The Boston Strangler (51 page)

But from then on, “There was no more for me. It was always Judy, always Judy, and this went on for one year, then two years. There was nothing there for me. So I cut out. My brother said to Irm, ‘Al's cutting up.' The way she was treating me would hurt anyone's ego. I was like any other normal guy, trying to make out.

“I asked the doctor. ‘She's so frigid,' I said. But she was afraid to have sex because we might have babies. She said, ‘Our next baby might be born without arms'—like what happened to one of her girl friends. She said to me, ‘If we're going to have any sex, I'll let you know.'” His voice was heavy with sarcasm. “
She'll
let
me
know! I used to think, what's wrong with me? Am I undersexed or oversexed or what? I bought some Kinsey books and read them. I wanted her to read them. She said ‘I don't want to read that kind of stuff.' I said, ‘Well, let's go to the doctor, let's talk this over.' But she don't want to hear nothing.”

In the little room DeSalvo wrung his hands.

“How can I be all wrong, Mr. Bottomly? Even her own girl friend told Irm, ‘You know damn well Al was stealing and you accepted all that money in 1961.' Irm wanted to go back to Germany when they put me in jail. Then when I came out she says, ‘If you ever get in trouble again I'm taking the children and I'm leaving you and never come back.'

“It's like my mother says: ‘If this woman loved you—if your father loved me like you loved your wife—even though your father did what he did to your sisters and me—I still would have forgave him and loved him. You washed the floors, you did all the work in the house, you did everything for her—that's what killed it. You were too good to her.' My mother told me that, Mr. Bottomly; can I be all wrong?”

On a Sunday morning in August Albert's mother had visited him. She was a heavy-set woman, of fifty-five. From childhood poor eyesight had forced her to wear thick glasses. Now she was virtually blind, but in her son's presence attempted to hide the fact. As Albert told Bottomly later, “I tested her. You see, I
know
she's blind, but she won't let on to me. So I tested her. ‘Gee, Ma,' I said, ‘your hair looks beautiful. You had it fixed. How do you like mine?' She says, ‘I like it the way you got it nice and short.' Is my hair short?”

“No,” said Bottomly.

“But last time she was here, my hair was short, and she knew it.”

They had talked together, with long periods of silence. Of her four sons, Albert had always been her favorite. He had been more attentive to her, more considerate, going out of his way to drop in to see her, even if only for a few minutes. Now she said to him, almost coaxingly, “Tell me something. You didn't hurt anybody?”

Albert, telling the story to Bottomly, said, “That's what's killing me. Her saying, ‘You didn't hurt anybody.'”

He had looked at his mother sorrowfully. “Ma, where you been?”

She had said, “But it can't be you. I've been thinking back about your childhood, your growing up, how good a son you were, how good a husband you were to your wife—it can't be you. I don't think you could hurt anybody.”

Albert had said, “Ma, I can't answer you, I can't answer you or anyone, but in a little while the truth will come out, and whatever it may be I've got to tell it.”

His mother had shaken her head. “I'm not going to believe it's you. If you did do it, if you get the proper treatment, they'll find out how it did happen, and they'll find a reason—if you did do it. There must be a reason.”

“Okay, Ma,” Albert had said. He had put his arm around her. “Okay.”

DeSalvo rose and paced back and forth. He dug into the pocket of his beltless, faded gray trousers and brought forth a battered wallet from which he pulled out a snapshot. It was of his daughter Judy and his son Michael—dark-haired, smiling children. “My little girl's eleven,” he said. “Michael's going on seven. Some day they'll know the true story. When my daughter gets married, they'll ask, ‘Who's your father? The Boston Strangler—'” He replaced the snapshot. “Don't you think I know what it means?” he said in a despairing voice. Then: “It's true, it's true. I wish it wasn't. Maybe it'll help society. Maybe they'll learn something from this—”

What would it do to his family, he asked, rhetorically. “My brother Frank, he's very immature. He said to me, ‘You're all washed up.' I said, ‘What do you mean? I'm not washed up. I still have to live my life in this institution.'” His sisters, Albert went on, were very concerned. “They think that I'm going to involve them.…”

He had not seen his father for twenty years, he said. Then they met one evening, his father took him to dinner and offered to buy him a car. Albert told him, he said, “I don't ever want to see you again. Do you think you can buy my love now?”

