The Boston Stranglers (20 page)

Albert's specialty, it seems, was oral sex.

“He was a superb seducer,” says Ames Robey.

And one with a keen and appreciative eye for good-looking women. A former Cambridge detective, reminiscing about the day a number of Albert's local assault victims were summoned to police headquarters to give their stories, says, “It looked like they were holding the Miss Universe Pageant at the front desk.”

Says another cop, “He had some of the prettiest girls you ever did see. Beauty queens.”

The youth and physical appeal of the women who succumbed to Albert's sunny smile (and other distinctive corporeal attributes—he clearly was possessed of a silver tongue in more ways than one) and boyish con routine made it hard for the Cambridge police to believe he would abruptly turn to assaulting elderly women such as Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, and Jane Sullivan.

“We never could figure out why a guy who had champagne and caviar every day suddenly went to beans and hot dogs,” says one detective.

In any case, “Al never had to kill anybody,” states another Cambridge cop. “He was a very gentle guy.”

The word
gentle
comes up often when those who knew Albert DeSalvo speak of him.

 

 

Albert had allegedly begun hinting that he was the Strangler in January of 1965, and confessing to being the Strangler in very early March of that year.

Months later, nobody was taking him seriously except for F. Lee Bailey, Jon Asgeirsson, and Lieutenants John Donovan and Edward Sherry of the Boston Police Department. Donovan and Sherry had been providing Bailey with extensive and hitherto (it was claimed) unpublished information about the murders so the lawyer could verify DeSalvo's statements.

On May 4, 1965, John Bottomly wrote to Edward Brooke, “As you know the DeSalvo story does not stand up well when compared with the relatively little objective evidence and witnesses now available to investigators. However, in view of the proclivities of one of his counsels it appears that more will be necessary to either eliminate DeSalvo as a suspect or charge him with one or more of the murders.”

Part of Bottomly's skepticism may have been engendered by an investigation being conducted by Task Force member Stephen Delaney. At 2:45
P.M.
on March 18, 1965, a fifty-two-year-old chambermaid named Effie MacDonald had been found strangled to death in Room 318 of the Boston House in Bangor, Maine. Her supine body, clad in a white uniform, had been found on the floor very near to and facing the room entrance. Her shoes and stockings had been removed, her dress was ripped open all the way down the front. Her eyeglasses lay next to her right foot; a towel covered the lower part of her body. Her legs were apart, her left shoe between them before her crotch.

The tight ligature around her neck consisted of two stockings. There was a large swollen bruise over her left cheek. Her body was still warm when she was found.

On April 5, 1965, Delaney wrote Bottomly a long memo detailing the similarities between the murder of Effie MacDonald and those of Anna Slesers, Helen Blake, Nina Nichols, Ida Irga, and Jane Sullivan. “The victim, like our earlier victims, was divorced, lived a quiet life with just a few friends, no boyfriends, did not drink or smoke, was 55 [sic] years of age, about 130 lbs, which was the average weight of the Boston victims ... The manner in which she was assaulted and the MO of the assault especially the trickery of getting this woman into the room are all characteristic to the methods employed in the Boston crimes. The element of surprise and trust was also utilized in this case and I cannot attribute these to the average rapist.”

Delaney concluded his memo with the comment that “obviously it is my feeling that this woman is very possibly the latest victim of the multiple ‘Strangler.' ”

Delaney, who would quit the police and go to work for F. Lee Bailey the following year, would later considerably modify his belief that as of the late spring of 1965 the Boston Strangler was still on the loose and not incarcerated in Bridgewater State Hospital trying to convince someone other than F. Lee Bailey of his guilt.

If Albert DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler, where did he get the information about the killings that enabled him to persuade F. Lee Bailey, Jon Asgeirsson, Gerold Frank, Edward Sherry, John Donovan, Phillip DiNatale, Andrew Tuney, and some members of the media that he was the savage murderer of thirteen women?

The answer is that there was a minimum of six excellent sources for the necessary data readily available to him.

Even so, how did Albert manage to absorb, assimilate, and retain so much varied and detailed information?

The answer to that question lies in a piece of testimony given by Ames Robey at the 1968 court proceeding launched by DeSalvo against the maker and distributor of the Strangler movie. Robey had commented of his former patient that the latter had “absolute, complete, one hundred per cent total photographic recall.”

Robey was not the only person to note—and remark on—this talent.

“He [DeSalvo] had a very retentive memory,” says one Cambridge detective.

“Albert had a phenomenal memory,” says Jon Asgeirsson.

“It was remarkable,” says Tom Troy.

