The Boston Strangler (36 page)

Three days later on Monday, December 7, Christopher Reid dropped out of Boston University. He was giving up school for a while; he could no longer concentrate on his studies. The campaign, thought Mellon hopefully, was beginning to pay off. But again—as with so many other suspects—one could only wait.

On Christmas Eve 1964, Mrs. Frances Sullivan, Mary's mother, made a sad journey to St. Francis Cemetery in Centerville, where Mary was buried. She told no one. She wanted to kneel there and weep, alone.

As she came near, she stopped. Someone had been there before her—perhaps only a few minutes before. One single long-stemmed red rose, still fresh and budlike, had been laid on the earth of her daughter's grave.

Mrs. Sullivan became hysterical.

Eleven days later, January 4, 1965, would mark the first anniversary of Mary's death.

Lieutenant Tuney mused. In analyzing the complex character of a sex murderer, the Medical-Psychiatric Committee had pointed out that such a man might be sentimental, might even reveal a sense of compassion. Had Mary's strangler placed the rose on her grave? If so, might not the anniversary of her death draw him to the scene of the crime? Perhaps only to stand at a safe distance and look again at the place?

January 4 would fall on a Monday. Lieutenant Tuney decided to set up surveillance of 44A Charles Street over the entire weekend—Friday, the first, through Monday, the fourth. It was done quietly. No one could have known that the white-aproned clerk in the Italian sandwich shop two doors from No. 44A Charles Street was Jim Mellon. From the interior he had an unobstructed view across the street so that he could observe anyone (Christopher Reid, perhaps) who stopped on the opposite side and gazed at the building, particularly the third floor where Mary had lived and died. Directly opposite No. 44A, on the other side of the street, was a laundromat, from whose large plate-glass window one could see the front and entrance of Mary's building. One man, reading a newspaper, sat among customers awaiting the completion of their wash. He was Steve Delaney.

At intervals, Lieutenant Tuney and Bottomly's secretary, Jane Downey, strolled by, their eyes alert for any lingering spectator.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, they kept vigil.

Nothing untoward occurred.

They were still—as Lieutenant Tuney had put it often before-sitting in the middle of nowhere. They did not know that the end of the search was almost in sight.

Part Four

18

It began slowly enough in 1960, nearly two years before Anna Slesers, the first of the victims, was murdered on June 14, 1962. There was nothing to indicate at the time that one of the most extraordinary chapters in the extraordinary story of the Boston Strangler was now opening. A dark-haired man in his late twenties would knock on the doors of apartments in the Harvard Square area about 9 or 9:30
A.M.
If a young woman came to the door he would say, quite courteously, something like this: “My name is Johnson, I'm from a model agency. Your name was given me as someone who might make a good model.” The job could pay as much as forty dollars an hour. She needn't worry about posing in the nude or anything like that—the jobs involved modeling evening gowns and sometimes swimsuits. He had been sent to take her measurements and other data—with that he produced a tape measure from his pocket—and if she proved suitable, a “Mrs. Lewis from the agency” would drop by in a few days to conclude the business arrangements. He was boyish, articulate, if not too grammatical, and as he deftly measured her waist, her hips, her breasts, her legs from hip to knee and knee to ankle, he said with a surprisingly winning smile, “I hope you don't mind this, I do it all the time.”

These calls went on for some months. Mr. Johnson never returned. Nor did a Mrs. Lewis ever drop by later. There were variations to his approach. On October 26, 1960, about six in the evening, Nancy Davis opened her door at 30 Boylston Street in response to a knock. Her roommate, Mary Wood, was in the shower. They had reported a gas leak and Nancy expected to see the handyman standing at the door. But it was a soft-spoken stranger in his late twenties wearing a jacket and dark green work pants, who said he was looking for an apartment to rent. “You must have the wrong place,” Nancy told him, but he was already in their foyer. “I just want to get an idea how the rooms run,” he said. He glanced about, then turned to her. “I'm a photographer,” he said, and added admiringly, “You have a fine figure. You could probably earn forty dollars an hour as a model. Do you know your measurements?” With that he dropped to his hands and knees in front of her and felt each ankle. “I ought to measure you,” he said. “I got my tape with me—”

He put his hand in his pocket but Nancy had already drawn back. Everything had happened so quickly she had hardly had time to react sensibly. “No, thank you,” she said. “I'm not at all interested.” She showed him out.