He had heard that his father was very concerned. “My brother came down last Sunday and told me. I said, ‘Maybe this is some way God has of shooting the works to him now for what he did to his children.'” DeSalvo thought bitterly about this for a moment. Then the words came out in a rush: “I saw my father knock my mother's teeth out and then break every one of her fingers. I must have been seven. Ma was laid out under the sink—I watched it. He knocked all her teeth out. Pa was a plumber, he smashed me once across the back with a pipe. I just didn't move fast enough. He once sold me and my two sisters for nine dollars, sold us to some farmer in Maine. No one knew what happened to us. For six months Ma hunted for us and couldn't find us.

“My father—” DeSalvo spoke dully. “We used to have to stand in front of him, my brother Frank and me, every night and be beaten with his belt. I can still to this very moment tell you the color of the belt and just how long it was—two inches by 36—a belt with a big buckle on it. We used to stand in front of him every night and get beaten with that damn thing—every night, whether we did anything wrong or not. We were only in the fourth or fifth grade …”

Bottomly had been listening to this recital with growing horror. He could only ask now, “Was he drunk?”

“He was feeling good,” DeSalvo said indifferently. “And he used to take my younger brother, Dickie, my mother will tell you this, took him, picked him right up and smashed him against the wall. My father used to go around with prostitutes in front of us … My sisters always had blacked eyes … My mother had a hard life. Six kids to bring up, and she was working all the time … When you're under the environment of sex all day long … You go up on the roof of our building and there'd be a couch up there … They'd give you a quarter and say, ‘Beat it, kid.'… Always in the bedroom something being done …

“I'm starting to realize what I'm really involved in.” He moved from one subject to another as they occurred to him. “I knew what I had to do, but I never knew the true consequences. I'm not going to back down. I told Frank, ‘You tell Ma I don't care if I get the chair. I've got to go through with it. I just got to go through with it all the way.'”

Bottomly said, “You're taking a great risk.” He pointed out that DeSalvo's plea in a trial would undoubtedly be not guilty by reason of insanity, but there was always the possibility that a jury would refuse to believe the defense medical testimony and find him guilty.

DeSalvo sighed. “There's no problem there because I figure, what good am I anyhow? If you're going to die for telling the truth, to hell with it. You only live once.”

“Well,” remarked Bottomly, “you've reached a point where you've got to get this off your chest—”

“One way or the other,” DeSalvo said. “What good am I alive? If there's any way of curing me—” He knew that those with money could always buy their way out of trouble, that they could pay for medical help to cure themselves if they could be cured. But—“if the rich people live and the poor people die, then I die. There'll be other people coming along.” He brooded for a moment. “What made me do it, and why? At least if the doctors find this out, it's something to give my kids. Even though I knew my father did what he did, I wanted him to love me. I want my son to love me … Because I think there's a lot more involved than just being a rape artist and cutting out and stealing … What really happened to me? This is what I can't understand.”

Again he was silent, sitting at the table, chin in hand. “It's true, God knows it's all true. I wish it wasn't. I don't want to be the person who did these things. There's no rhyme or reason to it. I'm not a man who can hurt anyone—I can't do it. I'm very emotional. I break up at the least thing. I can't hurt anyone and here I'm doing the things I did …” Suddenly he burst out, “Thank God they had no loved ones, no children—all single women. I can be very thankful for that … But, still and all, a life is a life.”

Later.

DeSalvo, to Bottomly: “Mr. Bottomly, how do the police feel toward this person?”

Bottomly said, “I think it's a tragedy. There's no other way to put it. It happened. You killed people. We can't undo that. You don't know why. We don't know why. Maybe the medical profession can figure it out. Maybe you can be rehabilitated.”

“I'm not even looking to be free,” DeSalvo said heavily.

