The Boston Stranglers (10 page)

“Ed and Lee crossed swords very vigorously,” adds former Assistant Attorney General Roger Woodworth. They had “some sharp points of disagreement about the arrangement.”

Before the matter of Albert's fate could be settled, however, a startling event took place, one that forced duelists Bailey and Brooke to sheath their rapiers momentarily. On April 8, 1966, John Bottomly abruptly resigned from the attorney general's office. No reason was publicly given for his action. Today Brooke cites an intraoffice quarrel as the cause of Bottomly's departure: “Jack had a rather short fuse.” The blow-up, Brooke claims, had nothing to do with the Strangler case or its disposition.

William Cowin assumed Bottomly's duties. One of Cowin's first moves, according to Bailey, was to put in gear the machinery necessary to remove George McGrath as Albert's guardian—a move for which Bailey, despite his approval of McGrath, had been agitating recently. On April 12, a judge deemed Albert competent to handle his own affairs, legal and financial. Within days of that decision, Bailey and Brooke reached their own agreement that Albert be brought to trial—not as the Boston Strangler but as the Green Man. Albert would plead not guilty by reason of insanity to the sexual assault charges filed against him in Cambridge. Bailey would then use the fact that Albert was really the Strangler to prove just how crazy his client was.

 

 

On June 7, 1966, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ordered a new trial for George Nassar. The day before, the United States Supreme Court had made the same determination in the case of Samuel Sheppard.

F. Lee Bailey, attorney for both men, was on a roll. And in fine fettle. “I was on a dusty street in Dodge City,” he writes, “and the bad guys were falling right and left.”
²⁶

He didn't mean George Nassar and Sam Sheppard.

 

 

As a man now considered by the court capable of managing his own business, Albert entered a major contractual relationship on June 17, 1966. On that day, he signed a release to Gerold Frank granting the author “in perpetuity, throughout the world in all languages, the exclusive right to publish, sell, distribute, perform, or otherwise disseminate all my literary properties and rights to biographical material concerning me.” In return Albert would receive from Frank an advance of fifteen thousand dollars against 10 percent of the first two hundred and 15 percent of any sums over that amount that Frank might earn from his book on the Boston Strangler.

Today Frank says he never asked for or received any such release from Albert for the book. But the document bearing Albert's signature and addressed to Frank is on file in the United States District Court in Boston.

It was witnessed by two individuals: F. Lee Bailey and Albert's former guardian, George McGrath.

Frank says that he believes Albert was supposed to be paid some release money for the movie that was made of Frank's book, but “he never got it.” Frank adds, “I'm not sure why he didn't get it.”

 

 

On June 30, 1966, Albert went before Judge Horace Cahill in the Middlesex Superior Court at a hearing to establish his competence to stand trial on the Green Man charges. The prosecutor was Assistant District Attorney Donald Conn.

Bailey's witnesses, Dr. Robert Ross Mezer and Dr. Samuel Tartakoff (one of the state-appointed psychiatrists who had examined DeSalvo), testified that Albert was competent to stand trial.

The prosecution witness, Dr. Ames Robey, testified the opposite. He says today that he did so because at that point “Albert so badly wanted to be the Strangler” that he had passed beyond rationality and was therefore incapable of participating in his own defense.

A few days later, Judge Cahill ruled that Albert was fit to stand trial on the Green Man charges.

The logic behind Bailey's winning argument was convoluted but clever: He did not label Albert the Strangler, but simply as someone responsible for “certain crimes.” Of course, everyone in the courtroom knew exactly what those “certain crimes” were. At any rate, Bailey's contention was that while Albert had been insane when he committed his Green Man sexual assaults (and by implication insane also when he did the stranglings), he was now sufficiently mentally healthy to be tried for his lesser offenses.

Robey, who held the opposite view, did not prevail.

 

 

On July 4, 1966, Albert wrote Gerold Frank that he had appointed George McGrath as his “agent and fiduciary in certain business transactions specifically including those which now exist or may develop between yourself and me.” Albert further requested that any monies owed him be sent to McGrath, who would be empowered to endorse and cash the checks. Those checks should, however, be made out to one “Robert McKay.”

This statement was witnessed by F. Lee Bailey.

 

 

John Bottomly was not the only person to quit his job. So did Task Force members Sandra Irizarry and Andrew Tuney. Stephen Delaney, another member of the team, had returned to his old post at the Metropolitan District Commission in July of 1965. By late 1966, they had all found new employment.

Irizarry, Tuney, and Delaney now worked for F. Lee Bailey.

