The Boston Stranglers (11 page)

Setterlund also told the court that he had first met Albert in the company of George Nassar, and that his—Setterlund‘s—own attorney had once been F. Lee Bailey.

 

 

John A. Keriakos, deputy master of the Billerica House of Correction, testified that Albert's behavior during his 1961 incarceration there had been perfectly normal; Adam Kozlowski, a senior officer at the Middlesex County House of Correction, deemed the defendant a model prisoner. Thereafter the Commonwealth called to the stand several of Albert's previous employers, all of whom told essentially the same story: that the defendant was a hard worker, courteous, congenial, and entirely normal in his speech, behavior, and dress. He had put in an eight-and-a-half-hour day for the Highland Contracting Company on June 8, 1964, the day of the assault on Virginia Thorner, and an eight-hour day for the same company on October 27, 1964, the day of the assault on Suzanne Macht.

A Malden man, Harold Orent, testified that he had known Albert from April of 1963 to November of 1964 and never noticed anything out of the ordinary about his actions or demeanor. Albert had in fact been in the Orent home on over a hundred occasions to do remodeling work. Anna Orent, Harold Orent's wife, said that she and her children had been alone in the house with Albert on a number of occasions and that his behavior had always been impeccable.

The Commonwealth's final witnesses were three psychiatrists: The state called back Samual Allen and called in Ames Robey and Samuel Tartakoff, both of whom had figured in Albert's various competency hearings in the spring of 1965 and the spring and early summer of 1966.

Ames Robey was the first to take the stand. He testified that Albert had told him also of faking his hallucinations, something Albert had admitted anyway at his February 1965 hearing. Robey further described the defendant as a con artist and a manipulator who could clearly distinguish between right and wrong. His present diagnosis of Albert was that the man suffered from a sociopathic personality disorder with schizoid features. Robey concluded that Albert had not been driven by an irresistible impulse to commit his Green Man offenses.

As far as Robey was concerned, the only uncontrollable urge Albert suffered from was the desire to be branded the Strangler.

Doctors Allen and Tartakoff substantially agreed with Robey that Albert knew right from wrong and that no inner demon had goaded him into his actions. Tartakoff added that he had taken no history from Albert of any “brain sensations” or “little fires” (as Tartakoff called them) occurring in the defendant's head, as defense witness Brussel claimed he had. Albert's sociopathy was treatable, but the prognosis for him was not good.

Before he left the stand, Tartakoff mentioned that Albert had once described himself to the psychiatrist as having a fast mouth and the ability to talk his way into anything.

The jury heard no further testimony.

 

 

The press coverage of the trial was, as might be expected, phenomenal. Although Albert himself was under heavy guard—clearly the authorities feared not just an escape attempt but that someone might try to kill him—it was his attorney whose life appeared to be in danger. In a typeface only slightly smaller than that generally used for a declaration of war, the
Record American
ran this headline on Thursday, January 12: B
AILEY'S
L
IFE
T
HREATENED.
The paper went on to report that additional court officers and fifteen cops were “rushed” to the trial because two gunmen were believed to be on their way from Boston to assassinate not only Bailey but his “attractive blonde wife” Wicki.

The threat had apparently been phoned in to the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office. When word of it was passed to Assistant District Attorney Conn, Judge Moynihan declared a recess. Wicki Bailey was hustled from the courtroom and, according to the
Record,
Bailey, Conn, and Moynihan adjourned for “a mysterious, hour-long, lobby conference.” Bailey emerged from it looking grim. When reporters asked him what the problem was, he replied, “I can't tell you.” As to the whereabouts of the abruptly vanished Wicki, Bailey would only say, “I've got her locked up.”

Happily, no assassins appeared at the Middlesex County Courthouse that day, nor for the duration of the trial. The
Record
reported that the threat had
not
been in retaliation for his defense of the Strangler (Bailey says it was), although how this could be established with any precision is unclear since no trace of the gunmen who could provide the explanation for their motive was ever found. Wicki was released from purdah and the trial resumed.

