The Boston Stranglers (41 page)

Kathleen Johnson, sister of Patricia Bissette, told
Newsweek
she could see no happy outcome to a reinvestigation of the murders: “I feel it can only cause more hurt. I wish they'd leave it alone.”

 

 

In mid-April 2001 I received a letter from a man living in northern New England. He began the letter by asking if I were the Susan Kelly who had written
The Gemini Man,
and went on to hint that a close friend of his had information that might bear on the Strangler case. He provided his business address, voice-mail number, and e-mail address. He ended the letter by requesting that I e-mail him if I happened to be the Susan Kelly he sought.

For several days, I debated whether to do so. Over the years I had received a lot of mail from individuals claiming to know something crucial about the Strangler case. Almost none of them did. A good number of the writers appeared to be demented. Some were demented and venal: one correspondent demanded “a lot of money” before he would divulge a tale of how the FBI, the CIA, and a certain famed attorney conspired (in a Manhattan hotel room) to frame Albert DeSalvo for the stranglings. Interestingly, the late father of this person was an ex-police officer suspected by some of his colleagues of feeding details of the killings to DeSalvo while the latter was incarcerated at Bridgewater in later 1964 and early 1965.

I had also been harassed and threatened with a lawsuit, although the harassment and threats came by telephone, and the harasser was a member of a news organization. This person felt I had secret information about the identity of the real killers, and wanted it.

The memory of such nonsense made me reluctant to make contact with the man who'd written to me in mid-April. Writer's curiosity being what it is, though, I finally did e-mail him. I should add that the letter I received from him was clearly the product of someone not only sane, literate, and intelligent but averse to personal publicity. And he didn't want money in exchange for a story.

I sent him an e-mail letting him know he'd found the right Susan Kelly. He replied immediately. The capsule information he gave was, to say the least, intriguing. Ultimately I agreed to meet him and his friend, at a restaurant in western Massachusetts of my choosing. I picked the place because I knew the people who owned it. If someone tried to kidnap me out of the parking lot, at least there'd be reliable witnesses to record the license plate numbers and furnish accurate descriptions of the kidnappers. I let a good friend know where I was going and what I was going to be doing. I also told the friend I'd telephone when I returned from the meeting. Which I did.

Since they wish to remain anonymous, for the present, I'll call the people I met that Sunday afternoon Sarah and David. David was the letter writer. Sarah, his good friend, was the person who had the actual story to tell. Sarah, like David, was intelligent, highly educated, articulate, and possessed of a sharp memory and an eye for detail. In other words, the perfect witness. The three of us hit it off immediately.

Here is Sarah's story.

In the summer of 1964 she was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sharing an apartment with three other young women. That season a professional acquaintance of Sarah's father, like him a prominent Boston psychoanalyst, warned her to be careful: whatever party was responsible for the strangling murders that had taken place from June 1962 to January 1964 was still at large. Sarah—very young, very attractive, a student—fit the prototype of the second group of victims. So she should certainly take care.

I will refer to this psychoanalyst, whose identity is known to me, as Dr. G.

Sarah vividly recalls the warning he gave her. According to Dr. G., the strangler was a Harvard professor who had been arrested by the Cambridge police for beating his wife. Although unspecified authorities were positive he was the killer, there was insufficient evidence to pin the eleven murders on the man. Thus he was no longer in custody. So said Dr. G.

In the autumn of 1964, in conversation with Dr. G., Sarah raised the subject of the Harvard professor. To her shock, he denied ever discussing it with her. He denied it, she recalls, quite vehemently.

On March 30, 2001, David had done some intensive research of his own. He visited the Cambridge Police Department and asked to inspect their journals from late 1963 to August 1964. He was seeking the record of an arrest for wife-beating (it wasn't called domestic violence back then) that might have corresponded to the one described—and subsequently denied—by Dr. G. What David found was that the journal was meticulously kept. With the following exception: some of the pages for November and December 1963 were loose rather than bound, and out of chronological order. Some had been tucked beneath the front cover of the journal.

There were no entries for arrests or incidents happening between November 29, 1963, and December 20, 1963. In David's words: “Considering how meticulously these records were kept and the fact that their current availability at the time must have required that they be sequentially bound each day, this is unlikely to be an error by the clerk who typed the archival version of the pages. It seems like a good hypothesis that pages were excised at the time, and, after that occurred, the dutiful record keeper started the next day's December entry on the last available clean page, which in this case happened to be on the back of a finished November day.” David, someone naturally endowed with investigative ability, adds that “the missing pages could be historically important since they fall between the murders of Joann Graff and Mary Sullivan.”

David also noted that in March 1964 the journal notes a case marked “confidential” and assigned to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. No hint of what crime the case might involve, who victim and perpetrator might be, is provided.

I explained to Sarah and David that cases thus marked, where no public information is given, usually involve sex crimes.

A point to bear in mind: Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to eleven murders and claimed to have committed two thousand rapes, never confessed to a sexual assault in Cambridge in March 1964. Nor was he charged with such an offense.

