The Boston Strangler (57 page)

But the sexual problem—his “terrible urge”—never left him. As he once told McGrath, he was driving to work one morning and as he drove he found himself having an ejaculation. He stopped his car and tried to think. “What's wrong with me? Why should this happen to me at 8
A.M.
driving to work—” He never told his wife about his problem, nor did he ask for help; and when “this thing” grew worse, and he was seeking out women all the time, he feared to ask for help because it might hurt his family, or Irmgard might leave him and take the children with her. But it was with him all the time. He would come home from work “and all through dinner it was on my mind. I wanted Irmgard … I knew she was trying to make some excuse to avoid it. I couldn't get through dinner, it was so much on my mind.” He also wanted her to make the first move—“to ask me.… She could never see her way clear.”

One night, he turned on the TV. The program was “The Bob Cummings Show.” In it the actor played a commercial photographer who hired fashion models. In one scene Cummings bustled about with a tailor's tape, measuring one strikingly beautiful girl after another who had applied to him for jobs.

Albert watched, fascinated. It was a new approach to sexual stimulation and he was never to forget it.

The Measuring Man was born then.

He had always had to get additional satisfaction outside his marriage. Although he loved Irmgard, there had always been difficulties in sex. From the very beginning he found her a little cold. But from the first he had been inordinately proud of her. Her parents were serious, respectable people who had not allowed her to go out until she reached her eighteenth birthday. Albert admired Irmgard: she had a better education, and as he told friends, “No one in her family ever even saw the inside of a jail.” He felt her to be unquestionably superior to him, and he was very much the dutiful husband. She was Catholic; and though he was not, he reared the children as Catholics and took them faithfully to church. He tried to please her in every way. Yet “putting her on a pedestal” was to plague him. She “would put me down” in front of others, “make me feel like nothing” before friends. “She gave me an inferiority complex,” he complained. When they argued at home, she would fling at him, “You're no better than the rest of your family.” There was little she could say that was more cutting to him.

Still, he loved her very much. When he was arrested as the Measuring Man in March, 1961, he was overcome with remorse. At Westborough State Hospital, where he had been sent for observation before sentence, he was in tears each time he spoke of the wrong he had done her. She looked so ill then. Once she had had to go to a hospital herself to undergo a gastrointestinal series—and it was all his fault.

“I can hardly wait to get out so I can be with her and treat her the way a wife should be treated, even if it means washing her feet,” he had told the psychiatrist at Westborough.

When he finally came out of the House of Correction in April, 1962, she presented him with an ultimatum. He must prove himself before she would accept him again as her husband. “I come out of jail after one year, all alone for one year in one room, and Irmgard tells me, ‘I wasted a year of my life.' She puts me on probation.” He could not endure it, wanting her so much, and she turning away from him. Lying next to her he felt as though he would burst. “I must learn to control my sex wants, she told me.… She would say I was dirty and sickening and called me an animal.” She made him afraid to make love to her. “I felt less than a man in bed with her,”

Yet, those last months of 1964, just before his arrest as the Green Man, she had been so wonderful to him. She gave him “so much loving, I felt no urge to go out and do those things.”

She was always first in his thoughts. The night he had given himself up to the police he had said to the detectives, “Give me a couple of days to square myself—” They had let him out on $8,000 bail.

Two days later police, armed with warrants from other states, had surrounded his house and seized him—“It was foolish for me to try to get away”—but a moment of panic swept over him. Yet it really didn't matter. In those forty-eight hours he had arranged to sell his house and car, the money to go to Irmgard and the children. He had only their good interests at heart.

He knew how much Irmgard's religion meant to her. On December 16, 1965, as Christmas approached, he asked to see a Catholic priest. Bottomly arranged for Monsignor George Kerr, Chaplain of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, to visit him. Priest and patient talked together for a long time. At DeSalvo's request Monsignor Kerr wrote a long letter to Irmgard, who had gone back to Germany with the two children and was now living there under a new name. The priest wrote: Albert is in good health; he misses you and the children very much; you must prepare yourself for the fact that he has confessed to “certain unsolved crimes.” He repents greatly, but he could not have continued to live with himself had he not unburdened his conscience. He hopes you will understand. He knows he will never again be a free man and he has resigned himself to that fate. He thinks constantly of you and the children, he wants very much to hear from you, and he begs you to write him, care of your sister.