On Friday, January 13, the
Record
bore another banner headline: D
E
S
ALVO
IS THE
S
TRANGLER
, with the subheading “Bailey Bares 13 Murders in 18 Months as Acts of an Insane Man.” Framing the headlines were close-up mug-style shots of Albert arriving at Superior Court, looking grim in the full-face shot and somewhat bemused in the profile. According to the
Boston Herald,
Bailey had in court that day described his client as “a completely uncontrollable vegetable,” in need, the
Herald
writer dryly suggested, of a suitable bin.

Also in its Friday the thirteenth issue the
Record
announced that it would begin running excerpts from Gerold Frank's
The Boston Strangler.
And directly underneath that announcement, on page four, ran a notice that the
Advertises,
the Sunday edition of the
Record,
would run in its
Pictorial Living Coloroto Magazine
an article by resident gossipist Harold Banks called “At Home With the F. Lee Baileys”—a piece promised to be “
as bright and informal
as the Baileys really are. The cover shows the family relaxing before a blazing fireplace.”

A small article at the bottom of the same page informed anyone who might be interested that the death toll of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam that week had dropped to sixty-seven.

For the fashion-conscious reader, the
Record
also thoughtfully provided a commentary on Wicki's courtroom couture.
³³

Ames Robey edged Bailey and Albert from the
Record
headline sweepstakes on January 17: MD
SHAKES STRANGLER STORY
. On January 18, it was John Bottomly's turn to be tabloid man of the hour: C
ALL STRANGLER PROBER TO TELL CONFESSIONS
. The former assistant attorney general didn't rate the all-caps treatment Bailey, Albert, and Robey had.

(Not only was Bottomly relegated to the lower case, he never even mounted the stand. Judge Moynihan tartly refused to allow his testimony, on the grounds that Albert wasn't being tried for the Strangler murders, which in any case they'd already heard far too much about from Dr. Mezer. Bottomly's exclusion was a defeat for Bailey.)

Given its magnitude, Albert's trial was a short one. On January 19, the
Record
informed its readers that J
URY HOLDS STRANGLER'S FATE
. Not the Green Man's fate. The
Strangler's
fate.

The jury had not, incidentally, been sequestered, nor had it been prohibited from reading press accounts of the trial. That was also true of the prosecution and defense witnesses.

 

 

On the morning of January 18, Bailey and Conn made their closing arguments. Bailey asked the jury to find his client not guilty by reason of insanity: “It is up to you to determine whether he is sick. I suggest that he is, based on the testimony of witnesses. I did not cross-examine some witnesses for reasons of decency. Their own stories about Albert indicate that he did not act like a normal human being. He was then, as he is now, very sick.”

Bailey then went on to ask the jury to heed the testimony of doctors Brussel, Mezer, and Tartakoff, but to disregard that of Robey. The lawyer then accused Robey of changing his diagnosis of Albert to suit the circumstances. “You can expect at least consistent testimony and proof,” Bailey declaimed. “If, as Shakespeare said, ‘let's kill off the lawyers,' I say, well, let's kill off the psychiatrists, too.”

Donald Conn, who had snickered audibly—and quite deliberately—at Bailey throughout his summation, had his turn at bat: “This is a man [DeSalvo] who wants you to believe he is a vegetable, overwrought and overwhelmed by irresistible impulses,” the assistant district attorney charged. “Don't be dissuaded [sic] by his cuteness and cunning. You're going to have to live with your conscience when you get out of here just as I am with mine. Are you going to sit there and let this man get in a hospital and get out in a few years? Stamp his conduct for what it is—vicious, wrong, cruel, criminal conduct. Don't allow him to fake, feign, and con you right out of your shoes like he conned a couple of doctors.”

Judge Moynihan instructed the jurors that there were three possible verdicts in this case: guilty, not guilty, and not guilty by reason of insanity.

The jury went out at 12:37
P.M.
on January 18.

Three hours and forty-five minutes later, the foreman sent word that a verdict had been reached. The jurors filed back into the courtroom.

“All rise,” the bailiff ordered. Those present shuffled to their feet. Albert, wearing a neat dark suit, white shirt, and tie, stood quietly awaiting his fate.

“How do you find the defendant?” Judge Moynihan asked.

The answer was unhesitating: guilty on all counts.

Judge Moynihan pronounced sentence: imprisonment for life. It was a statutorially imposed sentence, he explained, that would not ordinarily have been handed down but for the very clear indication that Albert was the Strangler.

