EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (14 page)

Albert Desalvo

The Boston Strangler

For a few years in the 1960s, the city of Boston was gripped by panic. A spate of gruesome murders had forced women indoors, cowering behind double-locked doors and jumping at the slightest sound. The dead women were all single women, thirteen of them being killed between 14 June 1962 and 4 January 1964. The police believed the murders – six of them elderly victims and the remainder younger women – to be the work of one killer, the monster the media dubbed the Phantom Fiend, or, more famously, the Boston Strangler.

There was a sexual motive to each killing and a number of the victims were strangled with articles of their own clothing, sometimes tied at the neck in a macabre large bow.

The case has become one of the most famous in American criminal history with debate raging even now as to whether there was one killer or a number of them committing copycat murders. One commentator even speculates that there were seven or eight murderers operating in the Boston area at the time. The main question is, however, was Albert DeSalvo, the man who ultimately confessed to the killings, the Boston Strangler? Or was he just a small-time criminal and sex attacker who wanted the infamy and the money that a confession would bring, even when he was locked up for life on other convictions?

DeSalvo was a twenty-nine-year-old construction worker who had been arrested frequently for burglary. Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1931, he was regularly beaten as a child by his abusive father. His criminal career started early and he was a frequent visitor to the police station on assault and other petty criminal charges. In 1948, he enlisted in the US Army, meeting his wife, Imgard during a posting to Germany. He received an honourable discharge from the forces in 1956.

Meanwhile, his first child was born, a girl who was unfortunately physically handicapped. At this time, his wife became concerned that if the couple were to have another child, it, too, would be handicapped. She refrained from having sex with DeSalvo which created problems for a man with an abnormally high sex drive.

A year before leaving the army, he had been arrested for molesting a young girl but the case never came to court. Nothing much changed after he left the army and he was arrested several times for breaking and entering. Nonetheless, he always had a job, working for a rubber company and then in a shipyard. As the new decade dawned, he was working in construction maintenance.

Everyone characterised him as a hard-working, devoted family man but there was another side to Albert DeSalvo which would pretty soon catch up with him.

In the early 1960s there had been a series of bizarre sexual offences in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area. A man in his late twenties would knock on an apartment door and if it was opened by a young, attractive woman, he would introduce himself as an employee of a modelling agency that was on the lookout for prospective models. He would claim that the woman’s name had been passed to the agency and that, if she was interested, she could earn $40 an hour. He reassured them about the type of work, that it was all above board and would involve no nudity. All he needed to do, he said, was take their measurements. If they were up for it, he would take out a tape measure and take down their vital statistics. Someone from the agency would call them if they were suitable, he would say before taking his leave of them. In March 1961, DeSalvo was arrested as he tried to break into a house. He confessed to being the character that had become known as the ‘Measuring Man’ but was treated fairly leniently by the court, receiving an eighteen-month prison sentence. He was released in April 1962. Two months later the Boston Strangler killed his first victim.

Anna Slesers was an attractive fifty-five-year-old divorcee who had arrived from Latvia ten years earlier. Her son Juris found her on the evening of 14 June 1962 lying on the bathroom floor with the cord of her bathrobe tied tightly around her neck in an elaborate bow. Her bathrobe was open, her legs spread grotesquely wide apart and she had been sexually assaulted with an unknown object. The apartment looked as if it had been ransacked, the contents of her purse scattered on the floor and other items spread around the place. Although it looked like a robbery scene, detectives were puzzled to find a gold watch and Anna’s jewellery intact.

Sixteen days later, sixty-eight-year-old Nina Nichols was found murdered in her apartment in Boston’s Brighton area. Again, the apartment gave the appearance of having been burgled, but valuable items had been left untouched. Again her legs were spread and her housecoat and slip were pulled up to her waist. She had been sexually assaulted and the killer once again left his signature – two nylon stockings around her neck tied in a large bow. She was estimated to have died at around five in the afternoon but the Strangler was having a busy day. Between eight and ten that night, he struck again in the Boston suburb of Lynn.

Helen Blake, a sixty-five-year-old divorcee, had also been strangled with a nylon and her brassiere had then been fashioned into a bow on top of them around her neck. She was lying face down on her bed and had been sexually assaulted, like the others, with an object. This time the killer had taken a couple of diamond rings from her fingers and seemed to have tried unsuccessfully to break into a metal strongbox.