Robey cites an example of how he tested Albert's ability to make instantaneous mental carbon copies of people, places, and things: “We had a staff meeting [at Bridgewater] with about eight people. Albert was walked in and walked out. The next day we had him brought back in. Everyone had on different clothes, was sitting in different positions. I said, ‘Albert, you remember coming in yesterday. Describe it.' ”

Albert did, perfectly.

 

 

The first source of information about the killings available to Albert was the press itself. Newspaper accounts of the stranglings had been extraordinarily detailed. With respect to the murder of Anna Slesers, the
Globe
, on June 15, 1962, reported that she had been found naked but for her housecoat, which had been ripped open, its cord tightly knotted around her neck, and that she had been beaten before being choked. On the same date the
Traveler
informed its readership that Anna's body bore bruises and that she had been dead for about three hours before she was found by her son. The
Traveler
article included the further detail that there was blood from the victim's right ear on the kitchen floor. The
Herald
repeated this latter finding, noting too that Anna lay on her back on the kitchen floor. On July 4, the
Globe
reported that the killer first tried to strangle her with a man's leather belt, but it broke: “Police said he would have to be a man of unnatural strength to do that.”

Even the sexual assaults on the women were graphically described. Whoever glanced at the
Globe
's account of Nina Nichols's death could conclude that she had been not only strangled but abused with a wine bottle. That Evelyn Corbin's killer may have forced or coerced her to perform oral sex on him was also a published fact.

As frank as the
Globe,
the
Traveler,
and even the
Herald
may have been, they were left in the shade by the
Record American
daily and its
Sunday Advertiser
. On January 9, 1963, the tabloid launched a series on the murders written by ace reporters Jean Cole and Loretta McLaughlin. The lead article the Record entitled T
WO
G
IRL
R
EPORTERS
A
NALYZE
S
TRANGLER
.
⁵⁷

On January 14, McLaughlin and Cole gave an exceptionally detailed account of the murder of Helen Blake. Included in it was not only an exact description of the layout of the victim's apartment, but a step-by-step rendition of how the killer had rummaged though Helen's belongings:

McLaughlin and Cole's January 15 article gave even further details of the crime and the crime scene. (“Her coffee cup still clean was set out on a small table in the living room”) and the murderer's actions (‘He opened a footlocker, storing bed lines and towels”).

It was brilliant investigative journalism. It was also practically all the information anyone needed in order to make a plausible-sounding confession to the murder.

On January 23, McLaughlin and Cole examined the death of Ida Irga. Again, the detail included in the story was astonishing: that a hand mirror lay on a table in Ida's living room; that the toilet seat was raised (here, as in the case of Sophie Clark, a cigarette butt was found floating in the bowl); that Ida's suitcase rested on the studio couch in the living room.

Toward the end of the piece was this paragraph:

On January 23, under full-face photographs of Anna Slesers, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, Jane Sullivan, Sophie Clark, and Patricia Bisette, the
Record
printed T
HE
F
ACTS: ON
R
EPORTERS
' S
TRANGLE
W
ORKSHEET
. Rather than an article, this was a chart that listed the names of the victims, their ages, the times of their deaths, the times their bodies were found, the causes of their deaths, the probability of sexual assault, where the bodies had been found, where the victims had been killed, what they had been wearing, and whether their apartments had been ransacked. There were also detailed notes on the victims' hobbies and personal interests, on their employment, and on their affiliations—if any—with area hospitals.

That DeSalvo had memorized this chart is apparent because in his confession to John Bottomly, he regurgitated not only the correct data on it but the few pieces of misinformation it contained as well.

 

 

A second source of information about the crimes was law enforcement. “The case had leaks all over it,” says Edmund McNamara, his disgust with this state of affairs obvious even today.

One of the major leaks was Suffolk County Medical Examiner Richard Ford, who according to McNamara held frequent unauthorized press conferences at which he liberally distributed information about the autopsy findings on the victims. Ford was at odds with—and in direct competition with—his colleague Dr. Michael Luongo. In terms of personality, the two men were polar opposites. Luongo was a reserved, methodical, thoughtful man who, as procedure dictated, submitted his findings directly to the district attorney's office and gave minimal information to the press. Ford, in contrast, was handing out copies of the autopsy protocols to reporters. Understandably, they loved him for his largesse.

