The Boston Stranglers (17 page)

“I then asked him if he knew what was involved in a guardianship of the person, and he gave me an excellent answer, which I will quote here: Guardian of the person concerns the ability to sign contracts, make confessions, hire people, to get married or divorced, apply for admission to the hospital, to apply for a driver's license, to make a will, to change counsel, to deal with insurance benefits and beneficiaries, to decide on his own future, and to decide on his visitors. A guardian of the estate, on the other hand, by contrast, he told me, concerns only the ability to handle money.”

“He told you those things you have just testified about, Doctor?” asked Lynch.

“That is directly—a direct quote,” replied Mezer.

It was also a remarkably polished one from a man whose grasp of English grammar was, to say the least, a bit loose.

Garrity interrupted: “Was he reading from something?”

“No, sir,” replied Mezer. “I copied it right down while he was telling me these things.”

“And are you reading from notes you made contemporaneously?” Lynch asked.

“Right here,” said Mezer. “Just as he was talking I was writing.”

“Now,” said Lynch. “Did you reach some opinion, Doctor, as a result of that interview and anything else as to whether or not Mr. DeSalvo at that time was competent to handle his business affairs without a guardian?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What opinion did you reach?”

“I thought he was quite competent to handle his own business affairs without a guardian.”

“Now,” said Lynch. “When did you next see Mr. DeSalvo?”

“I next saw Mr. DeSalvo on June 27, 1966.”

“Where, sir?”

“This was also at the Bridgewater State Hospital.”

“Doctor, based on your observations and conversations with Mr. DeSalvo, do you have an opinion as to whether or not on June 17, 1966, Mr. DeSalvo was competent to sign business instruments provided the contents thereof were explained to him by his attorney?”

“Yes, I have an opinion, sir,” said Mezer.

“What is your opinion?”

“That he was competent to do so.”

“What is the basis of your opinion, Doctor?”

“The basis of my examination of him, on the various dates that I have just talked about.”

“Did Mr. DeSalvo suffer from some mental illness during this period of time that you have talked about?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mezer had diagnosed Albert as a chronic undifferentiated schizophrenic, just as Robey had.

But there was a difference.

Mezer pronounced himself completely satisfied that Albert's condition, which the doctor himself described as “a serious, major mental illness in which the individual's ability to get along in society is seriously impaired... characterized by the presence of hallucinations, delusions, [and] violent behavior,” would in no way impede his ability to enter into a complicated business transaction if his attorney explained it to him.

On cross-examination, Troy asked Mezer to review his knowledge of Albert's financial transactions at Bridgewater.

Mezer, whom Troy had just subjected to a lengthy inquisition on the exact nature of schizophrenia, was a little weary. Nevertheless, he repeated his earlier remarks about Albert cashing VA checks and making purchases in the Bridgewater canteen.

“You don't mean that he handled this himself at all, do you?” Troy asked.

“Mr. Troy—” Mezer began.

“No, Doctor, will you answer my question?” the lawyer thundered.

“Yes, but your yelling at me won't get me to change.”

“I am raising my voice so everyone can hear,” explained Troy, “because I am a very meek individual in nature.”

“What I said was that he signed his own checks and that he used the money to buy things for himself at the hospital and he sent money to his family, and that he handled these aspects of it himself.”

“Don't they handle all the funds of an inmate at Bridgewater for him?” Troy asked.

“I have no idea,” Mezer replied.

“You have no idea,” Troy said. “And you want to leave your testimony that Albert handled these checks himself and the money himself, right?”

“That is just precisely the way I would like to leave it,” said Mezer.

“Okay,” said Troy. “You gave great weight, did you not, to the statement of Albert DeSalvo when he said ‘to engage in contracts, to make wills, to get a driver's license, to get married,' you gave great weight in your consideration of competency to that statement he made, did you not?”

“I gave it weight to the point that it showed that he knew what was involved in the various guardianships, yes, sir.”

Troy moved in for the kill. “And every time you spoke with Albert DeSalvo, why, he spouted long phrases like that to you, didn't he?”

Lynch objected. Garrity overruled him.

“Doctor?” Troy prodded.

“No, sir,” Mezer said.

“In fact,” Troy went on relentlessly, “he never did it before, did he?”

“What is that again?” Mezer asked.

“He never gave you a statement like that containing such depth about anything, did he?”

