The Boston Strangler (44 page)

DeSalvo, a mental patient, had to have his rights scrupulously protected. He would tell all to Bottomly but nothing he told could be used against him in court. Bottomly would interrogate him in the presence of McGrath. Then Detectives Tuney and DiNatale, in consultation with Lieutenants Donovan and Sherry in Boston, and with police officials in Cambridge, Lynn, Salem, and Lawrence, would check every statement by DeSalvo.

The law has its curious features. One might ask why Donovan, Tuney, and DiNatale could not interrogate DeSalvo themselves? The answer is that the district attorney of any of the three counties involved in the stranglings could, if he wished, subpoena them to testify as to what DeSalvo had told them; and if that happened, his account
would
be used against him. The detectives could refuse to testify but this could cost them their jobs as police officers. Bottomly, an independently wealthy man whose career was not at stake, might risk that possibility.

If DeSalvo was found to have been telling the truth and was then ruled competent to stand trial, psychiatrists would examine him to determine if he had been insane or sane when he committed the murders. If their conclusion was that he had been insane, he would make a formal confession to Donovan, Tuney and DiNatale to be used in court: there he would plead not guilty by reason of insanity with expectation of a directed verdict of acquittal and life commitment to a mental institution. The Strangler would have been found and identified. For the city of Boston the long ordeal would have been ended.

If, however, it appeared that their conclusion would be that he had been sane, all proceedings would halt. For a sane man to confess he was the Strangler would put him in the greatest jeopardy and no defense attorney could allow this. DeSalvo, then, would not formally confess, and without his formal confession there would be no trial, for there was no evidence to indict him. He would return to his original status as the Green Man, against him the charges of Breaking and Entering, Assault and Battery, Confining and Putting in Fear, and Engaging in an Unnatural and Lascivious Act—the charges on which he had been arrested so many months before—one more mental patient detained at Bridgewater awaiting trial on those charges. His insistence on being identified as the Strangler would be viewed—medically and legally—as the product of a deranged mind.

The sessions began.

The man whom Bottomly and McGrath saw standing before them in the small room assigned to them at Bridgewater was of medium height, his head small, well shaped, with hazel eyes, crew-cut black hair over a low forehead, a long, beaklike nose, and a sullen mouth that could unexpectedly break into a surprisingly winning smile. He was five feet eight and one half and he stood in his favorite pose, legs slightly apart, hands in pockets. He was solidly built, built like a wedge—broad, powerful shoulders tapering to a narrow torso. While overseas DeSalvo, attached to a tank corps, had been injured when a shell backfired, and had suffered a temporary paralysis of the left arm. He still received a 20 percent disability stipend as a result. But there seemed no evidence of any disability now.

DeSalvo's face intrigued Bottomly. It was at that moment a suffering face; with its close-set eyes above that sharp beak of a nose (Peter Hurkos had said the Strangler would have a sharp, a “spitzy,” nose, but Hurkos then was talking about Thomas O'Brien, the shoe salesman—or
was
he?),
*
it reminded him of an owl, the more so because the eyebrows, growing dark and black and straight above the eye, at their outer corners curved downward, like half-parentheses, as if to outline the intent, dark, watchful eyes. The mouth was thin, a little crooked, slanted down to the left; the chin strong, jutting, with a suspicion of a dimple in the center. His upper lip and jowls were blue; he seemed always to need a shave.

His voice was thin and rather high; hearing it, one might think one was listening to an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old boy, not a man of thirty-three. He spoke in the accents of Boston—“apahtment” and “pahlor”—sometimes his choice of words was surprisingly sophisticated—but his diction was semiliterate: full of “I done” and “Y'unnerstan' me?” punctuated with “So I goes here, right? Right?”—quick, sometimes curt, businesslike. Sometimes he spoke so rapidly that his words ran together and Bottomly realized he was hearing DeSalvo's double-talk—Albert telling and yet not telling, slurring over what he preferred not to talk about. As the interviews went on Bottomly was to become increasingly aware of DeSalvo's persuasiveness. That voice, however youthful, was immensely earnest; it conveyed sincerity, a disarmingly boyish eagerness to please you with its honesty—the mark of the con man, the Measuring Man who found women such easy prey.

