The Boston Strangler (55 page)

He dabbed at his eyes and put his handkerchief away. “I'm sorry, Mr. Bottomly,” he said. “I shouldn't of acted this way—”

Bottomly said, “I'm not surprised, Albert. You've got a lot to carry. It's surprising you haven't broken down more often.”

“I do it in my room,” said DeSalvo.

He was able to return to the case of Mary Mullen. When she slumped to the floor, he picked her up and put her on the couch—a green couch. He knew she had died. He didn't know how he knew it but he knew it was not a faint—that it was death—and he assumed the police would think it was from natural causes. “I didn't touch her, I didn't do anything to her—she went, just like that. She passed out. If I close my eyes, as I do now, it's just like being there. I picked her up and put her on the couch and I left.”

After a silence, Bottomly asked, “Albert, how did you con all these women? How did you know what to say to them?”

DeSalvo pursed his lips. “It's hard to explain—I don't know how, but the minute the door opened, if I got a glance at a crack in the ceiling, or anything—somehow, I could tell about whoever answered the door in a split second and size them up. I knew right away what she was, what I should say to her, how I should act—I had an answer for everyone who came to the door.”

Was he ready, at last, to talk about Beverly Samans?

He was not, but there was no way out. Two or three days before he found himself in Beverly's apartment in Cambridge, he said, he had been at work painting a house in Belmont. “In the cellar I opened some drawers and I found a sharp, push-button switch knife, the blade came straight out—whew!—I never saw anything like this.” Without knowing why he put it in his pocket.

On a weekday morning a few days later, on his way from home, “I shot over to Cambridge.” As with so many apartment houses, he knew Beverly's building well. “I'd been in it five or six times before, as the Measuring Man.” He rang the bell in the vestibule, walked up, and knocked on her door. She opened it. “She was wearing a zipper-type housecoat. It seemed she was reading my lips when I talked to her.”

Beverly, Bottomly recalled, was hard of hearing and always sat in the front row in her classes in order to hear the lecturer. “Oh, it was dark in her room. She didn't know me, I didn't know her. I closed the door and said, ‘Don't scream, I won't hurt you …'” He stopped and shook his head. “Jesus, I don't want to talk about it!” Almost a scream. “I don't want to say how I did it!”

Bottomly used an approach he had not employed before. “Do you want me to come back in two or three days?”

“No—” DeSalvo expressed utter hopelessness in the monosyllable. Almost in a singsong voice, “Whether it's
today
or
tomorrow
or the
next day
I got to tell you when you come back. It just takes a minute to tell it, but it's so shocking, telling you—”

“Where did you put the knife to her? In the bathroom?”

“As a matter of fact I didn't … I mean, she never knew she was stabbed. We were both sitting on the bed—”

Carefully Bottomly led him back to the moment he entered Beverly's apartment and finally, haltingly, the story came out. It was quite early—about 8
A.M.
, Albert said—when he knocked on her door. She appeared half awake when she opened it.

Had he seen anything in the apartment other than the usual furniture?

“I'm trying to think,” Albert said, after a moment, “if there was a piano.” Then: “Yes, there was.”

“Baby grand or upright?”

Albert wasn't sure. “But I can draw it.”

On the blue-line notebook paper he drew an upright. It was the kind Beverly Samans had in the room.

“Write ‘piano' next to it,” Bottomly told him. Albert scrawled a
p
, then an
a
, realized it didn't look right, and stopped. Bottomly spelled it aloud for him: “P-i-a-n-o,” and Albert dutifully wrote the word next to his sketch.

When Beverly—“a heavy, well-built girl”—opened the door to him he said, “I got to do some work in the apartment.” She said, “Can't you come back later?” He said he could not, and she said, “Oh, well, come in and get it over with.”

“I closed the door, I showed her the knife, I said, ‘Don't scream and I won't hurt you. I want to make love to you—'”

She said, “I won't let you—”

“I won't have intercourse with you,” he said. “I'll just play around with you and go.”

