A Death in Belmont (16 page)

D
ESALVO TOLD BAILEY
that he wanted to confess to thirteen murders in exchange for immunity from prosecution and transfer to a medical facility where he could get treatment for his psychological problems. He also wanted to sell the book rights to his story so that he could support his family from prison. Over the next several months DeSalvo submitted to an interrogation under hypnosis and recorded fifty hours of detailed confessions for John Bottomly, head of the Strangler Bureau. The transcripts were eventually released to the public in the form of highly processed excerpts in a book called
Confessions of the Boston Strangler
, by George William Rae. In the first chapter of his book, Rae explains to his readers that in order to protect DeSalvo's legal rights, the words attributed to him “are not presented as legally exact quotations—although they come from impeccable sources and follow closely his intellectual and grammatical formulations.”

Rae altered DeSalvo's testimony to give him some legal protec
tions, but there is no reason to believe—and no one has ever suggested—that he invented anything outright. Compressed into the kind of smooth-flowing narrative that Rae created, the tapes certainly did seem to provide an abundance of information that only a killer could know. The raw transcripts tell a different story, however. In them DeSalvo's descriptions of the murders are clumsy and halting, and he often gropes his way through the details only with the help of John Bottomly, who breaks with accepted procedure and keeps hinting at the right answers.

Doubts about DeSalvo's confession arose almost immediately. Not only did many cops dismiss DeSalvo as a braggart and a punk, but they deeply resented the fact that John Bottomly had been handed the Strangler Bureau without any experience in criminal investigation. To make matters worse, any number of important people had something to gain from a successful conclusion to the Strangler investigation, and that fact alone cast doubt on virtually everything that DeSalvo said. Bottomly could clear the entire slate of murders and disband the Strangler Bureau, which would be a tremendous boon to his political career. Attorney General Ed Brooke could make good use of the success in his upcoming senate campaign. F. Lee Bailey could take credit for yet another high-profile case. And Albert DeSalvo—already facing life in prison for serial rape—could sell the rights to his story and become a star in his own psychological drama.

Certainly jailhouse confessions are a dubious proposition. Of the two hundred or so convicted murderers in this country who have been released from prison because they were later proved to be innocent, one out of five confessed to the crime. The interrogation process can be so coercive, in other words, that innocent and guilty alike cooperate simply to put an end to their misery. And DeSalvo
wasn't a run-of-the-mill criminal; he was a high-profile rapist who had every reason to cooperate. Comfortably settled in prison with a high-profile lawyer and a flourishing drug racket, DeSalvo stood to reap huge financial benefits from movie and book deals by claiming to be the Boston Strangler. But the fact that he—or anyone else—stood to gain does not, in and of itself, prove that his confessions are false. The people who thought so were falling for a classic logical fallacy known as “asserting the consequent.” Rain makes the ground wet, but wet ground doesn't prove it has rained; someone could just have turned on the sprinkler. Likewise with DeSalvo: The fact that some murder suspects falsely confess in exchange for movie deals doesn't mean that every suspect with a movie deal has falsely confessed; guilty men like movie deals as well.

The other main reason people doubted DeSalvo's confessions were the numerous errors and blank spots in his memory. The extent of these errors was not commonly known until 1995, when a journalist named Susan Kelly reexamined transcripts of the original confessions in a book called
The Boston Stranglers
. According to Kelly's thoroughly researched book, much of DeSalvo's confessions was wrong, and the parts that weren't wrong could easily have come from newspaper accounts and prompting by John Bottomly. Every murder had these errors. When questioned by Bottomly about Anna Slesers, for example, DeSalvo could not easily remember the color of the lining of her housecoat, whether there was a wastebasket in her bedroom, or what kind of music was playing on her phonograph. And there were more significant errors as well: He could not remember the date Nina Nichols was killed—even though it had appeared in the newspapers. He could not remember her street address. He could not remember what floor she lived on. He said he raped Helen Blake when in fact she was not raped; he
said he raped Ida Irga when in fact she was not raped; he said he raped Mary Sullivan when in fact she was not raped.