 

 

On July 24, 1966, Bailey undertook the defense of Carl Coppolino, an anesthesiologist indicted for killing his mistress's husband in New Jersey in 1963 and his own wife, Carmela, in Florida in 1965. Andrew Tuney acted as one of Bailey's investigators in the case.

 

 

On August 5, 1966, the William Morris Agency, representing Gerold Frank, sent George McGrath, now the Commissioner of Corrections for the City of New York, a check for fifteen thousand dollars. This check was made out to and endorsed by “Robert McKay,” and made payable to the order of F. Lee Bailey.

 

 

In its August and September issues,
The Ladies' Home Journal
ran excerpts from Gerold Frank's
The Boston Strangler.
In October, New American Library published the book in hardcover. It became an immediate bestseller.

The book identified Albert DeSalvo by name as the Strangler—and further as the rapist of
over two thousand women.

Ames Robey remembers hearing this claim and wondering how Albert had found the time.

 

 

The November 5, 1966, number of the
Saturday Evening Post
featured an article entitled “F. Lee Bailey: Renegade in the Courtroom.” A long and flattering account of the lawyer's personal history and legal exploits (illustrated with photos of Bailey and his quondam secretary and second wife, Froma “Wicki” Bailey, relaxing aboard their sloop and lounging at their home wet bar), it again named Albert as the killer of thirteen women. “Bailey's tactic,” author Edward Linn wrote, “has been to publicize as much as possible that DeSalvo is the Strangler, which has made the Boston Bar Association unhappy.”

Just how unhappy the association was would become manifest in the spring of 1967.

 

 

In December of 1966, Bailey won another great legal battle. Carl Coppolino was found not guilty of having slain William Farber, the husband of Coppolino's ex-mistress Marge Farber. It was Marge Farber who had launched the original accusations of murder against Coppolino. Bailey dismissed Mrs. Farber's statements to the authorities as the vendetta of a woman scorned.

 

 

Albert did not go to trial on the Green Man charges until January of 1967, well after he had already been convicted in the court of worldwide opinion as perhaps the most dangerous criminal in history. Why the delay?

Bailey writes that not only was his own court calendar full until then but that “Donald Conn and I agreed that there was nothing to be gained by trying an already sensational case on the eve of a senatorial election.”
²⁷

Edward Brooke won that 1966 election. His opponent was Endicott Peabody, former Democratic governor of Massachusetts.

Why did Albert DeSalvo, dedicated family man, want so much to be known as a killer more bloodthirsty than Jack the Ripper?

“He had a desperate need to be somebody important,” says Ames Robey.

“He enjoyed the notoriety of the situation,” says former Cambridge Police Detective Michael Giacoppo.

“He had a deep-rooted need to be famous,” says Attorney Thomas Troy, who represented Albert after Bailey and Asgeirsson had passed from the picture.

Members of Albert's family confirm his tendency toward delusions of grandeur. Irmgard herself, according to Albert's own admission, constantly chided him for his self-promoting exaggerations, which acutely embarrassed her when he inflicted them on the couple's friends. Even Gerold Frank, who maintains today that he has no doubt Albert was the Strangler, reported in his book a number of occasions on which Albert spoke quite gleefully of all the fame that would come his way by virtue of his confession to being the murderer of thirteen women.

Beyond the fulfillment of a fantasy of celebrity, did Albert have a practical reason for proclaiming himself the Strangler? Everyone, including Bailey, agrees that he did—he believed he could sell his story for sufficient money to keep Irmgard, Judy, and Michael financially secure for the rest of their lives. And on top of that there was the reward money offered by Governor Peabody in 1964. Gerold Frank writes that Albert and George Nassar may have mistakenly believed that ten thousand dollars would be paid for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer of
each
Strangler victim, a sum in excess of one hundred thousand dollars, which the two men could then split, Nassar presumably taking his cut as the agent who represented Albert's confession to Bailey.
²⁸

Although one hundred thousand dollars, even two hundred thousand dollars, was a lot more money in 1965 than it is today, how great a sum could it seem in exchange for a lifetime behind the bars of a maximum security prison or a state mental hospital? For this was precisely the trade Albert seemed ready to make.

He apparently felt that he had no freedom left to lose.

Even his lawyer maintained this view. In
The Defense Never Rests,
Bailey writes that he told Brooke and Bottomly, “ ‘Look, when I met Albert, there were enough indictments pending against him to pretty much insure that he'd never be walking the streets again.'”
²⁹

In fact, Bailey was being overly pessimistic. For all his past adult offenses, sexual and otherwise, Albert had served less than a year in jail. Admittedly, the Green Man charges were more serious than anything he'd faced previously. But even if Albert had been tried and found guilty on all of them, according to several legal authorities, he probably would have received a maximum sentence of twenty-five years with an almost certain parole after ten. This was not a pleasing prospect, certainly, but neither again was it a lifetime in durance vile.

