The Boston Stranglers (19 page)

A week or so later Richard and Rosalie went down to the prison to retrieve Albert's personal effects.

Conspicuously absent from them was a manuscript Albert had been writing. He had been deliberately vague when discussing its contents with Richard and Rosalie; he hinted to them that it told, finally, the truth about his life.

Leaving the prison with the remnants of Albert's existence, Richard and Rosalie bumped into George Nassar. He asked them if they'd like a copy of Albert's autopsy report. Without waiting for an answer, he produced the document and gave it to Richard. Richard, barely sensible with grief, numbly accepted it.

Then Nassar turned to Rosalie and, smiling, embraced her.

“Now you can be
my
family,” he said.

“There isn't a cop in Cambridge who ever believed DeSalvo was the Strangler,” says Captain William R. Burke, Jr., a patrol officer during the Strangler investigation.

“I don't know who the Boston Strangler was,” says Tom Troy. “I just know it wasn't Albert DeSalvo.”

“When I saw Albert,” says Francis Newton, “I thought, this is not the guy who committed those stranglings.”

“I don't think Albert DeSalvo strangled any one of those women,” says retired Salem Police Lieutenant John Moran.

“Albert DeSalvo did none of the Boston stranglings,” says former Boston Police Detective Sergeant James McDonald. “Nor any of the others.”

His former boss, Commissioner Edmund McNamara, agrees. “I knew there was more than one killer.”

“From what I know of Albert DeSalvo, he didn't kill anybody,” says Cambridge Detective Sergeant Fidele Centrella. “If this guy had been involved in any homicide, believe me, he would have been charged.”

And indeed Albert never was, except in that most high and merciless of all courts, that of public opinion.

Other than his own confession and the assertions of his attorney F. Lee Bailey, there is absolutely nothing to substantiate Albert's claim to be the murderer of Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, Jane Sullivan, Sophie Clark, Patricia Bissette, Beverly Samans, Evelyn Corbin, Joann Graff, Mary Sullivan, and Mary Brown. Not a shred of physical evidence (including fingerprints) exists to connect him to any of the crimes. Nor was any eyewitness able to place him at the murder scenes or even in their vicinity.

At around 3:30 in the afternoon of November 23, 1963, the day of Joann Graff's murder, a man had knocked on the door of one of her neighbors at 54 Essex Street in Lawrence, Kenneth Rowe, an engineering student at Northeastern University. The stranger asked for “Joan” Graff. Rowe told him he had the wrong apartment and directed him to the proper one.

This individual later became a prime suspect in Joann's rape and strangling.

When shown a photograph of Albert, Rowe could not identify it.

Jules Vens, proprietor of Martin's Tavern in Lawrence, a short distance from 54 Essex Street, reported to police that at 2:00
P.M.
and again at 4:30
P.M.
on November 23, 1963, a man—not a regular customer—had come into the bar. During his second visit he was visibly nervous and agitated, seemingly apprehensive about being followed. He used the men's room and left without ordering a beer as he had on his first visit.

He was dressed similarly to the man who had spoken with Kenneth Rowe. At the time of his second visit to the tavern, his clothing was wrinkled.

When shown a photograph of Albert, Vens could not identify it.

A little before 3:30
P.M.
on January 4, 1964, the day Mary Sullivan was murdered, schoolteacher Eileen O'Neil happened to glance out a window of her apartment, which looked onto the rear of Mary's building. In one of the windows she saw the profile of a man whom she assumed to be standing in a hallway. (It was later determined that whoever this person was, he was in fact in the bathroom gazing at himself in the mirror.) The man appeared to O'Neil to be tall and to have reddish-brown hair.

When Eileen O'Neil was shown a photograph of Albert, she could not identify it.

Three fresh Salem cigarette butts were found in an ashtray near Mary Sullivan's bed. Neither Mary nor her roommates Pamela Parker and Patricia Delmore smoked this brand.

