterward, Albert told the court, he asked Bailey if he (Albert) had ever signed a power of attorney over to Bailey. Bailey told him he hadn't, but Albert, apparently disbelieving, persisted in asking the question. He wrote letters to Bailey that, according to Albert, went unanswered. When Charles Burnim visited Albert at the prison, Albert would put the same queries to him. Burnim told his client he had no answers: “As you probably know, Mr. Bailey is sending me up here just to pacify you.”

Albert said that he finally had to threaten to discharge Bailey in order to get the lawyer to meet with him at Walpole. “What happened was, Mr. Bailey did come in and I did confront him, and he said, ‘Well, yes, you did sign a power of attorney, but it was limited.' ” Albert then asked to see any and all documents he might have put his signature to. Bailey promised to provide copies, Albert claimed, but he never did.

Albert asked Charles Burnim if there was any way to prevent people from writing about him (such as
Parade
magazine author Lloyd Shearer and
Record American
gossip columnist Harold Banks), a question he'd also posed to Bailey, and Burnim offered a reply similar to Bailey's: Albert's story was in the public domain and whoever wanted to print some version of it couldn't be stopped. Albert inquired about the possibility of suing such authors. Burnim answered that such a course of action would be disastrous because “everything would be exposed then.”

Albert noted that Jon Asgeirsson, when informed of these developments, told his client, “You're being taken right down the drain.”

Albert had read Gerold Frank's book, and was shocked and angered that, among other things, his most intimate family correspondence had been reproduced in it. He asked Bailey how this could have happened. Albert was particularly upset that a letter he'd given Bailey to deliver personally to Irmgard had been printed in the book. Bailey told him that the attorney general's office must have handed over all those materials to Frank.

Troy asked Albert if Bailey had made clear to him what payment he'd receive for Frank's use of his life story.

Albert did recall endorsing a check for fifteen thousand dollars made out to Robert McKay and presented to him by Bailey for that purpose.