Search for the Strangler (8 page)

Albert DeSalvo’s family would soon face a storm of its own, however. On the morning of October 27, 1964, the wife of a Boston
University professor was startled awake by a strange man standing in her bedroom. In a soothing voice, the dark figure whispered,
“You know me.” Then, walking toward the bed, he told her he was a police officer and wanted to ask her a few questions. The
frightened woman, leaping out of bed, noticed something shiny in the intruder’s hand. It was a knife. Ordering her not to
look at him, the intruder tied her hands, blindfolded her, and forced a gag into her mouth. Continuing to whisper, he said,
“I won’t hurt you.” Then he lifted the woman’s nightgown and began fondling her breasts, all the while asking for her forgiveness.
The victim was certain she was about to be raped, but the intruder apologized once again and left the room as quietly as he
had come.

At Cambridge Police headquarters, the shaken victim gave investigators a detailed description of her attacker. The suspect
had slick black hair, a hooked nose, and a medium build. He was wearing some kind of work uniform consisting of a dark green
shirt and green pants. Investigators were familiar with the suspect the victim had described. An alert had gone out to all
law enforcement agencies in New England to be on the lookout for a sexual predator known as the Green Man, who was wanted
in Connecticut for several sex assaults and break-ins. A Cambridge detective took one look at the police sketch and knew he
had seen this man before. The detective didn’t know him as the Green Man, though. He knew him as the Measuring Man.

In early November 1964, ten months after the murder of Mary Sullivan, Albert DeSalvo was positively identified by the Cambridge
victim and placed under arrest. During his lengthy confession, DeSalvo admitted breaking into four hundred apartments in the
greater Boston area and sexually assaulting three hundred women in Connecticut and Rhode Island. During one trip to Connecticut,
DeSalvo claimed, he had assaulted four women in one day.

There is no question that Albert DeSalvo was a sexual predator, but the sheer volume of his claimed exploits should have raised
eyebrows. If DeSalvo had committed three hundred sex assaults in Southern New England over a two-year period, one would think
he had no time for anything else, including his job and his family. Yet DeSalvo’s employer, Russell Blomerth, would later
tell the police that DeSalvo was both hardworking and reliable. In any case, DeSalvo was booked on rape charges and shipped
to Bridgewater State Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

Although he was a veteran of reform school and jail, nothing prepared DeSalvo for what he saw at Bridgewater. Called “the
chicken coop” because of its unsanitary conditions, Bridgewater was a sprawling asylum for the insane and sexually dangerous.
Built in the 1800s, the institution housed many of the region’s forgotten souls. The forensic psychiatrist Ames Robey recalls
a story he heard when he first started work at Bridgewater. “Lives were expendable at Bridgewater,” he says. “The place was
a real pit. Guards told me that back in the 1940s to amuse themselves they’d put a patient in a cell in his underwear. Then
they’d open the windows and place bets on just how long it would take the patient to die from the cold.”

Even in the 1960s, many cells at Bridgewater lacked toilets or beds. Inmates had to wrap dirty wool blankets around themselves
and try to find a soft place on the cold concrete floor. Bridgewater, in short, resembled a medieval dungeon more than a hospital.
Dr. Robey was the first to interview DeSalvo when DeSalvo arrived at Bridgewater. “I asked him how many women he had assaulted,”
Robey recalls. “Albert first said six hundred. Then, a bit later, it was up to a thousand.”

Robey says he quickly realized his new patient had a vivid imagination. “He wanted to be important,” Robey recalls. “If you
said you broke into five homes, he’d say he broke into fifty.” DeSalvo was a liar, Robey knew, but he also had an undeniable
charm. “You had a tendency to like him,” the psychiatrist says, “and the thought of him becoming violent just wasn’t there.”
After meeting with DeSalvo once a day for the thirty-five-day court-ordered observation period, Robey concluded that DeSalvo
had a sociopathic personality but was competent to stand trial in the Green Man case.

In December 1964, DeSalvo was sent to the East Cambridge jail to await trial. Once there, his cocksureness disappeared, and
he began acting like some of the mentally ill patients he’d seen at Bridgewater, telling his jailers he heard voices and also
that he thought of killing himself. After one month in the jail, he was returned to Bridgewater.