Bailey's strategy had backfired; his insistence on identifying Albert as the murderer of thirteen women had resulted in exactly what attorney and client had striven to avoid. The jury of twelve men, all of whom had mothers if not also daughters, wives, sisters, granddaughters, and nieces, were not about to run the risk that this “twisted, driven vegetable” ever again be permitted to walk the streets. Nor was Cornelius Moynihan.

Nonetheless, Bailey today has no regrets about how he handled Albert's defense, maintaining still that he saved his client from the electric chair.

Francis C. Newton, Jr., smiles slightly at this claim: “If Bailey hadn't done what he'd done, Albert would be alive and free today.”

The same day he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars,
³⁴
Albert was committed to the custody of the superintendent of Bridgewater State Hospital. That night he was back at the institution he so despised to await shipment to the state's toughest maximum security prison, MCI-Walpole.

Bailey moved immediately for a stay of execution of the sentence to Walpole, which Moynihan granted. On January 20, Asgeirsson and Bailey filed on behalf of their client a motion for a new trial, claiming errors of law regarding the standard of criminal responsibility applied to Albert. One week later, the attorneys amended that motion with further grounds: The guilty verdict in the case was against the weight of the evidence.

Moynihan denied the request for a new trial on February 1. On February 21, Bailey and Asgeirsson filed a claim of appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.

At 11:00
A.M
. on the same day, Herbert DeSimone, the attorney general of Rhode Island, had a meeting with Massachusetts State Police Detective Lieutenant Joseph Simons, Detective Phillip DiNatale of the Boston Police Department and the Strangler Bureau, Charles Burnim, a lawyer from Bailey's office, and Ira Schreber, a lawyer who would serve as DeSalvo's Rhode Island counsel. The meeting was held to discuss the assault and robbery of a Central Falls, Rhode Island, woman that had taken place on July 3, 1964. Albert had allegedly volunteered the information that he'd committed this crime. But another man, Roland Petit, had been charged with and convicted of the offense and was now serving time for it. The victim had apparently identified Petit as her assailant.

This, like all the other out-of-state charges against Albert, would eventually be put on a permanent hold.

On Friday, February 24, at 12:20
A.M
., Albert and two of his fellow inmates, George Harrison and Frederick Erickson, escaped from Bridgewater.

 

 

That the three had vanished from their adjoining cells in the I Wing went unnoticed until 6:15 on Friday morning. One hour earlier, and again a half-hour after that, a guard had looked into each cell through a peephole and seen what he would swear were human forms in each bed. In fact, those forms were blankets plumped and twisted to resemble sleeping bodies.

The breakout, which Albert, Erickson, and Harrison had apparently been planning for several days at least, was childishly simple to accomplish. One of them had obtained a key to unlock their cells. The three then walked down a third-floor corridor to where an elevator was being installed. They removed the plywood covering the shaft, climbed down the scaffolding inside it, and stepped out onto the hospital grounds. They scaled a twenty-foot inner wall, a second thirty-foot outer one, and dropped down to freedom on the other side, landing in a bed of new-fallen snow.

Albert was supposedly armed with a gun, Erickson and Harrison with a half a pair of scissors each.

At 2:20
A.M
., the stolen car in which they were driving ran out of fuel, so they coasted into a gas station on Route 28 in North Easton. Albert tried to charge three dollars' worth of gas. The teenage attendant wouldn't let him, so they asked the young man to call them a taxi. Instead, he called the police—not because he was aware that he had three escaped felons on his hands, but to report a vehicle breakdown. Albert, Erickson, and Harrison had disappeared into a nearby woods by the time a cruiser appeared.

Either Albert and the others somehow retrieved their car and got it going or stole another one. Police and press reports are confused and conflicting about this particular part of the escape. What is definite is that the trio managed to reach Everett, where Albert's brother Joseph lived, before running out of gas again. Albert called Joe; Harrison and Erickson made phone calls of their own.

A few minutes later Joseph picked up the three and drove them to Richard DeSalvo's house in Chelsea. Richard gave Albert money and fresh clothing. All five then drove to Sullivan Square in Charlestown, where Harrison and Erickson wanted to be dropped. Albert gave them ten dollars apiece.

By this time, the escape had been discovered and reported. Hundreds of state troopers and municipal police joined in the manhunt for the fugitives. Armed guards were posted around the homes of the witnesses, judge, and prosecutor in Albert's trial.