Naturally, the female inhabitants of Boston were terrified. The Police Commissioner warned women in the area to lock all their doors and windows and to be very wary of strangers. Police leave was cancelled and every detective on the force was ordered to work solely on the Strangler case. It made little difference. On 19 August, he struck again.

Seventy-five-year-old widow, Ida Irga, was strangled in the city’s West End. As in the other cases, there was no sign of forced entry. In spite of all the warnings, she had let the man into her apartment. Once again, her legs were spread widely apart, this time balanced on individual chairs, exposing her private parts. She had been strangled with a white pillowcase before being sexually assaulted.

A day later, sixty-seven-year-old Jane Sullivan was found ten days after she had been murdered. She was on her knees in her bath, her feet up over the back of it and her head beneath the taps. She had been strangled with her nylons before being sexually assaulted with a broom-handle. This time he had not even bothered to ransack the apartment.

For three months there were no attacks but the police enquiries continued. Then, on 5 December, Sophie Clark became the only African-American Strangler victim. At twenty-one, she was a good deal younger than his other victims, but much of what police found matched the other killings, apart from the fact that semen was found on a rug near the body.

A neighbour told police that earlier that day a man had knocked at her door saying that he had been sent to repair her bathroom ceiling. When she let him in he started making comments about her figure. She became concerned as his manner changed completely. When she told him that her husband was asleep in the next room, he left, saying he had the wrong apartment. She described him as between twenty-five and thirty years old, of average height and with honey-coloured hair. He was wearing a dark jacket and green trousers. When they checked, they found that the building supervisor had not sent anyone to fix her ceiling. It had undoubtedly been the Strangler.

On 31 December, the boss of an engineering firm became concerned at the non-appearance at work of his secretary, Patricia Bisquette. He climbed through the apartment window with the help of the building’s janitor and found her in bed with the covers up to her chin. When the cover was pulled down, they found nylons and a blouse tied around her neck.

In early March 1963, they found sixty-eight-year-old Mary Brown who had been beaten, strangled

and raped. Then on 8 May, twenty-three-year-old Beverley Samans failed to turn up for choir practice. She was found with her legs wide apart on a sofa bed, her hands tied behind her and nylons encircling her neck in the customary bow. Unusually, however, the cause of death in this case were four stab wounds to her neck. The killer had stabbed her twenty-two times in all, eighteen of them in circles around her left breast. In this instance, the bow was tied around her neck purely as a signature.

The pressure on the authorities to find the Strangler was intense and, desperate, they turned to unorthodox methods such as clairvoyants and seers. Using these methods, a couple of suspects were uncovered but there was not enough evidence to link them with the murders.

The summer of 1963 passed without incident, but on 8 September Evelyn Corbin, a fifty-eight-year-old divorcee was found strangled by her nylon stockings with semen in her mouth. On 25 November, Joann Graff was discovered in her apartment in Lawrence. She had been raped and killed and wore a bow fashioned from stockings around her neck. Earlier that day, a woman and her husband heard someone sneaking around the corridors of the building. When they opened the door, they saw a man knocking

on the door of the apartment opposite. When the man had asked if Joann Graff lived there, they told him she lived on the floor below. He went downstairs and they heard the door of the apartment below opening and closing. When they telephoned Joann ten minutes later, there was no reply.

The last victim was murdered on 4 January 1964. Two young women came home to find their roommate, Mary Sullivan strangled. As with the others, she wore the customary bow. This time, however, the Strangler had left a greetings card at her feet. It wished them ‘A Happy New Year’. She had semen in her mouth and had been sexually assaulted with a broom-handle.

In November 1964, Albert DeSalvo was arrested for the October assault on a woman who woke to find him in her bedroom. He had put a knife to her throat and tied her feet and arms to the bedposts, in a spread-eagle fashion. He kissed and fondled her before apologising and leaving the apartment. She recognised him in an identity parade but he was also recognised by the police force in Connecticut who had been searching for a sexual attacker known as the Green Man from the green trousers he wore when he carried out his attacks. The Green Man was a prolific assailant, having assaulted four women in one day. DeSalvo admitted to assaulting 300 women and breaking into around 400 apartments.

