The Boston Stranglers (40 page)

On a Sunday night in late November 1973, a few hours before he was stabbed to death in his quarters in the infirmary of the state prison at Walpole, Albert DeSalvo made at least two telephone calls. One of them, to his brother Richard, was lighthearted. The other was not.

Between the time he hung up the phone after speaking with Richard and the time he made his next call, something bad had happened—something that had terrified Albert. Either that, or he had been feigning his earlier jollity with Richard.

 

 

Ames Robey, who in 1973 was director of forensic psychiatry for the state of Michigan, had come back to Massachusetts the weekend after Thanksgiving to testify at a criminal trial unrelated to the stranglings. That Sunday night, he received a phone call from Albert. Albert had heard through the prison grapevine that Robey was back in the area.

It was ironic that the last known telephone call that DeSalvo would ever make would be to Ames Robey, whom DeSalvo had once despised for his refusal to believe that he was the Strangler. DeSalvo obviously had a change of heart, because he told Robey that he wanted to see him as soon as possible. The matter was one of great urgency.

“He was really scared,” says Robey.

Robey agreed to meet Albert at the prison at 9:00
A.M.
the following day.

It was never to be. Early Monday morning, as Robey was finishing shaving and dressing, he flipped on the radio. A news bulletin reported that Albert DeSalvo, forty-two, had been found stabbed to death in his bed at Walpole.

 

 

One story has it that Albert was killed in a fight over two pounds of institutional bacon.

Another has it that Albert died in the aftermath of a quarrel over drugs. Says a Walpole
⁸⁰
inmate, “The things in prison that are important to some cons are dope, sex, and money. The cons that ran Walpole back in the seventies used Mr. DeSalvo ... They made him the dope man. To a con that didn't know what was going on, he was a big shot.”

The inmate observes that the hard cases wielded tremendous power. “One word from one of these prisoners and you could end up hurt or dead. Sometimes, they don't hurt you; they break you or use you.” DeSalvo, who enjoyed his illusory role as a big shot, wasn't aware that he was actually being used.

“Most cons didn't like Albert to start with,” the inmate continues, “even though we all knew he wasn't the Strangler. One night one of the so-called tough guys went to see Albert in his cell in the hospital unit and asked Albert for some dope.”

DeSalvo's role as drug kingpin had gone to his head. “He reminded this guy that he had not paid his bill from the last few times. This con that wanted the drugs was a tough s.o.b., and had killed before, so he took out a knife and stabbed Albert and left him laying on the bed as if he fell asleep reading a book.”

 

 

According to Ames Robey, Albert had asked one other person to meet him at Walpole that Monday morning—a reporter.
⁸¹

Why?

“He was going to tell us who the Boston Strangler really was, and what the whole thing was about,” says Robey.

And why had Albert been so frightened when he'd spoken to the doctor?

“He had asked to be placed in the infirmary under special lockup about a week before,” Robey says. “Something was going on within the prison, and I think he felt he had to talk quickly. There were people in the prison, including guards, that were not happy with him.”

And how had Albert's murder been arranged?

If it was an inmate who did the killing, Robey, who is very familiar with the prison layout, says the murderer “would have had to get out of one block, out of his cell, out of his corridor, out of his section, out of his whole ward down a hallway with two or three doors into the infirmary, in through the administration area, into the patient area, through that into the inner area, and then into Albert's room. All of which was always supposed to be kept locked. Somebody had to leave an awful lot of doors open, which meant, because there were several guards one would have to go by, there had to be a fair number of people paid or asked to turn their backs or something. But somebody put a knife into Albert DeSalvo's heart sometime between evening check and the morning.”

 

 

Bill O'Donnell, a senior corrections officer at Walpole during the time of DeSalvo's imprisonment, is another who is convinced the murder was drug-related: “The reason Albert was killed was because he was attempting to run a drug operation out of the hospital.”

O'Donnell continues: “I knew Albert because the warden at Walpole felt he had been handed a hot potato [when DeSalvo was transferred there after his 1967 escape from Bridgewater]. He ordered DeSalvo to be kept in a cell in the hospital area, with a twenty-four-hour guard.”

O'Donnell was the day guard. He got to know DeSalvo very well. “Albert was examined by many doctors,” says O'Donnell. All of them concluded that Albert didn't have the personality of a psychopath typical of a serial killer.