Joseph and Albert took Richard to work in Chelsea. From there, Joseph drove Albert to Lynn, where they parted company in front of a drugstore on Western Avenue.
³⁵

Albert, thinking that he had been spotted, broke into an apartment to hide for a few minutes. When it seemed safe, he left the apartment and broke into the cellar of a house on Western Avenue. He put together a makeshift bed and turned on his transistor radio to listen to the news of his escape.

By 10:23
P.M.
, Harrison and Erickson, who had spent their first and only day of freedom drinking—and in Harrison's case, ingesting drugs—at the Melody Lounge in Waltham, were back in custody. They had surrendered voluntarily to the authorities, who bought the pair hamburgers to blot up some of the alcohol they'd consumed before returning them to Bridgewater.

Albert went for a walk around the Lynn General Electric plant until 2:00
A.M
. Cold and hungry, he went back to his cellar refuge. There he broke into a locked bin and discovered two sea bags, one of which held a navy uniform. Albert dressed in that, leaving his discarded clothing—and an automatic pistol wrapped in a white T-shirt—on a bench.

Around 2:30 in the afternoon, he walked into the Simon Uniform Store on Western Avenue and asked to use their phone to call his lawyer. He feared the authorities were closing in on him, and he didn't want to be shot by an overzealous cop.

Five minutes later he was arrested by a Lynn patrol officer and taken to the police station and then to court. The judge ordered him to MCI-Walpole immediately. He arrived there at 7:15
P.M
.

To quote from the police report: “DeSalvo entered the Walpole State Prison and was thoroughly searched by Supervisor John J. Mahoney and Senior Officer Edward J. Cronin. After DeSalvo was stripped naked and searched, he was placed in his cell for his long-term sentence.”

Albert had gone from bad to worse.

He had also been reunited with George Nassar.

 

 

At the news of Albert's escape, the press went wild. The
Record
promptly offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for his capture. It furnished a list of protection do's and don‘ts alongside an article entitled
WOMEN BEWARE! HE'S A SMOOTHIE.
It warned that the female population was in grave danger not only from Albert but from Erickson and Harrison.

The public reaction was predictable. “I'm scared out of my mind,” a Beacon Hill secretary told Jonathan Klarfeld of the
Globe.
Klarfeld also reported that a resident of the town of Bridgewater was keeping a shotgun by her side as she did her housework. A local sportswriter, a twelve-year-old at the time, today recalls that his mother made him stay indoors for two whole days. Nor were any of his friends permitted to play outside while Albert was on the loose.

In Harvard Square, however, where sangfroid reigned supreme, women shrugged off the danger. The same was true in the affluent suburbs, just as it had been during the Strangler scare of 1962—64. According to one Andover woman, Albert's escape was “sort of a distant joke, really. We knew he wouldn't be coming here.”

If Albert's destination wasn't Andover, what was it? Media speculation abounded. Ames Robey thought he might try to lose himself in the population of a big city, wrote the
Globe'
s Sara Davidson. Mexico might be his goal, another source felt. And Samuel Allen thought Albert might head for Germany, where Irmgard, Judy, and Michael were now living near Bremen. Allen supposedly characterized Albert's putative need to see his wife and children as a “keen, twisted desire.”

Erickson and Harrison later told authorities they'd overheard him discuss with Richard and Joseph the possibility of taking a plane somewhere, of “flying out.”

 

 

While all this was going on, F. Lee Bailey was in Charleston, South Carolina, defending Air Force Captain Jack Simon in court-martial proceedings. Simon had been charged with molesting four children at the base swimming pool. On the evening of February 24, the captain was acquitted.
BAILEY DOES IT—AGAIN
! the
Record
crowed the following day.

Bailey's first step on learning of Albert's escape was to offer a reward of his own—ten thousand dollars for the
safe
return of his client to custody. He feared that the five-thousand-dollar booty put up by the
Record
might encourage some trigger-happy citizen or cop to shoot Albert on sight. He also angrily denounced the Commonwealth for “double-crossing” his client by reneging on its promise to get him good psychiatric help.

