The Boston Stranglers (8 page)

Albert DeSalvo hated Bridgewater, for which he can hardly be blamed, and was vocal about his discontent with the conditions of the place. Albert didn't much care for Ames Robey, Bridgewater's medical director, either. Robey, in his turn, found Albert, with his constant bragging and demands for attention, exasperating. Nonetheless, Robey, like some of the Cambridge police, would develop a grudging fondness for his troublesome patient. Maybe it was the Smile. Or maybe it was Albert's ability as a natural-born comedian with a flair for practical jokes.

Not that Albert had much occasion or, probably, inclination to be funny during his first sequestration in Bridgewater. He suffered through the court-ordered thirty-five days, during which he was diagnosed as having a sociopathic personality disorder with schizoid features. It was possible that he might become acutely psychotic. Nonetheless, Robey found Albert initially competent to stand trial for the various offenses with which he had been most recently charged. The doctor's diagnosis would change radically over the next few months.

On December 10, 1964, Albert was returned to the East Cambridge jail, where he began behaving in a way that seemed to confirm Dr. Robey's worst fears of a psychotic breakdown. He claimed that he heard voices; he claimed that Irmgard had appeared in his cell and berated him for his misdeeds. He also became depressed and suicidal. He was sent back to Bridgewater on January 14, 1965.

Albert also had a new lawyer, Jon A. Asgeirsson, his previous attorney, Robert Sheinfeld, having given up in disgust. Sheinfeld, who had labored mightily on behalf of Albert for so many years, obtaining for him light or suspended sentences, threw in the towel after Albert was accused of assaulting Suzanne Macht, Muriel LeBlanc, Virginia Thorner, and Geraldine Surette. Albert understood Sheinfeld's point of view, and in fact thanked the attorney for his past efforts.

In any event, it was Asgeirsson who appeared on behalf of Albert at a hearing in the case of
Commonwealth v. DeSalvo
in Middlesex Superior Court on February 4. The sole witness was Ames Robey.

Asgeirsson told Judge Edward Pecce, “I have been connected with this case since last November, and I have been very disappointed with [Albert's] reaction to me—to my questions, I should say, not to me personally, but to my questions. He's been cooperative as much as to his ability as he can, but I question his stability and his ability to know what is going on around him.” The judge asked if Asgeirsson was satisfied that Albert was mentally incompetent to stand trial. Asgeirsson replied that he was.

Ames Robey took the stand then and testified that his observations and those of other doctors at Bridgewater had indicated that Albert's illness had indeed grown worse. With medication he might be able to stand trial a few months from now. At the moment he was not competent to do so, although Robey felt that Albert was still able to comprehend the nature and severity of the crimes he had committed at the time he committed them. Robey declined to give a definitive opinion as to whether Albert had been driven by an irresistible impulse when he broke into the homes of Suzanne Macht, Muriel LeBlanc, Virginia Thorner, and Geraldine Surette.

The outlook for a complete remission of Albert's schizophrenic symptoms was not, according to Robey, very favorable: “The defendant is presently thirty-three, I believe, and this is getting into an age group that certainly causes the prognosis to be more guarded than if he were, for example, seventeen, twenty, twenty-two, or in this area.”

Albert then asked to speak for himself. Judge Pecce granted him permission. Albert took the stand—and promptly contradicted Asgeirsson and Robey by stating that he was fully competent to stand trial. He talked about his previous incarceration at Westborough State Hospital, where he told the doctors that an irresistible impulse had indeed compelled him to act out the Measuring Man charade. He spoke of how he had hoped to be returned to Westborough in November of 1964, and that the Cambridge police had told him they'd make such a recommendation to the court. But a number of recent escapes from that institution had dashed Albert's hopes. He had to be sent to a more secure facility.

Albert then spoke bitterly about life in Bridgewater. There, he was sure, he would never receive proper treatment. Throughout his denunciation of the place ran a vein of prudish, almost puritanical horror at some of the things he'd heard and seen. It was an odd reaction on the part of someone who otherwise spoke in such frank terms of his own sexual desires and exploits:

Judge Pecce thanked Albert for his testimony. Then he informed Albert that he would be recommitted to Briegewater until further order of the court.

Albert was shipped back to the institution he so despised. And there he renewed his acquaintance with another recently arrived inmate: George Nassar.

In
The Boston Strangler,
Gerold Frank quotes a letter written on January 9, 1965, by Albert to his former attorney, Robert Sheinfeld. In the letter, Albert apologizes to Sheinfeld for having caused the lawyer so many headaches, and expresses his gratitude for Sheinfeld's representation. He speaks of his sexual offenses with considerable regret and shame. “But still,” he adds, “thank God I neaver [sic] got to hurt anyone.”
⁸

At the same time Albert was writing to Sheinfeld of his relief at not seriously injuring any of his victims, and sitting in the East Cambridge jail conjuring up visions of a furious and reproachful Irmgard, he was, according to Gerold Frank, intimating to his new lawyer Jon Asgeirsson that he might be “the Boston ‘S' man.” But Albert, again according to Frank's version of the story, had to lead up to this revelation with a series of coy yet typically self-aggrandizing hints: The story he was about to tell Asgeirsson would be one bigger than that of the Brink's robbery. Asgeirsson asked him if by that he meant the recent Plymouth, Massachusetts mail robbery (four suspects in that major heist were, coincidentally, successfully defended by F. Lee Bailey). Albert said no, his story wasn't like that at all, it was a bigger one even than the saga of Jack the Ripper. Asgeirsson, Frank relates, told his client to stop vamping around and spit out whatever it was he had on his mind. Then Albert blurted to his attorney that he had committed
all
of the Boston stranglings.
⁹

What was Asgeirsson's reaction?