At these first sessions, however, DeSalvo seemed almost formal. Later he told Bottomly, “I was sizing you up all the time, testing you out—I was using reverse psychology on you, Mr. Bottomly, to see if I could trust you.”

“All right,” said Bottomly. He wanted to preface their conversation with a simple statement. “Albert, I don't think you did these things,” he said. “I don't believe it. But I'm here to listen—let's talk about them.” Would he begin at the beginning, then, and explain how he had gone about these murders he said he had done?

First, DeSalvo explained, he drove a 1954 two-door green Chevrolet coupe, registered in his wife's name. Most of the murders occurred on weekends—“I could always get out of the house Saturday by telling my wife I had to work.” As a maintenance man he was on the street most of the day, anyway. He would drive about, the urge would come upon him, he never knew where he was going—he had no specific apartment in mind, no specific woman in mind. “You got to realize this, Mr. Bottomly,” he said. “I just drove in and out of streets and ended up wherever I ended up.”

He began with Anna Slesers. He thought that was “the first one.” He placed it sometime in the summer of 1962, in June. He had no work that day. “I said I was going fishing—that was my excuse for getting out of the house,” he said. “I had a fishing net, it was weighted down with three lead pipes, and a fishing rod in the back of the car.” But instead, he shot out across the Mystic River Bridge into Boston, and found himself driving down St. Stephen's Street. He parked his car in front of St. Anne's Church, walked around the corner into Gainsborough Street, and at random chose one of the identical bay-windowed, four-story red brick houses that lined both sides of Gainsborough. He climbed the six or seven cement steps to the stoop, opened the heavy metal door with its “No. 77” in old-fashioned gold script, and walked up the stairs. He was wearing a raincoat over a charcoal-colored sport jacket, and in his pocket he carried one of the lead weights he'd taken from the fishing net. He knocked on the door of 3F. A slight woman wearing a light blue robe—“I guess it was flannel”—opened the door.

“I was sent to do some work in your apartment,” he told her, and she let him in. Carefully he described what he saw as he entered: “To the left would be a kitchen, then the bathroom about ten feet on. The light would be on. I see a sewing machine, brown, a window with drapes, a very pretty bedroom set, light tan, a couch, a tan record player with darker color—you know, dark cocoa-color knobs.” As she led the way toward the bathroom telling him what had to be done, he was behind her, and “I hit her on the head with the lead weight.” As she fell he put his arms around her neck and they fell together on the floor. For a moment she had put out one hand to support herself on the sewing machine, but then crumpled. “Her blood was all over me … I got up, I took her robe, I had the robe belt, and I put it around her neck and left it on her.”

To Bailey he had said that “she was still alive and I had intercourse with her.” He did not say this to Bottomly.

“Then I washed up in the bathroom and I noticed I was wearing gloves.” Time and again DeSalvo was to talk about himself as though he were another person and to speak of things “being done” to the victims as though he had had no part in what took place.

The bathroom was yellow with a white sunken tub, as he remembered it. She must have been preparing to take a bath “because there was maybe four, five inches of water in the tub.” When he went into the parlor, music—“symphonies and stuff like that”—still came from the record player, so he turned one of the knobs and the sound vanished, but he wasn't sure if he'd completely switched off the instrument.

“I saw I had blood all over, on my jacket and shirt, so when I left I grabbed a raincoat that was hanging in a cabinet and put it on.”

“What kind of cabinet?” Bottomly asked. “Where was it?”

“It was metal, about seven feet high, in the bedroom.” When he put his hand in the cabinet, he felt a bill on a shelf and took it. It was twenty dollars—“the only money I took at any place,” he said.

The raincoat, a tan one, was short in the sleeves, “but I went out, got into my car, and drove around until I came to an Army and Navy store.” When he emerged from No. 77, a policeman happened to be passing. DeSalvo simply walked by him to his car. He had ripped off his shirt and cut up the jacket into small pieces, using his fishing knife, wrapped his own raincoat, which was also bloody, about that, and hid the bundle in the back of his car. Now he walked, bare-chested, into the store and bought a white shirt which he put on there. He drove toward Lynn; he came by the Lynn Marsh, one of the many inlets of the Atlantic to be found there. It was low tide. He parked his car, waded out into the mud, and threw his jacket, piece by piece, into the water, then the raincoat, and watched the heavy current take the stuff away. As he was about to leave he looked up and saw a man, about a hundred yards down the shore, observing him. Calmly, he got back into his car and drove home.