In February 1965, DeSalvo would get his first hearing in front of a judge on the Green Man charges. Robey, the only witness
testifying on his behalf, said DeSalvo’s condition had grown worse and he was no longer competent to stand trial. DeSalvo
then took the stand and told the judge he was competent to stand trial, but he needed better psychiatric care than Bridgewater
could provide. DeSalvo maintained he was treated like an animal and that doctors at the hospital were not interested in helping
him gain control over his powerful sexual urges. The judge was not swayed, and DeSalvo was sent back to Bridgewater.

Robey, who continued to treat DeSalvo, found himself awed by the man’s memory. “He had a photographic memory,” Robey says.
“I’d bring him into a room full of doctors, and he’d tell us the exact seats we sat in two weeks before.” Robey also noticed
that DeSalvo had struck up a friendship with George Nassar, another inmate.

Nassar had been sent to Bridgewater for observation after his arrest for the cold-blooded murder of a gas station attendant
in Andover, an upscale Boston suburb near Lawrence, where another Boston Strangler victim, Joann Graff, was killed. On September
29, 1964, the attendant had been checking gas pumps when a man in a tan trench coat came up behind him and plunged a knife
into his back. Irving Hilton, the victim, begged for his life, but to no avail. The attacker pulled a .22 automatic from his
trench coat and shot Hilton six times. At that moment, Rita Boute pulled into the service station with her fourteen-year-old
daughter. When Boute heard the gunfire, she and her daughter ducked beneath the steering column. The killer, who had seen
the car pull in, calmly walked up and stared at the terrified pair. He tried to open the car door, but, finding it locked,
he instead tried to fire a shot through the windshield. Fortunately, no bullets were left in the gun. The man in the tan trench
coat got into his car and sped away.

Rita Boute gave a near-perfect description of the killer. She said he had wavy, brown hair, rigid cheekbones, and black, soulless
eyes. A police artist drew a picture that bore a striking resemblance to George Nassar, a Lawrence native who had been released
from prison in 1962 after serving time for murder.

Nassar had been arrested at age fifteen for fatally shooting a grocery store owner during a holdup and sentenced to thirty
years to life. While in prison the young man showed a keen aptitude for learning and convinced local ministers that he had
changed his ways. The ministers petitioned for Nassar’s release and he was freed after serving almost fourteen years. When
they compared Nassar’s mug shot to the police sketch, investigators were sure he was the one who had murdered the gas station
attendant. They traced Nassar to an address in Boston’s South End, only a few blocks from several Boston Strangler crime scenes.
When they searched Nassar’s apartment for evidence in the gas station murder, they found a police and a doctor’s uniform in
his bedroom closet. Nassar could have used these disguises to gain access to the strangling victims’ apartments.

Ames Robey interviewed Nassar when he arrived at Bridgewater. “He had a real hatred toward women,” recalls Robey, who already
had interviewed several suspects in the Boston Strangler case and had helped the task force create a psychological profile
of the killer. According to Robey, “Albert DeSalvo did not fit the profile at all. But George Nassar fit it ideally. He had
a real hatred of women and was prone to homicidal urges.” In any case, after meeting Nassar, DeSalvo underwent a personality
change. Robey says that before Nassar arrived at Bridgewater, DeSalvo was quite friendly with the other inmates and even the
guards. But after Nassar arrived, he behaved as if he and Nassar were the only two inmates in the hospital. The two spent
most of their time together, in the common room in the facility. “The other inmates knew they were not to be disturbed, unless
you wanted to be the victim of an accident, like falling in the shower and breaking your neck,” says Robey. When hospital
guards got too close, the two would immediately stop talking. One former Bridgewater inmate says he heard the men discussing
the Boston Strangler case. The inmate remembers Nassar quizzing DeSalvo about details, after which the pair would go over
the story again and again. “DeSalvo was a punk, but I was scared shitless of George,” the former inmate says.

The once chatty DeSalvo also stopped talking to Robey, but in this case, the psychiatrist claims DeSalvo was merely acting
on the advice of his new lawyer, a brash young attorney named F. Lee Bailey.

