Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (18 page)

Like all the others, Corbin eventually opened her door to DeSalvo. Once inside, DeSalvo drew his knife and put it to her neck. He said that the first thing she asked was, “You’re not the Boston Strangler, are you?” DeSalvo assured her he was not and took her into the bedroom.

Corbin told DeSalvo that she was not well and could not have intercourse. DeSalvo sat down on the edge of the bed and had Corbin kneel before him on a pillow on the floor and perform oral sex.

DeSalvo then told her that he was going to tie her up and leave. He made her promise to give him time to go and not make a sound. He tied her hands in front of her and laid her down on the bed. He then stuffed a pair of panties in her mouth, straddled her body sitting on her hands, placed a pillow over her face, and strangled her with his hands. Finally he took some nylon stockings from her drawer and tied them in a bow. He spread her legs open in a forty-five-degree angle and tied another bow around the victim’s left ankle.

On November 24, 1963, while most of America had come to a halt because of the assassination of President Kennedy two days previously, DeSalvo killed his twelfth victim: twenty-three-year-old Joann Graff. Despite the fact that victim was very wary and would not even permit the landlord to enter her apartment, DeSalvo talked his way in.

Graff was found lying at a diagonal across the bed with her legs spread apart. She was strangled. Two nylon stockings were intertwined with the victim’s black leotard tied in a bow around her neck. DeSalvo said that afterward he drove home, washed up, played with the kids, had supper, and watched television. The murder of Lee Harvey Oswald was broadcast live on network TV that day.

On January 4, 1964, police found DeSalvo’s thirteenth and last victim: nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan. She was found on her bed in a propped-up position. Under her buttocks was a pillow. Her back rested against the headboard and her head was resting on her right shoulder. Seminal fluid was dripping from her mouth onto her right breast. Both of her breasts were exposed. Her knees were bent and raised and her legs spread apart. A broomstick handle was inserted into her vagina. There were seminal stains on the blanket. A stocking was tied tightly around her throat and covered by a scarf tied in a large bow. Next to the victim’s left toes was placed a greeting card: “Happy New Year.”

The Boston Strangler was finished. DeSalvo now took on a new persona: the “Green Man.” Wearing green work pants and shirt, he broke and entered into women’s apartments, tied them up, and raped them. Often he ejaculated as soon as he tied up and touched his victim, and did not have intercourse. He apologized to the victim and loosened her bindings before he left.

In the eleven months during which he committed his Green Man attacks, DeSalvo never killed any of his victims. On November 3, 1964, a detective recognized a victim’s description of the Green Man as being similar to the Measuring Man. DeSalvo’s mug shots were shown to the victim and she quickly identified DeSalvo as the Green Man. DeSalvo was arrested and held at the Bridgewater Mental Hospital.

The police had no idea that they had the Boston Strangler in their custody. Because so many victims were elderly women, police were looking for a “mother hater”—somebody who was still living with a domineering mother. DeSalvo’s psychiatric prison records indicated that he had a good and loving relationship with his mother (despite Brussel’s assertion that she was “indifferent” to Albert). It was only in the spring of 1965, while still in custody, that DeSalvo began making his confessions. The police realized that they had had the Boston Strangler in their custody for six months already.

DeSalvo made a deal with the authorities: He would plead guilty to the Green Man rapes and take a life sentence if no murder charges would be brought against him as the Boston Strangler. Thus, in the end, nobody was officially charged or convicted for the thirteen murders.

Many in the law enforcement community were unconvinced that DeSalvo was a killer. They pointed out that DeSalvo did not need to kill for sex because he was adept at both seducing and raping females. The problem is that it is a slightly outdated notion that offenders rape for sex—in fact, rape as much as seduction or killing could have easily been a question of control or rage for DeSalvo, not sex.

The question remains, however: why did DeSalvo kill—and more important, why did he stop on his own? Psychiatrist James Brussel was brought in from New York by the Boston police prior to DeSalvo’s capture, as were several other psychiatrists. Brussel had been successful at profiling other criminals and had gained a formidable reputation in being able to project a killer’s personality by studying his crimes. (See Chapter 9.)