“With your mind and ambition—you're a very intelligent fellow basically, Albert—”

“Do you know what my I.Q. is?” DeSalvo interrupted him.

“I was told it's seventy.”

DeSalvo was indignant. “Oh, no. It's a hundred and twenty-five, a hundred and thirty.”

“With your mind and ambition you might make quite a contribution, even in an institution,” Bottomly went on. Had he ever seen the film “Birdman of Alcatraz?”
*
DeSalvo had not, and Bottomly summarized the story of Robert Stroud, murderer of two men, sentenced to prison for life, into whose cell one day a crippled bird flew, and how he devoted the rest of his life to a study of birds, taught himself to cure them of disease, even to operate upon them, and became such an authority that he wrote a treatise used as a textbook.

DeSalvo devoured this, his eyes shining. He was all eagerness. “Mr. Bottomly, right now I shave all the old men, I wash them up—I could help these people, give them a better life. Even if I may never be released, I'll be doing something for them. I could help younger kids coming in here, seventeen, eighteen, give them the better outlook on life. Not things like teaching them how to blow a safe—I don't want to hear that kind of talk. There's a good world out there—I got off the track. Why, I don't know but I'm going to do everything to find out so some day my children won't look at me in shame and disgrace.” He thought for a moment, and then in a voice reflective and suprisingly modest, said, “I think I have a fairly decent attitude towards this whole thing. I still think I can make a contribution. Many people have died for a good cause. I think these people may not have died in vain.”

When Bottomly left Bridgewater that day he was, for one of the few times in his life, at a loss for words to express precisely how he felt, and what emotions swept over him.

Could there be any doubt now? Bottomly, Tuney, DiNatale agreed: Albert was the man.

There would have to be one more session with him. And perhaps, with it, more insight into DeSalvo.

*
Based on the book,
Birdman of Alcatraz
, Thomas E. Gaddis, Random House, Inc., New York, 1955.

23

Little by little the word seeped out. Somehow it became known in Chelsea and nearby Malden—the first, the town in which he had grown up; the second, the town in which he had lived as a married man—that the mental patient at Bridgewater, the thirty-three-year-old laborer and father of two who claimed to be the Boston Strangler was Albert DeSalvo of 11 Florence Street Park, Malden.

Sitting in his office above the Reznik Drug Store at the corner of Broadway and Everett Street in Chelsea, Attorney Robert Sheinfeld was all but stunned. He did not know what to think. He had not seen Albert for some time but he had received a letter from him only a few months before, written from jail where Albert was awaiting trial as the Green Man. Albert was in difficulties again with the law, but there was nothing in what he had written to suggest that he was the Strangler. Or was there? Sheinfeld took the letter from Albert's file and read it again carefully. It was dated January 9, 1965. Five days later Albert was to be sent back to Bridgewater as incompetent to stand trial.

He had written:

Dear Mr. Sheinfeld,

I feel I owe you this letter. I wanted very much that you take my case but I remembered what you told me if I ever get in trouble again don't bother you. So I have another attorney Mr. Jon A. Asgiersson, from Stoneham, my brother Joe gave me his name …

Well, thought Sheinfeld, Albert certainly had taken him at his word. When the police had seized him four years earlier trying to escape after failing to jimmy the door of an apartment in Cambridge, Sheinfeld had been completely out of patience. “What's the matter with you!” he had demanded. “Why did you run away from a lousy B and E? And get shot at? You could have been killed—and for what? I'm sick and tired of this. B and E, suspended sentence, put on probation, soon as probation ends, B and E again, suspended sentence, put on probation, and now this silly B and E again—” Sheinfeld, struck by a thought, had interrupted himself to ask abruptly, “This Measuring Man stuff, Albert—do you get a thrill touching these women? Is that why you do it?” Albert had denied anything like that. “Then you're not kidding me,” Sheinfeld had said angrily. “It's just a front for your B and E. I've had it, Albert. You get in trouble again, don't bother me with it.” Why would Albert risk death, shame himself, his wife and children, all for a petty housebreaking that might net a few dollars? Albert should know better and perhaps threatening to wash his hands of him might knock some sense into his head.