“I did do a lot of things involving lawyers,” he says today. When asked to specify, he answers, “I don't want to tell you.”

Whatever Asgeirsson did took place between January and the beginning of March 1965.

 

 

In
The Defense Never Rests
, an account of his greatest cases published in 1971, F. Lee Bailey writes of how his first meeting with Albert DeSalvo came to pass. He was sitting in the prisoners' waiting room of Essex County Superior Court in Salem with his client, George Nassar, when Nassar said to him, “ ‘If a man was the strangler, 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 [writes Bailey]. ‘It's perfectly possible,' I said. ‘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 be the means by which the author would put himself in the electric chair.'

“ ‘I'll pass on the information,' said Nassar. ‘I promised this guy at Bridgewater I'd ask you. He's been after me to have you come in and talk to him, but I know you're pretty busy.'

“I was vaguely curious. ‘What's the guy's name?'

“ ‘Albert DeSalvo,' Nassar said.”
¹⁰

On March 4, 1965, Bailey paid his first visit to Albert at Bridgewater.

 

 

That initial visit, according to Ames Robey, lasted a half hour. Bailey was asked to leave the premises because he wasn't Albert's attorney of record. Then Robey called Jon Asgeirsson, who
was
Albert's attorney of record and thus the only one permitted to visit him at Bridgewater. Robey asked Asgeirsson, “What the hell is going on?”

According to Robey, Asgeirsson replied, “I don't know.”

 

 

According to Bailey, he had lunch with Robey a week or so
before
he paid his first visit to Albert.
¹¹
In the course of the meal, Bailey asked Robey if he knew Albert. Robey laughed and replied that he certainly did, and furthermore that while the man claimed to have an ungovernable sex drive, he had probably fantasized most of his encounters with women. And he was by no means a killer, Robey commented.

Bailey adds that Albert's brother Joe called to tell him that Albert wished to consult him. The lawyer's next move, by his own account, was to get in touch with Lieutenant John Donovan, head of the Boston Police Department's homicide squad. “I told him I might be talking to a man who was likely to claim he had committed some of the stranglings. I needed a few clues—things known to the police but not to the general public that would help me judge the man's validity. Donovan sent his close assistant Lieutenant Edward Sherry to my office, and Sherry gave me a few leads.“
¹²

It was more than a few. Speaking today, Donovan characterizes what was provided Bailey as “a lot of information.”

Armed with this data, Bailey went down to Bridgewater. Albert, who was polite and diffident during that brief meeting, answered all the questions the lawyer asked him promptly and apparently accurately. He also wanted to know if two things would be possible, says Bailey: whether he could be sent to a decent mental institution and whether the sale of his story would realize sufficient profits to make life financially comfortable for Irmgard and the children.
¹³

One other person was present at this meeting: George Nassar.

 

 

Bailey informed Donovan and Sherry of what Albert had told him. Then he made the two detectives an offer: He would, he said, record his next question-and-answer session with Albert and allow them to listen to the tape. But nothing on it could be used against his client. Sherry and Donovan agreed to the proposal, furnished Bailey with more “secret” information about the murders, and left the lawyer's office.

 

 

Meanwhile, Ames Robey was still wondering what the hell was going on. He called Edward Brooke and said, “Something's up with the Strangler business.”

Dictaphone in hand, Bailey returned to Bridgewater the following day. It was during this second meeting that the lawyer was convinced that Albert was the Strangler. “Anyone experienced in interrogation learns to recognize the difference between a man speaking from life and a man telling a story that he has either made up or gotten from another person,” Bailey wrote in
The Defense Never Rests.
“DeSalvo gave every indication that he was speaking from life.”
¹⁴

As he had promised, Bailey played the tape for Donovan and Sherry. They, he writes, were as quickly and firmly convinced on the basis of what they heard in playback that Albert was the Phantom Fiend as Bailey himself was when he listened to Albert live.

Following this, Bailey says, “Boston Police Commissioner Edmund McNamara agreed to come to my office at once. As Donovan left to pick him up, I called Dr. Ames Robey and asked him to come over from Bridgewater.”

McNamara and Robey appeared as requested. Bailey played the tape for them. When the last echoes of Albert's mechanically reproduced voice had died away, according to Bailey, the commissioner fired up a big cigar and asked his men for their recommendations.
¹⁵

Of this story, McNamara says today, “Absolutely untrue.” He never listened to the tape, he maintains, and in fact turned on his heel and walked out of Bailey's office as soon as the lawyer made it clear what he proposed to do. Right away, McNamara says, Bailey wanted to strike a deal—before telling McNamara who the suspect was or what this individual was supposed to have done. The commissioner, of course, knew precisely what Bailey had in mind.

