The Boston Stranglers (26 page)

On September 29, Bottomly asked Albert how he had killed Beverly. In the earlier session, Albert had volunteered that he'd stabbed her ‘three or four times. Maybe five.” Now he was prepared to elaborate. ”I stabbed her twice right underneath the right bust,” he said.

George McGrath, who was present at this session, jumped in to break the silence. “Where was the knife, Albert? You said you got it at a painting job in Belmont?”

According to the medical examiner's report, Beverly had been stabbed
seventeen,
times above, below, in, and on either side of the
left
breast.
⁶³
Her neck also bore four horizontal incised wounds, two on either side.

Albert kept changing the details in his story, perhaps in response to pressure from Bottomly.

Later during that same session, he said, “I coulda used a nylon stockin' to tie her hands—that's possible.”

Bottomly was still pressing the issue on September 29. “What did you tie her hands with, do you recall?”

Actually, Beverly's hands had been bound behind her back with one of her own multicolored scarves. One newspaper account of the murder, however, mistakenly reported that the ligature had been formed of handkerchiefs, which may have provided the inspiration for Albert's initial statement.

On September 9, Bottomly asked Albert if he'd put anything around Beverly's neck. Albert said yes, but he didn't know what. A little time passed and he amended this response: “I don't know if I put a nylon stockin' around her, I don't think so, I don't think so—coulda—” By September 29, however, he'd revised his memory yet again.

The autopsy report indicated that Beverly's killer had put two nylon stockings and a white scarf around her neck—in an obvious though poor imitation of the Strangler, police said.

Albert seemed familiar with the layout of Beverly's apartment, but then, as he told Bottomly, he'd cruised the whole complex in years past during one of his Measuring Man escapades.

Albert did know a great deal about Beverly—that she was an aspiring opera singer (he described her as built like one); that she was hard of hearing; that she was a student; and that she was writing a master's thesis. He also knew that there was a typewriter and a piano in the living room-bedroom of her two-room apartment. He knew that when her body was found she lay faceup on a studio couch, with a cloth rag in her mouth. He knew that she'd worn a housecoat before her killer stripped her or forced her to strip. He knew that she had not been strangled or raped in the traditional sense. He knew that the shades in her apartment had been pulled down to the windowsills.

All these details had been printed—more than once—in the newspapers.

Albert told Bottomly that Beverly had said to him that she understood the kind of problems he had: “She seemed to know a lot about abnormal sex acts.”

The
Record American
had carefully noted that Beverly's thesis concerned “abnormal sexual behavior.”

What Albert didn't seem to know was that a television set on a broken-wheeled cart stood at the foot of Beverly's studio bed. This fact apparently was not mentioned in any of the papers. The Cambridge police found a handprint, probably a man's by its size, in the center of the screen. It was not that of Albert DeSalvo.

That Albert did have a highly developed facility for absorbing and retaining information he'd picked up from the newspapers he demonstrated to Bottomly during one of their August 24 discussions. Albert said he'd been working in Belmont on a contracting job when Bessie Goldberg had been killed there.
⁶⁴
Mrs. Goldberg, Albert said, had “living in a brick house with white trim. I remember those things.”

“Yuh?” said Bottomly. “How do you remember? Did you go over when it happened?'

No, Albert said, he hadn't. “But I remember seeing the picture in the paper.”

“I see,” Bottomly said.

“It was like a two—a single family home, the shades were all down, white shades,” Albert recited. “It was a brick, a red brick house and it had the drain pipes on the right side, square type?”

“Uh-huh,” Bottomly said.

“No,” Albert said. “But I read this in the papers.”

His description of the Goldberg house, recalled after three and a half years, was accurate.

Bottomly then asked him how he'd remembered the identities of all his alleged victims. “You must've read it in the paper.”

“I did,” Albert said. He then hastily assured Bottomly that he'd
first
learned the victims' names when he'd seen them above the doorbells of their apartments—which doesn't explain why he kept calling Evelyn Corbin “Ellen Corbett.”

