The Boston Stranglers (2 page)

November 8, 1981, was one of those lead-gray days when the sky seems very close to the earth. I was visiting the Cambridge, Massachusetts, Police Department to do research for what would become my first published novel,
The Gemini Man,
a story about a serial killer.

I was sitting in the reception area outside the chief's office, waiting to speak to a lieutenant, a homicide specialist working out of the Criminal Investigation Division. Side by side on a bench diagonally across the room from me were two cops, both white-haired, both in their late fifties or early sixties, both in plain clothes. They introduced themselves as “the two Billies”
¹
and asked me who I was. I gave my name and added that I was doing research on crime and police work. I did not have the nerve to identify myself as a writer: At that point, my only publications were three brief scholarly articles on medieval literature.

The two Billies had been detectives for the past thirty years, the first said. If I wanted some good stories, I should ask them.

“We been around the block a few times,” the second said.

I smiled and said I'd look forward to hearing about that. Then I added, “At the moment, I'm trying to find information about serial killers.”

The two Billies looked at each other.

“Like Ted Bundy,” I said.

“How about the Boston Strangler?” the first Billy said.

“Him, too,” I replied.

The two glanced at each other again. Their faces wore the slightest of grins.

“We can tell you a lot about that,” the second Billy said.

Something was going on here. I studied the two men. “I'd love to hear it,” I said.

The first Billy gazed at me, still with that odd little smile. “Lemme ask you a question.”

“Sure.”

“Who do
you
think the Boston Strangler was?”

It seemed like a strange question. Sort of like asking who was buried in Grant's Tomb.

“Albert DeSalvo,” I said.

Everybody knew that. All the newspapers had proclaimed DeSalvo the Strangler. A best-selling book by a famous writer had said so. Ditto a major movie. History's only more notorious serial killer was Jack the Ripper.

The two laughed.

“Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler like my dog was the Boston Strangler,” the second Billy said.

I stared at him. Then I said, “Tell me.”

“You first, Billy,” the second said.

 

 

I went on to write
The Gemini Man
(in which I made a passing reference to the two Billies' story) and five more crime novels. The research for those books required frequent contact with law enforcement officials. Every once in a while, in conversation with one or another of these people, I'd mention what I'd been told that November day in 1981. To my initial surprise and then increasing fascination, almost all the cops, lawyers, and prosecutors concurred with the two Billies. Some had different theories about who the Boston Strangler—or Stranglers—might have been. But they all agreed on one point: Albert DeSalvo, a construction worker with a long record of convictions for breaking and entering, armed robbery, and sex offenses, was not the killer of the eleven women who died terrible deaths between June 1962 and January 1964.

If DeSalvo wasn't, who was?

I decided to try to find out.

 

 

In the autumn of 1964, thirty-three-year-old Malden, Massachusetts, resident Albert Henry DeSalvo, loving husband and devoted father of two, was arrested and charged with numerous counts of armed robbery unnatural acts, and rape, offenses that had been committed in various suburban communities in the greater Boston area. In the summer of 1965, after several months' incarceration in a state facility for the criminally insane and sexually dangerous, DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler. He claimed, moreover, responsibility not just for eleven of the killings the press ascribed to what it liked to call “the Phantom Fiend,” but for two others. His descriptions of these thirteen murders were graphic. So much so that it took DeSalvo two months to recite all the details.

The only problem was—a great many of those details were wildly inaccurate. And DeSalvo was ignorant of facts the killer would have known.

DeSalvo's confession was a phony from beginning to end. The individual who conducted the interrogation and tape-recorded it, one of the top law enforcement officials of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was quite aware of that. Still, he permitted the confession to stand unchallenged. A few years later, this individual would profit handsomely from the sale to the movies of the rights to DeSalvo's story and the part he himself played in it.

Albert DeSalvo was never charged with, much less tried or convicted for, being the Boston Strangler. He couldn't be. Not one shred of physical evidence connected him to any of the murders. Nor could any eyewitness place him at or even near any of the crime scenes.

Why did the Office of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—or at least one of its top representatives—accept DeSalvo's confession, knowing full well that it was phony? Simply because this was the quickest and easiest way to close the books on eleven gruesome murders.

Of course, there was also the money. The individual from the attorney general's office was not the only person whose bank account would be fattened by DeSalvo's confession.

Albert DeSalvo went to trial in January 1967 on the rape, armed robbery, and unnatural acts charges lodged against him in the fall of 1964. At the trial his attorney, F. Lee Bailey, identified his client as the Boston Strangler. Bailey's strategy—one he had used successfully at an earlier court proceeding to determine DeSalvo's competence—was based on the belief that if DeSalvo was branded the killer of thirteen women in an open forum, a jury would have to find him not guilty by reason of insanity of the armed robbery and sexual assault charges. Bailey further reasoned that DeSalvo would be committed by the judge to a mental institution rather than a state prison, since he was clearly a very sick man in desperate need of treatment.