Monsignor Kerr added that Albert had told him he was thinking of converting to Roman Catholicism; but he was not, as yet, ready to do it. It was something for the future.

Now, having told everything and prepared himself for whatever consequences would follow, DeSalvo waited.

The first time Bailey met DeSalvo, he thought that this could be the man, precisely because he looked so unlike what everyone had expected the Strangler to look like. Bailey had always felt that anyone looking for a monster—a Mr. Hyde—was grievously in error. Had the man been suspicious in appearance he would have been picked up long ago. They should have looked for a Dr. Jekyll—the most unlikely kind of a criminal. Albert's mild, inoffensive appearance—“sirring” everyone within sight, appearing almost apologetic for being alive—would explain why no one ever gave him a second glance.

In addition, George Nassar, whose intelligence and perception Bailey recognized, thought DeSalvo was telling the truth.

Nassar first mentioned DeSalvo to Bailey on February 10, 1965, at an Essex Superior Court hearing to determine Nassar's competency to stand trial. At a moment when they were alone, Nassar said without preface, “Mr. Bailey, how'd you like to talk to a man down at Bridgewater who says he's the Strangler?”

Bailey was not enthusiastic. “I'm not too eager to waste a visit down there to listen to some man's hallucinations,” he said.

Nassar went on, “No, I think he's the guy. If he
was
the Strangler, could he tell his story and earn enough from it to support his family the rest of their lives?”

“I doubt it,” said Bailey. “Because telling it would put him in the electric chair. In order to tell his story he'd have to expose it, which means making a public confession. That could be thrown into the grand jury and result in an indictment for murder.”

Nassar digested this soberly. Bailey asked, “Who is the man?”

Nassar said it was an inmate named Albert DeSalvo. He had asked Nassar to ask Bailey if he would want to defend him.

Bailey said, “I don't doubt there are a lot of fellows at Bridge-water ready to claim they're the Strangler.”

Nassar went on seriously, “I've done a lot of talking to him and I'm almost convinced. Why don't you talk to him yourself?”

Well, said Bailey, he would ask to see him “next time I'm down in Bridgewater.”

Nassar, originally sent to Bridgewater on January 18 for observation, was returned after the hearing for additional study, and Bailey went on to other matters.

A week later, the lawyer received a call from Dr. Ames Robey, Medical Director at Bridgewater. A patient named Albert DeSalvo, said Dr. Robey, had written him requesting that he please notify Mr. Bailey that he would like to see him. After another week passed, a Joseph DeSalvo left a telephone message with Bailey's secretary: his brother, Albert, a patient at Bridgewater, wanted to consult him. Would he please come down to Bridgewater and talk to him?

Bailey had been too busy. But on March 4 he had to talk to Nassar about his forthcoming trial. He decided he would see DeSalvo at Bridgewater at the same time. Although Bailey had read about the stranglings he knew few details. Before driving down he talked with Lieutenant Donovan, asking him for “half-questions” to pose to a man who might turn out to be a good suspect.

Thereafter, the lawyer, armed with half a dozen key words “to throw at the man”—words such as “belt,” “ascot,” “bottle”—saw DeSalvo for the first time on March 4. That afternoon he telephoned Donovan and gave him DeSalvo's responses. Donovan was impressed. Two days later Bailey visited DeSalvo again at Bridgewater and this time recorded a long statement from him about the stranglings.

Until the full story came out—that DeSalvo had made three requests to see him—Bailey knew he would be criticized for his unorthodox approach to the case. Lawyers, after all, had been known to solicit business at Bridgewater. He knew, too, that many would think of the affair as a hoax or a publicity stunt, which would make him even more suspect. Finally, he was not unaware of the political implications that could be drawn from the fact that he approached Boston police, rather than the Attorney General's office, with his information. Bailey's explanation later was that he knew Donovan, and he did not know Bottomly; more importantly, he assumed that Donovan's Homicide Bureau would possess more details than the Attorney General's office, which had entered the scene only after the stranglings were over.

