Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (46 page)

As the proverbial bluebird was found in the proverbial back yard, so DeSalvo, chafing in anonymity and eager to let the world in on his secret, was finally found at Bridgewater. Through the summer and fall of
1965
he volunteered to his interrogators a step by-step confession, adding new information as he won their grow ing interest. Some of his details were not letter-perfect. "I've been in so many apartments," he'd sigh, and offer his confessor an animated, man-to-man description of a victim's breast size. In addi tion to the Boston murders DeSalvo confessed to hundreds of sexual assaults without murder in Massachusetts and Connecticut, in which he usually tied up a victim and ejaculated on her body or in her mouth. His lifetime total of abuses, he volunteered, might run as high as
2,000
if the women he assaulted in Germany while a member of the armed forces were added to his record. ( DeSalvo

rarely committed a legally defined rape, in the strict definition of genital intercourse. When he did, he preferred to cover up his victim's face.)

Employing techniques he perfected as the Green Man for the Boston stranglings, DeSalvo confessed that he always committed his crimes during the day, sometimes on his lunch hour. He worked on and off as a mechanic and would "shoot over" by car to Law rence or Cambridge or Salem whenever the mood overtook him. Finding a likely building, he'd check for the names of single women, ring a doorbell and fast-talk his way inside an apartment by claiming the landlord had sent him to do some repairs.
If
a prospect seemed overly reluctant to open her door he'd retreat and
try
another doorbell.
If
a prospect did allow him to enter, he'd wait until her back was turned and grab her in a hammer lock about the neck. Rarely in the Boston killings did he commit a sex abuse first and then murder. His preferred style, like Winston Moseley's, was to murder first and then commit his atrocities.*

DeSalvo's confession was at odds with police reports on a couple of points.
In
one case he claimed rape but the medical men had found no trace of semen. (This in itself is not particularly significant, since semen is not traceable af ter a period of time; however, it seems probable that DeSalvo preferred to take credit for a "normal" sex act rather than the wild ejaculation that was his usual style.) Yet he was eerily precise on the stylized grotesqueries that marked the Strangler killings, which he could vividly recall but not explain: the nylon stocking used as garrote, the stab wounds or bite marks tattooed on the breast, the wine bottle or broomstick rammed up the vagina as the final coup de grace. As an extra touch of authenticity he even added two more killings to his list that the

*
The ease with which the Strangler got his victims to open their doors was a continuing source of wonderment to police detectives and reporters. Before DeSalvo's confession a popular theory held that the mysterious killer must have posed as a priest. Af ter DeSalvo
owned
up to the maintenance-man ploy, his success was attributed to his "charm" and to his victims' gullibility. More than likely his success was a tribute to the state of disrepair in many of Boston's older apartment buildings, and to female dependence on men for repair work.
All
of DeSalvo's murders were committed in shabby, run-down neighborhoods where a landlord's handyman is akin to a messenger from heaven, particularly to women who live alone and usually have something that "needs fixing."

THE POLICE-BLOTTER RAPIST
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police had not attributed to the Strangler. One was a bludgeon murder and the other was an 85-year-old woman whose death had been officially recorded as heart failure. Abashed, DeSalvo con fessed that she had suffered a heart attack in his arms. "I didn't touch her," he whispered. "I picked her up and put her on the couch and I lef t."

In
all, it was a convincing performance and the mystery of the Boston Strangler should have ended then and there.
It
didn't. One reason for the nagging doubts was that DeSalvo's case history did not match a psychiatric profile of the Strangler drummed up by a team of doctors working close to the investigation.