She was frightened at the sight of the knife. “Promise me you won't get me pregnant, you won't rape me—”

When he said, “No, I'll just make love to you and leave—” she said, All right then, she would wash up. He followed her into the bathroom (was it a ruse so she could lock herself in there?), then out again. She lay down on the bed, he tied her wrists behind her, then put a gag in her mouth and “tied a cloth around her head over her mouth so she couldn't scream but she was still able to talk.” Then he tied a blind over her eyes.

He fondled her. “Then I was going to have intercourse with her, anyway, and she began talking, ‘You promised, you said you wouldn't do it to me, don't, don't, I'll get pregnant.' The words kept coming and coming, I think because she couldn't hear me saying, ‘Keep quiet! Keep quiet!' I can still hear her saying, ‘Don't do it—don't do that to me.' Just like hearing something over and over again. She made me feel so unclean, the way she talked to me. Everything I was doing to her, she just didn't like it. No matter what I did, she didn't like it. And she just wouldn't keep quiet. I'd do one thing, she didn't like it. I'd do another, she didn't like it. And she wouldn't shut up. I did have the knife out. I promised I wouldn't hurt her. I'd put the knife on the edge of the coffee table, the typewriter was there, she said she wouldn't scream, but she started to get loud and loud and loud … She was stripped naked on the bed, her hands under her—”

Bottomly interrupted. “Then she got scared?”

DeSalvo was silent.

Bottomly said, “You have to make it, Albert.”

“Jesus Christ, do I have to?”

“Yes, you have to. You know that.”

“Oh, God!” he said. “Her hands were tied underneath her, I put a handkerchief over her eyes so later when you found it you thought it was around her neck. It was to cover her eyes …” He stopped. “
I don't want to talk about it!
” Then, swiftly, “You know what happened? I stabbed her three, four times, maybe five—”

“You strangled her?”

“No. She didn't get strangled. The stuff you found around her neck, I told you … She was stabbed two times right over her heart. Right in the throat and neck.”

“Did you have sexual relations?”

DeSalvo said he did not think so. “She kept saying, ‘Don't do it! Don't do it!' She didn't want it. In other words, she was ready to do anything else. She said, ‘You lied, don't do it!' She wouldn't stop screaming, trying to scream with the gag in her mouth, she kept yelling, ‘You're going to do it to me, you're going to do it to me!' I was playing with her breasts, she was louder and louder, the knife was just on the corner of the table …”

“Are you getting ready to do it to her?” Bottomly's voice was very soft.

“It was so dark in there, so dark!” He stopped, to get control of himself. “There was a window open. I tied her up, put the gag in her mouth, closed the window, put the shade down—it made it dark, completely dark in there.… And I didn't see her anymore. I don't know what happened then … I was playing with her, she was lying right on top of the bed. She kept yelling or trying to yell … and I stabbed her. Once I did it once … I couldn't stop.”

DeSalvo sat, his head down, and Bottomly realized that he was crying, not with the deep sobs that had marked him earlier but in a kind of child's intermittent weeping. “Her eyes were covered,” he was saying through his tears. “I held her breast. I reached over, got the knife … and I stabbed her in the throat. She kept saying something. I grabbed the knife in my left hand and held the tip on her breast and I went down, two times, hard …” He drew a deep, shattering breath. “She moved, and next thing you know, blood all over the place—”

“Was there blood on you?” DeSalvo shook his head.

“You jumped back?”

“I don't know that I did,” DeSalvo managed to say. “After I hit her two times, nothing happened.”

“Then you hit her again and again—”

DeSalvo groaned. “Jesus!”

“It's almost over,” Bottomly said.

“I kept hitting her and hitting her with that damn knife,” DeSalvo wept. “When I think about it now—you don't do a thing like that and forget it … She kept bleeding from her throat … I keep asking myself, Why was it about the same as Mary Brown? I stabbed her two times in the breast, too. I hit her and hit her and hit her. Why? Hard, all the time. Why did I do that? She did something to me. That's what I'm trying to tell you—”

“She refused you,” Bottomly said.