Bailey's strategy failed the second time around. The jury found DeSalvo guilty of armed robbery and sexual assault. The judge, apparently convinced by Bailey that DeSalvo was an appalling menace to society, sentenced him to life in prison. Afterward Bailey bitterly declared that Massachusetts had just burned another witch.

DeSalvo was stabbed to death in prison in 1973. His murder—just like those of the eleven strangling
²
victims—is officially considered unsolved.

Two questions remain. The first, of course, is—why did Albert DeSalvo confess to a string of murders he never committed?

He had four reasons, all of which must have seemed to him quite valid. First, his attorney, in whom he reposed complete faith, was erroneously convinced that the 1964 rape and armed robbery charges would put DeSalvo in prison for life. (According to other legal authorities, it was very unlikely Albert would have received such a stiff sentence.) Second, DeSalvo was told that the sale of his life story and confession would make him a great deal of money, which could be given to his beloved wife and children for their support. Third, his attorney convinced him that he would be confined to a posh mental hospital—Johns Hopkins, Albert claimed—if he identified himself as the Strangler. Fourth, in branding himself a serial killer, Albert would become world-famous, something he dearly wanted to be.

He achieved this last goal, but surely not in the manner he'd intended.

If the previous question has four answers, the final question has two parts. The first: If Albert DeSalvo wasn't the Boston Strangler, who was? The second: Why, then, wasn't the real Strangler—or Stranglers—ever arrested and prosecuted?

I am convinced that there was not one Boston Stranger, but rather a bare minimum of six and much more likely eight or nine. The Boston Stranglings were not eleven serial killings—at least six of them were one-on-one murders committed for motives as individual as were the killers.

And why were these killers never charged, but permitted to get away with their crimes? No blame can be attached to the police for this. In one case, the principal suspect died. In two others, the suspects left the state and vanished. In other cases, the suspects were incarcerated on other charges (some of them still are). In still another case, a piece of conclusive evidence was never obtained. In another case, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office was ready to seek an indictment. The indictment was postponed, and later dropped, because of a squabble over jurisdictional rights.

In a final instance, the excellent case being prepared against a particular suspect by the attorney general's office was abruptly abandoned by that office. This was shortly before Albert DeSalvo began suggesting that
he
was the killer.

In 1966, Gerold Frank wrote that “the story of the Boston stranglings has ended.”

He was wrong. In some ways, it had just begun.

“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate; and did not stay
for an answer.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

 

 

It isn't really justice; it's the way you play the game.

—F. Lee Bailey, 1976

The first one to die was Anna Slesers.

Slesers, a fifty-six-year-old Latvian immigrant, lived at 77 Gainsborough Street in Boston. On the evening of June 14, 1962, she was due to attend a memorial service for the victims of the Russian invasion of Latvia during World War II. Her son Juris would escort her.

Juris knocked on the door of Apartment 3-F a little before 7:00
P.M.
No answer. No sound of movement from within the apartment, either. Thinking his mother might have gone to the store, Juris went downstairs to the foyer to await her.

She did not appear.

Juris went back upstairs and knocked again at the apartment door. No response. He returned to the foyer. It was then he noticed that his mother had forgotten to retrieve her mail.

At a quarter to eight, there was still no sign of Mrs. Slesers. Juris, probably now very worried, decided to break into her apartment.

His mother was at home. She had been at home the whole time.

Her body lay in the hall leading from the bathroom to the kitchen. The blue housecoat she'd worn had been ripped open to leave her torso nude. Her left leg was out straight, her right, the knee bent, at a nearly forty-five-degree angle.

She had been strangled with the cord of the housecoat, which had been drawn very tightly around her neck and tied under her chin in a sort of bow. There was blood in her right ear and a gaping laceration on the back of her skull. Her neck was scratched and abraded and her chin contused.

The blood in her vagina indicated that she had been sexually assaulted, probably with an object.

Except for a small amount of blood on the kitchen floor and an overturned wastebasket, there was no sign that a struggle had taken place in the apartment. It had apparently been searched. For a reason no one could guess, a chair had been placed in the front hallway just inside the door.

The following day, the Boston
Traveler
carried a story with the headline M
OM
F
OUND
S
TRANGLED IN
B
ACK
B
AY
. The
Boston Globe
story on the murder described the victim as “an attractive divorcee.”

Slightly over two weeks later, on June 30, the body of Nina Nichols, sixty-eight, was found on the bedroom floor of her apartment at 1940 Commonwealth Avenue in the Brighton section of Boston.

The pink housecoat she wore was open. Her bra had been yanked up above her breasts. Her slip had been pushed up to her waist. On her feet were blue tennis shoes. She lay on her back.

