The Boston Stranglers (7 page)

“I'm a police detective,” the man stated, adding that he wanted to ask her a few questions. He began walking toward the bed. Then he told Mrs. Macht that he was in fact not one of the police but fleeing from them. They were surrounding the building at that moment.

Mrs. Macht screamed and rose from the bed. The man yanked out a knife and told her not to look at him. He assured her that he wouldn't hurt her. Then he bound her hands and gagged and blindfolded her.

He pulled up her nightgown and began to fondle and kiss her breasts and pubic area. She squirmed off the bed and struggled to her feet. The man kissed her again, lifted her in his arms, and placed her back on the bed. He did not rape her, nor did he strike or beat her.

He asked her to forgive him for what he had just done—and not to tell his mother about it. As he started to leave the room, Mrs. Macht asked him to loosen her bonds. He did so, and then he departed.

Mrs. Macht quickly freed herself and called her husband at work. A while later, she called the Cambridge police to report the assault.

She checked the two doors to the apartment, both of which had been locked by her husband when he'd left for school. Knife markings indicated that they had been jimmied.

Her final statement to the court was that the man had told her he'd kill her if she screamed.

 

 

Suzanne Macht recited the details of her sordid and terrifying experience to Detectives Duncan McNeill, James Galligan, and Louise Darling of the Cambridge police.

The description she offered of the clothing her attacker had worn had a familiar ring to Sergeant McNeill. Like other area police departments, the Cambridge force had been receiving Teletype messages about a distinctively clad man who'd committed a number of housebreaks and sexual assaults in Connecticut. This person invariably dressed in dark green shirt and pants; the costume was apparently some kind of work uniform. Its wearer had become known to law enforcement personnel as the Green Man.

Later that day a Massachusetts state police technician made a sketch of Suzanne Macht's assailant based on the information she gave him. One of the Cambridge detectives, Paul Cloran, thought that the finished portrait bore a strong resemblance to the Measuring Man they'd arrested in 1961.

The Measuring Man, Albert DeSalvo, was now living in Malden with Irmgard and the children. Duncan McNeill arranged with the police department of that city to have Albert brought in and put in a lineup.

Suzanne Macht, who had already identified Albert's photograph, picked him right out of an eight-man lineup. She asked to hear him speak, and claimed to recognize his voice—which was indeed a distinctive one.

Albert faced his accuser and calmly said, “I don't know the woman.” When informed that she had positively identified him, he replied, “It couldn't be.”

McNeill advised him of his rights. Albert asked permission to make a phone call. He also requested that his brothers, Frank, Joseph, and Richard, be summoned and allowed to join him while he was in custody.

McNeill told Albert the story that Suzanne Macht had related. “I don't know the woman,” Albert reiterated, “and I didn't do it. How could I admit it?” Irmgard and Albert's sister Irene came to the Malden police station where Albert was being questioned. The three talked together for a while. McNeill said later that he overheard Irene say, “Al, tell them everything. Don't hold back.”

Albert turned to McNeill. He said, “I've committed some breaks and I've been all around the area. Sergeant, you have a rape or a couple of rapes you don't know about.”

Accompanied by Albert, McNeill drove back to Cambridge. Albert wanted to point out to McNeill the scene of one of his crimes. He was doing so, he remarked, in order that the Cambridge police might maintain jurisdiction over him. He had a specific reason for wanting it that way. “I
like
you guys,” he confided to one of McNeill's colleagues. Years later he was still saying the same thing; he would always refer to Louise Darling as “that nice lady cop.”

When McNeill and Albert drove past Suzanne Macht's apartment building, Albert said, “That's where the girl lived who looked at me the other night.”

At the Cambridge station, Albert was handed over to law enforcement officials from the other New England states who wanted to question him about sex crimes committed within their bailiwicks. Some of them apparently came on like gangbusters. Albert, normally talkative and relaxed with his friends on the Cambridge force, shut down and refused to speak with the out-of-staters.

“Actually, I don't blame Al,” says one ex-Cambridge cop today. “There was some state police major from Rhode Island who was acting like a real asshole.”