A Salem cigarette butt was found floating in the toilet of Apartment 4-C at 315 Huntington Avenue in Boston the day Sophie Clark died there. Salems were one of the brands that Sophie and her roommates Audri Adams and Gloria Todd preferred. The butt in the toilet may have been left there by Sophie's killer.

Albert DeSalvo did not smoke.

Marcella Lulka, a resident of 315 Huntington Avenue, told police that at 2:30 in the afternoon of December 5, 1962, a man calling himself Thompson had come to her apartment stating he was there to paint it. He then began making complimentary—and suggestive—remarks about Mrs. Lulka's figure. She got rid of him by telling him that her husband was home asleep in the bedroom. She described the stranger to police as approximately twenty-five years old, about five feet nine inches tall, with pale honey-colored hair combed straight back and an oval face. At first she thought he might be a light-skinned black male; later she claimed he could be white.

At 5:00
P.M.
on December 5, 1962—a half-hour before Sophie's body was discovered—William Ronalder of 315 Huntington described this person as a light-skinned black man, around twenty-five years of age, with long hair, possibly dark, combed back. He wore a dark waist-length jacket, just as the man who'd come to Mrs. Lulka's door had. Ronalder didn't think he'd recognize the man if he saw him again.

Eartis Riley, wife of Anthony Riley, the nurse who'd attempted to resuscitate Sophie, told police that at about 4:30 on the day of the murder “a light-skinned colored man whom she new as ‘Al' came to her door and asked for a book he claimed Anthony had promised to lend him. Mrs. Riley knew nothing about any book. She noticed that Al ”was perspiring heavily and also appeared to be very excited.”

The description she gave the investigators was that of a black man about six feet tall, 160 pounds, twenty-six years old, with light brown skin and sandy hair waved backward. He was clad in a dark waist-length cloth jacket.

None of these descriptions in any way resembled that of Albert DeSalvo.

Mrs. Lulka later sketched for police a portrait of “Thompson.” It shows a delicately featured young man with a long, narrow face, a very thin nose, a pointed chin, and large, almond-shaped eyes. It looks nothing like Albert DeSalvo.

The same can be said of any composite drawing made of any suspect in the Strangler case.

In March of 1965, after Albert had begun confessing to the stranglings, Mrs. Lulka was taken by authorities to Bridgewater. There she viewed Albert in person. She had never seen him before in her life.

Accompanying Mrs. Lulka was a woman named Erika Wilsing, formerly of 26 Melrose Street in Boston, thought by some police officials to be the sole survivor of a Strangler attack. On February 18, 1963, Wilsing, a native of Germany, had been assaulted in her apartment by a man who told her that if she didn't fight him, he'd let her go. Despite this warning, Wilsing struggled furiously with her assailant; he grabbed her around the throat and she bit him on the right hand.

The man fled without raping or seriously injuring Miss Wilsing.

Albert had allegedly confessed to this assault. He claimed he'd had a knife. Wilsing couldn't really recall if the man who'd attacked her had been so armed.

Albert also reportedly described Miss Wilsing's apartment perfectly, even noting details of its appointments she herself had forgotten after she moved out of it. (A kitchen chair she thought was brown was in fact blue, as Albert had said it was.)

Gilbert Chinn, a handyman working at 28 Melrose Street the day Wilsing was attacked, told investigators that at about 12:30
P.M
. he saw a man enter Wilsing's apartment building “as if he lived there.” Five or ten minutes later, Chinn heard a woman scream. Shortly after that, the man he'd seen earlier emerged from the building, yanking on a blue raincoat.

Chinn was unable to identify a photograph of Albert.

Erika Wilsing, brought into Albert's presence at Bridgewater, did not recognize him either.

Another inmate did, however, catch the eye not only of Wilsing but of Marcella Lulka. Both women told police that they found him very familiar-looking. In fact, Mrs. Lulka claimed that but for the fact that this man's hair was dark, he could have been the double of the “Thompson” who'd shown up at her front door that cold gray day in December of 1962.