Albert, who was street-smart, could have figured this out for himself. But here the street-smart Albert ran up against the gullible and easily led Albert. Who can say why it turned out that way? Perhaps the shock of being sent to Bridgewater rather than to Westborough State Hospital as he had hoped had caused something in Albert to snap, sending his judgment into limbo. The fact remains that sometime between November 1964 and the winter and early spring of 1965, someone apparently convinced Albert that his most recent arrest guaranteed him a permanent place on the guest rolls of a state correctional facility.

 

 

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts fired its opening gun in the matter of Albert Henry DeSalvo on January 10, 1967, in Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge. Judge Cornelius Moynihan would preside. Assistant District Attorney Donald Conn would prosecute the case. Albert would be represented by Bailey and Asgeirsson, whose role as co-counsel seemed to have slipped Bailey's mind by the time he came to write
The Defense Never Rests.
³⁰

The process of jury selection began. Most of the women called declined to serve on the then judicially acceptable grounds that the testimony they would hear would be unfit for female ears. It was reported that counsel finally agreed that an all-male jury be empaneled. Some of the relatively few women spectators at the trial appeared unhappy with the decision.

Before the jury was chosen, however, Judge Moynihan held a preliminary hearing to determine whether Albert was competent to stand trial. The Commonwealth's first witness in this matter was Samuel Allen, a psychiatrist who had observed Albert at Bridgewater.
³¹
Allen's finding was that Albert was mentally capable of understanding the charges against him and the nature of the concomitant legal proceedings; he was also, in Allen's opinion, fit to participate in his own defense.

Bailey then called Albert to the stand. Albert testified that he had thoroughly consulted with his co-counsels Bailey and Asgeirsson and that he understood the nature of the defense they had prepared for him. He affirmed that he was fully cognizant that he might receive a heavy sentence if the jury found him guilty of the charges brought against him. He was aware of, and agreeable to, the fact that Bailey did not intend to argue any of the factual allegations made against him.

On January 10, Judge Moynihan wrote his decision: “I find that the Defendant is alert, intelligent, and is well able to understand questions put to him and to give rational and intelligent answers thereto. On the witness stand, he indicated adequate emotional control, despite a rather trying cross-examination.

“I conclude, therefore, that the defendant at the present time is not suffering from a mental disease, disorder, or defect to such an extent as to affect his capacity to understand the nature of the charges on which he is being tried, the nature and purpose of this criminal proceeding, the possible penalties and verdicts that may result from the trial and the nature of the defenses available to him. I further find that he does have the capacity to cooperate with and to assist his counsel in the defense.”

Bailey's defense strategy was basically the same one he'd used at Albert's competency hearing in June 1966. Only this time he did not delicately allude to “certain crimes” his client had committed. Rather, Bailey openly referred to Albert as the Boston Strangler. It was the lawyer's reasoning that any man who would commit thirteen gruesome sex murders in the course of eighteen months was obviously hopelessly insane. And if this could be vividly demonstrated to a jury—which Bailey, armed with the knowledge of Albert's confession, had no doubt it could—that jury would surely find DeSalvo not guilty by reason of insanity on the lesser charges of rape and armed robbery.

In this order, Suzanne Macht, Geraldine Surette, Muriel LeBlanc, and Virginia Thorner took the stand to recount what Albert had done to them. DeSalvo stipulated to the identifications made of him by all four women. Sergeant Duncan McNeill of the Cambridge Police Department testified that Albert had described to him the defendant's rapid and noise-free method of housebreaking: DeSalvo had cut strips of plastic from detergent bottles and with these slipped locks.

McNeill informed the court that Albert had admitted to him robbing Mrs. LeBlanc, and that he had also committed another break-in in which he netted eight or nine dollars from a child's piggy bank. Albert told McNeill that the gun he'd held to Mrs. LeBlanc's head had been a toy one and that although he carried a knife, “I never killed anybody.”

McNeill also testified that in the Malden police station he'd overheard Albert say to his sister Irene and to Irmgard, “Please, let me be a man just this once.”

Albert had tried to evade the authorities on the morning of November 5, 1964.
³²
When McNeill asked him why he'd done so, Albert had replied that he knew he was in trouble and wanted to settle his affairs, principally the sale of his car and house. He told McNeill that he wanted Irmgard to have the profits.