The panel of psychiatrists, Brussel recalls, were all deeply divided as to the personality of the killer. A faction insisted that there were two different killers. They all agreed that the killer had a mother-hate complex and that he was probably suffering from impotency. At the conference after the murder of Mary Sullivan, Brussel recalls that he felt very uneasy—as if a solution were at the tip of his fingers, yet eluding him. Brussel heard one of the psychiatrists say, “ . . . and this trail of semen, ranging from the thighs of the early victims to the mouth of the most recent, could hardly have been left by a single man.” He suddenly came to the solution, Brussel states, by following the trail of semen, figuratively. Brussel concluded that over the two-year killing period, DeSalvo was psychosexually maturing—passing from puberty to manhood in a most monstrous way.

Brussel noted that DeSalvo’s first five victims, elderly women, were not raped but manipulated or penetrated by a foreign object. Brussel saw this as sexuality typical of a small boy coveting his mother’s love and curious about her body and by association the bodies of women in general. But with the alleged absence of his mother’s love, DeSalvo expressed these longings with a rage—thus his murder and molestation of the first five victims.

Then, after a four-month hiatus, he turned his attention to younger women and girls. According to Brussel, DeSalvo was in a stage now resembling puberty, attempting intercourse but achieving only a half-potent immature kind of interaction.

In the end, DeSalvo grew up and “cured” himself through murder, Brussel concluded. He writes:

The last one, Mary Sullivan, was subjected to the final and complete indignity. The semen was in her mouth. The Strangler had said, symbolically, I throw my sex in your face. And where the sex should have been, he scornfully thrust the handle of a broom . . .

I think he has finished . . . He’s been seeking two things: to grow up sexually, and to avenge himself for his mother’s rejection of him or whatever caused his hang-up. I believe he has succeeded on both counts.

“With Mary Sullivan,” I said, “he perpetrated the final indignity, the final revenge. He threw his sex in her face. He used a broom handle to say that her sex no longer troubled him; he scorned it. I think Mary Sullivan may turn out to be his last victim. I think he has, in a way, ‘cured’ himself of his overtly sexual difficulties—though not of his other emotional problems.”
⁸²

Brussel’s theory is a fascinating one but problematic in certain areas. First, Brussel maintains that DeSalvo had a negative relationship with his mother. Other sources say the opposite, that DeSalvo loved and cherished his mother and that he was her favorite. If his mother was indifferent, why did she spend six months looking for her children after her husband sold them to a farmer? Second, unless Brussel was representing DeSalvo’s point of view, Brussel perhaps attaches too much of a value judgment on oral sex by referring to it as an “indignity” and to the vagina as “where the sex should have been.” Finally, if DeSalvo had been having extensive sex since adolescence and was such a prolific seducer, why would he engage in these few acts of “immature child-like” sex, followed by murder? Of course, there is a distinct possibility that DeSalvo was fantasizing about his sexual exploits. Perhaps women did not throw their jewelry at him in exchange for sex, and perhaps he was not the big bisexual neighborhood stud-muffin he claims he was. The only accounts of DeSalvo’s sexual history come from DeSalvo himself. What if Irmgard was his first sexual partner?

Canadian anthropologist and serial murder expert Elliott Leyton rejects the psychoanalytic model of Albert DeSalvo for a socioeconomic one. Leyton points out that DeSalvo made numerous statements attesting that he felt he came from very low-class status. Like his father, DeSalvo “married up” in class—Irmgard came from a respectable European middle-class family just as DeSalvo’s mother came from a respectable old middle-class Boston “Yankee” family. In the end, Irmgard rejected DeSalvo.

When he was arrested as the Measuring Man, DeSalvo told police:

I been a poor boy all my life, I come from a bad home, you know all that, why should I kid you? Look, I don’t know anything about modeling or cameras . . . I’m not educated and these girls was all college graduates, understand me? I made fools of them . . . I made them do what I wanted and accept me and listen to me.