One day DeSalvo and O'Donnell had the following conversation:

Out of the blue, Albert asked, “Do you believe I'm who they say I am?”

“Who's that?” O'Donnell replied, knowing full well but feigning innocence.

“The Boston Strangler,” Albert said.

“Oh, Albert,” O'Donnell said. “For Chrissake, you're no more the Boston Strangler than I am.”

“Well, who do you think it was?” Albert asked.

O'Donnell named a name, that of DeSalvo's very close associate in prison.

Albert nodded. Neither he nor O'Donnell ever again raised the subject.

O'Donnell was off-duty the night DeSalvo was slain.

Three men were charged with Albert's murder and tried twice. Both times the trials ended in hung juries.

Says the Walpole inmate, “The man who killed Mr. DeSalvo has been free for years now and is still running around someplace out there ... I can't give you his name. It wouldn't bring Albert back.”

Other sources remain convinced that Albert's murderer is still incarcerated within the prison system.

The manuscript DeSalvo told his brother Richard that he was writing, the biographical document that would finally set straight the record of his life, was never found.

One of Albert's literary efforts, a poem, survives. It was composed several years before his death:

“Albert,” says Ames Robey with a sigh, “was a showman.”

This is what has happened to some of the principal actors in the Strangler drama:

 

Jon Asgeirsson
practices law in Stoneham, Massachusetts.

 

F. Lee Bailey
has law offices in Boston and West Palm Beach, Florida. In 1973 he was indicted for mail fraud and successfully defended by Alan M. Dershowitz. In 1976, after being found guilty on bank robbery charges, Patricia Campbell Hearst retained a new lawyer to challenge her conviction. Ms. Hearst maintained that Bailey had failed to represent her fully because his interests were engaged elsewhere. Although a lower court dismissed the claim, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco noted that Bailey had “created a potential conflict of interest” in seeking a publishing contract for a book about the Hearst case while it was ongoing. After his February 1982 arrest on drunken driving charges in San Francisco, charges against which he was successfully defended by Robert Shapiro, he wrote
How to Protect Yourself from Cops in California and Other Strange Places.

Bailey is a commentator for
Court TV.
With Robert Shapiro, he participated in the defense of O. J. Simpson, accused of the double murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

 

John S. Bottomly
was suspended in 1980 for six months from the practice of law in Massachusetts for mismanaging a trust. In 1968, he discovered that sixty thousand dollars' worth of bearer bonds was missing from his office, a fact that Bottomly did not bother to report to any of the trust's principals until several years later. In 1981, he was indicted for and found guilty of state tax evasion committed in 1973. The judge presiding over the disposition of both cases was Hiller Zobel, who in March 1967 had been appointed by the Boston Bar Association to investigate the professional conduct of F. Lee Bailey.

Bottomly died in 1984. Although he and his wife made restitution for the missing bearer bonds, the bonds themselves were never recovered.

 

Edward Brooke
lost his Senate seat in 1978. He has a law office in Warrenton, Virginia.

 

Phillip J. DiNatale
resigned from the Boston Police Department to accept an offer from Twentieth Century-Fox to serve as technical consultant on the 1968 film
The Boston Strangler.
He later became president of his own private detective agency. He died in 1987.

 

John Donovan,
retired from the Boston Police Department, was most recently head of security for the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

 

James McDonald,
the Boston Police Department detective sergeant who investigated a number of the strangling murders, remains convinced that Albert DeSalvo committed none of them. He is retired from security work in the private sector.

 

Edmund McNamara,
who served ten years as Boston Police Commissioner, is retired from law enforcement.

 

John Moran
is enjoying his leisure after thirty-two years with the Salem Police Department.

 

George Nassar,
whose long association with Albert DeSalvo ended a month before the latter was slain, is an inmate at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Norfolk, Massachusetts. In 1968, the United States Supreme Court rejected his appeal for a new trial in the 1964 murder of Irvin Hilton.

 

Francis C. Newton, Jr.,
brought an action against F. Lee Bailey in 1971 to recover monies owed Albert DeSalvo as a result of the release he had signed to Gerold Frank. Over the next six years, Newton scheduled numerous appointments with Bailey in order to take the latter's deposition; unfortunately, Bailey always had to cancel these appointments at the last minute because of trial commitments. In 1977, four years after Albert's murder, Newton received a payment from Bailey of $47,761.37, which, less an eight-thousand-dollar fee to Bailey and a two-thousand-dollar fee to Newton (for six years' work) and other expenses, went into Albert's estate.