A Medical-Psychiatric Committee, upon invitation of the stymied police, had put together an imaginative, detailed profile of the phantom Strangler. Or, to be more precise, they put together an imaginative profile of the Strangler's mother. Struck by the advanced age of the first victims, one of whom was 75, the committee postulated with the kind of certainty that seems en demic to their profession that the elusive killer was a neat, punc tual, conservatively dressed, possibly middle-aged, probably impotent, probably homosexual fellow who was consumed by raging hatred for his "sweet, orderly, neat, compulsive, seductive, punitive, overwhelming" mother. The Strangler's mother was probably dead, they agreed, but during his childhood she had walked about "haJf-exposed in their apartment, but punished him severely for any sexual curiosity." Consumed by mother hatred, the psychiatrists divined, the Strangler had chosen to murder and muti late old women in a manner "both sadistic and loving."

When the next six of the Strangler's victims turned out with one exception to be young women, the Medical-Psychiatric Com mittee broke ranks. Some were of the opinion that the second batch of murders was the work of another, "more heterosexually adjusted" killer, while others maintained that the more recent killings showed that the Strangler had been "cured" of his mother fetish and had found his potency, at last, with young girls. On one point the psychiatric group voiced unanimity: The older women had been Pure Victims but the younger women Might Have Brought Their Fate on Themselves.*

*
Gerold Frank records that the only two women allowed in the inner sanc tum of the Strangler investigation, a research assistant in charge of the files

Armed with this learned psychiatric analysis, the police pro grammed themselves to look for "an impotent male bearing an unendurable rage toward his mother and all women like her."

Albert DeSalvo, as he revealed himself and as his juvenile records bore out, was genuinely attached to his mother. Moreover, she was still alive and not particularly sweet, neat or overwhelming. The consuming rage DeSalvo bore was uncompromisingly directed against his drunken, brutalizing father, who had regularly beaten him, his mother and the other children during a wretched youth. DeSalvo's father had engaged in sex acts with prostitutes in front of his children, had taught his sons to shoplif t, had broken every finger on his wife's hand and knocked out her teeth, and had gone on periodic rampages where he smashed up all the furniture in the house. As a final act of rejection he abandoned the family when Albert was eight.

At one point during his meandering confessions DeSalvo bristled at the suggestion that a 75-year-old woman like Ida Irga might be an unusual choice of sex object. "Attractiveness has nothing to do with it," he patiently explained. "She was a woman. When this certain time comes on me, it's a very immediate thing." He did not consider himself an impotent, and neither did the police. The idea of homosexuality made him embarrassed. As far as DeSalvo understood DeSalvo, he was unhappily blessed with a powerful sex drive and he petulantly whined that
if
his German born wife and the mother of his two children had not "denied me my rights as a husband" things might have worked out a little better. On the other hand, he knew he had gone from a "nothing"

and a secretary to the assistant attorney general, fought spiritedly against the police detectives who, in Frank's words, "were inclined to agree with the psychiatrists that the younger victims might have brought their fate on them selves." On a related point, Frank notes that a woman reporter on Boston's Record-American proposed to do an investigative series after the fourth mur der of an older woman took place, at a time when the police still publicly maintained that the killings were unrelated. Her city editor vetoed the as signment, arguing, "They're nobodies. Who'd be interested in them?" Vic tims Number One through Four were Anna Slesers, 55; Nina Nichols, 68; Helen Blake, 65; and Ida lrga, 75. Victim Number Five was Jane Sullivan,

1. Victim Number Six was the first of the young women, Sophie Clark, age
   20
   and black. The Record-American's Strangler series, in
   29
   parts, did not begin until af ter the murder of Patricia Bissette,
   23,
   DeSalvo's first young,
   white
   victim.
   

   

   THE POLICE-BLOTTER RAPIST
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   to a "something" and "Boy, it made me feel powerful." Once he hopefully ventured, "I was like any other normal guy, trying to make out."
   

   Cleared of Oedipal interpretations, DeSalvo's graduation from older victims to young ones loses much of its mystery. He told his police interrogators that he was a terrible coward as a boy because he ran away from fights. When he started boxing in the Army he astounded himself by his ability to "drop" bigger men.
   It
   seems highly logical that he deliberately began his murdering career by "dropping" older women, who would certainly present less physical resistance, and then, as he gained in confidence, began testing his strength against younger women. Sophie Clark, his first young victim, who happened to be black, was 5 foot
   10,
   a fact that impressed him more than her color. "Tall, very tall, taller than me," he exclaimed over and over. "She was the one I had to tie really tight."
   