On November 3, 1964, Albert was arraigned at the Third District Court in Cambridge on charges of breaking and entering in the daytime to commit a felony; confining and putting in fear with intent to commit a felony; unnatural and lascivious acts on the person of Suzanne Macht; and assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon. He entered a plea of not guilty. The case was continued to November 17 and bail was set at eight thousand dollars.

On November 6, Albert was brought back to district court. He was there charged with further complaints of breaking and entering in the daytime with intent to commit a felony; breaking and entering in the daytime with intent to commit larceny; and unnatural and lascivious acts on the persons of Geraldine Surette, Virginia Thorner, and Muriel LeBlanc.

Again, Albert pled not guilty. New complaints against him were continued until December 11. Judge Edward Viola ordered him to be confined at MCI-Bridgewater for observation.

At 3:45
P.M
. on September 29, 1964, Rita Buote and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Diane, both of Lawrence, were on their way to Boston. Driving along Route 125 in Andover, Mrs. Buote noticed that her car was running low on gas. She pulled into the Texaco station managed by Irvin Hilton. In the next instant, the quiet lives of the Buote women changed forever. And another quiet life ended horribly.

To quote from the police report: “As they approached the gasoline pumps, [the Buotes] observed a man on his knees in front of the lubritorium door and another man standing over him. They saw the man standing fire one shot into the body of the man on the ground and saw him fall over on his side and then heard three more shots fired from the assailant's weapon. They saw a small black firearm in the right hand of the assailant. At the time, they were about 25 to 30 feet from the victim both sitting in the front seat of their car. They observed the assailant then walk hurriedly towards their car and as he approached the driver's side, Mrs. Buote snapped the latch on the door from the inside, locking the door. Both the witnesses observed the assailant through the window on the front left side of the car. Upon finding the door locked, he pounded on the roof of the car and said, ‘Open the door.' They both saw the small black gun in his right hand and he pointed it in their direction. Mrs. Buote heard the gun click twice and told her daughter to get down on the floor. She crouched down on the floor of the car on the driver's side.” Mrs. Buote said later that she also told Diane to pray.

As Mrs. Buote was driving into the Texaco station from one side, a truck operated by William King of Andover pulled in on the other. With King was his friend Reginald Mortimer. King stopped the truck before the gas pumps, and he and Mortimer heard what sounded to them like exploding firecrackers. They saw a slim, dark-haired man of medium height, wearing a light tan trench coat or top coat, run toward the Buote vehicle. They then watched as the man ran toward another car parked near the pumps, leapt into it, and sped off in the direction of North Andover. They got the plate number and King went into the gas station to call the police.

The getaway car turned out to have been stolen earlier that day from near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge. It was found later that evening on a street in Andover adjacent to Phillips Academy. The car was registered to a navy lieutenant who was taking classes at MIT. Underneath the front seat the lieutenant had left a thirty-two-caliber nickel-plated Harrison and Richardson revolver and a twenty-two-caliber Astra semiautomatic pistol.

Sergeant Robert Deyermond of the Andover police found six twenty-two-caliber cartridge shells at the crime scene. The corresponding slugs were later dug out of the victim's body.

The dead man, Irvin Hilton, a forty-three-year-old North Andover resident, was autopsied at Lawrence General Hospital. He had been shot six times at close range. He had also been stabbed in the back. If the bullets hadn't killed him, the knife would have. It was thought that the person responsible for Hilton's bloody execution may have forced the gas station manager to his knees and ordered him to beg for his life while simultaneously pumping bullets into him.

The viciousness of the murder curdled the blood of the investigating police officers.

Rita and Diane Buote looked at dozens of mug shots, but could not make an identification. They were, however, insistent that they would recognize Hilton's slayer if they saw him again. And their description of him was thorough enough to enable Andover police officer William Tammany to draw a composite. The sketch was given to the press for publication.