Former Boston Police Department Detective Sergeant James McDonald says today that the Strangler Bureau itself was appallingly lax in its handling of the confidential files on the murders. Rather than being kept under lock and key, McDonald states, the files, or casebooks, were left strewn around the State House headquarters of the Bureau, readily available to be leafed through by any visitor who wished to do so. One of McDonald's colleagues on the Boston Homicide Squad, having business to discuss with the Strangler Task Force, entered the Bureau offices one afternoon and bumped into a group of State House pages goggling over the crime scene photos and trading them back and forth like baseball cards.

The Strangler Bureau's failure to exercise tight control over the material it had accumulated concerning the murders is confirmed by the Task Force members themselves. In the February 1967 memo to Herbert Travers written by Sandra Irizarry, Andrew Tuney, and Phillip DiNatale, they described how in April of 1964 they had been ordered by Bottomly to throw open the murder files to Gerold Frank, an order to which they objected vehemently, but to no avail; The trio also stated:

The end result of the Strangler Bureau's carelessness was that any leaked or purloined so-called secret information about the murders that wasn't published in the newspapers ended up public property anyway. That Mary Sullivan had been found dead with the handle of a broom inserted three inches into her vagina had never been printed or broadcast. The general population was nonetheless quite aware of this ghastly fact. Even Gerold Frank reports that “it was common knowledge on the streets.”

Where, presumably, anybody, including Albert DeSalvo, could have picked it up.

 

 

A third source of information on the murders was the “research” Albert had done himself. After DeSalvo was convicted on the Green Man charges, Robey asked him how he'd obtained the familiarity he'd shown with the layouts of the Strangler's victims' apartments. That was child's play for him, Albert maintained. So fascinated had he been by press accounts of the murders that he'd taken the trouble to visit—and tour—each crime scene. He'd had no trouble slipping in and out of each dwelling.

He was, after all, a past master of the art of housebreaking.

 

 

What data Albert didn't procure through the street grapevine, from the newspapers, or through his own investigations, may have been fed to him before and after he began confessing—inadvertently in some cases and quite deliberately in others.

On March 20 and 21, 1965, Bailey had brought hypnoanalyst William Joseph Bryan III to Bridgewater for the purpose of putting Albert into a trance in order to elicit from him further details of the murders that might be buried in his subconscious mind. In their respective books, Gerold Frank and Bailey offer partial transcripts of these sessions. According to both, Bryan urged Albert to think of the strangling victims as substitutes for his wife, Irmgard, and his daughter, Judy—the true targets of Albert's homicidal rage, Bryan opined. As Frank himself wrote, “those who witnessed the hypnoanalysis wondered how much DeSalvo had been led or influenced by Dr. Bryan, so forceful and domineering.” And indeed, Bryan's questions seem to have been highly suggestive: “Each time you strangled, it was because you were killing Judy, wasn't it? You were killing Judy . . .”
⁵⁸

Bryan drew a further connection between the kind of massage Albert had been taught to perform on Judy as therapy for her hip disease, which entailed placing painful pressure with the thumbs on the child's thighs, and the sexual molestation of the murder victims.

Who can say to what extent, too, the resolve of Albert (who had been injected with sodium pentothal as well as hypnotized) to be known as the Strangler might have been strengthened by Bryan's words?
⁵⁹

It may be possible, too, that F. Lee Bailey, when conducting his initial interrogations of Albert, accidentally let slip some of the confidential information Donovan and Sherry had given him.

Beyond that, what kind of questions did Bailey pose? How did he phrase them? How difficult were they to answer?

In a book entitled
Confessions of the Boston Strangler,
published in February 1967 by Pyramid Books, author George Rae wrote that “[John] Donovan primed Bailey with half-questions and key words such as
‘What was Nina's last name?'
...
‘What happened on June 30, 1962?' ‘What kind of foreign objects figured in the stranglings' . . . ‘How were these foreign objects used?' . . . ‘What was the color of this chair?' . . . ‘Miss Clark's first name' ...
and so on.”
⁶⁰

If Rae is accurate, then Bailey was asking questions that could have been answered by any reasonably alert newspaper reader—even one not blessed with a photographic memory.

 

 

Two people are suspected by local law enforcement authorities of having deliberately provided Albert with information about the stranglings so as to make his confession to them the more substantive and therefore believable. One of these individuals was a Boston police detective, now deceased, who resigned from the force when Edmund McNamara relieved him of his investigative duties and returned him to uniformed patrol. When this person left the department, he took with him handwritten copies of sensitive and privileged information (in enormous quantity) about the murders. He was known, prior to April 1965, to be in regular contact with Albert at Bridgewater. Some of this man's ex-colleagues believe he may have been motivated by revenge against the Boston Police Department to feed data on the stranglings to Albert. Others think he did so in order to solve the case and claim the reward money.