There was no doubt that DeSalvo was going to prison for the rest of his natural life. He made sure of that when he confessed to being the Boston Strangler. In fact, he opened up the possibility of being condemned to death, although the death sentence had not been carried out in Boston for seventeen years. He displayed a remarkable knowledge of the crime scenes and of the murders themselves, but it has been speculated that all of this information could have been gleaned from the newspapers of the day. Furthermore, people have claimed, DeSalvo possessed a remarkably photographic memory.

Another theory put forward was that DeSalvo had learned about the details of the killings from the real Boston Strangler. A man called George Nassar was also an inmate of Bridgewater State Hospital where DeSalvo was being held. Nassar was actually recognised by several witnesses as being the Strangler.

DeSalvo, it has been suggested, confessed to being the Strangler because he had nothing to lose. He was going to be in prison for the rest of his days, anyway. Confessing could actually prove lucrative, with book and movie deals to be made. It was one way of providing for his family while he was inside.

The problem for the authorities was that his confession was inadmissible as evidence. At his trial for the Green Man attacks, his lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, attempted to prove that DeSalvo was not mentally competent to stand trial, using the thirteen murders to prove this. Witnesses described how he would break in or con his way into their apartments. Then, threatening with a knife or a toy gun, he would tie the woman up and strip her, fondle her breasts and demand fellatio or cunnilingus. He did not rape his victims, however. Expert witnesses testified to DeSalvo’s paranoid schizophrenia but after only four hours deliberation, the jury found him guilty on all counts in the Green Man case. He was sentenced to life.

Albert DeSalvo was stabbed to death at Walpole State Prison in November 1973. Some say he was killed because he was about to reveal the real identity of the Boston Stranger. Others have said he was killed because of a prison drugs deal gone wrong. He was never charged with the gruesome murders committed by the Boston Strangler. No one was.

John Wayne Gacy

The smell coming from the house was terrible, a rancid stench that neighbours commented on. His second wife, Carole thought there was a dead rat under the floorboards and exhorted Gacy to do something about it. He said it was a build-up of moisture in the crawl space under the new two-bedroom 1950s ranch-style house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in the Chicago suburb of Norwood Park. It was a tidy, family-friendly neighbourhood and the smell did not seem to put off the neighbours or his friends when John Gacy threw one of his parties. There he would be, the centre of attention, often dressed in his clown outfit, acting out the role of Pogo the Clown, a costume he wore to entertain children in local hospitals

Pogo the Clown appeared at other, more sinister times, however. David Cram met him one night. He worked for Gacy’s contracting business and Gacy had given him the job of enlarging the crawl space under the house. While Cram was carrying out the work, Gacy let him live in the house. One night Cram came into the house to find Gacy drunk and dressed in his clown outfit. Cram sat down and had a few drinks with his boss before Gacy tricked him into putting on a pair of handcuffs. Gacy suddenly changed, beginning to growl at Cram and spinning him round. ‘I’m going to rape you!’ he snarled. Cram somehow managed to knock Gacy to the ground, grabbed the key to the handcuffs and locked himself in his room. Few of Gacy’s victims were so lucky and most of them lay in the ground under the house, slowly decomposing.

John Wayne Gacy was born on St. Patrick’s Day, 1942, the second of the three children that Marion and John Gacy Sr. would have, and the only boy. His childhood was fairly normal apart from the fact that John Sr. was an abusive alcoholic who was violent towards his wife and to John Jr., who he beat with a belt and called a ‘sissy’. The boy, meanwhile, did his best to win his father’s affection, but it was a lost cause.

Aged eleven, Gacy Jr. had an accident when he was hit on the head by a swing. It caused a blood clot that was not discovered until he was sixteen. In the meantime, he had been suffering from blackouts and headaches. He was put on a course of medication that dissolved the clot. Then at seventeen, he began having heart trouble, although throughout his life it was never discovered exactly what was wrong with his heart.

Gacy failed to graduate from school, dropping out and travelling to Las Vegas where he worked as a janitor in a funeral parlour. It was a tough time for him. He was desperate to find a proper job and earn a decent wage but without a high school diploma, he was eventually forced to return to Chicago where he enrolled at a business college. He exhibited skill at selling and found a job as a management trainee with a shoe company. Before long he was managing a shoe shop in Springfield, Illinois.