What Bailey had not anticipated was that it would fall upon him, a defense attorney, to prove that DeSalvo was the Strangler. “We found ourselves before a really unbelievable situation. It was up to us to prove he was the right man—and to do it without giving the State a single piece of legal evidence. Albert had to get by that electric chair. He had to get by it thirteen times.”

The Middlesex County Courthouse in East Cambridge, a stone's throw from the bleak wooden terminal in which the Boston trolleys make their last stop, is a massive red brick building imbued with New England solidity. Here, on the last day of June, 1966, in a square, old-fashioned courtroom on the second floor, Albert DeSalvo made his first public appearance since he had been committed to Bridgewater as mentally ill on February 4, 1965.

The occasion was a hearing to determine his competency to stand trial as the Green Man. Perhaps thirty persons were in the courtroom, among them virtually all the principal actors in the story of the Boston Strangler.

John Bottomly, now no longer Assistant Attorney General, but still deeply involved in these closing chapters of the unique case, was present. Sitting in the rear of the court, watching the proceedings yet taking no part in them, he still felt a twinge of concern. He had wanted so badly to carry the case through to a conclusion. “I'm sorry I had to leave it undone,” he told a friend. “Yet it was being undone, anyway.” A month before his resignation he had sent a memorandum to Brooke recommending the steps necessary to conclude the Strangler case. Brooke, he said, had not replied; nor had he been able to get any decision to go ahead when he brought the matter up again, he said.

The police who had lived with the stranglings from the very first one on June 14, 1962—more than four years ago—were present. Lieutenant John Donovan, Chief of Homicide, Lieutenant Edward Sherry, and the three remaining members of Bottomly's original “Strangler Bureau”: Lieutenant Andrew Tuney, Detective Phillip DiNatale, and their assistant, Sandra Irizarry. As for the others, Special Officer James Mellon was now carrying out police duties in suburban Roxbury; Officer Steve Delaney had left the force and was employed in a private detective agency; and Jane Downey, who had worked so zealously with Sandra to compile the casebooks of each strangling, had long since returned to the Eminent Domain division.

On the witness benches, awaiting their call to testify, were the psychiatrists: Dr. Robert Ross Mezer and Dr. Samuel Tartakoff (private practitioners who had examined DeSalvo during his internment at Bridgewater these past eighteen months) and Dr. Robey.

At the defense table were F. Lee Bailey, his assistant Charles Burnim, and Jon Asgiersson, DeSalvo's co-counsel; opposite them sat Donald L. Conn, Assistant District Attorney of Middlesex County. George McGrath, until recently DeSalvo's guardian, was not present: he was in New York, the newly appointed Corrections Commissioner of the city.

No member of DeSalvo's family was present.

In the center of the room in the square prisoner's box, raised about three feet off the floor, his back to the audience, his face toward the empty bench and the waiting lawyers, sat DeSalvo. Ten feet behind him sat two ponderous, khaki-clad men, who almost took up the space of four, with their bellies overflowing their broad leather belts. The two faces were surprisingly alike—rugged, rough-hewn, and having an outdoors look that sharply contrasted with the faces of the lawyers, psychiatrists, and reporters. These were prison guards from Bridgewater. They had brought DeSalvo, in manacles, from the State Hospital this morning; a few hours later they would return him there in the same fashion.

Standing almost at DeSalvo's elbows, on either side of the prisoner's box, were two uniformed bailiffs, alert and watchful. They seemed altogether unnecessary. Albert sat quietly, sedate as a minister in a neatly pressed blue suit, a white shirt with widespread collar, and a generous knot in his blue tie—the same knot he tied the day he posed, aged sixteen, for his graduation photograph at Williams School. Now and then, waiting for the proceedings to begin, he touched his chin nervously with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand—a massive hand for a man his size—or allowed a quick smile to flash over his face. With the smile, the narrow small face dominated by the long nose suddenly lit up with an unexpected charm: seeing Albert's smile, one understood many things.