“I think he did at other times,” Mezer said.

“When?” Troy inquired. “Check your notes if you want to.”

“At times we discussed different criminal charges,” Mezer said, “and he had a very excellent knowledge of criminal charges and the penalties that were involved.”

Troy struck with his broadsword. “Almost like they were memorized?”

“Yes, sir,” said Mezer.

 

 

In January the matter of
Albert DeSalvo versus Twentieth Century-Fox and the Walter Reade Organization was
decided.

Judge Garrity found for the defendants Fox and Reade.

Troy requested an appeal.

His request was denied.

Meanwhile, Bailey was having problems of his own with the judicial system of New Jersey. He had undertaken the defense of a publishing executive named Harold Matzner, who was accused of murdering Judith Kavanaugh, the wife of one of his employees, and Gabriel DeFranco, a minor underworld figure. Bailey felt that Matzner was being railroaded by the prosecution, whom he accused of bribing and threatening witnesses.

On April 28, 1968, Bailey wrote a letter to New Jersey Governor Richard Hughes outlining his complaints, with copies to United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark, New Jersey Attorney General Arthur Sills, the president of the New Jersey Bar Association, and the state's United States senators and congressmen. Because of a misunderstanding on his secretary's part, Bailey says in
The Defense Never Rests,
copies also went to every one of New Jersey's state legislators.
⁵²

Two days later it was also printed in the newspapers. As a result of this publicity, the New Jersey Supreme Court gave notice that it intended to remove Bailey from the Matzner case unless he could furnish it sufficient reason not to.

Bailey claimed before Judge Gordon Brown that he had nothing to do with the letter being given to the press; Judge Brown found nonetheless that Bailey had overstepped the boundaries of his professional sphere and in fact had demonstrated a “shocking contempt” for the code to which New Jersey lawyers were supposed to adhere—that of not attempting to try a case anywhere but in the courtroom.

Bailey was indeed removed as counsel to Harold Matzner. Ultimately, he was suspended from the practice of law in New Jersey for one year.

 

 

In 1969, Tom Troy dropped Albert as his client. Relations between them had grown strained after the failed lawsuit against Twentieth Century-Fox and Walter Reade; Troy had begun to find Albert's nonstop demands wearisome and irritating. “He was constantly asking me for money, and I told him I wasn't a banker,” Troy says today. “I was a lawyer and if he didn't like it, he could place his lips upon my posterior.”

 

 

Bailey says that the trouble he ran into in New Jersey inspired the Boston Bar Association to take a fresh look at his conduct in Massachusetts. In September 1969 it filed a complaint against him with the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth. Two of the charges against him were the same as those that had been leveled in 1967—his appearance on
The Tonight Show
to talk about the Coppolino case and the radio interview he'd done with Paul Benzaquin on the Plymouth mail robbery. The Boston Bar Association was also disturbed by the letter he'd written to the governor of New Jersey, Bailey says.

Perhaps unbeknownst to Bailey, a second party was gearing up to launch a formal complaint against him. That party was his former client Albert DeSalvo.

On Christmas Eve, 1969, Albert sent a letter (clearly written by someone else) to the Grievance Committee of the State Bar Association. In it he claimed that “since 1965—the beginning of my representation by Mr. Bailey—I have been unethically served by Mr. Bailey to such an extent that I have been seriously disadvantaged... In substance my charges are that Mr. Bailey knowingly involved me in contracts and litigations which essentially served his own interests and completely distorted or abandoned my own.”

Five days later, Albert followed this with a four-page document in which he enumerated in detail his charges against Bailey. They were very much similar to the claims he'd made in U.S. District Court the previous year: that Bailey had refused to let him read the release to Gerold Frank, that the lawyer had not given Jon Asgeirsson or Albert's brother Joseph the chance to look it over, and that Bailey had misled him as to the contents and duration of the release. In addition, wrote Albert, “Bailey never established a guardianship for me that would have put competent people in charge of my personal, legal and medical affairs, when he knew perfectly well that I was not competent to handle my own affairs when they involved such complex issues.” And, “Bailey made promises which he knew he couldn't or wouldn't keep and cited a legal fact or procedure what was not true.” Albert said that Bailey had assured him that if a movie were to be made of Frank's book, a separate contract between Albert and the filmmaker would be forthcoming. “The truth was that the Frank ‘release' empowered Frank to do this himself in spite of what I may wish.”