On and on the list went, thirteen murders half remembered by a man who claimed he'd committed them but who mainly seemed able to recite details that had already appeared in the papers. Even more damning, some of the facts that he got wrong were also reported incorrectly in the newspapers. It looked, in other words, as though DeSalvo had just studied the newspaper accounts and absorbed everything, correct or otherwise. Kelly's explanation for DeSalvo's errors was that he was lying, and that's certainly a possibility. But it's not the
only
possibility. Perfect recall by criminals—by anyone—does not exist, and exceptionally violent incidents are known to trigger temporary amnesia not only in eyewitnesses but in the perpetrators as well. Sirhan Sirhan readily admitted killing Robert Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel in 1968, but he remembered almost nothing of how he had done it. Soldiers who have won the Medal of Honor for heroism during combat typically remember very little of the incident that won them the medal. Furthermore, murderers read the newspapers like everyone else, so not only correct details but
incorrect
ones as well could conceivably work their way into a confused killer's memory. DeSalvo, in fact, told John Bottomly that one of the reasons he remembered the names of his victims was because he read them in the newspaper the next day.

In 1984 in Annapolis, Maryland, a teenage boy named Larry Swartz had a brief, unpleasant exchange with his foster mother and then shocked himself by suddenly grabbing a ten-pound splitting maul and burying it in the back of her head. He went on to kill his father with a knife before going to bed and then called 911 in the morning. Swartz eventually confessed to the police, but his memory was highly distorted by the sheer violence of the scene. He remem
bered growling like a dog while he was doing the killing and also remembered looking down from the ceiling as if watching someone else. His memories were fractured and distorted and significantly inconsistent with the evidence. Those memories, however, may well show what murder looks like through the eyes of a murderer.

“He told me his body was working very quickly, his mind was working very slowly,” Swartz's lawyer explained to a local reporter. “He would see himself stab [his mother] in the throat. His mind would somehow say, ‘God, you've got to stop that!' But by the time the thought had formed, he would see himself stabbing her again. He described it to me as, ‘My mind never caught up with my body.' Then he turned around and saw his father standing there on the landing with what he called a blank look. He heard himself growl like a wolf or a dog and realized it was himself. He sensed himself taking one giant step and his father fell back into the computer room. He recalls his father trying to shut the door and Larry just brushing it aside. Larry told me it was like the door wasn't even there.”

The psychological term for this is “dissociation”; it is an adaptive mechanism that allows people who are undergoing extreme trauma—either killers or victims—to insulate themselves from reality. Dissociation does not open the door to violence; rather, it is triggered by the first puzzling blow. After that both killer and victim find themselves in a slow-motion dream that neither can escape. It is an odd and sluggish dream where the inner narration in the mind of the killer—“I can't believe I'm strangling this woman”—is roughly mirrored by the inner narration of the victim, who is thinking, “I can't believe this man is actually strangling me.” Victims of near-fatal car accidents often dissociate, as do people who survive falls from great heights or are attacked by wild animals. Time slows
down in a dissociative state. There is a sense of unreality, as if what is happening has to be a dream. Certain details become very vivid, and others are completely wiped out. In Swartz's case he hit his mother with the splitting maul and then had a memory of her breathing so loudly that he felt compelled to make it stop by cutting her throat with a knife. In reality his mother was so badly wounded that her breathing must have been nearly inaudible, but Larry Swartz's mind fixated on it to the point where it overwhelmed every other sound in the room.

After the murders Swartz regained his senses enough to try to hide the evidence, but police easily linked him to the crime. When he finally gave his confession, he sobbed so violently that he could barely speak. He spent hours with the police trying to reconstruct what had happened that night, but his memory never matched the evidence that was found at the scene. The most puzzling of these inconsistencies were shoeless footprints in the snow that left the Swartz house and meandered half a mile around the neighborhood before returning home. Larry Swartz was the only person who could have left those tracks, but he had no memory of it. All he had was an unexplained gash on one foot and a dim recollection of a “burning sensation”—because his feet were frozen?—at some point after the murders.

