The Boston Strangler (37 page)

But she
had
looked at him. She would never forget his face, she told detectives. An artist's sketch was made from her description: Detective Paul Cloran, studying it, said, “This looks like the Measuring Man.” He had operated in the same area, and knew how to enter locked apartments. Police telephoned DeSalvo at his home. Would he come down to answer a few questions about an assault on a woman? On Wednesday, November 3, DeSalvo came to Cambridge Police Headquarters. Sitting in the interrogation room he denied any knowledge of the attack, but even as he spoke the girl herself stood in an adjoining room, studying him through a one-way mirror; and after making doubly sure by hearing his voice through a partly opened door, she identified him. Still denying it, he pleaded innocent to charges of Breaking and Entering, Assault and Battery, Confining and Putting in Fear, and Engaging in an Unnatural and Lascivious Act. He was released on $8,000 bail for hearing two weeks later.

As a matter of routine, his photograph went over a six-state teletype network. Within thirty-six hours it brought detectives from Connecticut where similar sexual assaults had taken place through the summer and autumn—in every instance, a man tying up women on their beds. He had become known as the “Green Man” because he wore green work pants. Sometimes he was in the uniform of a building maintenance worker. His energy was extraordinary. If the records were correct, on one day—May 6, 1964—between 9
A.M.
and midday, he had bound and assaulted four women in four towns—Hamden, Meriden, New Haven, and Hartford.

Acting on this new information, police on November 5 suddenly descended on DeSalvo's home, a modest, neatly kept one-family house at the end of a dead-end street in Malden. He was away. They waited. DeSalvo drove up, saw the police cars, attempted to reverse his car and drive off, but was trapped and seized. He was brought again to Cambridge Police Headquarters. This time several women victims from Connecticut were on hand to identify him.

He would not talk to anyone, he said, until he spoke to his wife, but he begged police not to let her see him in handcuffs. That was agreed to. Mrs. Irmgard DeSalvo, a tall, dark-haired woman of thirty, and Albert's sister Irene came to the station. For nearly an hour he talked to them in the presence of three detectives.

Toward the end, he broke down in tears. “Please,” he pleaded with his wife, “please, Irm, let me be a man just this once. I've done some very bad things with women—I've broken into houses, I've used a gun but it was a toy gun, I used a knife but I never killed anybody—I'm tired of running, I want to get it off my chest, I need help, I want help. When they had me before I didn't know how to ask for it.”

His wife, who suspected he had been “doing something,” was not surprised at his sexual assaults on women. She could not bring herself to tell police now, but the man was insatiable—no one would believe how oversexed Al was. It was a shameful thing. He wanted her in the morning; he wanted her again when he came home for lunch; then in the early evening after supper, and again before they fell asleep at night. On weekends, when he was home from the job he now had as an outside maintenance man for a construction company, he needed her five and six times each day. Nor was that enough. When they went out he made suggestive remarks, even in her presence, to attractive women. It was impossible to satisfy him; she had given up trying to do so. He had complained she was frigid to him, and they had argued bitterly about it.

Aloud, she said in her heavy German accent, “Al, tell them everything, don't hold anything back,” and the two women left the room.

DeSalvo turned to the detectives. “I've committed more than four hundred breaks, all in this area, and there's a couple of rapes you don't know about,” he said. They drove him about Cambridge and he pointed out fifteen apartments he had broken into. He never had difficulty getting into them. At first he slipped the locks by using the cardboard corner of a stenographer's pad. Later, he perfected his technique, using 2½-by-6-inch strips of polyethylene foam which he cut from bottles containing household detergent. These were stronger than cardboard, left no mark, and made no sound.

Other women came forward. In one instance he had blindfolded his victim, held a knife to her throat, and had his way with her for nearly an hour. As the investigation widened, it became clear that DeSalvo had been sexually assaulting women not only in Massachusetts and Connecticut, but in New Hampshire and Rhode Island as well. Police estimated that his victims numbered more than three hundred women.

Repeatedly Cambridge detectives questioned him. DeSalvo was by turns truculent and agreeable. But he was especially grateful to Sergeant Davenport, who had him in his gunsights but did not fire, and spoke more easily and familiarly with him. Sergeant Davenport's general air of breeziness helped matters considerably.