Bailey added that he wasn't surprised Albert had fled Bridgewater, because he had been extremely depressed and despairing after his conviction, resentful that the Commonwealth had so ill repaid his cooperation with it. (Albert would later claim that he had escaped in order to dramatize the hellish conditions at Bridgewater.) Bailey also said that he didn't think the self-admitted Strangler posed much danger to the public at present, since his urge to kill had been sated years ago with the murder of Mary Sullivan.

 

 

The fact that DeSalvo, Erickson, and Harrison had been able to slip so easily out of Bridgewater was a major concern and a major embarrassment to the authorities. “I'm shocked and very upset,” said Governor John Volpe, who ordered Public Safety Commissioner Leo Laughlin to look into the matter.
³⁶
State Representatives Robert Cawley and George Sacco would ask a legislative committee to investigate. “It could only happen in Massachusetts,” the
Globe
editorialized acidly, going on to remark that while most states in the union had mass murderers, only the Commonwealth seemed incapable of keeping its mass murderers under lock and key.

 

 

 

The saga of Albert Henry DeSalvo, already bizarre, sordid, and tragic, took on a dimension that was downright ludicrous the following month. Having transferred the literary and theatrical rights to his life story to Gerold Frank, Albert had now gone into the music business. On March 15, C-C-M Productions of Cambridge announced the release of a recording based on a poem Albert had written while in Bridgewater.

It was entitled “Strangler in the Night.”

All the profits from the record would go to the Foundation to Study the Cause and Treatment of Sexual Disorders—established by C-C-M.

C-C-M Executive Vice President Samuel A. Cammarata told the press that “this recording tells, in part, [Albert's] feelings during the period he was undergoing psychiatric tests at Bridgewater State Hospital... DeSalvo would not receive a penny from the sale.” CC-M legal counsel Joseph Balliro said that the foundation expected to realize ten thousand dollars from sales.

“Strangler in the Night” did not make the Top Forty, although it did become a very minor kitsch classic.

 

 

On March 20, Bernard Schultz, manager of the main Lynn post office, reported to the police that he had a package addressed to Mr. A. DeSalvo of 785 Western Avenue. The package was a bundle of books from the Doubleday Book Club. Some anonymous practical joker had made a note of Albert's hideout address as published in the press and used it to enroll him in the club.

It was the kind of stunt Albert himself might have pulled.

 

 

While Albert was busy fashioning a new career as the Frank Sinatra of Walpole State Prison, Donald Conn was settling into his new position as assistant attorney general of the Commonwealth, to which he had been appointed very shortly after the Green Man trial. He was hired by Elliot Richardson, who had succeeded Edward Brooke as attorney general.

Richardson and Conn, along with Herbert Travers, head of the Criminal Division, were taking a serious look at the possibility of trying Albert for the stranglings.

And the Boston Bar Association was taking a serious look at F. Lee Bailey's role as Albert's defense attorney.

 

 

Nineteen-sixty-seven saw a number of setbacks for F. Lee Bailey. One was the April trial of Carl Coppolino in Florida. It ended that same month with Coppolino being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of his wife Carmela. And in August, George Nassar would be reconvicted of the murder of Irwin Hilton. This time, the jury recommended that Nassar be sentenced to life imprisonment rather than execution. Judge Donald Macauley followed its recommendation.

There were other difficulties for Bailey. In
The Defense Never Rests,
he writes that his tribulations with the Boston Bar Association began in June, after he applied to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts for a certificate of good standing in order to represent Coppolino at his Florida appeal.
³⁷
Bailey expected the application to be routinely approved. He was instead informed that it would be held up because the Bar Association had some “matters of concern” regarding Bailey that they wanted to discuss with him first.

These “matters of concern,” according to Bailey, were “a report that [he] intended to play [him] self in a movie about the Sam Sheppard case,” “a contract [he] had signed with David Susskind's Talent Associates for an ABC-TV series that fall,” “ [his] appearance on CBS radio in Boston to discuss [an aspect of the Plymouth mail robbery case] with a local interviewer named Paul Benzaquin [one of George Nassar's supporters],” ”[his] appearances on the Joey Bishop and Johnny Carson TV shows after Carl Coppolino's conviction, during which [he] attacked the verdict,” and ”the fact that [he] had contracted to write [
The Defense Never Rests
], and engaged a literary agent [Sterling Lord].“
³⁸