If Swartz could run a half mile barefoot through the snow and not remember it the next day, DeSalvo could forget the color of Anna Slesers's housecoat or even the exact manner of her violation. DeSalvo took credit for thirteen murders in all, including the brutal clubbing death of Mary Brown several days before Bessie Goldberg's murder, and the death by heart attack of an elderly woman who caught him breaking into her apartment. Neither the clubbing death nor the heart attack had been considered “Boston
Stranglings,” and yet he had claimed them anyway. The amount of raw information in even the most cursory newspaper articles was enormous, on the order of fifteen or twenty core facts for each murder. And there was probably an equal number of lesser details—the color of Nina Nichols's housecoat, for example—that would never have made it into the papers. Had DeSalvo not killed anyone, he would have had to memorize as many as five hundred random facts about the murders, a sort of grim trivia contest. But what would constitute a “high” or a “low” score in such a contest? If DeSalvo got, say,
half
the details correct, was that a lot or a little?

Put another way, if a man went on blind dates with thirteen different women and was asked years later what the women had worn the night he took them out, what they'd ordered for dinner, what music was playing, and what the waiter looked like, would a score of 50 percent be reasonable? Ten percent? These were not dates, though, they were murders, and killers who dissociate tend to fixate on certain details of their crimes and block out others. That could make a culprit's testimony both very compelling and very spotty. DeSalvo's testimony, if true, pointed strongly toward some degree of dissociation.

“When it turned, it did it fast,” he told Bottomly about his sudden slide into violence. “I was only angry at two of the Strangler's women, both of them had said something to me that made me angry. The rest of them, I don't know, I just found myself doing it to them…either in a daze or like a dream or standing there watching myself do it. And sometimes after, I would not think it was me with my arm around the old woman's neck, or me with my hand on a woman's throat and she hadn't done nothing to me, in fact she'd been very good to me. All I know is that something would happen and I would have my arms around their necks.”

I
T WAS ONLY
a matter of time before someone remembered Bessie Goldberg. DeSalvo never mentioned her name, but the murder was almost identical to many others that he confessed to, and those confessions were filled with references to Belmont. Any alert investigator would eventually get around to wondering whether there was some connection between the two. My mother, like a lot of people, always thought that Roy Smith might be innocent, so she was not surprised when a detective from the Strangler Bureau called and asked if she would answer some questions about Albert DeSalvo. Sometime in early 1966, Lt. Andrew Tuney and Detective Steve Delaney drove out to Belmont, parked in front of our house at 21 Cedar Road, and walked up the brick path to our door.

Delaney was not new to the Goldberg murder. Two years earlier, just after he'd started working at the Strangler Bureau, Attorney General Ed Brooke had stopped by his desk to ask a favor. Delaney's job was to read through the crates of files, looking for
patterns to the murders, and Brooke wanted him to add the Goldberg murder to the list. Were there similarities, Brooke wanted to know, between the modus operandi of the Goldberg murder and the other murders?

It was a politically risky request because Smith had already been convicted—in fact his case was currently under appeal—and Brooke was essentially suggesting that someone else might have committed the murder. If the press found out, they would have a field day with it. A couple of weeks later Brooke ran across Delaney in the office and asked him if he'd had time to go through the Goldberg file. Delaney told him that he had, and that the MO had seemed to him exactly the same.

Brooke said he was sorry to hear that—very sorry—because word had gotten out that the Strangler Bureau was still investigating the Goldberg murder and it had turned into a political bombshell. Delaney would have to give the file back. According to Delaney, the Middlesex district attorney had gone to the State Supreme Court and complained that the attorney general's office could not simultaneously review the Roy Smith verdict and also explore the possibility that someone else had committed the murder. It was a conflict of interest. The judges agreed and ordered Brooke to reclaim the file from Delaney.