Around this time, he became involved in community organisations such as the Chi Roh Club where he became membership chairman, the Catholic Inter-Club Council of which he was a board member, the Federal Civil Defence for Illinois and the Jaycees to which he devoted most of his time, becoming the vice-president and being voted ‘Man of the Year’. He worked so hard for these organisations that at one stage he was hospitalised suffering from nervous exhaustion.

In September 1964 he settled down, marrying Marlynn Myers, whose parents owned a number of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in Waterloo, Iowa. Marlynn’s father offered him a job at one of the restaurants and Gacy and his new wife moved to Iowa.

He worked hard, as ever, also throwing himself once again into volunteer work for the Jaycees. Meanwhile, Marlynn gave birth to a son followed by a daughter.

It was all going so well. A lovely house in a good suburb, a good job, two nice kids. But soon the wheels began to come off. Rumours began to spread about John Gacy’s sexual predilections. He always seemed to be surrounded by young boys, both in his charity work and at his restaurant and whispers suggested that he had made passes at more than one of them. In spring 1968 he was indicted by a Black hawk County grand jury. They alleged that he had committed sodomy with a teenager, Mark Miller. The boy explained to the court how Gacy had tricked him into being tied up when he was visiting him before violently raping him. Gacy, in his defence, claimed that Miller had actually engaged in sex with him willingly to earn money. He also suggested that he had been set up by Jaycee members opposed to a bid that he had been making for the presidency of the local branch of the organisation.

Gacy made a big mistake about four months later when he hired another boy, Dwight Andersson to beat Miller up. Miller fought back, however, when cornered by Andersson and escaped to call the police. When they picked up Andersson, he told them that he had been hired by Gacy. He was brought in for psychiatric evaluation to see if he was fit to stand trial. They found him to be mentally competent, but that he was an antisocial personality. Gacy pleaded guilty to the sodomy charge and, aged twenty-six, was sent to prison for ten years, Marlynn divorcing him shortly after.

In prison, he stayed out of trouble, gaining parole just eighteen months into his sentence. On 18 June 1970, he was back on the outside and heading back

to Chicago.

His father had died by now, leaving Gacy depressed that he had never properly reconciled with him or said goodbye. He moved in with his mother at West Summersdale Avenue, living in one half of the building while his mother and sisters owned the other half.

He seemed to be putting his life back together again after prison, but was unable to fight the urges that consumed him. He was charged with disorderly conduct, having picked up a young boy at a bus station and forced him to perform sexual acts on him. He was lucky, however. When the victim failed to show up on the day the trial started, the charges were dropped.

He married Carole Hoff on 1 June 1972 and she and her two young daughters moved into his half of the West Summersdale Avenue house. She knew about his past but was convinced that he had learned his lesson and was a changed man.

In 1974 he started a company, Painting, Decorating and Maintenance Incorporated, or PDM. It was noticeable that he hired only young men, but that was to keep the costs low. He did not have to pay teenagers as much as he would older men. However, some, especially his wife, Carole, were not fooled. Their marriage had started to come apart at the seams. Their sex life was practically non-existent and his moods were unpredictable. When she began to find magazines filled with photographs of naked young men she confronted him only to be informed that he preferred boys to women. In March 1976 they were divorced.

Gacy now launched a political career, hoping to one day run for public office. He was nominated for the street lighting commission, becoming secretary treasurer in 1975. Once again, however, the whispering started.

One story came from the previous year. In 1974, Gacy had volunteered his teenage workers to clean up the Democratic headquarters. He made a pass at one of the boys, sixteen-year-old Tony Antonucci, puling his old trick of handcuffing the boy. Antonucci managed to slip out of the cuffs, however, and he threw Gacy to the floor, handcuffing him. When Gacy promised he would not try anything again, Anonucci set him free.

Seventeen-year-old Johnny Butkovich worked for Gacy to fund his interest in cars. He drove a 1968 Dodge into which he put most of his time and money. When Gacy refused to pay him for two weeks, Johnny visited him on 17 July 1975 with a couple of friends. During an argument, Butkovich threatened to expose to the authorities the fact that Gacy was not paying tax on his workers’ earnings. Nonetheless, Gacy still refused to pay the boy. They left and he dropped his two friends off at their house. He was never seen again.

