The Boston Stranglers (49 page)

Neither wishes to be further identified.

The two other murders to which DeSalvo confessed are also considered unsolved.

No relation to Jane Sullivan.

Frank, p. 40.

Report of Attorney
General
Edward W. Brooke: Coordination of Investigations of Stranglings,
August 18, 1964, p. 8.

Frank, p. 100.

Bailey, p. 144.

Frank, p. 334.

Frank, p. 251.

Bailey, p. 143.

Bailey, pp. 144—45.

Bailey, p. 145.

Bailey, pp. 144—45.

Bailey, p. 151.

Bailey, p. 153.

Bailey, pp. 153—54.

Bailey, pp. 155—56.

Frank, p. 248.

Bailey, pp. 156—58.

Bailey, p. 158.

Bailey, p. 166.

Bailey, p. 166.

Bailey, p. 167.

He professed no knowledge of the slayings of Margaret Davis or Modeste Freeman. He did, however, claim to have caused the death of eighty-five-year-old Mary Mullen of Brighton on June 28, 1962. The story Albert allegedly told was that he'd broken into Mrs. Mullen's apartment and attempted to strangle her. But she died of a heart attack first. Mrs. Mullen's death had previously been attributed to natural causes. A very good suspect in the killing of Modeste Freeman was incarcerated in Bridgewater in 1964.

Bailey, pp. 171-72. Bailey may have been overreacting here. There wasn't much chance Albert would be executed: no convicted felon had been in Massachusetts since 1948. Even Nassar would escape the chair.

Bailey, p. 173.

Bailey, p. 178.

What Governor Peabody had in fact offered was ten thousand dollars total for a solution to any one or all of the killings. Albert's misapprehension would be confirmed at his 1967 trial.

Bailey, p. 172.

Bailey suffered a similar odd lapse of memory in the fall of 1968, when asked in U.S. District Court when he had first met Albert. Bailey wasn't exactly sure; he thought it might have been in February of 1965. In 1971, he was able to specify the date as March 4, 1965, citing the Bridgewater visitors' book as his source. The log does confirm that Bailey was at Bridgewater that day.

And who was now its acting medical director, Robey having left to become director of the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Out on bail after his November 3 arraignment, he was being sought by police on November 5 for questioning on out-of-state assault charges.

Singer Connie Francis, appearing at Blinstrub's in Boston, took time out from her rehearsal schedule to attend one day of the trial. Albert was reported to have thought that very nice of her. Ironically, Francis herself would in later years fall victim to a rapist more savage than any of Albert's Green Man victims claimed him to be.

On the armed robbery charge; the indecent assault convictions earned him a ten-year sentence.

Richard and Joseph would be indicted but never tried or convicted for aiding and abetting the escape. The next day, Richard would also be arrested by the FBI and charged with illegal possession of a weapon and transporting it over state lines. Richard's defense was that his employer, a New Hampshire trucker, required his drivers to keep a handgun in their vehicles. The FBI, which stated that Richard's arrest had nothing to do with Albert's escape, did not pursue the charge. Richard's lawyer was Jon Asgeirsson.

Superintendent Charles Gaughan, who had been pleading for years that the state upgrade security at its principal holding facility for the criminally insane, without result, may have been grimly amused by this sudden flurry of attention.

A lawyer must obtain one of these from his home state to be eligible to conduct legal business in another state.

Bailey, p. 235.

Droney, like DeSalvo, misunderstood the amount. It was $10,000.

Richardson says today, “I never had warm feelings for Bottomly.”

The
Boston Herald
had recently merged with the
Traveler.
Several years later, the
Herald-Traveler
would merge with the
Record American,
becoming the
Herald-American.
In 1982, under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch, it would become, again, the
Boston Herald.

Here called Lisa Gordon. All the victims were given pseudonyms.

A story widely current in legal, media, and show business circles has it that the prison escape scene in the Charles Bronson movie
Breakout
was inspired by this incident.

Charles Burnim was the lawyer in Bailey's office who had argued Albert's appeal of his 1967 conviction before the Supreme Judicial Court.

DeSalvo's comments would find a haunting parallel in remarks made long after his death by Patricia Campbell Hearst in her 1982 memoir of her kidnapping,
Every Secret Thing
(with Alvin Moscow, Pinnacle Books, 1982). Hearst's father had hired Bailey and his associate J. Albert Johnson to represent his daughter at her 1976 bank robbery trial. Part of Bailey's fee would be the right for Bailey to write a book about the case: “Al [Johnson] had said he would be giving me a paper to sign later on. Meanwhile, he said, I had to learn to trust my attorneys... About three days after my conviction, Al came to me with a letter. ”Remember the paper I told you I was bringing you to sign one day? Well, here it is.” The letter was to a publisher. It stated that I agreed to F. Lee Bailey writing a book about me and the trial and pledged I would cooperate with him and not compete with a book of my own for at least eighteen months after his was published. I couldn't argue. I signed it for him, confused as to the necessity for it.” (p. 449)

Except for occasional interpolations in brackets for the purpose of clarification, the transcript is reproduced exactly. No attempt has been made to regularize spelling or punctuation.