Albert was entirely correct in believing that he had already signed away his movie rights. On file in the U.S. District Court in Boston is a document dated September 2, 1967, in which Gerold Frank notified Twentieth Century-Fox that he was granting to it the permission he obtained from Albert DeSalvo for his name and biography to be used in the film version of Frank's book. Fox had optioned
The Boston Strangler
for $15,000 and bought the property for an additional $185,000. That option money was then turned over to “Robert McKay” by the William Morris Agency, Frank's representatives.

In the letter to the Bar Association Albert stated that Bailey had promised him a civil commitment if the verdict in the Green Man trial went against him. “He lost the case and the question of civil committment [sic] is a dream.” And Albert bitterly accused Bailey of appealing his case to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts purely for form's sake, and with no expectation of winning a reversal of the conviction.

Frederick Norton, the secretary of the Boston Bar Association, suggested that Albert be more specific in describing his complaint against Bailey. On January 11, 1970, Albert replied to Norton—clearly with literary help from his friend, George Nassar—providing this account of the circumstances of the signing of the release:

On February 10, 1970, the Massachusetts Bar Association's action against Bailey was heard in the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston. Hiller Zobel, who had been one of the principals in the 1967 investigation of Bailey's conduct, was one of the prosecutors in this matter. The presiding justice was Paul Kirk.

In
The Defense Never Rests
Bailey writes that Chief Prosecutor Calvin Bartlett subjected him to rigorous questioning about his literary activities, his television show (canceled in midseason), his 1964 radio interview on the Plymouth mail robbery, and his conduct in New Jersey.

The hearing concluded on February 12. Bailey submitted briefs contesting the proceedings. Judge Kirk arrived at his verdict and handed it down: censure. Kirk's ruling seemed to indicate that he had considered disbarring Bailey.

Bailey wanted at first to appeal; on reflection, he decided not to for fear of making matters worse.

 

 

That spring, the Bar Association asked one of its members, Francis C. Newton, Jr., to look into Albert's complaint against Bailey.

Newton, today seventy, is a tall, genial man with a relaxed and unassuming manner. A World War II veteran, he is an avid Civil War buff whose office near North Station in Boston is overflowing with books about and memorabilia of the War Between the States. He can discourse as fluently about Antietam as he can on a point of criminal law.

Newton has many vivid memories of his famous client. One of these is of the very close relationship that had developed between Albert and George Nassar. “George had a rather strange hold over Albert,” the lawyer says. “When you talked to Albert in George's presence, George would inject himself into the conversation.” Nassar would also answer questions put to Albert before the latter could open his mouth to reply. Never was the one unaccompanied by the other.

Newton's experience in this respect was almost identical to that of Tom Troy. “On most occasions when I visited DeSalvo, I visited him in the presence of George Nassar,” comments Troy. “He said Nassar was his adviser.” And Nassar seems to have indeed acted as such. Newton has no doubt that Nassar helped Albert write the letters of complaint to the Bar Association, since the language and grammar of the documents was of a far more sophisticated level than Albert could attain on his own—although it was not at all beyond the grasp of the literate and articulate Nassar.

The sway Nassar held over Albert made Newton uneasy; the lawyer regarded his client's closest associate as “a very dangerous and twisted man.” And he was concerned about the direction Nassar's influence over the easily led Albert might take: “George was a schemer.”

His distaste for Albert's choice of advisers notwithstanding, Newton agreed to take the case. For even if the language of Albert's complaint against Bailey was Nassar's, the sentiments expressed therein were Albert's own, and to Newton they had merit. At base was a simple—and single—issue. “What it came down to was, Bailey had a lot of Albert's money, and where the hell was it?”

Again, Newton's reaction mirrored that of Troy, whose primary purpose in bringing suit against Twentieth Century-Fox and Walter Reade had been to get these funds disbursed.

 

 

Albert, who had once deified Bailey, had come to loathe him. And he was vocal about it to Newton. “All the time I knew Albert,” says the lawyer, “he never had anything good to say about Bailey.”

The trust Albert had once reposed in Bailey he now transferred to Newton. That much is evident in a letter he sent to the lawyer on July 27, 1970. This letter, which was probably worded by Nassar, also gives considerable insight into just how deeply dependent Albert was on any strong personality who offered him help or friendship. And it illuminates the intensity of his bond with Nassar.