The Cases That Haunt Us (44 page)

DeSalvo was born on September 3, 1931, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, one of six children. His father, Frank, was a violently abusive man who regularly beat his wife and children. Frank also brought prostitutes home and had sex with them in front of his family. At five or six, Albert played sex games with his brothers, no great surprise in light of his father’s example. Albert developed some sadistic compulsions, which manifested themselves in cruelty to small animals. Throughout his adolescence, he went through periods of delinquency and pretty criminality, interspersed with periods of good behavior and staying out of trouble. His relationship with his mother, Charlotte, was reasonably good.

Albert was in the army from 1948 through 1956 and stationed for a time in Germany, where he met his wife, Irmgard Beck, an attractive woman from a respected family. He’d been promoted to a specialist E-5, but was demoted back to private for failure to obey an order. In 1955, he was arrested for fondling a young girl, but the charge was dropped. That same year, his first child, Judy, was born with a congenital pelvic disease. This had a large impact on DeSalvo’s home life. Irmgard, terrified she would have another child with a handicap, tried to avoid sex, while Albert had a voracious sexual appetite. He received an honorable discharge from the service. Between 1956 and 1960, he had several arrests for breaking and entering, but each time received a suspended sentence. In 1960, a son, Michael, was born without handicaps.

In spite of his brushes with the law, DeSalvo managed to stay employed. He was a press operator at a rubber factory, then worked in a shipyard, then as a construction worker. Most people who knew Albert DeSalvo liked him, and one boss characterized him as a decent family man and good worker. Unlike his own father, Albert treated his wife and children with love and consideration.

Police arrested DeSalvo at home for the Green Man crimes. He was mortified that Irmgard would see him in handcuffs, but she urged him to tell the truth. He admitted to breaking into four hundred apartments and to assaulting some three hundred women in the four-state area. Given his tendency to self-aggrandize, it was difficult to know if the number was actually anywhere near that high.

On February 4, 1965, DeSalvo was sent by the court to Bridgewater State Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Shortly thereafter, George Nassar, charged with the vicious, execution-style murder of a gas station attendant, also came to Bridgewater. He had a high IQ and the ability to manipulate. The two men were placed in the same ward, and he became Albert’s confidant. Around that time, a police detective had come to Bridgewater to take DeSalvo’s handprint for the Boston Strangler investigation. Soon Albert was telling people that, indeed, he was the Strangler.

Nassar contacted his own attorney, the soon to be famous F. Lee Bailey, who met with DeSalvo in prison even though DeSalvo was at the time represented by another lawyer. Bailey was able to obtain unreleased information on the Strangler cases from Boston PD so he could learn what DeSalvo actually knew. He taped an interview, then played it for the police.

Bailey said he was convinced Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. Ultimately, the police came to the same conclusion. Now there was a larger issue to contend with: how to deal with a self-confessed killer and the people’s demand for justice.

With Bailey as his counsel, DeSalvo went to trial on January 10, 1967, not for the Boston Strangler murders, but for the Green Man assaults and break-ins. During the trial, Bailey conceded that DeSalvo was the Strangler, so as to earn him a spot in a mental institution instead of a penitentiary. DeSalvo was found guilty of the Green Man crimes and sentenced to life in prison.

While he was awaiting transfer to Walpole State Prison, DeSalvo escaped from Bridgewater with two other inmates and stayed out for thirty-six hours before turning himself in. Though the entire area was terrified that the Boston Strangler was free, he said he just wanted to show his desire to go into a mental institution.

The Boston Strangler phenomenon was huge. A book by Gerold Frank became a best-seller. A movie starred Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda. F. Lee Bailey became a celebrity and legal star. And from prison, Albert DeSalvo, the Measuring Man and the Green Man, basked in his notoriety as an American nightmare.

On December 27, 1973, DeSalvo was stabbed to death in the infirmary at Walpole. The murder was believed to be related to his involvement in a prison drug operation. Three inmates were tried, but twice the trials ended in hung juries. The controversy over whether DeSalvo actually was the Boston Strangler lives on long after him.