Francis Lee Bailey was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1933. His father was in advertising, and his mother was a nursery
school teacher. Lee, a fair athlete and a star pupil, finished high school at age sixteen and entered Harvard University.
After Harvard, where Bailey was an average student, he joined the U.S. Navy and enrolled in naval aviation school. Finishing
there, he transferred to the U.S. Marine Corps with his heart set on flying Sabre Jets. However, when his squadron’s chief
legal advisor was killed in a plane crash, Bailey was ordered to fill the position. His chance of becoming a pilot was over,
but his legal career was born.

Bailey worked on several cases during his two remaining years of military service. Sometimes he worked as a prosecutor, other
times as a defense attorney, all the while soaking up the protocol and nuances of military law. After his discharge, he worked
as an investigator for a Boston lawyer and put himself through law school at Boston University. He graduated in 1960 and hung
out his shingle that fall. Bailey quickly built a reputation around local courthouses as a lawyer willing to use any method
at his disposal to help his client and promote himself. Working hard to become a superstar lawyer, even more famous than Clarence
Darrow had been, Bailey hired a driver and was the first attorney to customize his automobile with a swivel chair in front
on the passenger side so he could swivel around to chat with reporters tagging along in the backseat.

Bailey’s first high-profile case came in 1961, when he got a call from the brother of Sam Sheppard. Sam Sheppard, a physician,
was serving ten years in an Ohio prison for the murder of his pregnant wife, who had been bludgeoned to death in the couple’s
Cleveland area home in 1954. Sheppard claimed he had walked in on the killer, who had knocked him unconscious with a blow
to the head, but prosecutors argued he had murdered his wife after she discovered he was having an affair with a medical technician.
During Sheppard’s trial, the jurors were allowed to read every salacious detail of the affair in the newspapers and even permitted
to talk with reporters. The case, which made headlines across the country, would later spawn the television series
The Fugitive.

F. Lee Bailey filed an appeal of Sheppard’s conviction, claiming the defendant had not received a fair trial because the jury
had been polluted by the publicity surrounding the case. A federal judge agreed and released Sheppard in the summer of 1964,
pending a retrial. The case was retried two years later, in the fall of 1966. This time, with Bailey as his defense attorney,
Sam Sheppard was found not guilty of his wife’s murder.

Bailey claims he first heard about Albert DeSalvo from his client George Nassar in March 1965. In his book
The Defense Never Rests,
Bailey relates that Nassar mentioned DeSalvo and the possibility of making money from the Boston Strangler case. “If a man
was the strangler,” George Nassar said, “the guy who killed all those women, would it be possible for him to publish his story
and make some money with it?” “I had to smile,” Bailey writes. “It’s perfectly possible to publish, but I wouldn’t advise
it. I suspect that a confession in book form would be judged completely voluntary and totally admissible. I also suspect that
it would provide the means by which the author would put himself in the electric chair.”

Bailey claims Nassar also pleaded with him to travel to Bridgewater State Hospital to meet DeSalvo, after which Bailey contacted
the Boston Police Department and asked for information to help him determine whether DeSalvo was involved in the Boston Strangler
case. Bailey writes that police gave him answers to five questions that only the killer could know. Bailey says he quizzed
DeSalvo on those unreleased crime scene details, and that DeSalvo passed that test.

Knowing the publicity that was likely to result from this sensational case, Bailey advised DeSalvo’s wife to take her young
children as far away from Boston as possible. Irmgard DeSalvo told Bailey she had a sister living in Colorado, and Bailey
gave her money for three plane tickets.

Special Officer Jim Mellon knew something was amiss with the DeSalvo case because Albert DeSalvo was simply too eager to tell
his story. Mellon hoped Irmgard DeSalvo could fill some of the holes in the mystery.

Arriving in Colorado, Mellon rented a car and drove to the small community of Golden, tucked deep into the Rocky Mountains.
Irmgard and the two children were living in a trailer park just outside town. Mellon had rehearsed his approach to Irmgard.
He would offer his irresistible Irish smile and a few sympathetic words, in the hopes she would talk to him. Knocking gently
on the aluminum door, he watched as she nervously approached. “Who are you? Why have you come here?” Irmgard said with a thick
German accent. Her eyes darted across the snow-covered parking lot, looking for newspaper reporters, whom Bailey had warned
her against. But when Mellon took out his police badge from his coat pocket to identify himself, Irmgard quickly ushered him
inside.