That was Thursday, June 14, 1962. He had been out of jail two months.

Saturday morning—he remembered it was a Saturday, probably the last Saturday in June—he told Irmgard that he was going out on a job. He had a cup of coffee in a little restaurant near his home, got into his car, and “I shot out toward Swampscott to see a fellow I was doing some work for. Instead, I went to Salem, and I rode around for a while and I ended up in Lynn. I was just driving—anywhere—not knowing where I was going. I was coming through back ways, in and out and around.
That's the idea of the whole thing. I just go here and there. I don't know why
.

“Okay. So I go through the different streets—right? Right? I find myself in front of Seventy-three Newhall Street. Now, I'd been in this same building before.”

What had brought him there then?

“Same thing as now,” DeSalvo said simply. “But I didn't do anything. I talked to a dark-haired girl, about thirty-five, five foot seven and a half, about a hundred and thirty pounds—not bad-looking. I passed a remark …” He stopped to think.

He and Bottomly sat across a table from each other in a room whose walls were completely bare and whose only other furniture was a wooden high-backed bench against one wall. Between the two men was the microphone of the tape recorder Bottomly had brought with him. McGrath, a nationally known criminologist, penologist, and attorney of high reputation—all parties involved had agreed upon him as guardian—sat at the head of the table, listening intently. His role was to advise DeSalvo if any question arose as to his rights. He had met him some months before and DeSalvo had impressed him with his apparent sincerity and honesty. To keep an open mind McGrath had avoided learning any details of the crimes. Only now and then did he ask a question.

On the table was a detailed street and building map of Boston, and a blue-lined school pad. Each time DeSalvo spoke of a building, at Bottomly's request he sketched it on the pad—the entrance he used, the stairs he climbed, the layout of the apartment, the location and kind of furniture, the windows, fire escapes, exits. To refresh his memory as to streets, he consulted the map. But his memory was extraordinary. More than once he was to say, “I know you're telling me what your photographs show, but I'm telling you what I saw.”

“Now, why didn't I do anything?” he asked himself. “Did I get scared that first time because I saw a woman and that made me take off? I don't know.” On this second visit to 73 Newhall Street he entered, began to mount the back stairs, but seeing someone, went around to the front, opened a dark oak glass door, and climbed to the second floor.

“I went to the right and knocked on a door.” It was Helen Blake's apartment. He stopped again. “Was it her front door? Back door? This hallway's got me bugged,” he said, talking as he sketched it. “There's a curve in the hallway there …

“When I knocked she opened the door. She was wearing cotton-type pajamas, bottoms and top, some kind of pink print, buttoned down the front—”

“What kind of print?” Bottomly asked. DeSalvo dutifully sketched the pattern as he remembered it.

“I told her, ‘I'm going to do some work in the apartment,' and she said, ‘This is the first I've heard about it,' and I said, ‘I'm supposed to check all the windows for leaks and I'm going to do some interior painting.' ‘Well, it's about time,' she said.” There were two milk bottles in front of her door. “You got milk bottles here,” he said politely, and “reached down and got them up in the crook of my thumb and first finger so there's no prints and I talked my way right into her fast and she let me in.”

McGrath suggested that Albert draw the shape of the bottles. Were they wet and cold to the touch? Not wet, said DeSalvo; maybe a little cold. Probably just had been delivered, he thought. “I handed her the bottles and she put them on the refrigerator—”

Bottomly caught him. “Wasn't it odd that she didn't put them
in
the refrigerator?”

DeSalvo dismissed the question. “I wasn't paying much attention. She was doing her housecleaning because the bedroom windows were open and she had rugs hanging out over them. There was a white mantelpiece in the parlor, she had pictures on it and an older-type TV with a picture of a girl—say eighteen, twenty on it—her daughter, I think, or her niece. We had some conversation, she was telling me about her, a very nice woman, you know, talking about her niece …” DeSalvo's voice took on an indulgent tone. Then he told her, “Your ceilings need only one coat of white paint. I'd like to check the windows in the bedroom, too.”