A Lawrence cop named Charles Keenan saw it in the local paper, the
Lawrence Eagle
-
Tribune
, and the man it portrayed looked very familiar to him. He checked his files and came up with a photograph of a former Lawrence resident who had in 1961 been paroled after serving sixteen years of a life sentence for second-degree murder. The photo was shown to Rita and Diane Buote. According to the police report, their identification of it was immediate—and positive. This was the man who had murdered Irvin Hilton.

The suspect was at present living in the Mattapan section of Boston. The Andover, Lawrence, and state police got in touch with the BPD and obtained a warrant at Dorchester District Court to search the suspect's car and his apartment at 51 Deering Road. When the police went into the apartment they found the suspect with a social worker, Francis Touchet, of the Medfield State Hospital. They also found a hunting knife, which they confiscated.

“Do you remember me?” Sergeant Keenan asked the suspect.

“I can't place you,” the man replied.

“Do you remember sixteen years ago?” Keenan persisted.

“Oh, yes,” the suspect said.

“Same thing as sixteen years ago,” Keenan said.

The suspect nodded in apparent agreement.

He was put in a lineup and viewed first by Diane Buote and then by Rita.

“That's him,” Diane exclaimed when it was the suspect's turn to step forward from the line.

“When and where did you see this man?” asked a police officer.

“Thursday afternoon at the gas station,” Diane answered.

Was she positive?

“Yes, I'm sure,” Diane said firmly.

That night the Andover police station, where the suspect was being confined, was under heavy guard.

On October 2, the suspect was charged with murder at the Lawrence District Court. His lawyer, Paul Smith, entered for him a plea of not guilty. Counsel also asked for and was granted a continuance to October 29. On that date the case was continued yet again to November 5. At that point, the suspect had retained a new lawyer.

The probable cause hearing on November 5 ended with the suspect being held without bail for the Essex County Grand Jury, sitting in Salem. He was remanded to the Lawrence jail.

On November 12, the
Lawrence Eagle-Tribune
reported that five Boston-area men, including a minister and WBZ-Radio talk show host Paul Benzaquin, had formed what they called a Committee for Reasonable Justice to raise seven thousand dollars to pay the suspect's legal fees.

On January 18, 1965, the suspect was sent to MCI-Bridgewater for a court-ordered psychiatric examination and observation. On February 10, his commitment there was extended another thirty-five days. He was initially diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with an extremely severe sociopathic personality disorder.

The suspect's name was George Henry Nassar.

His new attorney was F. Lee Bailey.

Who was George Nassar?

According to F. Lee Bailey, he was a student of the Russian language planning to attend Northeastern University. He'd been a newspaper reporter and a hospital attendant. Most impressively, however, “he'd taught Sunday school and, a couple of times, had taken over the pulpit for one of his minister friends.”
⁷

According to Attorney Francis C. Newton, Jr., “If you met him at a party or on the street, you'd think he was the pleasantest person imaginable. Very bright, with impeccable manners. And yet he had the history of a mad dog.”

According to George V. Higgins, “He was a vicious, unprincipled and crafty figure.”

According to Ames Robey, medical director of Bridgewater, he was “a man of great anger.” Also a busy one. “The information we had about Mr. Nassar was that of the Charlestown [a section of Boston] gang wars that were going on in the early sixties, he was responsible for at least seventeen of the murders and maybe as many as thirty.”

According to a retired Cambridge detective, “Nassar was the scariest guy I ever heard of.”

Let former Inspector John Moran have the final word: “Guys like him, you shoot them first and
then
tell them to put their hands up.”

Sunday school teacher or psychotic killer, George Nassar was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in June 1932. He was the eldest of two children of Henry Nassar and the former Helen George, both of Syrian descent. Henry had emigrated to the United States with his parents, and worked as a weaver in various mills in Lawrence. He died there in 1955. Helen, who had been born in Dover, New Hampshire, and worked also in the mills as a bobbin setter, had been previously married to a man named Lawrence Otis. She and Otis were divorced in 1931. They had one son, named after his father. Helen had no better luck with her second marriage; Henry abandoned her and the children long before his death.

George and his younger sister, Eileen, grew up in Lawrence and attended local schools. They were raised as Catholics. George played neighborhood sports and joined the Boy Scouts. Otherwise he was not the convivial type; his teachers found him quiet, reserved, and a poor mixer.