Still, Delaney had seen enough for him to have serious doubts about Smith's guilt. Even though he was young, he had already seen so much rule bending in the system—by everyone from beat cops to county prosecutors—that he took nothing for granted. Such skepticism about the criminal justice system is rare in a cop, and it's probably no coincidence that soon thereafter, he quit the police force and went on to work as an investigator for F. Lee Bailey. Decades later, he found work helping to overturn bogus rape and
murder convictions with a legal aid group in New Jersey called Centurion Ministries. The misconduct that Centurion has uncovered is staggering. One prosecutor they investigated secretly paid his main witness seventy thousand dollars in exchange for crucial testimony. Another prosecutor sent a man named Jimmy Wingo to the electric chair with the unsupported testimony of a lone witness who had lied under oath. She lied, Centurion discovered, because a deputy sheriff had threatened to take her children away if she didn't; he also coerced her into sleeping with him. In yet another case, an innocent man got a life sentence only because the prosecutor relentlessly pressured three uncooperative witnesses to lie in court. “I will eat stone,” the man told the court after being found guilty. “I will eat dust. I will eat anything…to prove my innocence. I am not the man.” Centurion eventually got the case overturned and was commended by a higher court for their work.

That phase of Delaney's life was still decades in his future, but when he and Andy Tuney drove out to Belmont to talk to my mother, he was already a young man keenly attuned to the idea of injustice. Tuney did not necessarily share Delaney's idealism—or cynicism, depending on how you looked at it—but he was a seasoned investigator who could be counted on to do a thorough job. He had already talked to Russ Blomerth about the kind of worker DeSalvo was. “Couldn't get him mad,” Tuney had written in his notes about DeSalvo. “Never got tired. Very strong. Unbelievable strength. Didn't show any great interest re: stranglings.” Blomerth said that DeSalvo had come recommended by a man named Andy Amerault, who had worked with DeSalvo at the Monroe Shipyards. Blomerth hired him on September 4, 1962, a few days after the fifth strangling in Boston, and let him go the following August. In that time Blomerth said that DeSalvo worked briefly on another job in
Belmont and then moved on to my parents' house. He worked roughly forty hours a week but had no set schedule and occasionally spent time on his own. On February 18—the date that Erika Wilsing was attacked in her apartment—DeSalvo was not on the clock for Russ Blomerth. On March 4 and 5—two of the possible dates for the murder of Mary Brown in Lawrence—DeSalvo was also not on the clock. He worked at my parents' house Wednesday, March 6, and Thursday, March 7, and then returned the following Monday. That was the day Bessie Goldberg was killed.

At the knock my mother opened the front door, let the two detectives into the living room, and offered them a seat on the couch. Tuney was a tall, attention-getting man who was already a grandfather at forty-three but still managed to maintain a certain reputation around town. (“Good booze and bad broads is what keeps us going,” he once told a newspaper reporter about detective work.) Delaney was recently separated from his wife and trying to decide whether or not to continue police work. My mother brought out a calendar with the dates of the studio job marked on it and described the incident in the basement and the incident with her student, Marie. She showed them the photograph of her and Al and me and pointed out the ladder in the background that Al had been standing on when she told him about the Goldberg murder.

My mother wanted to know what would have happened if she had gone down into the basement. The detectives agreed that DeSalvo wouldn't have dared kill her, but they said he might have attempted a very forceful seduction. If he had killed her, they reasoned, he immediately would have become a suspect, and he was too smart for that. Delaney asked if he could keep the calendar and my mother said that that would be all right, and after half an hour or so the men got up and put on their coats and hats and said good
bye. Either that same day or the next—Delaney doesn't remember—the two men marked their car odometer in front of my parents' house and then drove through Belmont to Scott Road. The distance was 1.2 miles.

Was it possible? Could DeSalvo have gotten into his car, driven to Scott Road, knocked on Bessie Goldberg's door, talked his way in, raped her, killed her, and then gotten back to our house before my mother and I arrived home? The trickiest—or least likely—part of this scenario was on Scott Road, where DeSalvo would have had to slip unnoticed past the neighborhood children. He also would have had to get into and out of the Goldberg house during the forty-eight-minute window between Roy Smith's departure and Israel Goldberg's arrival. He would be threading an awfully small needle to do it, but it was still possible.

Another problem was the location: According to the FBI's analysis, all the murders DeSalvo claimed to have committed were in apartment buildings where many people came and went and residents might not be surprised if a maintenance man knocked on their door. But this was a house in the suburbs where a stranger would stand out immediately because everyone on the street knew one another by their first names. Once you have DeSalvo in the house the crime is pure Boston Strangler, but how do you get him there? And why would a killer who claimed to have developed such a perfect technique for killing women suddenly abandon it for something far riskier?

