The Boston Strangler (52 page)

Sheinfeld read on:

I'm not looking to get out of this trouble I am in but I am looking to be helped if I can be. I realize I am sick and have been for a long time. but I neaver knew how to ask for help. I was afriad and ashamed. how could I tell my wife I am oversexed and have a drive and urge I cannot control. even you Mr. Sheinfeld, when you had my case in 1961 in Cambridge involving all them women. you asked me if I got a thrill or feeling when I touched them. and I lyed to you and said no, because I was ashamed to admit it of my sex drive. But now its got out of hand, but still thank God I neaver got to hurt anyone.

Sheinfeld paused. Albert had written this
before
he had ever claimed to be the Strangler. Why should he now—months later—paint himself as a murderer?

But I think the way I was going anything could have happen in time had I not been caught. I've been doing a lot of thinking—plus what the doctors have told me—that this had to come out one way or another somehow my problem started way back in my childhood days. Mr. Sheinfeld, I want so bad to tell all I have inside me and
I have a lot
. My wife is still staying by me because she knows I am really sick and I am not lying but asking for help. Mr. Sheinfeld at Westboro State Hospital they treated me good, I saw a doctor just about every day. They at least tried to help and find out what is really wrong or what kind of a problem a person has. I was hoping they would have sent me there but they didn't. they sent me to Bridgewater State Hospital. At Bridgewater State Hospital Mr. Sheinfeld it's a shame all you do is to stay down there for 35 days and they send you back. I saw one doctor for about 1½ in the whole thirty-five days I was there. I filled out an answer sheet with 500 questions on it and from this they found me sane but recommend I be sent to Treatment Center. How can anyone find out in 1½ if a man is sane or not?

Mr. Sheinfeld, I no something is wrong with me. You no my family background and what my father was like and all the things he did. Mr. Sheinfeld, do you no of anyway I can be sent to a hospital where I can come clean with everything inside me. I don't care if I never come out but I want to no at least I am being helped. and maybe find out what made me be what I am and do all them bad things which I am so ashamed of. there is got to be some kind of explanation as to why this has all happen. If you could only no of the good and love I have given my wife and children. this is why she cant believe or understand why this has all happen. I tried being good and did everything to make her happy and children. Mr. Sheinfeld, the night this all happen. She cried and said Al how could you do this to me, you made me relove you all over again. So you see Mr. Sheinfeld I was trying with all my heart to be good but my drive got to bad I found myself relieving myself at least four and five times a day. it was so bad. but when I went out and did what I did that I am in here for it was so strange because it was like I was burning up inside and the feelings I was getting put me like a daze it would be like a dream I would not no where I was going but I was thinking and seeing a woman in my vision in front of me wondering what kind of a body she would have and so on. sometime before I even got anywhere I found myself sitting in the car while driving, already releaved. but in five min it came back again. I was all ready again. But when I did get a woman and she did what I asked her to after it was all over I cried and told her I was sorry please forgive me and the woman also told the police the same. they even said some of the women that they felt when I just got nexted to them, they had a feeling that I had just releaved myself because after that I just tied them up and left without even doing anything to them. its true I just put my hand on them and I was finished. and then realized again what I had done. in almost all the cases the women said more than half I didn't even touched them but tie them up and run whitch took only 3–5 min—so you see I was so build up by the time I found a woman I just got near her and I was releaved. I realize Mr. Sheinfeld that this may mean nothing to you but maybe some day someone else will come up to you with my same problem and you may be able to help him. if there is anything or in any way you can somehow help me. I'll give you my attorney I have allready told him about you but he said he would see you or call you.

Then came Asgiersson's name, address, and telephone number, printed in block letters.

I always did respect you Mr. Sheinfeld but I didn't no how to explain my problem you have always treated me better than good.

Albert DeSalvo

Then a postscript:

I went to the police station myself also Mr. Sheinfeld. I gave myself up to the police.