On February 17, 1961, a Boston housewife opened her door to a man who said he came from a talent agency. He named the friend who had recommended her, brought out a tape measure such as tailors use, and began, as she said, “to measure me all over.”

“I didn't stop him at first, I don't know why,” she said later. “He actually lifted my skirt and touched the skin of my thigh—I jumped away then.” When he had finished jotting down her measurements, he said, “You're good for at least forty dollars an hour—why don't you talk to your husband about it tonight?” gave her a handshake, and left.

Three weeks later the story began to take on darker overtones. Sarah Craig and her roommate, Sylvia McNamara, were at breakfast in the kitchen of Apartment 3 at 268 Harvard Street about 11
A.M.
Saturday, March 11, 1961, when they heard a soft tapping. Was it at their door, or someone knocking at the apartment across the hall? Sarah unlocked the door and swung it open to disclose a young man standing there, dark-eyed, with dark hair, and obviously nervous.

“Can I come in and talk to you, please?” he asked. She led him into the living room. The reader must remember that this incident took place before the Strangler appeared on the Boston scene. Standing in the room, the young man said, “I was sent to Apartment Number Three. I'm an artist's agent. Are you a model?” When Sarah said no, he began to speak so rapidly that she couldn't make out what he said, though she asked him twice to repeat his words. Apparently it was about photography, modeling, sculpture, Harvard University, and a fee of forty dollars an hour. She finally broke in, “You really must have the wrong party—”

“I don't know,” he said. “Could it be your roommate?”

When she shook her head, he said, “Well, in case you're interested, Mrs.—” —she could not make out the name—“from the agency will be in the building later and she'll have papers you can fill out.” He was gone, out the door, as nervous as when he entered.

The two women decided the whole thing was a fraternity stunt—probably a student carrying out a silly assignment for his initiation. But next day their janitor showed them metal shavings outside their door. Around the lock were marks of a screwdriver used in an attempt to jimmy it.

That, then, must have been the tapping they heard. Had their caller of the day before been trying to force his way in?

Why did he not simply knock?

The following Friday, March 17, just before dusk, the elusive dark-haired man was seized. There had been a series of housebreakings in Cambridge and six police cruisers were on the alert for the burglar. Sergeant Leo Davenport, cruising in one car, heard a call over his radio: “We're chasing a man who just ran into the yard at Ellery and Harvard.” Sergeant Davenport, finding himself at that very intersection, jumped out and was about to vault a fence when he heard a gunshot. Someone shouted, “Colleran shot!” Colleran was a fellow policeman. Davenport leaped the fence, gun in hand, just as a dark-haired man of medium height raced across the yard thirty feet in front of him. Davenport shouted, “Stop, or you're dead!” just as someone else boomed out, “Halt, or I'll shoot!” It was Colleran, unhurt, his gun also trained on the fleeing man. The latter stopped in his tracks. Half a dozen detectives surrounded him. Behind him he had dropped a two-foot-long screwdriver with a bright yellow handle. Skeleton keys and a jackknife were in his pocket. In his car parked nearby were four more screwdrivers. He had just tried to break into an apartment, he admitted to Lieutenant Chester E. Hollice, who was leading the search. Earlier in the week he had measured two nurses who lived there—“I just wanted to get into the apartment and wait for them to come home.”

Why? He could not think of an answer.

His name was Albert H. DeSalvo, and he was twenty-nine years old. A check showed that he had a juvenile record and had once been committed to Lyman School, an institution for delinquent boys. In 1958 and 1959 he had been arrested for numerous breakings into apartments and houses, stealing small amounts of money he found. Now, he admitted, he was engaged in a different type of activity. In the past weeks he had measured more than a dozen women, promising them modeling jobs with nonexistent agencies. He lived in suburban Malden, and he was married—his wife was a German girl he had met while serving abroad in the Army of Occupation. He had two small children, a six-year-old daughter being treated for a congenital pelvic dislocation, and an eight-month-old son, and he worked as a press operator for a rubber factory.