But he was not the first of Gacy’s victims. On 18 January, he had killed eighteen-year-old Timothy McCoy, whose body would not be identified until June 2007. After Butkovich, he murdered eighteen- year-old Darrell Sampson in April and then a month later it was the turn of Sam Stapleton, the youngest of his victims, at just fourteen years of age. Another seventeen-year-old, Michael Bonnin, disappeared in June 1976, while en route to meet his stepfather’s brother at a railway station, followed a few days later by Billy Carroll. Billy had always been in trouble, sent to a juvenile home for stealing a purse aged nine and being caught in the possession of a gun at the age of eleven. By the time he was sixteen, he was making good money from pimping young boys to adult men. On June 13 he left home and was never seen again.

Gacy carried on killing through the summer and autumn – seventeen-year-old Rick Johnson in August and Kenneth Parker, a sixteen-year-old and fourteen-year-old Michael Marino in October. On 12 December, seventeen-year-old Gregory Godzik dropped his girlfriend off at her house. The next day police found his beloved 1966 Pontiac, but there was no trace of Gregory. He had worked at PDM for Gacy.

In January, nineteen-year-old John Szyc drove off in his 1971 Plymouth Satellite and was never seen again. However, a short while later, a youth was intercepted while driving the car. He told the police that the car was owned by a man in whose house he was living. They visited Gacy who explained very plausibly that Szyc had sold the car to him before he vanished. If the detectives had been a little more diligent in their investigation, they would have discovered that not only had the car been signed over to Gacy eighteen days after Szyc had disappeared but that the signature was false. They might also have learned that although Szyc had not worked for PDM, he had been a friend of Johnny Butkovich and Gregory Godzyk and was acquainted with Gacy.

Between January 1977 and December 1978, another thirteen boys and young men would die at Gacy’s hands. In December 1978, fifteen-year-old Robert Piest disappeared from outside the pharmacy where he worked. His mother had come to pick him up but was told that he had gone to see a contractor about a job. He never returned from the meeting.

Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak, leading the investigation, found out that the contractor with whom Robert had an appointment was John Wayne Gacy. He went to Gacy’s house to invite him to the police station for questioning. Gacy, however, claimed that there had just been a death in his family and said he had some phone calls to make. He turned up at the station a few hours later but claimed to know nothing. However, Kozenczak ran a check on him and found out that he had gone to prison for sodomy. He obtained a search warrant and visited Gacy’s house once again.

They uncovered a treasure trove of incriminating evidence such as Swedish pornographic films, the drugs amyl nitrate and Valium, a pair of handcuffs, a gun, clothing that was too small for Gacy, police badges and beneath the insulating material in the loft, an eighteen inch dildo. In one of Gacy’s vehicles they discovered strands of hair that matched Robert Piest’s.

Gacy was brought in but had to be released as the police as yet did not have enough evidence to hold him. However, he was put under round-the-clock surveillance. Eventually, they arrested him on charges of possessing marijuana that they had found in the house.

At last, however, thay found compelling evidence linking Gacy to one of the boys who had disappeared. A ring found at the house belonged to John Szyc. They also learned that three boys who had gone missing had all worked for PDM. Detectives returned to the house to resume their search. Under the house, amidst the stench of death, they found human remains.

On 22 December 1978, John Wayne Gacy confessed to killing at least thirty people, most of whom he told them were buried in the crawl space. He added, however, that he had run out of space and had thrown a number of his victims off a bridge into the Des Plaines River.

Victims were found with socks or underwear lodged in their throats. Gacy explained that he would slowly garrot his victims with a plank of wood as he had sex with their bound bodies. The socks and underwear were to stop their screams from being heard. By 28 December, twenty-seven bodies had been dug up from beneath the house, plus one in the river. They then took pickaxes to the patio and found more.

The trial began on 6 February 1980 in the Cook County Criminal Court in Chicago. Gacy’s lawyers tried to make the jury believe that the murders were irrational and impulsive, that Gacy was insane and not in control of his actions. The case fell apart in the face of more than sixty prosecution witnesses who testified otherwise. The jury decided that John Wayne Gacy had raped and tortured his unfortunate victims in a premeditated and planned manner. They found him guilty and he was sentenced to death.

On 10 May 1994, he was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center in Crescent Hill, Illinois. His last meal was a dozen deep fried shrimps, a bucket of original recipe chicken, French fries and a pound of fresh strawberries.