Sheinfeld stared again at the letter, written in a childlike hand, with its childlike mispellings, on blue-ruled school paper. When he first received it he had decided he could do nothing. Albert had hired another lawyer. It would not be proper for him to intrude himself into the case. But what
did
this letter mean? Granted, Albert had a sexual problem—his hunch
had
been right, then—but would this sort of thing make a man a murderer? And Albert had clearly written, “Thank God I neaver got to hurt anyone.”

Sheinfeld could come to only one conclusion. Albert had always been terrified lest Irmgard leave him. Once he had asked the lawyer, “If a guy's insane, can his wife divorce him?” Sheinfeld, though taken aback, explained that Massachusetts law did not allow this.

There must lie the answer, thought Sheinfeld, the reason behind this entire masquerade. Albert, now locked up in Bridgewater with characters who probably knew something about the stranglings, must have thought, I'm in trouble again, if I'm insane they can't kill me, Irm can't divorce me, so I'll say these things, I'll make up this story …

The attorney, troubled, returned the letter to the file. If Albert proved to be the Strangler, he, Sheinfeld, would be the most flabbergasted man on earth. While he had no illusions about Albert—a petty thief, an incorrigible B and E man, an ingratiating con artist—certainly he was not a man given to violence, surely not a vicious killer, the murderer of thirteen women. As far as Sheinfeld knew, Albert had always been a perfect gentleman in the presence of women. When he had dropped into his office to make payments on his bill—even now he still owed four hundred dollars—he had always been courteous, gentle in manner, never fresh or insolent. Often there were women clients in the office. Albert's behavior at such times was above reproach. Miss Dunn, Sheinfeld's secretary, had remarked upon it, too—so likable a man, with his shy wife and lovely little girl upon whom he so obviously doted …

In Sheinfeld's home friends often admired an intricately carved, beautifully fashioned wooden jewel case. It was a gift from Albert. While still in the House of Correction, he had sent it to the lawyer with a note, on October 19, 1961, reading:

Dear Mr. Sheinfeld.

Sending you a package, while making my wife one I thought of you and thought maybe your wife would like one, so I went and made her one, please I'm making this out of the goodness of my heart. I learned to do so much in here. I work in the carpenter shop and learn to do so much with woods as you can see. its all done by hand buy me. also I've taken a course in math in here and doing a lot of studying not wasting my time. I'm okay, feeling fine. this is what I needed to wake me up. to bad you didn't do it the first time. you know what I mean. but I'll be okay now my wife comes up every week. you have always done me right the many talks we had together in your office, a person like you can never be forgotten. hoping this letter find you in good health.

Mr. Albert H. DeSalvo

“To bad you didn't do it the first time,” Albert had written. The first time Sheinfeld defended Albert on a B and E charge was on St. Valentine's Day, 1958. Someone had broken into a Chelsea house and escaped with several silver dollars and change, some of the coins stained with red nail polish. Later that day police happened to walk into a confectionery store. There stood Albert pushing across the counter several coins stained with nail polish. He was buying a valentine for his wife and a box of candy for his little girl.

He admitted not only the burglary, but two other housebreakings that morning in which nothing had been taken. Sheinfeld made an eloquent plea. His client had served nearly ten years in the Army, he and his wife were both working, they had a crippled child, he was in debt because he had been playing the horses and numbers in an attempt to make money, but he was a good father and husband, he had learned his lesson … The prosecution agreed and Albert was let off with suspended sentences of one year on each of the three counts. Three years later, in 1961, when Albert was seized as the Measuring Man, Sheinfeld had told him, “The trouble with you is that you've only received suspended sentences. Maybe if you'd have had to serve thirty or sixty days on those first B and E's, you might have learned that you can't get away with such things.”

Was this man a murderer? Sheinfeld could not believe it.