“And that's how you remember the names,” Bottomly said.

“Yes,” Albert replied.

“Oh,” said Bottomly. “I thought you just picked it up from the paper afterwards when you read about it.”

 

 

The long interrogation came to an end on September 29, 1965. Whether Bottomly believed any of what he'd just spent the last two months hearing is impossible to say. He told Albert he didn't think a grand jury would put too much stock in his story. And there were other troubling factors.

“Like Mr. McGrath said, Albert, you were a very smooth operator,” the Task Force chief commented, “and a lot of people who saw you [at the crime scenes] don't even know they saw you and, on the other hand, this is such a notorious thing we're talking about and it has so many implications beyond the crimes themselves that a Grand Jury—”

“What do you mean by implications?” Albert asked quickly.

“Well,” Bottomly began, “the—”

Albert interrupted. “Somebody trying to make something out of it.”

“Well,” said Bottomly, “the monetary aspects of it alone—”

“What do you mean by mone—?”

George McGrath, sitting in at this last session, interceded. “The money involved.”

“Money,” Bottomly added. “The money-making aspects of it.”
⁶⁵

Some people would end up profiting handsomely indeed from their roles in the Strangler saga. But before that could happen, something else would have to take place. “Well,” Bottomly told Albert, “we have to corroborate what you're saying in every way that we can.”

“Yuh,” Albert said.

George McGrath—whom Bottomly had just incorrectly informed Albert was no longer his legal guardian
⁶⁶
apparently shared the Task Force chief's anxiety about verifying the confession. “See, this is the big thing, Albert,” he said. “There's got to be some things here that are provable.”

“Yuh,” Albert repeated.

“Because if we get to the point where all we know is what you've told us,” McGrath concluded, “we're gonna be in trouble.”

If Albert DeSalvo didn't kill Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, Jane Sullivan, Sophie Clark, Patricia Bissette, Mary Brown, Beverly Samans, Evelyn Corbin, Joann Graff, and Mary Sullivan, who did?

There was certainly more than one murderer and—according to a number of law enforcement authorities—perhaps as many as twelve.

Far better cases can be made against these individuals than can be made against Albert DeSalvo. In at least one of the homicides, authorities were ready to go to the grand jury to seek an indictment against a particular suspect. And despite the basic similarity among the crimes—strangulation by a ligature consisting of articles of the victim's clothing—the disparities were equally numerous.

If a single killer was responsible for more than one of the murders, it would most likely be for the group that occurred in Boston between mid-June and late August of 1962: those of Anna, Nina, Ida, and Jane. Helen, although she lived somewhat far afield of the others in Lynn, might also be one of this number.

The Strangler Bureau itself recognized this fact. Attorney General Brooke's report, written in the summer of 1964, noted that “the homes of the [older] victims were quite similar in many respects. Though they are multiple dwelling structures they are not apartment houses in the modern sense or flats of the type found in, for example, the Dorchester and Roxbury area. They are comfortable, stone and brick structures with 3 to 6 stories and 3 to 5 room apartment units. They are similar to the 19th century row houses and some are converted town-houses. Presently they are somewhat run down. However, they have sturdy walls and construction of the type which puts them among the most isolated and sound-proof dwellings in which the inhabitants may have almost complete privacy.

“Of these four victims the youngest was 55 [Anna, who was fifty-six] and the oldest was 75 with three others in their 60's. Each of the women lived relatively isolated lives with many acquaintances and few friends. Their living pattern at the time of their death was one of rigid respectability. All were pleasant, very neat and well-groomed with a much younger physical appearance than usual at their ages. All were apparently of north European stock. It appears they all had a liking for music. As patients or members of the profession they had a fairly constant association with the medical world and were generally not interested in others.”

