The Boston Stranglers (42 page)

A distinct picture forms in the mind of whoever reads the above passage, and the picture is not a pretty one.

The lawsuit of the DeSalvo and Sullivan families against the Attorney General of Massachusetts is set for trial in June 2002. Elaine Sharp considers using the following quote from Shakespeare's
Rape of Lucrece
in her closing argument.

Shortly after eight on the morning of October 26, 2001, the body of Albert DeSalvo was exhumed from a cemetery in Peabody, Massachusetts. I was present, as were Elaine Sharp, Richard and Rosalie DeSalvo, and Timothy DeSalvo. James Starrs oversaw the procedure; he and his daughter-in-law and assistant Traci Starrs recorded data as the grave was opened and the coffin raised. Videographer Mitchell Calhoun and photographer Gaetan Cotton documented every step of the process.

Kevin Watts and Leo Barry of the John-Lawrence Funeral Home in Marstons Mills, Massachusetts—the funeral home that had provided, free of charge, the facilities for the autopsy of Mary Sullivan—loaded the casket into the back of a black SUV. Just before the door of the SUV was closed, Timothy DeSalvo kissed his right hand and laid it on the casket to wish the earthly remains of his uncle Godspeed.

There was no way to tell that the SUV was a hearse except by looking at its license plate. The choice of an innocuous vehicle was deliberate: Elaine Sharp and the DeSalvos wanted to attract as little attention as possible.

After some business was finished at the cemetery office, the convoy—the hearse in the lead, Gaetan Got-ton, Elaine Sharp, and I in a bright red SUV loaded with photographic equipment, and James Starrs, Traci Starrs, and Mitchell Calhoun in a black pick-up truck equally loaded with photographic equipment—set off for Pennsylvania. The autopsy of Albert DeSalvo would be performed at York College of Pennsylvania.

The purpose of the autopsy would be twofold: to recover physical evidence that might lead to the solution of the 1973 murder of DeSalvo and the 1964 murder of Mary Sullivan. The York College site for the procedure had been chosen because it was convenient for the many experts being called in from various parts of the country to participate.

There was already considerable certainty that Albert DeSalvo had not—as he insisted he had—murdered Mary Sullivan. Tests on the samples of material taken from her body compared with samples of mitochondrial DNA taken from Richard DeSalvo indicated this. Tests run on nuclear DNA extracted from the tissue of Albert DeSalvo himself would merely affirm those results.

The mood of everyone in the convoy—we communicated vehicle to vehicle by walkie-talkie—was tense, punctuated by moments of hilarity. The drive south through Massachusetts had everyone a little on edge. Would the press find out and follow us? Would we be stopped by law enforcement? The latter possibility was remote, but hovered nonetheless. In exhuming DeSalvo's corpse and transporting it out of state, could we be said to be tampering with the evidence in an ongoing criminal investigation?

We crossed the border into Connecticut and stopped for breakfast to celebrate. “It's like a road trip with friends,” Leo Barry remarked. “And then you remember what we're doing.” That knowledge was with us every time we made a rest stop during the ten-hour journey. We would glance at tourists in their RVs, stretching their legs, walking their dogs, eating burgers, and think, “You have no idea of what's in the cargo bay of that black SUV.”

One of the convoy vehicles ran low on gas in New York and made an urgent plea by walkie-talkie to get off at the next exit and seek a service station. The exit we took led to the Poughkeepsie airport. “There has to be a gas station around here somewhere,” someone said. After a half mile we ran into a traffic jam. As the cars ahead of us inched along, I noticed a huge roadside sign. It read
HIGH SECURITY AREA. ALL VEHICLES SUBJECT TO SEARCH
. I looked over at Gaetan Cotton, who was driving. Judging by the expression on his face, he had also noticed the sign. So had the passengers in the other two vehicles. As one, the hearse, the truck, and our SUV pulled out of line, U-turned, and sped back to the highway. When we did stop for gas twenty minutes later everyone rolled out of the cars laughing uncontrollably. It was the hysteria of relief.

“What would you have done?” I asked Kevin Watts. “If the police had told you to open the...”

He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “I don't want to think about it.”

Night had fallen by the time we drove up to the rear entrance of the York College building where the autopsy would take place. John (Jack) Levisky, a professor of anthropology, was waiting to admit us. Kevin Watts and Leo Barry rolled the casket on a wheeled gurney into the building and onto an elevator. Gaetan Cotton and Mitchell Calhoun swarmed like paparazzi with their cameras. It was essential that every step of the process be photographed. Cotton and Calhoun would indeed film the autopsy from beginning to end.

There was a Halloween moment when the casket was brought into the biology laboratory. The doorway was too narrow to accommodate the steel box horizontally; it had to be upended and tilted slightly sideways. “Oh, God,” someone said, echoing everyone's fear. “I hope it doesn't pop open.” It didn't. The casket was settled in the lab. Everyone grouped around and stared at it for a moment.

Leaving the building, we followed a Hansel and Gretel trail of fluid that had dripped from the casket—a combination of ground water, formaldehyde, and other substances no one particularly wished to identify closely. The stench made me gag; I yanked the turtleneck of my dress up over my nose to filter out the smell.

We piled back into our cars and went to a restaurant. Some of the other members of the forensic team joined us: Major Timothy Palmbach, a crime scene specialist from the Connecticut State Police; Professor Michael Warren, Deputy Director of the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory at the University of Florida; and James (Jack) Frost, Deputy Chief Medical Examiner for the State of West Virginia. Just after the first round of drinks had arrived, a pleasant man named Scott Koscevic, the sales manager of Yorktowne Caskets, appeared. In his van he had a Ziegler container (a sealed metal case) in which what would be left of DeSalvo after the autopsy would be placed and sealed in the casket for reburial. The company had been kind enough to donate the container. A moment before the salad course was served, Kevin Watts, Leo Barry, and Koscevic went to the parking lot to transfer the container to the hearse. Another Halloween moment.