In Cambridge, in his basement office at the Third District Court, Robert Clifford mulled over the same question. With his boyish shock of black hair and his massive build, at forty-one Clifford looked more like a college football player than a probation officer who had behind him over fifteen years experience as a lawyer and social worker. It had been Clifford who first took Albert's history when he was arrested in 1961. Albert, sitting in a wooden chair before Clifford's desk, had affected him strangely. The man had a hangdog look: he was the eternal Sad Sack, helpless, defeated, almost apologetic for being alive—yet, when he spoke, curiously appealing. He poured his heart out to Clifford. He told him about his childhood, his family repeatedly on relief, his father going with prostitutes, beating up his mother and the children. He had burst into tears with the words, “Can you accept a man after what he's done to his family? What kind of a man is that!”

Clifford, making his notes as Albert spoke, thought, This fellow hates his father so much he doesn't even want to be a man. The world's a jungle to him where you get by only by outsmarting other people.

When Albert explained the “big kick” he got out of measuring the girls around Harvard Square, he had added, “Boy, it makes me feel powerful when I can make those girls do what I want—make them submit to me. I'm nothing in this life, Mr. Clifford. But I want to be something—”

“Did you want to be caught?”

DeSalvo's eyes lit up. “Yeah, I'd be somebody then. I'd get publicity in the papers.”

He had been miserable at home, he told Clifford. “My mother was a simple girl, she got married at the age of fifteen. We used to freeze or were on welfare all the time. We never had enough to eat.” When his father used to beat him, he would run away from home and live for days under the wharves in nearby East Boston. Clifford knew the East Boston docks. They were places of refuge. He had gone there often, looking for youngsters on probation. He would find them here—boys in their teens, sleeping on discarded mattresses under the wharves, boys who had run away “to get out of the heat of the kitchen, to get away from fathers always beating them up and beating up their mothers,” as Clifford put it. Usually Clifford had found the mothers to be weak, masochistic women. They needed punishment and they had married the kind of man—consciously or not—who would give them punishment.

Clifford had written his report, adding the comment, “Subject is either a clever fellow or a compulsive con artist.” A week later he visited the building in which Albert had grown up, an apartment house in the poorer section of Chelsea, itself a workingman's town. The moment he entered the dimly lit, cluttered interior he was assailed by a sharp, acrid odor—clothes, food, he was not sure what. Then he saw soiled clothes piled against one wall of the kitchen to within a few feet of the ceiling; beer cans were on the kitchen table, the sink was full of dirty dishes.

The only person home, apparently, was a short, heavyset man in his early thirties. He turned out to be Albert's eldest brother, Joe.

Clifford introduced himself and explained that the law required him to make a house visit to learn the family background. “You know your brother Al is in trouble—”

“He's always in trouble.” Joe's voice was indifferent.

“Where's your father?”

The other stared at him coldly. “I don't know and if I did, I wouldn't tell you.”

“Why?” Clifford asked.

“I don't care for him, he's never done nothing for me—” He turned away. “I got to go to work—” The interview was terminated.

Clifford glanced about, and made his notes. He checked the welfare records. Through the years the family had been often on relief, receiving about $125 every two months. To help out, the mother had taken in sewing. Visualizing the family background, the conditions under which Albert had grown up, Clifford thought, These people have been in so much trouble they don't care anymore. The police and welfare workers have been here so often—this family has been agencied to death. There's no cohesiveness here. They're all isolated individuals, and everything in their lives is negative. They have been hit over the head for years by the old man. As they see it, everyone's against them. They live in desperation and helplessness.

Now four years later, Albert was claiming to be the Strangler.

They'd have to convince me, thought Clifford. This fellow got nothing from his family—no sense of status. He wanted desperately to be somebody. That would explain his imposture as the Strangler. Clifford thought, If Albert had struck me as a bottled-up guy—well, that would make it easier to believe he's the man. But he was fluid, everything poured out of him, nothing appeared repressed or held back …

Clifford read through the report he had written on Albert on March 21, 1961. No, he
can't
be, he thought.