Mr. Newton practices law in Boston and pursues his avocation of Civil War studies.

 

 

Ames Robey
practices psychiatry in Stoneham, Massachusetts, and consults on various criminal cases.

 

Thomas Troy
practices law in Reading, Massachusetts.

 

Andre Tuney
is chief investigator of the Kuhn Bureau of Investigation, Inc., in Lynn, Massachusetts. He has taught for the Learning Adventure in Boston a course called “Be Your Own Private Detective.”

On July 9, 1999, a front-page story in the
Boston Globe
reported that the Boston Police Department had announced it was searching for DNA evidence to establish whether Albert H. DeSalvo had actually committed the strangling murders that had terrorized the greater Boston area over three decades previously.

The probe had actually begun in the summer of 1998, when the BPD's Cold Case Squad examined fourteen boxes of evidence taken from the scenes of the crimes. “The Strangler case is one of the most notorious in the country,” said Captain Timothy Murray to the
Globe.
“If we can solve this, it might just spark other cities to use DNA to solve old crimes. There's no statute of limitations on murder.”

As of July 9, 1999, the police had been unable to locate some of the physical evidence known to have been preserved. Among these missing items were semen samples taken from some of the victims as well as the knife that had been used to stab Albert DeSalvo to death.

On November 7, 1999, Albert DeSalvo's son Michael gave an interview to the Boston CBS television news affiliate in which he called for Massachusetts law enforcement authorities to perform the DNA testing that might exonerate his father.

The Boston Police Department, however, seemed to have lost its enthusiasm for the project since the past July. A spokesperson for the department told the
Boston Herald
that “There is no biological evidence (from the women) that could give us a suspect. Things (evidence) get contaminated if you leave them out in the air.”

Timothy Murray was promoted out of the Cold Case Squad.

In February 2000, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, a British-born Massachusetts attorney who, with her lawyer husband Dan, ran a practice out of Marblehead, received an e-mail from Professor James Starrs of George Washington University. Professor Starrs wondered if Sharp would be interested in working on the Boston Strangler case. Starrs added that if she would prefer not to be involved, she should notify him.

Sharp knew next to nothing about the Boston Strangler case. A vague recollection suggested to her that it might have taken place around the turn of the twentieth century. (She comments that as someone English-bred, she might have confused the Boston Strangler with Jack the Ripper.) Sharp did, however, know a great deal about Starrs, an internationally famous expert in forensic science. Sharp, a bulldog litigator with an interest in medico-legal work and a specialization in traumatic brain injury and police misconduct cases, also shared Starrs's professional interests: she had cocounseled or consulted in about sixty murder trials. Her highest-profile case to date was Commonwealth vs. Louise Woodward, in which she prepared the medical defense for the British au pair charged with the beating death of Matthew Eappen, infant son of Drs. Deborah and Sunil Eappen of Newton, Massachusetts. The trial made international headlines for nearly two years.

In October 1999, Sharp attended the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Reno, Nevada, where Starrs gave a talk on expert testimony and scientific evidence. After the speech Starrs, Sharp, Sharp's assistant, and a mutual friend had dinner, and later made a day trip to Virginia City, Nevada, to one of the city's famous graveyards. “A place which held an equal and mutual fascination,” Sharp remarks.

Starrs, a relaxed man with a quick dry wit, had in his career undertaken to solve some of American history's great puzzles. He had spearheaded the effort to exhume the remains of explorer Meriwether Lewis, long thought to have died by his own hand, maintaining that the description of the gunshot wounds Lewis had died of—one in the head, the other in the chest—pointed to murder rather than suicide. Starrs led the team of scientists who performed the DNA testing on the body exhumed from the Kearney, Missouri, grave of Jesse James and concluded that the remains were 99 percent likely to be those of the legendary outlaw. This was disappointing news to Texas author Betty Duke, who claimed the real Jesse James was her great-grandfather James Lafayette Courtney, who died in 1943 at age ninety-six. In 1998, Starrs was granted access to the Washington, D.C., medical examiner's records to determine exactly how FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had died. Starrs was dubious that Hoover—whose body had never been autopsied—died of a heart attack, since nothing in his medical history warranted such a diagnosis. “Hoover had numerous enemies in all walks of life,” Starrs told the Associated Press. “The man's life was marked for death by all sorts of people.”