Although there were some inaccuracies and too-sweeping generalizations in this description of the victims—the “rigid respectability” of their present lifestyles contrasted with their sometimes less conventional pasts—it was basically correct. An intriguing commonality of three of the women was that they were either immigrants (Jane Sullivan from Ireland) or refugees (Anna Slesers and Ida Irga from Eastern Europe). And there were professional connections: Anna and Ida were seamstresses, Jane was a nurse's aide, Helen was a practical nurse, and Nina was a physiotherapist. This latter “medical parallel” among the victims (Anna had been an outpatient at New England Hospital and Ida an outpatient at Massachusetts General Hospital as well as a sometime visitor to Massachusettes Memorial Hospital, where Nina had been employed) particularly interested some authorities, giving rise to the theory that all five women had been killed by a deranged doctor, orderly, or other sort of health care worker. An alternate theory was that the murderer was a psychotic patient who harbored an irrational hatred of late-middle-aged and elderly women associated somehow with a hospital setting.

Some investigators also found it significant that Anna, Nina, Helen, and Ida shared a love of classical music—although it must be said that in the early 1960s it would have been difficult to find a reasonably cultivated older white women whose tastes ran to rock or rhythm and blues. Could the killer therefore have been a man with similar “longhair” (as Albert DeSalvo would have said) preferences? Or even a musician? Or someone whose work brought him into regular contact with the music world?

Anna and Jane were recent tenants of the apartments they occupied when they died, which led to speculation that their murderer or murderers had first met them during the process of moving their households and settling into new residences. And it was posited too that all five women might have been victimized by a delivery man or a door-to-door salesman, the elderly being particularly easy prey for solicitors.

One suspect who came under intense police scrutiny in the spring of 1963 was a twenty-eight-year-old man named Bradley (Barry) Waring Schereschewsky, the son of the controller of one of New England's most prestigious preparatory schools. A college graduate with a checkered employment history, Schereschewsky had been in and out of mental hospitals since September 1959. In April 1962 he was living in a rooming house on Harvard Street in Cambridge and hanging out regularly at the King's Tavern in Central Square.

Subsidized by his father, Schereschewsky worked sporadically at various jobs. At the beginning of July 1962 he was a gravedigger at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. From July 27 to August 27 that year he was a counselor at the Duxbury Stockade, a camp for eight-to-fourteen-year-old boys in East Pembroke. He helped coach the track and swim teams, receiving in return a salary of $125 and his room and board. On August 20 he interviewed for a teaching position at a private secondary school in Connecticut. He took a bus from Boston to Hartford and returned from his appointment, again by bus, at nine-thirty that night. The police would later go to great pains to verify this event.

Schereschewsky didn't get the teaching post. In mid-September he went to work as a salesman at a retail store in Lexington. This lasted only a month; Schereschewsky was recommitted to Danvers State Hospital on October 23, 1962. The intention this time was to make the commitment permanent.

Schereschewsky's first incarceration in Danvers began on September 22, 1959. The reason for his institutionalization was an unusually horrifying one: the twenty-four-old had attempted to rape his own mother. When the elder Schereschewsky came to his wife's rescue, the young man turned on his father and beat him savagely. “Mr. Schereschewsky labors under the impression that it is perfectly all right for him to sleep with his mother and [that he] should be allowed to have intercourse with [her],” the police report noted with dry understatement.

What brought Schereschewsky to the attention of the authorities investigating the stranglings was not simply his pathological sexual drive but the fact that each of the murders of the elderly women occurred when he was on extended release from whatever institution had been holding him.

Anna Slesers was killed on June 14.

Schereschewsky was on the loose.

Nina Nichols and Helen Blake had died on June 30.

Schereschewsky was on the loose.

Margaret Davis, the alcoholic vagrant strangled in a fleabag hotel, died on July 11.
⁶⁷

Schereschewsky was on the loose.

Ida Irga died on August 19.

Schereschewsky was on the loose.

Jane Sullivan had died two days later. Schereschewsky was on the loose.

There were other disturbing coincidences.