   DeSalvo always chose to murder under the safest conditions, where the odds were clearly in his favor. Twice he backed off after selecting a victim. On one occasion a strongly built waitress kept up a loud, sustained scream while she bit his finger down to the bone. He fled in anger and confusion. Another time during his "check" for leaks and falling plaster he discovered a six-year-old boy in an adjoining room. He turned on his heels, walked up a flight of stairs and rang another doorbell.
   

   Albert Desalvo single-handedly smashed every cherished psy chiatric concept of a sex murderer. To add a final irony, the flam boyant Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos, whose secret entry into the case caused an uproar early in the investigation, had conjured up a description of the Strangler that matched the real DeSalvo more closely than the Medical-Psychiatric Committee's "profile." With equal certainty Hurkos had instructed the police to search for a religious shoe fetishist ( false) about 5 foot 8 ( true) with a big nose ( true) who worked with diesel engines ( true) and who bore a scar on his lef t arm ( true) .
   

   DeSalvo was never put on trial as the Boston Strangler. In stead, with F. Lee Bailey as his lawyer, he went to court in Massa chusetts for Green Man-style offenses against four women and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Bailey, who did not have any doubt that DeSalvo and the Strangler were one and the same, shrewdly hoped that an insanity verdict on these lesser crimes ( the
   

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   specific charges were breaking and entering, assault and battery, unnatural and lascivious acts, and burglary ) would guarantee that his client would not face the electric chair for the Boston murders. He was partially correct. DeSalvo never did face the chair, but an all-male jury,* fully aware of the notorious celebrity they had in the dock, voted life imprisonment.
   

   "Life" proved somewhat shorter than expected. Late in i973 DeSalvo was murdered by some fellow inmates at Walpole State Prison. In the news stories surrounding his death it was reported that he had become rather skilled at making costume jewelry and had been an active leader of an inmates' union seeking reforms. "The only problem we had with Albert," an official said, "was his trafficking in drugs." Nowhere was there a mention of how his "powerful sex drive" adjusted to a society without women, and how it got "releaved."
   

   Winston Moseley and Albert DeSalvo represent fairly typical, if unusually dramatic, examples of the men who commit rape murder. Far from the stereotypic, psychiatric construct of mild mannered, repressed, impotent homosexuals with an Oedipus com plex, they are better understood as brutalized, violence-prone men who act out their raging hatred against the world through an object offering the least amount of physical resistance, a woman's body. They do not provide a complete composite of the crime of rape murder, for no individual case studies can.
   

   Some rape-murders are frivolously accidental and occur in the course of wha t
   was
   intended to be a routine break and entry. A victim dies because the gag stuffed in her mouth suffocated her and her inexperienced assailant didn't know any better. Or a victim dies because her attacker got carried away by the awful power of his violence, which became more important to him than the act of rape or robbery that was his initial intent.
   

   It
   is a rare rapist who intends to kill, except in war, where killing is cheap, just as it is a rare robber who expects his act to end in a fatal stabbing. And yet accidental, totally inexplicable murder does occur, and although as yet it cannot be proved by statistical
   

   

   *
   DeSalvo's jury was all male not entirely by accident. Under Massachusetts law a judge may bar all women from juries hearing cases of child rape, statu tory rape, obscenity and various sex-rela ted crimes because women might be "embarrassed" by the testimony. (This law was still on the books in
   i974.)
   