Troy says today that Bailey told him outside the courtroom that Robert McKay was in fact F. Lee Bailey. Bailey says today that Robert McKay was Albert DeSalvo.

Bailey's repetition of the phrase “I don't recall” during this court proceeding resonates again in the memoir of Patricia Campbell Hearst. Hearst, who writes that her attorney instructed her to give brief answers to all questions asked her at her trial, comments also that he coached her in the use of certain key expressions. “For some reason I could not fathom, Bailey added that I should never say on the witness stand, ‘I can't remember.' If I could not remember something, I should reply, ‘I don't recall.' ” (Hearst, p. 426.)

In Walpole, Albert had slashed his wrists, although not badly enough to do him any permanent damage. No doubt his despair was real enough, but the gesture was probably more histrionic than it was a genuine suicide attempt.

In three and a half pages of testimony, Burnim used this expression nine times. Even Garrity latched on to it.

It must have been contagious.

Bailey, p. 242

Bailey, p. 237.

Women were still, however, attracted to him. But they were probably reacting more to his sinister glamour as a celebrity felon than to the man himself. He had contact with a woman in Maine; he had also developed a long-distance relationship (of which very little is known) with a woman in the South to whom he occasionally sent money. And he was visited fairly frequently by another woman, married with several children, whom Richard DeSalvo suspected of running drugs into the prison.

Being the comedian that he was, he specialized in choker necklaces, which were sold to the public.

According to F. Lee Bailey, Albert said that
he
recognized Erika Wilsing and Marcella Lulka. (Lulka's photograph had been in the newspapers.) Of the tentative identification of George Nassar, Bailey states in
The Defense Never Rests
(p. 164) that it was rigged by someone at Bridgewater who wanted to deflect suspicion away from Albert and onto George Nassar.

The “girls” were in their early thirties, married, and mothers.

Frank, p. 274.

Dr. Bryan had acquired his hypnoanalytic skills from his parents, a pair of vaudevillians whose stage act included inducing members of the audience to emulate chickens.

The ellipsis and italicizations in the above passage are Rae's (p. 13).

An interesting echo of the horrified remark he'd made to a Cambridge police detective in 1964: “I wouldn't hurt no broads. I
love
broads.”

To be discussed fully in chapter 33.

Newspaper accounts gave varying numbers.

Albert had always maintained his innocence of this murder. There would have been little point in him faking a confession; Roy Smith had already been convicted of killing Mrs. Goldberg on the basis of very good evidence.

Bottomly and McGrath were doubtless referring not to the reward money offered for the solution to the killings (which DeSalvo couldn't collect if he were the killer) but to potential book and movie sales.

Whether Bottomly was lying or simply mistaken is unknown. And, if McGrath
wasn't
Albert's legal guardian, why was he present at the latter's interrogations?

Margaret Davis's murderer was believed, probably correctly, by most police to be the drifter with whom she'd checked into the hotel and spent the night.

Jane Sullivan had an illegitimate daughter, again an indication that her past life was slightly less than conventional.

In
The Boston Strangler
Gerold Frank writes that Barrows (whom Frank calls Arnold Wallace) had been brought to the attention of police by a psychic who had uncannily accurate visions of Barrows at his homicidal activities (pp. 68—81). It was later established that these visions had their basis in an acquaintance the psychic had formed with Barrows at Boston State Hospital.

Apart from the semen stain.

Ruth Darling reported to police that much to her disgust, John had asked
her
out when she told him that Patricia wasn't available. When she later met him, in Pat's company, her initial bad impression was confirmed: “He looked like a snake.”

No relation and no apparent connection to the Joann Graff who was to be raped and strangled in Lawrence in late November 1963.

Beverly was a creature of her time, as was Leslie. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, many gay men sought—or were told to seek—counseling in the hope of finding a “cure” for their sexual orientation. The theory fashionable at the time, according to gay men who underwent this therapy, was that they had been warped by their mothers.

Frank, p. 209.

In an outlandish coincidence, the
Globe
reporter was a college friend of Strangler suspect William Lindahl, and would be accused in 1970 of murdering his own wife.

This atmosphere enabled Albert DeSalvo, in his Measuring Man phase, to move so freely around the Harvard Square area. He was in fact quite gleeful about the number of “high class ladies” he was able to seduce there. He claimed to have enjoyed a number of sexual successes with residents of apartments at University Road, which was probably why when he confessed to the murder of Beverly Samans, he was able to describe the layout (although not, interestingly, the furnishings and household effects) of her flat fairly convincingly.