From all of my study of serial sexual offenders, I believe it is virtually impossible that Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler.

Why not? He was there at the time. He was mobile in the way the Strangler was. He’d already demonstrated his proficiency at breaking and entering, his voracious sexual appetite, and his willingness to rape. He certainly had the kind of abusive background you’d expect to see in a sexual predator. So what’s missing?

Behavior.

Through a lot of research and case experience, we at the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico have divided rapists into four major categories: the power-reassurance rapist, the exploitative rapist, the anger rapist, and the sadistic rapist. There can be some overlap and crossover, just as there is with organized and disorganized criminal behavior, but these categories hold up well in providing insight into the type of personality who commits a given sexual crime.

Simply stated, the power-reassurance rapist is someone who feels himself to be inadequate and compensates for this by forcing women to have sex with him. The exploitive rapist is an impulsive predator who seizes an opportunity when it comes along. He is very conscious of his body and ego and, unlike the power-reassurance rapist, will be unconcerned with the victim’s feelings. The anger rapist, also known as the anger-retaliatory rapist, uses sexual assault as a displaced expression of the rage and anger within him. The victim might represent a mother, wife, girlfriend, or even a group of people whom the offender hates. The sadistic rapist attacks because of sexual fantasies involving dominating, controlling, and hurting other people. Depending on his fantasies and preferences, the victim might be subjected to normal vaginal intercourse or anything in the range of perversity—including torture and/or death. The only thing that really matters to him is dominating the victim and making her suffer for his own pleasure and satisfaction.

As should be clear, though all forms of sexual attack are horrible and heinous, the anger rapist and the sadistic rapist will tend to be the most dangerous.

All of the evidence in the Green Man crimes suggest that the perpetrator was a power-reassurance rapist. He threatened his victims to get his way, but did not attack them with his knife. He talked to them and was apologetic. In an admittedly weird and self-centered way, he seemed concerned for their welfare.

This type of behavior squares with DeSalvo’s background as the Measuring Man. A power-reassurance rapist will generally start out with socalled “nuisance crimes,” such as voyeurism, and, as he gets older and a little more confident, will evolve into less benign activities that are still nonviolent. The important consideration is that this type of personality does not evolve into an anger-retaliatory or sadistic offender. Even DeSalvo’s background gives him away on this. He hated his father but had good relationships with his mother and wife. This is not the hallmark of an anger rapist. But with the precipitating stressor of the birth of a sick child and his wife’s resultant antipathy to sex, we have all the motivation we need for the evolution into a power-reassurance rapist.

If we look at the Boston Stranger murders, we see clear evidence of a sadistic rapist at work. He not only targeted young women but older, more vulnerable ones. He not only raped but beat them. He strangled them with articles of their own clothing. He depersonalized them. He posed them in such a way as to degrade the victims and shock whoever came upon the crime scene.

From a behavioral perspective, everything about these two sets of crimes is different. Keep in mind that the Green Man was still operating after Anna Slesers was killed. There is no way DeSalvo or any other killer could have deescalated from such a brutal murder back to the kind of assaults the Green Man was committing. Albert DeSalvo was not an angry or sadistic guy. If he were, this behavior would have shown up in other aspects of his life, and it would certainly have shown up in his interactions in prison.

Though DeSalvo wouldn’t have committed crimes as savage and sadistic as those of the Boston Strangler, it is understandable that, once the suggestion was made to him, he’d take credit for the crimes. If he’s power-reassurance motivated, then anything that puts him into a more macho light can be appealing to him. If he’s looking for status, he knows he’s not going to find it as a brain surgeon, a movie star, or a pro athlete. And one way or another, he’s not getting back out on the street anytime soon. But in the milieu in which he’s used to operating, if he can be perceived as a celebrity criminal, well, at least he’s a somebody.

If DeSalvo was taking credit for crimes he did not commit, it was not the first time. He had claimed responsibility for a robbery and assault in Rhode Island in 1964, though someone else was identified by the victim and arrested for the crime. As to how he could have gained specific information on the Strangler murders, he later said he was so fascinated by the press accounts that in some cases he used his burglary skills and broke into the victims’ apartments just to look around.