He was a sophomore in high school when he was arrested on a charge of second-degree murder.

Police would later characterize the crime as a thrill-killing. Nassar himself claimed to have done if “for excitement.” In May of 1948, he and two companions, sixteen-year-old William Kenney and sixteen-year-old Gennaro Pullino, went on a robbery spree in Lawrence that netted them eighty dollars. They hit four establishments; at one of them, the female proprietor chased the three from her premises with a broom.

Dominic Kirmil, a shopkeeper at 99 Park Street, was not so lucky. When the trio held him up, he came at them brandishing a Coke bottle. Nassar withdrew from the pocket of his dark-colored trench coat (evidently trench coats were his garb of choice for the commission of homicides) a nickel-plated revolver and shot Kirmil four times. The shopkeeper died three hours later of massive blood loss.

There were a number of witnesses to the crime, all of whom could describe the youth in the dark trench coat.

On May 20, Nassar was cruising along Route 110 in Ayer, Massachusetts, in a stolen car. He lost control of the vehicle, hit a soft shoulder, and flipped four times. He emerged from the wreckage unscathed but for an abraded elbow.

Lawrence patrolmen Charles Keenan and Walter Sliva picked him up and brought him in on auto theft charges.

In his pocket Nassar had two thirty-eight-caliber bullets. Beside the wrecked car had been found a nickel-plated revolver. With this knowledge in mind, Keenan began questioning Nassar about the Kirmil slaying.

Nassar and his cohorts Kenney and Pullino were indicted and allowed to plead guilty to a second-degree murder charge. Nassar's lawyer, citing his client's youth and potential for rehabilitation, asked Judge Frank Smith of the Salem Superior Court to show mercy in his disposition of the case. Smith, who had allowed a plea of second- rather than first-degree murder to be entered because of the defendants' “tender age,” sentenced the three boys to life in prison.

Nassar served his time at MCI-Norfolk in Dedham, Massachusetts. There he met Unitarian minister William Moors, an assistant to the prison chaplain. Moors and Nassar became “good friends,” as Moors would tell the
Lawrence Eagle-Tribune
in the aftermath of Nassar's arrest for the murder of Irvin Hilton. Moors decried the press coverage of the Andover slaying as “inflammatory and suggestive,” “calloused, immoral and unfair.”

Nassar had in fact become the Willie Horton of his day. Francis X. McCann, a Democratic state senator from Cambridge, insisted that the parole board give a public accounting of the reasons it had granted Nassar early release in 1961. Representative Perlie Dyar Chase, he who had demanded an investigation of the Boston Police Department for its failure to solve the Strangler murders, maintained that the State Crime Commission ought to reexamine all pardons and paroles handed down during the previous decade.

Nassar's new attorney, F. Lee Bailey, unlike the Reverend Mr. Moors, claimed to be quite satisfied with the pretrial publicity accorded his client. In a speech entitled “Trial by Newspaper,” given to the Greater Lawrence Men's Brotherhood of Temple Emmanuel on November 23, 1964, Bailey said he was confident that any negative effects of the media treatment of Nassar could be blunted.

Nassar himself seems to have had no problems with the Fourth Estate either. In an interview with Michael J. Carney of the
Lawrence Eagle
-
Tribune
, Nassar asked Carney, “What's my chance of getting into the newspaper business as a reporter?” He had, after all, experience in the field—he'd worked on the prison newsletter during his incarceration at Norfolk.

Nassar had interests other than the Russian language, theology, and journalism. When the cops searched his Mattapan apartment, they found among his effects a badly typed leaflet produced by an organization called the Guardians of Democracy. The group met every evening at a private home in Everett. Its membership drive appears to have been aimed at the previously institutionalized:

Perhaps over a decade and a half of imprisonment had created a joiner out of Nassar, the adolescent loner; the police also found in his apartment a copy of a letter addressed to “Dear Couple” and dated April 24, 1964. The letter is clearly a response to a solicitation for group sex. In it, Nassar furnishes a physical description of himself and a list of his interests: reading, writing, hosting parties, taking photographs, and going to the theater. “And, more and more lately,” he adds, “exploring the bizarre, exciting and unexplored.”