“What I'm trying to tell you … It was just like my—”

Bottomly broke in. “She refused you and you—”

“I did that one time before, too … It was Irmgard. I grabbed her right by the throat, she made me feel so low, as if I was asking for something I shouldn't have, that I wanted something dirty. I wanted to kill her that night! Asking her to make love was asking a dead log to move. It was always ‘Do it quick, do it fast, get it over with—' She treated me lower than an animal … I loved her so much, yet I hated her. I was burning up. How many nights I would lie next to her, so hot, so wanting to be loved and to love her—and she would not …
She
reminded me of her. ‘Don't do it, don't do it!'” He paused, then with infinite bitterness: “Irmgard—‘
Don't do it, it's not nice
'—Irmgard said that to me just the night before. The same way! The same way! And
she
, right through the gag she was saying, ‘Don't do it, don't do it!' She was lying there, I could see everything … And still she talked. It wasn't the loudness to me, it was just the way she said it … The thing I was doing, there was nothing wrong to do it. ‘
Don't do it, it's not nice.'
It's not this, it's not that …”

On and on he went with his soliloquy. It was Beverly become Irmgard become Beverly …

*
Danvers State Hospital is a mental institution in Danvers, Massachusetts.

25

Good Friday
, April 8, 1966.

F. Lee Bailey, a man not easily thrown off his stride, put down his telephone, all but stunned. John Bottomly had just called to inform him that he was going to resign as Assistant Attorney General. He had had a disagreement with Attorney General Brooke over matters unrelated to the stranglings. He felt it impossible to remain in office. He was resigning as Assistant Attorney General, as Chief of the Criminal Division (a post to which he had been appointed a few months before), and as chief of the “Strangler Bureau.” He was withdrawing, as well, from the Brooke-For-United-States-Senate campaign. He was returning to the private practice of law. An official announcement would be made in a few hours.

The break between Bottomly and Brooke was completely unexpected. Indeed, until a month ago Bottomly had been talked about as his running mate, as a candidate for Attorney General to succeed Brooke. His resignation would give Boston political writers material for days, but uppermost in Bailey's mind was one question: what was now to be done with Albert DeSalvo?

The past seven months since DeSalvo completed his story had been a period of legal sparring. Until today the strategy of both State and defense had been directed toward a trial. DeSalvo's case was a tremendous challenge to Bailey. He sought neither to set the man free nor to let him die in the electric chair. Rather, he wanted him placed in a hospital where doctors could study him, in the hope that society might learn what prompts the apparently senseless rape-murders that so frequently shock the country. Yet in this case, all law was reversed: it was the criminal who bore the burden of proving his guilt, and of relieving Boston of the fear that the Strangler was still about. There was no precedent for anything like this. As Bailey was to say later, “Albert was on the left bank of a river and my job was to get him to the right bank without letting him drown.”

Bailey had rejected two other ways this might have been managed: presenting the case to a grand jury with the expectation that the jury would no-bill any murder indictments on grounds of insanity, or denominating Albert the Strangler and committing him to an institution for the rest of his life on the ground that the case could not be legally proved in court.

A trial was the best resolution for it would establish judicially that Albert was the Strangler. Then he could receive the required medical attention and analysis. No top-flight psychiatrist would devote himself to Albert unless he was sure that he was the Strangler. To give him such study and attention would cost tremendous amounts of money, it would take distinguished specialists who charged large fees, and it would require a long period of time. Bailey thought of Albert as a criminal research project without parallel: the man possessed virtually total recall; he was alert, intelligent, rational; he had demonstrated that he was a good hypnotic subject; and he was ready to cooperate in every way in order to learn about himself.

The procedure had already been arranged with Bottomly. Indictments for all thirteen murders were to be obtained in the three counties in which the crimes were committed and the trial was to be held in one county, probably Suffolk County, with a jury chosen from residents of the three counties. It would last from four to six weeks. Bottomly would coordinate the prosecution, conducted by the three district attorneys, as he had coordinated the search.