The two nylon stockings around her neck had been tied and knotted very tightly. There was blood in and around both ears, and a small abrasion on the lower right side of her face.

Her external genitalia had been lacerated and there was blood and mucus in her vagina.

One of the Boston police detectives called to the crime scene took from it an empty wine bottle, a woman's black plastic purse, and a small cardboard box. These were brought to headquarters for further examination.

That same day in Lynn, a small industrial city fifteen miles northeast of Boston, Helen Blake met a terrible death. According to the autopsy report, “this sixty-five-year-old white female was found by her housekeeper about 6
P.M.
, July 2, 1962, lying upon her bed within her ransacked apartment. The housekeeper had last conversed with the victim at 4:30
P.M.
, June 29, 1962 ... Decedent was lying prone on her bed, clad in pajama tops, with legs equally abducted [pulled apart] and face turned toward the left.” There was dried blood in both ears and on the outer part of the left one. The two stockings around her neck were knotted at the nape. Over the stockings was wrapped a bra, tied in front below the chin.

Her pajama top, which had been pushed up over her shoulders, bore reddish-brown stains. So did her pajama pants and the bed sheets.

Her vagina and anus had been lacerated, although the medical examiner found no spermatozoa in either.

A
NOTHER
S
ILK
S
TOCKING
M
URDER
was how the next day's edition of the
Globe
described the crime.

On Tuesday morning, July 11, 1962, a chambermaid named Eva Day entered Room 7 on the second floor of the Hotel Roosevelt, a now no longer extant fleabag on lower Washington Street in Boston.

Eva Day retreated shrieking from the room she had intended to clean. On the bed lay an elderly woman, naked and dead. An autopsy would establish that she had been manually strangled.

Accompanied by a man, she had checked into the hotel the previous night. They gave their names as Mr. and Mrs. Byron Spinney. The address the man wrote on the registration card was as phony as the names he and the victim had assumed.

The dead woman was identified first as Ethel Johnson, wife of one Johnny Johnson. Someone else identified her as Anne Cunningham, alias Annie Oakley. She was known to a third party as Winnie Hughes, and to a fourth as simply Tobey. Ultimately she was correctly identified as Margaret Davis, age sixty, by her nephew Daniel O'Leary. She was an alcoholic who had been treated, apparently with little success, at City Hospital. She had also been a patient at the House of the Good Shepherd in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, where she had worked as a domestic until the beginning of June.

At 7:47
P.M
. on August 21, 1962, the Boston police arrived at 7 Grove Street, at the bottom of Beacon Hill, to find the body of a woman who had been more grotesquely done to death than any of the previous victims.

Seventy-five-year-old Ida Irga had actually died on August 19. She lay on her back on the living room floor of Apartment 10. She wore, according to the police report, “a light brown nightdress which was torn, completely exposing her body. There was a pillowcase wrapped tightly around her neck, her legs were propped up on individual chairs, and were spread approximately four to five feet from heel to heel, and a standard bed pillow, less the cover, was placed under her buttocks; there was dried blood both under her body and covering the entire head, mouth, and ears.”

The police also “found the [bed] room light burning; and on the floor was a sheet and blanket and a pair of women's underpants and a quantity of dried blood and two brown hair combs. Also a trail of blood leading from where she was apparently attacked in the bedroom, and then apparently carried or dragged out into the living room.”

There were slight injuries to her external genitalia. No spermatozoa were found in her vagina. She had died of manual strangulation and strangulation by ligature.

Her body had been positioned so that her pubic area faced the front door of the apartment. It was this sight that greeted the person who found her, her younger brother Harry Halpern.

On August 22, the
Globe
ran a front-page article about Ida's death headlined W
IDOW
5TH
V
ICTIM OF
S
TRANGLER
.

Sixty-seven-year-old Jane Sullivan had moved to 435 Columbia Road in the Dorchester area of Boston on July 1, 1962. She died there on August 21, 1962.

Her body was not found until ten days later. The discovery was made by her nephew, forty-four-year-old Dennis Mahoney, at 3:10
P.M.
His mother, Jane's sister, had been worried about Jane because she hadn't heard from her in a while. Dennis's mother asked him to check up on his aunt.

He found her on her knees in the bathtub, partially submerged in six inches of water. Her feet were up over the back end of the tub, her buttocks thrust into the air. Her head was beneath the faucet. A housecoat covered the upper part of her body; her underpants were pulled down on her legs.

Although the corpse was badly decomposed, the autopsy found no evidence of trauma to the vagina or anus. There was matted blood on the right side of Jane's scalp. Two stockings were twined around her neck and knotted, and the right side of the hyoid bone had been fractured. Her bra was on the bathroom floor.

There was no evidence of forcible entry to the apartment (nor had there been in any of the previous cases), but there was blood on the floors of the kitchen, hall, and bathroom. Jane's handbag was open on the living room sofa. There was no evidence that the apartment had been ransacked.