The man Wilsing and Lulka found so familiar-looking was George Nassar.
⁵⁶

The Cambridge Police Department has had plenty of experience with sadistic murderers, violent sex offenders, and serial killers. And it is this experience that, apart from anything else, leads its officers to the conviction that Albert DeSalvo was none of the above. He simply didn't fit the type.

Retired Detective James Roscoe was one of those who investigated the so-called “Hitchhike Murders” that plagued the greater Boston area in the early 1970s. Several of the victims had been known to thumb rides regularly to and from work or school, hence the nickname.

One of the first to die horribly was nineteen-year-old Ellen Reich, an Emerson College student whose body was found in an abandoned apartment on Seaver Street in the Roxbury section of Boston. It had been concealed in a closet, the door of which had been nailed shut. Forensic evidence proved that Ellen had been raped, or had engaged in sexual intercourse with her killer, just before her death. She had been strangled and shot in the chest and stomach.

The last day anyone saw twenty-two-year-old Damaris Synge Gillespie alive was November 29, 1972. Her body was found twenty miles away in Billerica on February 3, 1973. The Cambridge resident and university student had been strangled to death on the day she vanished.

The perpetrator was one Anthony Jackson, a man distinguished by a phenomenally high I.Q. and a terrifying and seemingly insatiable appetite for cruelty. A pimp who lived with (and off of) three women in Roxbury, he was arrested in Cambridge on the night of December 26, 1973, when Officer John Conroy spotted him driving down a city street gesturing at a young woman on the sidewalk. Jackson was apparently trying to pick up the girl. When he noticed the police presence, Jackson sped off in his Cadillac. A chase ensued and Jackson shot at Officer Joseph McSweeney, who returned the fire and downed Jackson.

Anthony Jackson is today serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, at Walpole State Prison. He has been linked to as many as twenty-seven murders of young women. Some authorities believe that the corpse of one of his victims lies beneath the foundation of a high-rise office building in Cambridge. Jackson had apparently quite deliberately placed the body in the excavation just before the concrete was to be poured.

James Roscoe, who knew Anthony Jackson, and knew Albert DeSalvo, sees no resemblance between the two. Roscoe had several long conversations with the latter after Albert was brought into the Cambridge police headquarters on the charge of assaulting Suzanne Macht.

“I sat and talked to him,” Roscoe says today. “But I did not think he had the brutality to strangle women.”

Albert's personality, Roscoe adds, was altogether different from that of a proven serial killer such as Jackson.

Former Cambridge Detective Michael Giacoppo concurs with Roscoe's assessment. “A gentle guy” was the phrase one of albert's sexual assault victims used to describe him to Giacoppo. She added, to Giacoppo's complete astonishment, that she wouldn't have minded if Albert had paid her a return visit.

Such comments raise the question of whether Albert was even a serial rapist, much less a serial killer. There is no doubt that he suffered from an ungovernable sex drive. He told one Cambridge detective that at one point he had masturbated so vigorously and so frequently that he passed blood when he urinated. And there is Irmgard DeSalvo's testimony that she simply couldn't meet his desires.

Certainly in his Measuring Man days he was never violent. And if women resisted his advances, he left them alone and unharmed. “He didn't fight back,” says an ex-Cambridge detective. “He took off.”

How often Albert had to leave his sexual appetite unsatisfied after he entered a woman's home is a good question. The Cambridge detective quoted above describes how Albert charmed his way into the home of a local university professor, whose wife offered to put on a leotard and dance for him. Later, while Albert and the woman were having intercourse on the living room floor, her husband called from work. She chatted with him in an offhand fashion while Albert continued making love to her. The woman later filed a complaint with the Cambridge police but refused to identify Albert, although she apparently recognized him. She also indicated that the sex act had been consensual.