“Leo,” DeSalvo said at one point during an interrogation, “if you knew the whole story you wouldn't believe it.”

“Al, what are you doing—bragging or telling the truth or lying? What the hell you doing?” the detective demanded.

DeSalvo took a long breath. “It'll all come out, Leo,” he said. “You'll find out.”

Sergeant Davenport considered the man before him. What DeSalvo had said about breaking into apartments had turned out to be true. Sometimes the women he said he had measured—and often been intimate with—denied having ever seen him. That was understandable. In the instances where DeSalvo had tied up his victims, none had given all the details to police. But the horror in their eyes indicated that DeSalvo had told the truth as far as he wanted to tell it. The lengths to which he had gone—the actual indignities he had committed upon them or forced them to commit—most likely would never be completely revealed by his victims. Davenport followed a train of thought. At the time DeSalvo broke down before his wife, detectives had asked him about the strangulation murders. “No, no,” he had said. It was as he told his wife Irmgard. Terrible things with women—but he had never killed anyone. But, thought Sergeant Davenport, he was a powerful man—swift, agile, athletic. He knew how to slip in and out of buildings, how to enter apartments silently. And he had a gift of gab, too, so he was able to talk his way into apartments. Sergeant Davenport suddenly said, “Al, what do you know about the Beverly Samans killing on University Road?”

DeSalvo shot a hurt glance at him. “You can't put that one on me, Leo. I don't go that one at all.” Then: “Where is that street? Is that the one down near the post office?”

So DeSalvo knew Beverly Samans' street and did not mind revealing that he knew it. But DeSalvo, begging that his wife be spared the sight of him in handcuffs, apologizing profusely to his victims for attacking them, certainly seemed to lack the murderous hatred for women exhibited by the Strangler. Nothing here seemed to fit the Medical-Psychiatric Committee's psychiatric profile—no consuming rage toward his mother, no Oedipus complex, surely no problems of potency—rather, fear and contempt for his father, and shame for the way his father had treated his mother.

“Okay, Al,” said Sergeant Davenport. Next day DeSalvo appeared in court again, this time with the out-of-state warrants against him. He was held in $100,000 bail and sent to Bridgewater for the customary thirty-five-day pretrial observation. When the reports on DeSalvo reached the Attorney General's office, Lieutenant Tuney asked Jane Downey to telephone Dr. Robey to say that a man named Albert H. DeSalvo had been sent to Bridgewater pending trial for sexual assaults; he had denied knowing anything about the stranglings and Cambridge police thought he was telling the truth. Nevertheless, would Dr. Robey look him over as he had the others?

Dr. Robey and his staff concluded that DeSalvo suffered from “a sociopathic personality disorder marked by sexual deviation, with prominent schizoid features and depressive trends.” In short, a borderline psychotic, but competent to stand trial. On December 10 he was returned to Cambridge jail. But he began to behave strangely. One night he claimed to hear voices. He insisted to a guard that his wife was in his cell, denouncing him; he begged her not to be indifferent to him. A moment later he turned on her furiously, ordering her out of his cell. Then he became despondent and threatened to kill himself. On January 14, the court ordered him to be returned to Bridgewater for a second evaluation. This time Dr. Robey and his colleague, Dr. Samuel Allen, concluded that the stress of waiting for trial—in Massachusetts rape is punishable by life imprisonment—had pushed DeSalvo over the brink. Sometimes he appeared sane, in touch with reality; at other times he heard voices, was “potentially suicidal and quite clearly overtly schizophrenic.” If brought to trial he would most likely be unable to advise his counsel: he was judged not competent to stand trial.

On January 27, Dr. Robey sent the necessary papers to Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge and at a hearing on February 4, 1965, Judge Edward A. Pecce ordered Albert DeSalvo recommitted as mentally ill “until further order of the court.”

He became one more inmate at Bridgewater.