On June 30, Schereschewsky was a guest of his aunt in Lynn. She lived on the street adjacent to Newhall Street—where Helen Blake had lived.

During the late spring and early summer of 1962, Anna Slesers was a frequent visitor to Duxbury, right by the summer camp where Schereschewsky worked from late July to late August. He had visited the camp several times in May and June. Since he had no car, he had to hitchhike back and forth from Boston.

Anna, who traveled to Duxbury by car, was known to pick up hitchhikers—a practice less hazardous than it is today but nonetheless suggesting she was somewhat less cautious and straitlaced than the attorney general's report had indicated.
⁶⁸

Schereschewsky frequently visited his sister in Boston. She had been living in an apartment at 102 Gainsborough Street since mid-March of 1962—a block down from Anna.

Schereschewsky had a close female friend whom he visited at her home on Beacon Hill, near where Ida Irga had lived.

On January 23, 1965, Schereschewsky escaped from the violent ward at Danvers. The state police were put on alert by Andrew Tuney, who also notified the Cambridge police at 2:45 that afternoon that Schereschewsky was out and might be heading their way. Tuney also got in touch with Bottomly, who in his turn notified the Boston police through John Donovan. Bottomly then called Schereschewsky's father and urgently requested that the elder Schereschewsky make contact with him at once if the escapee turned up at his parents' Andover house. Bottomly gave the father the numbers of his private telephone lines at the State House and at home.

At this point—about six weeks before Albert began his confession to F. Lee Bailey—the Strangler Bureau not only considered Schereschewsky a menace to the public welfare but a prime candidate for the murder of at least five women.

Fortunately, Schereschewsky was captured and recommitted before he could do anyone else any harm.

By a bizarre twist of fate, Schereschewsky was friends with yet another suspect in the stranglings of the older women. His name was William Axel Lindahl, and his father was a Boston cop who had been recruited for the job as a strikebreaker during the Boston police strike of 1919, when then-Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge had called in the militia to restore order.

Lindahl's mother died in his infancy, and his father subsequently remarried, more than once. The boy did not get on well with any of his stepmothers, nor did he have a particularly close relationship with his father, a stern and rather cold man. He attended the Boston Latin School, where he was a good enough student to be offered several college scholarships. He went to Harvard, from which he graduated in 1955.

Lindahl's innate tendency toward homicidal violence first unleashed itself after he joined the naval ROTC; he tried to strangle a drill instructor. The ROTC promptly dismissed him. The next person he attempted to strangle was his girlfriend—when he found her in bed with another woman. Later he married and had a child, and obtained a teaching job at Lake Forest Academy in Illinois. According to one police report, Lindahl knew fourteen languages.

The marriage did not last. After the breakup, Lindahl's wife and child went to Texas. Lindahl was warned never to set foot in the state, so it seems evident that he was considered a threat to at least the peace of mind if not the actual physical safety of his former wife. Lindahl returned to the East and eventually got a job teaching Greek and Latin at a private school. In later years he would work for a while as a tree surgeon; he told an acquaintance that he enjoyed hacking and sawing and chopping the job entailed.

In the summer of 1962 he was living in Cambridge and frequenting the King's Tavern with Schereschewsky and another counselor at the camp that had briefly employed the latter.

Those who knew Lindahl say that he hated women—a hatred he did not bother to conceal but rather spoke of openly and often. He had very powerful hands.

During the period Anna, Nina, Helen, Ida, and Jane were strangled, Lindahl was working at Symphony Hall as an organist. Symphony Hall was a two-minute walk from Anna's door. She also had a subscription to the symphony. Nina and Ida were known to attend concerts there. These facts were of considerable interest to the police.

The wife of one of Lindahl's Harvard friends—the two men had belonged to the Fox Club—was convinced that Lindahl was the Strangler. She found his consuming rage against women terrifying in its force and scope. This woman would die in 1970. Her husband would be charged with her murder, tried, and convicted of manslaughter.