Other than for George Nassar, we can’t be sure whom DeSalvo had extensive contact with at Bridgewater, but it is clear that he easily could have been fed additional information on the Strangler crimes. It is also possible that Bailey might unintentionally have asked him leading questions. Much was published in the papers. And though DeSalvo wasn’t the brightest guy in the world, he was known for his excellent memory. Not only that, Albert’s own extensive experience as a burglar allowed him to intuit some of the right answers just because he knew how an intruder would have acted. Even so, DeSalvo still got a number of Strangler details wrong or didn’t remember at all.

No witness ever identified DeSalvo in connection with any of the Strangler crime scenes, and no physical evidence connects him to any of the murders.

No one has ever been tried for the Boston Strangler murders. A number of accomplished detectives never believed DeSalvo was the Strangler and, in fact, thought there was more than one offender. A number of reasonable alternative suspects have emerged over the years, including George Nassar himself, a criminally sophisticated convicted murderer with a high IQ who has admitted to having killed for excitement. However, he has steadfastly denied that he was the Strangler, and no official attempt has been made to tie him to the crimes.

New York police lieutenant Thomas Cavanaugh believed he discovered the identity of the Strangler through a 1963 homicide he investigated: the strangling of a sixty-two-year-old woman tied to Charles A. Terry, twenty-three at the time and a native of Waterville, Maine. Terry had been in Boston during the first six Strangler murders, and evidence from the New York crime scene matched many of the Boston details, including positioning of the body, strangulation with a scarf, and tying the bow. He had been diagnosed as a psychopath and sexual sadist and had a history of assaults against women. He died in prison of lung cancer in 1981.

After the August 20, 1962, murder of sixty-seven-year-old Jane Sullivan, the sixth Strangler victim, George Snubbs, a man with a deviant sexual history, committed suicide several blocks from Sullivan’s apartment by tying a bow around his neck with a pair of stockings. After his death, the age range of the Strangler’s targeted victims shifted from older women to younger ones.

A man whose stay at Bridgewater overlapped with DeSalvo’s was a suspect in the deaths of Anna Slesers, Jane Sullivan, and three others of the first wave of murders, since he was missing from Boston State Hospital on those dates. A diagnosed psychotic with a low IQ, he had tried to kill his mother, whom he regularly punched and kicked. He reportedly told his sister that he was the Strangler.

And then there was another inmate at Bridgewater whose stay overlapped DeSalvo’s by five weeks. He was a university student in the Boston area during the Strangler murders. Another diagnosed psychotic and possible schizophrenic, he had an extremely high IQ, as well as a history of drug-abuse and petty crime. He had been arrested for abusing his pregnant wife. Friends said he was subject to wild fits of anger and violence and claimed he said he would save the world by destroying its women. His move from Boston to the Midwest coincided with seven brutal sexual murders there, in two of which stockings were tied around the victims’ neck.

There is no evidence that Albert DeSalvo had any knowledge or insight as to the true identity of the Boston Strangler or Stranglers. He acknowledged the mystery, at the same time adding to his own mythology and mystique, with a poem he composed in prison. It ends:

Today he sits in a prison cell,

Deep inside only a secret he can tell.

People everywhere are still in doubt,

Is the Strangler in prison or roaming about?

I
n the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, many of the themes we’ve been dealing with come together: family … celebrity … personality evaluation … the suffering of the most innocent among us … kidnapping … brutal, sustained-aggression killing … and the appearance of raw evil where we least expect to find it. It is also the one case in this book with which I have had extensive personal involvement.

And since I am personally involved, it’s probably necessary to say a couple of things up front. My purpose here is neither to defend or condemn John or Patricia Ramsey, nor to justify the actions or positions for which, in certain circles, I have been roundly criticized and my motives challenged. My purpose is only to explain how I reached the conclusions I did through the use of the criminal investigative analysis that I helped develop over a quarter of a century.