One wonders why the Cambridge police journal entries from the November-December period are missing. It is possible they were removed by the state police. At my request, the matter is being investigated. Perhaps the missing pages will reappear, as well as the confidential file from March 1964. Probably not. Except for unsolved homicides, the Cambridge Police Department, like virtually all police departments, routinely destroys the records of all cases after a certain period of time.

Since no one on the Cambridge police force ever seriously believed that Albert DeSalvo murdered Cambridge resident Beverly Samans in May 1963, that case remains officially open. As I've mentioned before, the principal suspect in that murder has long since died.

Final note: Sarah has been a lifelong friend of one of Albert DeSalvo's sexual assault victims. Many years ago, Sarah reports, this woman had a dream in which DeSalvo appeared to her and asked her forgiveness. She gave it. The following morning she learned from the news that he had been stabbed to death in prison.

 

 

Since 1995, the following people, who contributed so much to this book, have died:

F. Lee Bailey has suffered some serious reversals since 1995. In March 1996 he was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Maurice Paul to six weeks in a Tallahassee, Florida, jail on a contempt of court charge, specifically for failing to turn over to the government 400,000 shares of stock owned by one of the lawyer's former clients, international drug trafficker Claude DuBoc. In January 2000, in Orlando, Florida, U.S. Magistrate James Glazebrook recommended that Bailey be held in contempt on a similar matter: a refusal to hand over to the federal government two million dollars in legal fees from client William McCorkle, infomercial king and convicted swindler. Said Judge Glazebrook: “[Bailey] has no right to accept fraudulently obtained and laundered money in payment of a fee.” Glazebrook further stated that while Bailey was being cross-examined, he “rarely gave a straight answer. The privilege to practice law is not a license to share in the proceeds of fraud.”

From May 30 to June 5, 2000, Collier County (Florida) Circuit Court Judge Cynthia Ellis refereed disciplinary proceedings against Bailey. The complainant was the Florida Bar. In her Amended Report of Referee, Judge Ellis recommended that Bailey be disbarred from practicing law in Florida on the grounds that he had committed the following violations:

—In the Supreme Court of Florida (Before a Referee); Case No. SC96767, TFB Number 1996-51,085 (15B), 1997-50, 110 (15A). Complainant: The Florida Bar vs. Respondent: F. Lee Bailey, p. 20.

 

Furthermore, Judge Ellis wrote,

Ellis concluded her withering assessment by writing that “Indeed, since the disciplinary actions noted above, Chief Judge Paul and Magistrate Judge Glazebrook and this Referee have had numerous opportunities to assess and characterize the demeanor and credibility of the Respondent. In each instance, the various Judges and Justices have employed circumspect and eloquent ways of saying the same thing: The Respondent is a liar ... At the end of the day, the Respondent has forfeited his privilege to practice law in the state of Florida. Frankly, it is difficult for this referee to conceive of a more egregious set of circumstances than those which Mr. Bailey has brought upon himself.”
Ibid., p.
23.

 

The day before Thanksgiving 2001, F. Lee Bailey was disbarred in Florida.

 

What of Albert DeSalvo's other attorneys?

Jon Asgeirsson has told Elaine Sharp that he is suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Francis C. Newton, Jr., is a judge.

 

In the spring of 2001 someone gave me a copy of an interesting document: a transcript of an “interrogation” of Albert DeSalvo conducted at Bridgewater State Hospital on March 6, 1965. This was not an interrogation made by a police officer or other law enforcement official. March 6, 1965, was one of the days F. Lee Bailey visited Albert DeSalvo at Bridgewater. At the top of the document is a handwritten note partially cut off by the photocopying process. What is visible of the inscription reads “Bai Tape.”

The transcript consists of a series of questions posed to DeSalvo about the murders of Anna Slesers, Ida Irga, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, and Sophie Clark. The document is jumbled and oddly annotated: next to the typed heading of a portion of the transcript that identifies it as detailing the murder of Nina Nichols is handwritten “Ida Irga.” Whether this is a correction is difficult to determine. A footnote to the dialogue about Helen Blake states that the “rest of the tape did not record.”

The Helen Blake discussions preserved in the transcript contain, nonetheless, some striking passages. One occurs when Albert DeSalvo describes his rape of Blake: “She was a well-built woman, and I picked her up, took off her clothes, and rather than doing anything more to her, took off her clothes and had intercourse with her.”

The autopsy of Helen Blake found no spermatozoa present in either her vagina or her rectum.

The autopsy additionally found that the ligatures around Blake were a bra, tied in front, and two stockings tied at the nape. DeSalvo was quite clear on March 6, 1965, that the reverse was true.

The Sophie Clark portion of the March 1965 transcript contains equally interesting details. The interrogator asks DeSalvo what he did with Sophie's halt-slip.

Surely a killer with a much-vaunted photographic memory should have recalled such a detail. And not have demanded assurance that his memory hadn't played him false.

 

 

On page eighteen of John Bottomly's personal transcript of Tape One of DeSalvo's confession to the murder of Sophie Clark, recorded on August 24, 1965, Bottomly notes that Albert has already viewed the police photographs of the crime scene.
⁸²
The March 6, 1965, transcript of the interrogation of DeSalvo at Bridgewater records the following dialogue about the murder of Helen Blake.