“I said, ‘Look, if you're talking about DeSalvo, forget it.' Bailey almost fell off his chair.” Then McNamara added, “You got the wrong guy. Go see the district attorney.”

Before he left Bailey's office, McNamara noted that a large quantity of Chinese food had been brought in and dished out to Donovan and Sherry. They had also been offered and had accepted drinks.

Robey confirms that a considerable amount of liquor flowed during the meeting, although most of it went down the throats of the two cops rather than that of Bailey.

The commissioner took his leave. “I blasted John Donovan for even taking me there,” he remarks today.

Despite his anger with Donovan and Sherry at having involved him in the incident, McNamara still maintains a high regard for the investigative abilities of his two lieutenants. They entered into the deal with Bailey out of sheer frustration at their failure to solve the strangling murders, he says. But: “You can fault my guys a little for being suckers.”

Of the tape Bailey had played for the detectives, McNamara remarks, “Who knows how it was edited?”

Says Donovan today, “I'm sure it was legitimate, what we did.”

 

 

Bailey wanted Albert to take a polygraph test. Donovan, he writes, agreed to the idea with alacrity. Robey objected; he wanted to give a physical examination to Albert first. Bailey fumed at the delay this would entail—he felt the examination wasn't necessary, because all anyone needed to submit to a lie detector test was a pulse and that Albert certainly had—but finally conceded to Robey's demand. First he counseled Albert to behave himself with Robey, whom he states his client disliked intensely.

The next day Robey pronounced Albert fit to take a polygraph.
¹⁶

 

 

Bailey and Donovan agreed that the head of the Strangler Task Force, John Bottomly, should be apprised of what had transpired over the past few days. Bailey told Donovan to give Bottomly a call; he himself had to go to Springfield to give a speech.

Bailey and Bottomly spoke later that day. Bottomly, according to Bailey, mentioned that the Task Force had been just about to zero in on Albert themselves (Phillip DiNatale, one of the Task Force investigators, had in fact been sent down to Bridgewater to get Albert's palm print). Bottomly agreed that a lie detector test sounded useful and promising.

Bailey never got to administer the polygraph to Albert. When he turned up at Bridgewater the next day with the equipment, he was directed not to his client but to the office of Superintendent Charles Gaughan. Gaughan told Bailey that he had been instructed to deny the lawyer access not only to Albert but to George Nassar.

The order had come from the attorney general.

Bailey said to Gaughan that perhaps some legal action or the threat thereof might change his mind.
¹⁷
Today he says that Bottomly was behind the move to deny him contact with his clients because the Task Force chief wanted to take over the case. “He filed a series of lawsuits in federal court preventing me from seeing DeSalvo.”

Edward Brooke, however, disputes this claim: “I issued that order myself.”

Brooke was unhappy with Bailey's conduct in making the initial visit to Bridgewater to see Albert without first informing Jon Asgeirsson of his intentions. “I was upset by the fact that F. Lee had done this,” Brooke says today. “And I called the other lawyer [Asgeirsson].” What Bailey did was not technically illegal, Brooke comments, but the ethics of it were very questionable. “I even threatened to go to the Bar Association.”

 

 

In short order, the
Record American
broke the news that the Boston Strangler was incarcerated at Bridgewater and that he was being represented by F. Lee Bailey. Today, Bailey says he isn't really sure how the
Record
obtained its information. He theorizes that a Boston police officer tipped off one of the reporters who were always hanging around the station.

 

When the
Record
hit the stands, Attorney General Brooke hit the roof. To add to his displeasure was the fact that a television crew had turned up at Bridgewater and was milling around outside the gates trying to get shots of the wing where DeSalvo was being held. Brooke went to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and got an injunction preventing anyone involved in the Strangler case from speaking to the press.

 

 

A month or so before Albert had begun his confession, Irmgard had left Massachusetts with Judy and Michael. The stigma of her husband's arrest in Cambridge on sexual assault charges had been too painful to endure; she sought surcease as well as refuge with her sister in a western state where the name DeSalvo meant nothing to anyone. On March 7, whatever separate and fragile peace she had achieved was shattered. Bailey called her with the information that her husband's name and face would be on the front pages of tomorrow's newspapers in connection with a horrific story. He advised Irmgard to change her name (which she had already done) and go deeper into hiding. He would be flying out to speak with her immediately.

Gerold Frank reports that Irmgard received another telephone call, this one from an individual who spoke German, Irmgard's native language. He informed her that he was calling on behalf of F. Lee Bailey because Mr. Bailey feared his own phone might be tapped. Someone from Bailey's office was en route to see her as they talked, he said.
¹⁸

Then Albert's brothers Frank and Joe came on the line. They confirmed the appalling news Bailey had so dramatically broken—that Albert had confessed to being the Boston Strangler. Irmgard must, they emphasized, do whatever Bailey's representative told her to do.

She heard, but she didn't believe. Ten days later she telephoned Albert at Bridgewater and told him that if he didn't stop spouting these monstrous lies, she would kill herself and Judy and Michael.