Tuney and Delaney parked on Scott Road and walked around the Goldberg house, noting where the front and back doors were and how far Smith had to walk to get to the bus stop on Pleasant Street. One of the first things that struck Delaney was that the Goldberg house was easily approached from the back; it was a route,
in fact, that neighborhood children said they used as a shortcut. If a killer wanted to enter the Goldberg house unseen from Scott Road, all he had to do was cross behind the Hartunians' house on the corner of Pleasant Street and walk about 120 feet to the Goldbergs' backyard. Workmen would not ordinarily use the front door of a house like the Goldbergs', so Bessie might not be suspicious if a man knocked on her kitchen door and said, for example, that he worked for the Belmont Water Department and wanted to check her meter.

But even that maneuver might not have been necessary. Beryl Cohen didn't emphasize this at trial, but the children of Scott Road played in front of the Goldberg home for only part of the time that Bessie was supposedly alone inside. Roy Smith left the house shortly after three o'clock, right around the time that Dougie Dreyer, Myrna Spector, and Melissa Lovett were walking up Pleasant Street and approaching the corner of Scott Road. They remembered passing Smith on the corner, and they remembered that he seemed in a hurry. The children went to their respective homes, and Dougie told the Belmont police that he didn't go back outside again until 3:25, which was when the school bus usually dropped Susan Faunce off at the corner. When Dougie went back out onto the street, he saw Susan standing in front of Myrna Spector's house talking to her through an open window. The time was 3:30 p.m. From that moment on, the neighborhood children were playing kickball directly in front of the Goldberg house until Israel came home, and anyone who wanted to enter or exit unnoticed would have had to do it through the back. No one, however, was watching the Goldberg house from 3:05 to 3:25. That did not mean that Smith was innocent, but it certainly made it less sure that he was guilty.

If Delaney was the idealist of the two, Tuney was the seasoned
pragmatist. He'd been in police work long enough to know that the politics of a case are everything, and that if you ignore them you'll get nowhere. Consequently, the first thing he'd done on the way to Scott Road was to stop at the Belmont police department and let the police chief know they were in the area. It wasn't required but it was a matter of respect, and it may have been a courtesy that paid off. Delaney is not positive where they got this information, but he believes it was from someone at the Belmont police department. Apparently a neighbor of the Goldbergs' had seen a suspicious person on Scott Road on the afternoon of the murder and had called the Belmont police with the information, but they had not followed up on it. The lead, such as it was, now belonged to Tuney and Delaney.

The neighbor turned out to be an elderly man with a bedridden wife, and Delaney has a memory of standing back while Tuney asked the man to repeat his story. On the afternoon that Bessie Goldberg was killed, the neighbor said, he'd been approached by a man in work clothes who had offered to paint his house as a side job on weekends. The man was white and probably in his thirties and—in Delaney's mind, at least—roughly matched a description of DeSalvo. The old man said he declined the work offer by saying that a private nurse he'd hired to help his wife needed him back in the house. The incident had stuck in his mind, though, and an hour later—when he saw police cars and an ambulance on Scott Road—he'd called the police department.

By then, however, every cop in Massachusetts was already looking for Roy Smith, and a white man walking around a white neighborhood knocking on doors would have meant absolutely nothing. That was, however, something that DeSalvo said he often did to find weekend work. Maybe he knocked on Goldberg's door and Bessie
opened, Delaney thought. Maybe she let him in. Maybe he said he needed to check her water meter or offered to paint her living room. Maybe she just turned away for a moment and he was on her. It was a classic Boston Strangling except that DeSalvo never confessed to it and Roy Smith was convicted of it; in every other respect it was identical to the thirteen murders he claimed to have committed.

Delaney and Tuney finished up on Scott Road and drove back to Boston without anything concrete to report. It was a delicate line of inquiry anyway—what with Smith's case under appeal and the attorney general himself warned away from making any awkward comparisons to other murders. It was a case, however, that Delaney never managed to get out of his head.