The suspect did have three hundred dollars on his person when taken into custody, McNeill recollected for the court. Albert claimed it was the proceeds from the sale of his car. And, McNeill added, a lawyer showed up at the police station that evening with a paper for Albert to sign regarding the sale of his house. McNeill said that he had advised Albert to consult Jon Asgeirsson, the attorney now representing him, before putting his signature on anything.

McNeill's final piece of direct testimony was to state that the defendant had remarked to him that the Malden police officer who'd arrested Albert had been an old man. “You know,” Albert had commented, “I could have taken that gun from him and shot him. But what the hell.”

On cross-examination, Sergeant McNeill revealed that Albert had asked McNeill to “help” him.

 

 

The defendant's psychiatric case was first stated by Dr. James A. Brussel, associate commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Health. A former member of the Strangler Task Force's Medical-Psychiatric Committee, Dr. Brussel was now, like Sandra Irizarry, Andrew Tuney, and Stephen Delaney, in the employ of F. Lee Bailey. Dr. Brussel told the court that he had examined Albert for a total of four to five hours on October 16, 1965, and January 9, 1967. During those sessions Brussel interviewed the defendant about his life. Brussel said that Albert had given him an autobiography replete with anecdotes of “abnormal behavior with family, friends, and animals.” Albert also, according to Brussel, had discussed his sexual activities with the wives of fellow officers while he was in the army and his exploits as the Measuring Man.

Brussel further told the court that Albert had admitted to him experiencing a “brain sensation” that would compel him to leave work and go looking for an apartment to break into and plunder.

Brussel went on to testify that in April 1964, as part of his duty to the Medical-Psychiatric Committee, he had profiled whomever the Strangler might be as a paranoid schizophrenic. During cross-examination he allowed that Albert in 1966 and 1967 did not quite fit this diagnosis, although Brussel did indeed find the defendant in 1966 suffering from a chronic undifferentiated type of schizophrenia with paranoid features. The doctor had also found that although Albert had been driven by an irresistible impulse to commit his Green Man crimes, he had been sufficiently
compos mentis
to take the precautions necessary to avoid detection by the police.

Brussel did not conduct a physical exam or any neurological testing of the defendant, nor did he inquire of the Bridgewater guards whether Albert had betrayed any symptoms of violence or disorder.

During redirect examination Brussel told the court that the defendant knew the difference between right and wrong under the dictates of law, religion, and morality, and that he was fully aware his actions were criminal. He was, however, Brussel reiterated, driven by an urge he could not control.

Brussel also said that Albert had never spoken to him of any ambition to make money by admitting to the stranglings. (Brussel may have been unique in this respect, since Albert broadcast the desire to profit from his crimes to virtually everyone else who came within earshot.) Nor did Brussel consider Albert a compulsive confessor.

Bailey's next hired psychiatric gun, Dr. Robert Ross Mezer, testified that Albert, whom he had seen four times during March 1965, three times during April 1965, and seven times the following year, was a long-term sexual psychopath who as a child had tortured dogs and cats and had once strangled another boy until his eyes had rolled back in his head.

Mezer also told Judge Moynihan and the jury that Albert had confessed to him the murders of thirteen women and provided the doctor with a complete account of his nonhomicidal sexual assaults.

Mezer further stated that Albert had told him he labored under an uncontrollable urge that forced him to wander various neighborhoods in search of an apartment he could break or talk his way into in order to have sex with the female occupant.

One of Mezer's most intriguing revelations was that Albert had told him he'd feigned the hallucinations he'd experienced in the house of correction—those of Irmgard furiously chastising him—for the purpose of
being sent back to Bridgewater.
Bailey, of course, had been maintaining all along that his client was desperate to get
out
of Bridgewater. And Albert himself was explicit about his hatred of the place.

 

 

The first witness called to the stand by the Commonwealth was Stanley Setterlund, a Bridgewater inmate who had, according to his own testimony, become one of Albert's confidants. Setterlund told the court that Albert had admitted to him being the strangler of eleven women (as opposed to the thirteen he allegedly told Mezer he'd killed) and that his knowledge was worth a great deal of money—ten thousand dollars per victim. Setterlund further stated that Albert had told him that he had cased the residences of his female victims and then entered them with the intent of committing robbery and rape. If the women screamed or fought, he strangled them. He cleaned up after himself, leaving no physical evidence behind, and would purposely refrain from taking all the money and valuables from the apartment so that police would believe the victim had been murdered by a sex maniac and not by a robber.

Setterlund testified that Albert had told him that he didn't want to spend the rest of his life rotting in prison, that he wanted to be sent to a mental hospital and be cured of his condition—and that
Life
magazine had offered him ninety thousand dollars for his life story, the
Saturday Evening Post
forty thousand.