Nassar himself is part of a couple: “I have a girlfriend who is in many ways more unconventional than I am.” [She must have been quite a gal.] He ends the letter with the hope that he and “dear couple” together can provide the woman with an opportunity to “blossom out.”

The alleged contract killer had emerged from incarceration an aspiring swinger.

 

 

Who was F. Lee Bailey, Nassar's replacement for Paul Smith? In 1964, at the age of thirty-one, he was already a national figure on his way to becoming a legendary one like his brother defenders Edward Bennett Williams, Racehorse Haynes, Melvin Belli, and Percy Foreman. Perhaps he would someday attain the mythic stature of a Clarence Darrow. Alan M. Dershowitz, himself a major constellation in the legal firmament, who taught Bailey's younger brother Bill in one of his Harvard Law School classes and who ultimately represented the elder Bailey when he was charged in 1973 with conspiracy to commit mail fraud, has called his former client's cross-examination technique “masterful” and “spectacular.” Ames Robey, a perpetual courtroom adversary, praises Bailey's summations as “brilliant.”

Trial lawyers are a notoriously flamboyant and egotistical breed; Bailey extended the parameters of the stereotype. He carried enormous sums of money on his person (retainers, he told colleagues) and a gun to protect the wad. He once tried to pay an eighty-five-cent restaurant check with a one-thousand-dollar bill; with stunning aplomb, the coffee-shop waitress asked him if he had anything smaller. He blasted around Boston in a souped-up Pontiac GTO with the license plate TRIAL; he zoomed in and out of airports at the controls of his own twin-engine Cessna 310, single-engine Cessna 172, or Beechcraft Bonanza.

“A high, wide, and handsome kind of guy,” comments Francis C. Newton, Jr.

Bailey was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, on June 10, 1933, the son of an advertising man and a nursery school founder. In 1943, his parents divorced. He attended good private schools, earning the scholarships to do so. In 1950 he matriculated at Harvard as an English major.

In his sophomore year, Bailey read
The Art of Advocacy
, by famed attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker. The book so impressed him that he changed his career plans—from writer to lawyer.

Bored with higher education, he dropped out of Harvard at the end of his second year and joined the Naval Flight Training program. A year and a half later he switched to the Marines and became a jet fighter pilot. He also volunteered for his group's legal staff. Very shortly afterward, the chief legal officer died in a plane crash and Bailey took over his position. The experience he garnered was invaluable. Upon leaving the Marines, Bailey was admitted to Boston University Law School (alma mater of John Bottomly and Edward Brooke), despite his lack of an undergraduate degree. He would graduate first in his class.

Just three months after passing the bar, Bailey took on and won his first sensational case—the Torso Murder. A Lowell, Massachusetts, auto mechanic had been accused of killing his wife and tossing her headless, dismembered body into the Merrimack River. Bailey obtained an acquittal for his client, George Edgerly, in part by suggesting to the jury that the prosecutor in the case was willing to send an innocent man to the electric chair just to insure his own reelection. The ploy worked.

(Several years later Edgerly was arrested again, this time on a charge of taking an ax to a Lawrence auto dealer. He was convicted—but this time he didn't have Bailey defending him.)

In 1964, Bailey would have an even more spectacular success representing another accused wife-killer, Cleveland osteopath Samuel Sheppard. Bailey contended that Dr. Sheppard, who had been convicted and imprisoned in 1954, had been the victim of a smear campaign conducted by the
Cleveland Press
and the
Cleveland Plain Dealer.
The adverse publicity, Bailey maintained, had made it impossible for Sheppard to get a fair trial. A decade later, Bailey got a judge to agree. Sheppard was freed from prison on ten thousand dollars' bond and tried two years later. Bailey represented him in this courtroom battle and Sheppard, the second time around on the same charges, was acquitted.

If George Nassar had confidence in his new attorney, it seemed well placed.