   

   THE POLICE-BLOTTER RAPIST
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   incidence, it appears to be committed with increasing frequency in our violence-oriented culture by youths whose overriding impulse seems to be
   to
   stab or bludgeon, rather than
   to
   rob or rape. Increasingly, it seems, we hear of cases where something snaps and a compliant victim is fatally wounded. Who can explain the life time of built-up rage that led inevitably to this senseless explosion? I think it is important to mention here that despite the popu
   

   lar myths of male violence and the alleged safety in submission, it has never been demonstrated that resistance on the part of a rape victim in an attempt to escape "provokes" an assailant to commit an act of murder.
   

   At this point we will skip the critical processes that bring a rapist to his confinement or let him go scot-free to wreak more damage on further victims, and proceed to a brief look at the rapist in prison, where he serves an average of less than four years, and where he is indistinguishable from the rest of the prison population except in one interesting aspect. He is more than twice as
   likely
   to continue to insist on his innocence than the nonsexual offender.
   

   A study completed at Sing Sing ( now the Ossining Correc tional Facility ) in
   1955
   reported that
   80
   percent of the prison's rapists were partially or markedly evasive about their crimes while only
   26
   percent of the control group of general offenders displayed this attitude. An earlier New York City report emphasized the convicted rapist's tendency
   to
   project his blame on others, most notably on his victim, "even in the face of conclusive evidence."
   

   A
   1967
   Canadian study of thirty rapists confined at Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario, bore out the American results.
   R.
   J.
   Mc
   

   

   Caldon, a prison psychiatrist, noted that the Canadian rapists, like their American counterparts, were "generally young men" from the lower socioeconomic classes, who had a total number of forty-six previous offenses among them, "mainly acquisitive." McCaldon broke down the Canadian offenders' attitudes toward their rape convictions in this manner:
   

   Admits	33%
   Denies	27%
   Rationalizes	333
   Amnesic	73

   He summed up, "In two-thirds of the cases one hears, 'I'm here on a phoney beef,' or 'So I might have been a little rough with her but
   

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   she was asking for it,' or 'I might have done it but I was too drunk to remember.' "
   

   Ten years ago Clinton Duffy, the famous warden of San Quentin, put his thoughts on sex and crime together in a breezy, opinionated book.
   In
   command of one of America's toughest penal institutions for almost thirty-five years, Duffy didn't require any sociological studies to tell him what he knew from practical experi ence in the yard. He had learned first hand that the typical felon's cry was "I'm no rapo," and it amused him. He had seen men return to his care again and again with "a three-page rap sheet of burglary convictions without one mention of rape," but they didn't fool him. The yard-wise warden knew they were rapists. As he patiently explained to the general reader, each time up the man had copped a plea in court. By arrangement he had pleaded guilty to burglary and in return the rape charge had been quietly dropped. For good reason. Burglary could mean a one-to-five-year sentence while rape could mean twenty years to life. "Rape is of ten so difficult to prove," he airily explained, "that prosecutors will settle for a bur glary conviction."
   

   Duff y spoke from strength when he wrote, "Rapists are usu ally all-round offenders with a long list of convictions. The oppor tunity for rape often crops up while they're in the course of committing another felony, and they take advantage of it. Actually, practically every offender who is not an overt homosexual is a potential rapist. And most habitual criminals have rape, or the burglary conviction that really means rape, somewhere on their rap sheets. I have never known of a 'second-story' burglar who climbed into the window of a man's apartment."
   

   When Duffy fished out one of these pseudo burglars, he rarely let the fellow off his hook. What happened next was usually a fierce battle of wills. He reported with no small degree of satisfac tion, " 'I'm no rapo!' may cut some ice in the yard but it adds years to the time [a man] spends in prison.
   If
   he's on an indeterminate sentence he won't get out until he responds to treatment, and if he refuses therapy there's nothing for him to respond to." Few prison wardens took their jobs as seriously as Clinton Duffy.
   

   As described by Warden Duffy or as defined by the statistical profiles of the sociologists and the FBI, America's police-blotter rapists are dreary and banal. To those who know them, no magic, no mystery, no Robin Hood bravura, infuses their style. Rape is a