Ambling about the Virginia City cemetery, Sharp told Starrs she'd like to work with him on an exhumation project. They agreed to join forces on the repatriation of an American member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade killed during the Spanish civil war and buried in a mass grave. Starrs entered negotiations with the Spanish government to proceed with the exhumation while Sharp, a journalist before she entered law school, used her press contacts to publicize the effort.

“Given the events that follow[ed],” Sharp comments, “the repatriation project has not moved forward much.”

She agreed to work with Starrs on the Strangler project. At Starrs's behest, she telephoned a relative of Mary Sullivan, the eleventh Strangler victim. This individual was having difficulty obtaining information about the Sullivan homicide from the Massachusetts Attorney General's office and from the Boston Police Department. Sharp received from him a copy of the hardcover edition of this book, read it, and decided on the basis of the information the book contained that the case should be reinvestigated, putting to use current forensic technology such as DNA testing.

Sharp met with Mary Sullivan's relatives and explained their rights to them under the Freedom of Information Act/Massachusetts Public Records Law

(FOIA) and the Fair Information Practices Act (FIPA). She then decided that an alliance between the Sullivan survivors and the DeSalvo family might prove a powerful force in persuading the authorities to release the information about the homicide of Mary Sullivan. With this in mind, Sharp telephoned Timothy DeSalvo, Albert DeSalvo's nephew, who was resistant to her idea but nonetheless eventually suggested she call his father Richard.

Richard DeSalvo was, at first, Sharp says, “a bit hostile.” Sharp understands why, given the previous experience Richard had had with some of the lawyers involved in the matter of Albert DeSalvo. As Sharp explained what she wanted to do, Richard seemed to soften. He spoke of his brother's murder, and of how Albert's corpse had been found hours after the commission of the crime.

“When a person dies, they stop bleeding, right?” Richard asked Elaine.

She said yes, that was indeed what happens.

“Well, there was blood all over the mattress and I think they [the prison authorities] left my brother to bleed to death,” Richard replied bitterly.

At that moment, Sharp says, she knew she would do whatever was necessary to ease Richard's decades-old anguish.

She and Dan Sharp, who would serve as her cocounsel, visited Richard and Rosalie DeSalvo and their son Timothy at the DeSalvos' home in April 2000. A vital order of business was to have Richard and Rosalie sign a waiver of conflict of interest: the Sharps were representing the family of Albert's alleged victim Mary Sullivan as well; and suppose, after a thorough investigation was completed, it should emerge that Albert had indeed killed Mary? Insistent that all they wanted was the truth, Richard and Rosalie signed the waiver.

On May 11, 2000, the Sharps, the DeSalvos, and members of the Sullivan family held a press conference in Boston to announce their intent to reopen the Sullivan homicide. The goal, as Elaine Sharp explained to the media, was to exonerate Albert DeSalvo and, ideally, establish the identity of Mary's true killer. Timothy DeSalvo stepped forward and, in a statement prepared for him by Elaine, threw down the gauntlet: “Let the investigation begin and let the chips fall where they may.”

The Sharps distributed copies of letters they had written to various law enforcement agencies, including the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office and the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office, requesting the release of materials these agencies held relating to the murder of Mary Sullivan.

Following the press conference, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly told a reporter from the Boston CBS news affiliate that he sympathized with the Sullivan and DeSalvo families and was inclined to grant their request for access.

On May 12, 2000, the Boston Police Department issued the following statement: “Due to the passage of time, the deterioration of the evidence, and the likelihood that successful testing cannot be performed on the evidence which remains in Boston Police custody, the Boston Police Department has declined to participate in further investigation into the Boston Strangler case.”

On September 14, 2000, the families of Mary Sullivan and Albert DeSalvo announced that they had filed suit against Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly, the Boston Police Department, and other law enforcement agencies to compel the release of old evidence collected during the investigation of the murder of Mary Sullivan. Elaine and Dan Sharp would serve as cocounsel for the two families in the suit. James Starrs was on hand to oversee the scientific testing on whatever evidence was released. This did not appear likely to happen soon, if ever. According to Attorney General Reilly, Mary Sullivan's murder was unsolved—despite Albert DeSalvo's confession to it—and thus was an open case.