A partial fingerprint was found at the scene. It could not be identified.

There were also bloodstains on the handle of a corn broom.

About 6:35
A.M
. on October 13, 1962, Violet Prioleau of 618 Columbus Avenue in Boston happened to glance out her apartment window at the rear of 791 Tremont Street. She saw in the ward what appeared to be a body. She caught the attention of John Reese, who worked at 791 Tremont. He investigated and confirmed that what Violet Prioleau had spotted was indeed a corpse. It was that of thirty-seven-year-old Modeste Freeman.

Reese called the police. They arrived five minutes later.

Modeste, who had lived at 394 Northampton Street in Boston, was not only far younger than the previous murder victims, but of a different race—black—as well.

If Ida Irga's slaying had been the most grotesque to date, Modeste Freeman's was surely the most barbaric. Her body was nude except for a piece of clothing wrapped around her neck. What had been a beautiful face was now a distorted pulp, the nose virtually flattened. Her skull was battered into a lump. She had died of strangulation by ligature and multiple blunt force trauma.

Her blood alcohol level was staggeringly high, something not found in any of the other victims.

A wooden stick had been shoved up her vagina.

At five-thirty in the afternoon of December 5, 1962, a student at the Carnegie Institute of Medical Technology, Gloria Todd, returned to the apartment at 315 Huntington Avenue in Boston that she shared with two fellow students, Audri Adams and Sophie Clark. What confronted her when she opened the door made her turn and rush headlong back down the building stairway. In her flight she encountered a neighbor, Anthony Riley of 313 Huntington Avenue. Later that evening, at police headquarters, Gloria told investigators, “He [Riley] spoke to me and I said, ‘Hi, Tony.' I stopped, and he said, ‘What's the matter?' and I said, ‘I don't know what to do,' and I felt as if I was going to faint, and he said ‘What's the matter?' and I told him what I had saw [
sic
].”

What she had seen was the body of twenty-year-old Sophie Clark.

Sophie lay on her back, legs apart, partially dressed in a print housecoat, a garter belt, black stockings, and black tie shoes. Beneath the garter belt she wore a menstrual harness with a fragment of the tab of a sanitary napkin attached to the metal clasp. Around her neck was a half-slip, and beneath that, a nylon stocking tied very tightly. Near her body were a ripped bra, bloodstained pink flowered underpants, and the sanitary napkin that had clearly been torn from her.

Gloria and Riley, accompanied by Nat Nelson, the janitor of the building, went back to Apartment 4-C. Riley, a nurse, felt Sophie for a pulse. There was none. With a surgical scissors, he removed a gag from her mouth. He attempted resuscitation.

A male friend of the victim arrived at the apartment nearly simultaneously with Gloria, Riley and Nelson.

The nurse's effort to revive Sophie failed. He called the police.

Sophie had suffered no external genital injuries, nor was there any trauma to her scalp, skull, or brain. Smears taken from her vagina and rectum showed no fresh blood, nor was there any menstrual discharge. She had died of strangulation by ligature.

A Salem cigarette butt was found in the toilet. The roommates smoked Salems, Newports, Pall Malls, and Marlboros.

A seminal stain was found on the rug in the living room near where Sophie lay.

And also among the effects in the apartment was discovered a typed document headed “‘Silk Stockings' From an Old Story Entitled, ‘The New Look' Or ‘Mother Should Have Stayed At Home.' ” It was an adolescent, quasi-literate fragment of pornography that told from the woman's point of view the tale of her seduction—which took place all because she wore silk stockings.

Like Modeste Freeman, Sophie Clark was black, although of mixed-race ancestry. Her lovely features, reproduced in newspaper photographs the day following the murder, had an almost Polynesian cast.

In six months, eight women had been savagely murdered. Six were white and late middle-aged to elderly (although Anna Slesers had looked somewhat younger than she was). The two most recent victims were young, black, and beautiful.

What were the other differences?

Modeste Freeman had been killed on the street, unlike any of the others. Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, and Jane Sullivan, all widowed, divorced, or never married, had lived alone. Sophie Clark, engaged to a young man from her home state of New Jersey had not. Margaret Davis, a street person, had lived wherever she could find shelter.

If there was any sort of pattern to these crimes, the next murder would introduce a further aberration to it.

Twenty-three-year-old Patricia Bissette, a secretary at the Boston firm of Engineering Systems Incorporated, was supposed to get a ride to work from her boss on the morning of December 31, 1962. When he knocked on her apartment door a little before 8:00
A.M
., though, she didn't answer. He left for work. The phone calls he placed to Patricia from there went unanswered as well. Finally he became worried enough about his secretary to return to her apartment at 515 Park Drive in Boston. With the help of the building's custodian, Pat's boss climbed through a window into her living room.