The Boston Stranglers (21 page)

The second person investigators speculate might have coached Albert for his role as a serial killer was George Nassar.

There is, however, a third party, who beyond the shadow of a doubt,
did
knowingly and quite intentionally provide Albert with information about the murders—while he was taking the latter's confession to them.

That was John Bottomly, during August and September of 1965.

As a tutor, Bottomly was persistent but ultimately inept. Lengthy as the confession was that he extracted from Albert, it is remarkably thin in incriminating detail, which explains why the only versions of it ever made public were abbreviated and heavily doctored.

The full version virtually exonerates DeSalvo.

When Bottomly quit the attorney general's office in 1966, he took the original tape recordings of DeSalvo's confession—some fifty-four hours' worth—with him. It was clear he didn't want the contents made public. Elliot Richardson, who succeeded Edward Brooke as chief law enforcement official of the Commonwealth, suspected that Bottomly had removed the recordings, but he wasn't sure of it until
Globe
reporter Ronald Wysocki confirmed the fact on February 14, 1968.

Interviewed by Wysocki, Bottomly agreed that the tapes were the state's property. He also told the reporter that he'd asked Richardson, Donald Conn, and Herbert Travers (the head of the attorney general's office's criminal division) what they wanted him to do with the tapes, but none of the men bothered to respond to the question.

“Does anybody want them now?” Bottomly blandly inquired of Wysocki.

Richardson apparently did. And he emphatically denied that Bottomly had ever said anything to him about the disposition of the recordings.

In the story he wrote for the
Globe
, Wysocki compared his effort to get Bottomly to reveal the location of the tapes to “playing ‘20 Questions.' ”

“Do you know where they are?” Wysocki asked.

“Yes,” Bottomly replied.

“Where?”

“In a bank vault,” Bottomly said.

“Who got the vault?” Wysocki asked.

“I did.”

“Who has the key?”

“I have.”

“Are there any other keys?” Wysocki wanted to know.

“Not to my knowledge,” Bottomly said.

“Then you have the tapes,” Wysocki deduced.

“No,” Bottomly said. “The bank has them.”

“But you have the only key?” the reporter asked.

“To the best of my knowledge,” Bottomly replied. Then he said, “Why don't you ask the really important question? Why hasn't the Attorney General come and gotten the tapes—because they're not going to try the guy anyhow.”

That much was true.

Shortly after Albert's murder in 1973, there were calls from the press that the tapes be made public. And in fact some news organizations did eventually acquire recordings of one sort or another of Albert describing some of the murders. At least one of these tapes seems to have been made in 1967, well after Gerold Frank's book had been published—and well after the purported Strangler had read it.

Bottomly's own transcript of the 1965 interrogations still exists. It includes a list of the questions Bottomly would put to Albert, and some notes to himself that the Task Force chief had scribbled.

“Start by learning all you can about Albert,” one of these notes reads. “Learn all you can.”

Having made what preparations he felt were necessary, Bottomly went down to Bridgewater in early August of 1965 to begin interrogating the man who so badly wanted to be known as the Strangler.

 

Albert was eager to talk, which Bottomly encouraged by adopting a jocular yet sympathetic manner toward him. (In this respect, at least, Bottomly showed some ability as an interviewer.) Albert boasted of his sexual exploits. Bottomly responded with the appropriate exclamations (“Fantastic!”) of awe and admiration. Albert, warmed by the flattery of this important man, began to regard the Task Force chief as his buddy—precisely as Bottomly had intended he should.

The con man had fallen for yet another con.

Albert spoke at length of his embittered love for Irmgard: “I gave her everything. I gave her every dime I ever had. Never kept a dime in my pocket. I didn't drink. Didn't go out anywhere. Didn't go out nights for two years.”

“She gave nothing in return,” Bottomly observed.

“Nothing,” Albert said. “Ah, you might say I tried to buy her. That's one way of looking at it. But I loved her so much that I would give her anything. See?”

He grimly predicted that Irmgard might change her name, might remarry, might flee to the ends of the earth. But she would never escape his memory.