Nonetheless documents pertaining to it had leaked all over the place. Elaine Sharp obtained a copy of Mary Sullivan's autopsy report. She read it and compared it to DeSalvo's confession. The report stated that no spermatozoa had been found in Mary's vagina, nor had the hyoid bone in her neck been broken.

If Albert DeSalvo had strangled Mary manually, as he said in January 1965 he had, the hyoid bone would have been fractured. If he had penetrated her vagina with his penis, that too would have left its traces.

 

 

The Sullivan family had Mary's body exhumed in October 2000. At a funeral home in Marstons Mills, Michael Baden reautopsied the corpse, a process that took more than eight hours. Elaine Sharp watched the procedure, which was recorded by a videographer.

No sign of trauma could be observed on Mary's skull. Albert DeSalvo had confessed to knocking her unconscious with a blow to the head before he strangled her.

Baden removed sixty-eight samples of hair, tissue, and possible semen from the body.

Subsequently Attorney General Reilly ordered DNA tests to be conducted on the evidence in the Sullivan homicide the A.G.'s office had retained in its custody. Investigators had found some long-missing case files, as well as semen samples taken from the crime scene.

 

 

In mid-November 2000 a Christmas card signed by Albert DeSalvo sold for $202.50 on the E-Bay Internet auction site. A letter written by DeSalvo sold for $600 at the same site, and, in late November, yet another letter went up for bid. The author, who so desperately wanted to be world-famous, could never have imagined such a thing happening.

 

 

U.S. District Court Judge William Young attempted, on December 14, 2000, to mediate between the Sullivan family and the DeSalvos and the law enforcement authorities of Massachusetts. “Why don't you give [the families the evidence] or at least share it with them?” Young asked Judy Kalman, Senior Counsel for the Attorney General's Office. “They want to hire their own people. Why not let them do that?”

Said Dan Sharp to the Boston Herald: “We have met with the Attorney General's Office and we have been given zip, zilch, zero, zed.”

Kalman maintained the need for the A.G.'s office to hold on to the evidence in the Sullivan case: “This is an open, ongoing criminal investigation.”

Young urged Kalman and the Sharps to get together and work out their differences amicably. Negotiations were attempted; the attempts did not prove fruitful.

On February 20, 2001, Attorney General Reilly announced that DNA testing of the evidence in the Sullivan case had been “nonproductive.” A second group of tests was being conducted, from which, Reilly told the press, he would expect results in another four weeks. The Sharps filed a motion in U.S. District Court demanding a halt to the state's testing. “The defendants are in the process of destroying evidence even as we speak,” Dan Sharp stated.

James Starrs was attending the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Science in Seattle, Washington. On Friday, February 23, he had called a press conference to discuss the results of the tests he had performed on the samples taken from Mary Sullivan's body. The announcement he made to the two hundred people gathered to hear him speak was, however, something no one in the audience anticipated. He said that he had been ordered by Judge Young not to talk.

Elaine Sharp was present. Masking her frustration, she turned to the members of her team and stated formally, “It is my duty to inform you that you are gagged.” Young's order covered the attorneys as well as Starrs.

On February 28, 2001, Judge Young held a session at the Harvard Law School. During this proceeding he rejected the major counts in Attorney General Reilly's motions for dismissal of the lawsuit brought by the DeSalvo and Sullivan families.

The litigation continues. It appears nowhere near a speedy resolution.

How do the relatives of Albert DeSalvo and Mary Sullivan—other than those behind the lawsuit—feel about the reopening of the Strangler case? Distinctly unhappy, in several instances. Helen Sullivan Rapoza, Mary Sullivan's sister, was quoted in
Newsweek
(March 5, 2001) as telling Diane Sullivan Dodd, the sister behind the litigation, that “I hate what you've done. I don't want to talk about it.” Albert DeSalvo's children are in favor of the effort to exonerate their father; most of Albert DeSalvo's siblings are unwilling to join in Richard's quest to clear his brother's name, although one brother, Joseph, has softened his opposition to the idea.