 

 

The autopsy began at eight on Saturday morning, October 27. I was present for most of it.

Richard DeSalvo, convinced from the start that his brother was not the Boston Strangler, had taken great pains to insure that Albert's body was preserved against the day when an exhumation might prove necessary— as it had twenty-eight years later. The embalmed corpse had been placed in a twelve-gauge steel casket and then into a plastic-lined concrete vault. Despite these precautions, the body had deteriorated in the course of nearly three decades. The face was unrecognizable as such, except for the thrust of Albert's protuberant nose; it was a mask of some crusty black substance shortly afterward identified as the husks of maggots. Along with ground water, beetles had entered the casket and done their work. Ironically, the suit in which DeSalvo had been buried was in nearly perfect condition.

Starrs had assembled an all-star team to perform the autopsy and tests on materials extracted from the corpse. In addition to Frost, Levisky, Warren, Palmbach, and Traci Starrs were forensic specialists Michele Hamburger, Sherry Brown, and Barbara Hanbury; pathologists Michael Baden and Patricia Aronica-Pollak; odontologist John McDowell; geophysicist George Stephens; radiographers Michael and Susan Calhoun (brother and sister-in-law of videographer Mitchell Calhoun); toxicologist Bruce Goldberger; microscopist Walter F. Rowe; radiologist G. Brogden; entomologist Neal Haskell; researcher Matthew Mantel; and attorney Linda Kenney as well as Sean Brebbia, Starrs's legal assistant.

After pausing for a brief two
P.M.
lunch break—catered from a local McDonald's by Elaine Sharp, who removed her scrubs long enough to make the food run—the autopsy continued until six that evening. It was an exquisitely choreographed ballet of necrosis: Frost and Aronica-Pollak performing the actual autopsy, the others receiving and readying the materials removed from the corpse for further testing.

The day's work ended at six
P.M.
At that moment the energy and purpose that had buoyed each member of the forensic team seemed to escape like air from a leaky balloon. I stood next to one of the team members as she slumped back against a counter and stripped off her surgical mask. “I want a shower,” she said. “Then a restaurant. And a bar, and a bar, and a bar . . .”

It was a sentiment echoed by everyone else on the team.

We went to an Italian restaurant and consumed large quantities of food and wine. Afterward, most team members returned to their motels and collapsed into bed. A few went to a pre-Halloween celebration in York. One of them danced with a fellow costumed as the Frankenstein monster. It seemed, under the circumstances, quite appropriate.

At eleven on Sunday morning, the forensic team held a press conference on a lawn outside the York College Music, Arts, and Communications Center. James Starrs, wearing a white medical coat and a George Washington University baseball cap, took center stage. He promised the assembled reporters “blockbuster” results from the Albert DeSalvo autopsy and “many rewards” for the DeSalvo family.

Back in Massachusetts, Attorney General Thomas Reilly, asked to comment on the weekend events, termed the autopsy “a macabre stunt.” George Burke, the retired Norfolk County (Massachusetts) District Attorney who had twice prosecuted Carmen Gagliardi, Robert M. Wilson, and Richard L. Devlin for DeSalvo's 1973 prison murder, told the
Boston Globe
that there was no mystery about Albert's homicide. Both trials ended in hung juries and mistrials. According to Burke, authorities decided not to pursue the matter further because Gagliardi, Devlin, and Wilson were already serving long prison sentences. Gagliardi would in fact die of a heroin overdose shortly after the second trial.

And why had DeSalvo been murdered? Again according to Burke, to prevent him from muscling in on the drug trade flourishing in Walpole State Prison.

On Monday, October 29, 2001, Albert DeSalvo's remains were reinterred at the Puritan Lawn Cemetery in Peabody, Massachusetts. Elaine Sharp bought flowers for the service and located a minister to perform it—the Reverend Patricia Long of the United Church of Christ in Marblehead.

Like the day of the exhumation, the day of the reburial was a beautiful one, warm and sunny with a panoply of autumn foliage spread out against a lapis sky. Present were Richard and Rosalie DeSalvo; Timothy DeSalvo, his wife Cheryl, and their children; Richard and Rosalie's other son, daughter, and son-in-law; James Starrs; British journalist Noel Young; Mitchell Calhoun; Gaetan Cotton; Elaine Sharp; Dan Sharp; Michael DeSalvo, the only son of Albert DeSalvo; and me.

The service was brief, dignified, and very moving. Reverend Long read two psalms, a prayer of her own composition for the repose of the soul of Albert DeSalvo, and asked the mourners to join her in the Lord's Prayer.

Timothy and Cheryl's four children each carried a single rose. At the end of the service, they approached the casket and set the flowers atop. Elaine Sharp followed with the bouquets she had purchased earlier that morning. The casket was lowered into the ground. Cemetery attendants began immediately to fill the hole with earth.

“Daddy,” piped one of Timothy's sons, “what did Albert DeSalvo do?”

Timothy looked at the boy for a moment and then rested a hand on his head.

“Someday,” he said. “When you're older.”

 

On December 6, 2001, James Starrs held a press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce the final results of the tests that had been conducted on the materials taken from the remains of Mary Sullivan and Albert DeSalvo. Accompanying Starrs were George Washington University Professor David Foran, who, with his post-graduate team of assistants, had done the DNA profiling; Michael Baden, who had compared the Sullivan autopsy report with DeSalvo's confession to the murder; and University of Florida Professor Bruce Goldberger, who had performed toxicological studies.