DeSalvo preyed on victims in lower-middle-class and student low-rise apartment blocks, but for DeSalvo it was a step up. He thought of striking in a wealthier neighborhood called Swampscott, but didn’t have the confidence:

Now Swampscott . . . is a fancy place with big houses and lots of them smart and educated broads like I used to fool over around Harvard Square but they grew up and got married and now they got kids . . . and anyway I don’t go to Swampscott because I don’t like the way they make me feel like an animal, those kinds of broads, and that is why I always put something over their faces and eyes so that they can’t look at me.
⁸³

During his interrogation, DeSalvo turned to one of the state attorneys and said:

You are a man, you know what I mean, sure you have been to them high-class colleges and you got all them big excuses, but you have had that thing in your pants too—I think this is one of the troubles, sir, that guys like you, who have played with yourselves, who have looked with real lust on women, some of them far too young, way out of your range of possibility with a great deal of lust are afraid to admit it because somehow it takes you down from the goddamn pedestal on which society places you—but you are only a man.

Let me say this, sir, to you who sits across the table from me with such a shocked face, just let me say this . . . I ain’t got nothing to lose no more, you know, and I couldn’t give less of a goddamn for your world which is a nice society for you as long as you have money . . . have you ever thought of what it would be like for your ass if you didn’t have dough? I bet you ain’t.

At one point DeSalvo suggested that he stopped killing because his Irmgard treated him better, but even then he expressed it in socioeconomic terms: “My wife was treating me better. I was building up, you might say, my better self, the better side of me. I was very good at my job, they liked me, I got two raises.”

DeSalvo had wanted to confess earlier, but according to him, his wife had threatened to commit suicide and kill the children if he confessed to being the strangler. At some point DeSalvo began to believe that his wife never really loved him and was kind to him in the last months only because of his increased income. This angered him so much that he confessed to being the Boston Strangler. He told his wife, “Our last two months together you made me feel for the first time like a man. You gave me love I never dreamed you had to give. But why—only because you had just about everything you dreamed of . . . everything you wanted, house fixed up, all the money coming in.” Confession was his revenge.

Leyton wrote that in the end, DeSalvo found what he was searching for in all those apartments in the last victim’s home—the Happy New Year card—the ultimate insult to society, placed at the foot of society’s precious young woman, raped and dead.

Whether Brussel’s psychoanalytic model or Leyton’s socioeconomic theory is more valid, we will probably never know. Any hope of further questioning Albert DeSalvo vanished on November 26, 1973, when he was stabbed through the heart in his prison cell. His murder remains unsolved, as does the mystery of exactly why he began killing and why he ceased.

America Tumbles into the Sixties: 1966, “The Year the World Went Mad”

In the wake of the Boston Strangler, the escalation of violence that swept through America during the 1960s was dramatic and heralded by two notorious acts of mass murder in 1966: in Chicago, Richard Speck killed eight nurses in a dormitory, and in Texas, sniper Charles Whitman killed sixteen people. Both events shocked the nation and were major headline news stories. Serial crime historian Michael Newton recently wrote:

Reporter Charles Kuralt once labeled 1966 “the year the world went mad,” prophetic words as we reflect upon a quarter-century of random killers run amok. That year, God died on the cover of
Time Magazine
and the Church of Satan opened its doors in San Francisco; the sexual revolution and hippie-drug subculture burst into the headlines; the Vietnam war entered American living rooms through a television tube and brought thousands of protesters into the streets.
⁸⁴

From the assassination of President Kennedy, the disorder in the streets over the war in Vietnam, and racial rioting to the oil crisis of the early 1970s and the disillusionment of Watergate, America suffered a cultural collapse comparable to that of postwar Germany or post-Soviet Russia. In economic and political terms, the inflation-driven collapse perhaps was not as severe as those of Germany and Russia—but in social terms, it was as drastic. America of the 1950s was as different in spirit and values from the America of the 1970s as was the Soviet Union from today’s Russian republics or imperial Germany from the Weimar government. Something in those kinds of radical cultural transitions unleashes serial murderers. Perhaps it’s a collapse of once-treasured values, or a loss of any vision of a future, but those already predisposed to kill seem more likely to act in such times.