Bottomly told Albert that a detective had interviewed Irmgard at her new home out west.

“How did she talk about me?” Albert asked eagerly.

“What kind of attitude did she say?”

“Oh terrific,” Bottomly assured him. “She was—couldn't praise you enough.”

“She still cares for me in many ways,” Albert said.

“Oh, yes,” Bottomly said. “Yes.”

The Task Force chief explained to Albert how Edward Brooke had charged him with the responsibility of solving the strangling murders.

“In other words,” Albert commented, “he gave you something you couldn't handle?”

“I don't know,” Bottomly replied. “Here we are. Maybe we could handle it.”

Albert then remarked that in the six months that had elapsed since he'd begun confessing to the murders, the Task Force hadn't been able to find a trace of evidence to connect him to the crimes. All they had was one man's (interestingly, Albert here referred to himself in the third person) statement of guilt.

“That's right,” Bottomly said. “I couldn't do it without your admission.”

“Right,” Albert said. “But I—I—”

“And even more than that,” Bottomly continued, “I have to convince myself that your admissions aren't self-serving. I've explained this to you.”

“Yuh, you—”

“You—you've got motives that, uh, could explain why you're confessing—I'm not saying they are—but they could explain why you're confessing though you may not have done [all the murders]. You might have done some and you tie them all in. You might have done one, and you might not have even done any.”

“That's right,” Albert said.

He spoke scornfully of Jon Asgeirsson, telling Bottomly that the information he'd given the attorney in January of 1965 (when he'd told Asgeirsson he was the Strangler and furnished details about a few of the murders to bolster his claim) had been a complete fabrication. He also told Bottomly that it was Asgeirsson who'd advised him in early 1965 to feign hallucinations so he'd be transferred out of the East Cambridge jail and into a mental institution while awaiting further legal action on the Green Man charges.

Bottomly asked Albert if Ames Robey had been a party to this fakery.

“Nah,” Albert said dismissively. “He has no brains to have any conspiracy, to be honest witcha.”

Albert did not confess to the murders in their chronological order—probably because, despite his much-vaunted memory, he not only had terrible trouble recalling
when
some of them occurred but even
that
some of them had occurred. But if Albert couldn't come up with a date, Bottomly would oblige with it—along with any other relevant details Albert might require to flesh out his rambling fantasy of rape and murder.

That Albert was not only receptive to these cues but was also desperately trying to anticipate the kind of response Bottomly wanted, and to gauge from Bottomly's reaction whether he was answering the Task Force chief's questions “correctly,” is obvious in the following exchange about the murder of Anna Slesers. Bottomly had asked Albert to describe the victim's clothing.

“And there was that on that there on her,” Albert concluded, in what must have been a near-babble.

Despite Albert's apparent desire to get off the subject of the housecoat, Bottomly kept pressing the point, asking what color the robe's lining had been.

He had certainly tried. And failed. The proper answer to the question about the lining of the housecoat would have been “red.” The garment was thus described in the autopsy report. That and the police report taken at the crime scene stated that the outer part of Anna's robe was blue cloth.

The “Strangle Worksheet” chart published in the Record had described the housecoat as “blue quilted taffeta” with no reference to any kind of lining. One wonders if this was where Albert got
his
description of the robe, and whether his impression that there was something “very funny” about it referred to the quilting he'd read of in this paper.

Bottomly had further questions about the crime scene that Albert couldn't answer.

There was in fact a wastebasket in Anna's kitchen, and bits and pieces of its contents were strewn about the floor near it. Anna's killer may have rifled the basket, for whatever bizarre reason.

This fact had not been printed in the newspapers, and Albert was clearly unaware of it.

Albert was on a little surer ground when Bottomly questioned him about Anna's personal interests.

The “Strangle Worksheet” had described Anna as enjoying “symphonic music.” The radio component of her stereo system had been turned off, although the record player itself was still on when her body was discovered. This fact was also publicized in the press.

Albert's problem with dates was given a slapstick exposition when he and Bottomly tried to establish exactly when he was supposed to have killed Nina Nichols.