Why had he done these things? What was the purpose of measuring women and promising them jobs?

He just liked to talk to women, he said. But later, the day before his court appearance, he poured out a story of a wretched upbringing, a childhood of deprivation in a large family frequently on relief, tyrannized and later deserted by a father who abused his wife and six children and went openly with prostitutes.

“Can you accept a man after what he's done to his family?” DeSalvo demanded. “What kind of a man is that?” He spoke almost in tears. “I have three brothers and two sisters. All of us brothers graduated from jail. To show you how bad it was, my own brother and father were in jail at the same time.”

Visiting the girls about Harvard, measuring them, gave him “a big kick. I'm not good-looking, I'm not educated, but I was able to put something over on high-class people,” he told probation officers. “They were all college kids and I never had anything in my life and I outsmarted them. I felt they were better than me because they were college people. Telling those girls they could be models built up their egos, so they let me do it. Anybody with any sense would have found me out, because, gee!”—he flashed his dark-eyed, boyish grin—“they never even asked me for proof and I never had a camera. It was a real crazy idea.”

Police officials looked at him. So this was the Measuring Man. A harmless figure who derived some kind of pathetic sexual satisfaction from touching strange women? Or just another small-time burglar who posed as a model's agent in order to have an excuse for loitering about hallways?

After psychiatric examination at Westborough State Hospital, he was diagnosed as a sociopathic personality—a man whose behavior and emotional reactions deviate from the normal—and on May 4, 1961, sentenced on charges of Assault and Battery, brought by some of the women he had measured, and attempted Breaking and Entering, to a two-year term in the Middlesex County House of Correction. He was found not guilty of two counts of lewdness. Later the judge, sympathetic to DeSalvo's tearful promise that he would turn over a new leaf and his attorney's plea that his family needed him, reduced the sentence to eighteen months. Shortly after, the Parole Board took a similarly sympathetic view. The result was that with good behavior this dwindled to eleven months and DeSalvo was released in April 1962.

Nearly three years elapsed—years in which a DeSalvo and his petty sickness were eclipsed by the overwhelming presence of the Strangler.

In early November 1964, while Jim Mellon was beginning his reinvestigation of Christopher Reid as a suspect in the Mary Sullivan case, and Phil DiNatale was checking the death of Daniel Pennacchio who had falsely confessed to killing Beverly Samans, and Steve Delaney was trying to determine if Pietro Achilles had been in Rockport when Joann Graff visited there the night before her death, Albert DeSalvo was seized again by Cambridge police.

This time the accusation was far uglier.

A week before, on Tuesday morning, October 27, a twenty-year-old co-ed, a bride of a few months, was in bed in her Cambridge apartment. It was a few minutes after 9:30
A.M.
; her husband had just left for his teaching job. She dozed off for a moment. When she opened her eyes, a man stood in the bedroom doorway, staring at her. He was of medium height, his eyes hidden behind huge green aviator's sunglasses, his dark hair combed back, wearing a dark waist-length jacket and green slacks. “Don't worry,” he said quickly, “I'm a detective—” But as he spoke he was approaching her bed.

She managed to find voice enough to say, “You leave this room at once!” She struggled to sit up in bed.

He pushed her down, hard, and she screamed. She felt the blade of a knife against her throat. “Not a sound, or I'll kill you,” he warned. As she lay there all but paralyzed, he stuffed her underwear into her mouth, and using her husband's pajamas and her own clothes, tied her in a spread-eagle position on the bed, each ankle tied to a bedpost at the foot of the bed, her wrists to those at the head. Then he kissed her about the body and otherwise sexually abused her. “Don't look at me,” he said again and again. Then, after a long while, she heard him say, “How do I leave this place?” She could only think,
Oh, God, get him out
—She told him how to find the front door. He bent over her, his face averted, and loosened her hands and feet so she would be able to free herself. “You be quiet for ten minutes”—he warned, then added apologetically, “I'm sorry,” and slipped away.