The Boston Stranglers (23 page)

Perhaps nowhere in the entire confession is Albert's need to please Bottomly by giving him the “right” answers to his questions more urgently expressed than in this account of Ida Irga's murder. And Bottomly's maneuverings to elicit those appropriate responses from Albert are equally blatant, particularly in the passage dealing with the purported rape of the victim.

In fact, Ida had not been raped—at least, there were no spermatozoa found in either her vagina or rectum, which is why Bottomly had to attack Albert's initial confident assertion that he'd had full intercourse with the victim. No one had, although the slight injury to her external genitalia discovered during the autopsy indicated that she might have been assaulted with an object. Albert was insistent that he had committed no such brutal perversion.

Albert was entirely correct in claiming that Ida had been strangled by a pillowcase tied tightly around her neck; that the pillow itself had been placed beneath her body; that she had salt and pepper hair (it was actually brown and gray rather than black and white as he said); that she was found supine with her feet propped up on two chairs; and that her bedroom furniture was made of dark wood.

All those details had been printed—more than once—in the
Record
.

So had the fact that there was blood on Ida's head.

So had the fact that she had been assaulted in the bedroom.

Albert said twice that Ida had been wearing a black and white housecoat with “squares” on it.

The “Strangle Worksheet” claimed she wore a “polka dot duster.”

The police report, written by the first officer to arrive at the crime scene, stated that Ida's body was clad in a torn light brown nightgown.

Albert said he had placed the chairs on which he propped the victim's feet on their backs.

The crime scene photo shows them standing upright.

But Albert made his worst mistake when—after a long hesitation—he told Bottomly that he'd assaulted the victim around 2:00
P.M.

If Albert was in Ida Irga's apartment at that time, he was there by himself. She was in the Public Garden with a friend—until shortly before six o'clock.

It was August 19, 1965, and George McGrath, Albert's legal guardian, had joined Bottomly in the small room at Bridgewater.

“Okay,” Bottomly said. “Now—so when you grabbed her, you probably fell back into the kitchen, into the kitchen area, I mean—”

“In the kitchen area,” Albert repeated.

“Boy, there must have been a thud when the two of you hit the ground,” Bottomly commented.

“Oh, yeah,” Albert agreed.

“And she gave you a good struggle, huh?”

“No struggle,” Albert said. “She just didn't move, but I mean she couldn't do nothin' about it.”

“But it took a long time to knock her out, though?”

“No, I wouldn't say too long. It was just another—” Albert paused.

They were talking about the murder of sixty-seven-year-old Jane Sullivan, who, like fifty-six-year-old Anna Sleser, sixty-five-year-old Helen Blake, sixty-eight-year-old Nina Nichols, and seventy-five-year-old Ida Irga, had died in the summer of 1962.

Jane's body was not found until nine days after her death, and its state of decomposition was well along, making the medical examiner's task a more difficult one. He was, however, able to establish that she had been strangled with a ligature of two stockings. There was no evidence of trauma to her vagina or anus.

When her body was found, it was facedown in a kneeling position in the bathtub. A housecoat covered the upper torso; the underpants were pulled down on the legs. Jane's bra was on the bathroom floor.

There were bloodstains on the kitchen floor, in the hall, and in the bathroom. The apartment did not appear to have been ransacked.

The “Strangle Worksheet” reported accurately the date and manner of Jane's death as well as the position in which the killer had left the corpse. It also reported that the victim was wearing a duster, a slip, and a girdle, and that her underpants were around her ankles.

Albert's confession to this murder was not specific in its details, and Bottomly had to work particularly hard to wrest answers from him that weren't either evasive or contradictory.

(The medical examiner's report shows no indication that during the autopsy any teeth marks were found on the body.)

(The tape transcript is riddled with incidents like these in which Albert asks Bottomly to confirm a detail of a crime scene, and Bottomly does.)

Albert had a great deal of difficulty recalling the murder of Evelyn Corbin, whom he kept calling “Ellen Corbett” or “Evelyn Corbett” despite Bottomly's constant corrections. He also did not know when the crime had been committed.

“Is there any chance of me knowing what year it was?” he asked Bottomly. “You tell me,” Bottomly replied, and Albert chuckled.

Reluctantly, almost coyly, Albert admitted that he'd gotten Evelyn to perform oral sex on him. She couldn't have regular intercourse, he said, because of a medical problem.

Bottomly then tried to pin him down on when the murder had occurred. Albert said he thought it was either in the wintertime or the summertime.

Evelyn had been slain on September 8, 1963.

Albert was correct when he told Bottomly that the victim had died on a Sunday, that she had been getting ready to go to church, that she was going to have Sunday dinner with a man friend, and that another woman in the building had a key to her apartment.

All these facts had been widely publicized.

Albert thought the weather had been “nice” that day; in fact, it had been foggy in Salem the morning Evelyn died.

Albert must have been sweating bullets throughout this interrogation. At one point he said to Bottomly, “I can't get no breaks.” Said Bottomly, “You're getting plenty of breaks.”

When Bottomly asked Albert how old he thought Evelyn had been, Albert replied, “She looked, uh, to be about fifty-two or fifty-three and she had, uh, brownish hair like. She was, uh—”

Press accounts of the murder had in fact variously given Evelyn's age as fifty, fifty-one, and fifty-three. But everyone who knew her agreed that her appearance was startlingly youthful; she was often mistaken for a woman in her thirties.

Albert said that Evelyn had been wearing only a “negligee” and a housecoat. In fact she had been clad in a short robe, a nightgown, and white socks. Her killer had left her supine on her bed, two stockings tied around her neck and a third around her left ankle. She lay with her right hand and forearm tucked beneath her. To Salem Police Inspector John Moran, one of the first investigators on the scene, it looked as if someone had tied her feet together and then cut the bond.

Albert had told Bottomly that he'd tied Evelyn's hands behind her back. Bottomly kept pushing him on this detail.

All he would admit to was binding the victim's hands. There was no indication at the scene that that had been done; at any rate, the stocking Albert said he'd used to do so was missing and he didn't say he'd taken it with him.

Albert told Bottomly that after Evelyn had finished fellating him, he'd ejaculated into a tissue. Bottomly asked him if he thought the victim had caught any of his semen in her mouth. He wasn't sure.

That she had was confirmed by the autopsy. The really interesting detail here is that Albert was clearly aware that crumpled semen-stained tissues, as well as lipstick-stained underpants, were found on the bedroom floor. His knowledge of this would seem to indicate that he had a firsthand knowledge of the crime.

But it could just as easily have been gleaned from the close-up photos of the scene—which Bottomly had shown Albert for identification purposes
prior
to the confession.