Four days after DeSalvo had been returned to Bridgewater, a new prisoner arrived for observation pending trial for murder. One might not have given him a second glance at this institution, where almost every other inmate might be a murderer, had it not been for his appearance. He could have been typecast as a gang leader out of the bloody 1920's. He was nearly six feet, broad-shouldered, lean, with black hair and somber black eyes, a dark-complexioned face with furrowed cheeks; a man acutely aware of everything going on—in the psychiatrists' words, “very paranoid, very bright, very angry.”

He had been charged with a particularly brutal killing. At 3:50
P.M.
September 29, 1964, Mrs. Rita Buote, forty, and her fourteen-year-old daughter Diana drove into a Texaco station in Andover, Massachusetts, to come upon a horrifying tableau: the attendant on his knees, pleading for his life, a lean, black-haired man in a tan trench coat standing over him, gun in hand, and as they watched, firing bullet after bullet—they heard four loud reports—into the kneeling man. As Mrs. Buote stared, unbelieving—was a movie being made here?—the man turned, saw her car, and gun in hand, walked swiftly toward her. She had sufficient presence of mind to snap the inside door catch. The killer was on her side, the driver's side; she saw his face clearly on the other side of the glass, the gleaming black eyes, the furrowed cheeks. He raised his hand, he pointed his gun at her through the glass—she heard two clicks. The gun was empty. He pounded on the door. “Open up! Open up!”

Mrs. Buote seized her daughter and slid down with her onto the floor, huddling under the dashboard. “Pray, Diana! That man has a gun! He's going to kill us—”

At almost the moment that Mrs. Buote drove into the station, William King and Reginald Mortimer of Andover in their truck pulled in from the opposite side. They saw the same terrible scene from another vantage point, and as of seconds earlier: the attendant suddenly crumpling before the man, the other standing over him. And they heard what sounded like firecrackers. The man wheeled—a gun glinted in his right hand—he walked to Mrs. Buote's car. They saw him aim, squeeze the trigger soundlessly, saw him pound on the side, tug wildly at the door, then turn, run to a dark sedan parked near a gas pump, and drive off.

A dead man lay sprawled before them, his blood staining the gray pavement of the station. He was Irvin Hilton, forty-four. His death actually resulted from a single stab wound in the center of the spine. It was not difficult to reconstruct what had happened. Hilton's assailant had come up behind him and plunged a knife into his back. Hilton, dying, fell to his knees, turned to plead with his killer—and received six bullets at point-blank range. It seemed a cruelly senseless crime, for though robbery was assumed the motive, the cash register appeared untouched and Hilton's wallet was intact in his trouser pocket.

The dark sedan, found abandoned a few miles away, had been stolen from the parking lot at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge. Its owner, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student, told police two guns were missing—a black .22 pistol and a .32 revolver, with ammunition for both, which he kept under the driver's seat. A .32-caliber slug was discovered in one of the gas station's drains not far from Hilton's body.

Given an artist's sketch based on Mrs. Buote's description, it took police twenty-four hours to find the man they charged was Hilton's murderer. His name was George Nassar, and he lived in suburban Mattapan; he was thirty-three, unmarried, a parolee who had killed a man in a grocery stickup in 1948, when he was only sixteen. He had been paroled in 1961, after serving eleven years of a second-degree murder sentence. In prison his intelligence, his willingness to rehabilitate himself, and his general ability had impressed several ministers, as well as the parole board. Indeed, since his release he had taught Sunday School classes, and on some occasions actually substituted for a minister in his pulpit. There was no question that he was an unusual man; he had been studying Russian, and planning to enter Northeastern University, and he had been working at various jobs from hospital attendant to newspaper reporter.

He vehemently denied Hilton's murder. “If I had done it, I would have killed myself,” he exclaimed. One only had to look at his record since he had been paroled. It was all a case of mistaken identity. But both Mrs. Buote and her daughter identified him in a police lineup. They were positive he was the man.

At Bridgewater, Dr. Robey and his staff found Nassar a man of extremely high intelligence—his I.Q. was above 150—but now showing paranoid and schizophrenic symptoms. After thirty-five days' observation Dr. Robey recommended that he be kept for further study.

Usually Bridgewater State Hospital has about seven hundred inmates. In January, when Nassar arrived, he found himself in the same ward as Albert DeSalvo. They struck up a friendship.