The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (35 page)

On 17 March 1960 a police patrol that had been set up to trap the ‘Measuring Man’ saw a man acting suspiciously in a backyard in Cambridge, Mass., and arrested him.
Girls identified him as the ‘Measuring Man’, and he finally admitted it – claiming that he did it as a kind of lark, in order to make himself feel superior to college-educated girls.
In May 1961 DeSalvo was sentenced to serve two years in the Middlesex County House of Correction.
He served eleven months before being released.
He had told a probation officer that he thought there was something wrong with him – that he seemed to be wildly oversexed, so that he needed intercourse six or more times a day.
No-one suggested that he needed to see a psychiatrist.

Albert DeSalvo had clearly graduated from caressing girls as he measured them to rape.
He was arrested on 5 November 1964 and identified by some of his victims.
On 4 February 1965 he was committed to the Bridgewater State Hospital, a mental institution in Massachusetts.

Bridgewater had – and still has – many sexual psychopaths in residence, and many spoke freely about their exploits, particularly in the group therapy sessions.
Albert DeSalvo was not reticent about his own sexual prowess, which was apparently considerable.
He described how, in the summer of 1948, when he was seventeen, he had worked as a dishwasher in a Cape Cod motel, and spent much time swimming and sunbathing on the beach.
There were many college girls there, and they found the powerfully-built youth attractive.
Word of DeSalvo’s amazing sexual prowess soon spread.
‘They would even come up to the motel sometimes looking for me and some nights we would spend the whole night doing it down on the beach, stopping for a while, then doing it again . . .’

Possibly because he encountered a certain scepticism – he had a reputation as a boaster – DeSalvo began hinting that he had done far more serious things than raping a few women.
Only one of his ward-mates took him seriously: a murderer called George Nassar.
At first, Nassar also thought DeSalvo was merely boasting – particularly when he confided that he was the Boston Strangler.
What finally convinced him was DeSalvo’s detailed knowledge of the crimes.
‘He knows more about them stranglings than the cops.’

Nassar knew there was a large reward for the Boston Strangler, and he spoke to his attorney, F.Lee Bailey, who had achieved fame when he obtained freedom for Dr Sam Sheppard, accused of murdering his wife.
Bailey was also sceptical – there are endless fake confessions to almost every widely publicised murder – but when he went to see DeSalvo on 4 March 1965, he soon realised that this sounded authentic.
DeSalvo was not a man of high intelligence – although bright and articulate – and it seemed unlikely that he could have read and memorised newspaper accounts of the murders.
He even mentioned a murder that no-one knew about – an old lady of eighty or so who had died of a heart attack as he grabbed her.
In fact, DeSalvo’s account enabled the police to identify her as eighty-five-year-old Mary Mullens who had been found dead in her Boston apartment two weeks after the murder of Anna Slesers, the first Strangler victim.
DeSalvo’s descriptions of other murder scenes made it clear that he knew details that had never been published.
Most important of all, he knew exactly what the Strangler had done to various victims.
This information had been deliberately suppressed, giving rise to all kind of wild rumours of torture and perversion.
DeSalvo knew, for example, precisely what position Mary Sullivan – the last victim – had been left in, and that she had a broom handle inserted into her vagina; and he was able to describe in precise detail the rooms of most of the victims.

There were some odd complications.
Several witnesses who had seen a man entering apartment buildings where stranglings had taken place failed to identify DeSalvo as the man.
And two women who had seen the Strangler – including Gertrude Gruen, the German girl who had fought him off – not only failed to identify DeSalvo, but identified George Nassar as the strangler.
Yet DeSalvo’s incredibly detailed knowledge of the crimes finally convinced most of those involved with the case that he alone was the Boston Strangler.

In the long run, all this proved irrelevant.
Albert DeSalvo stood trial for the Green Man rapes, and in 1967 was sentenced to permanent detention in the Walpole State Prison, where he could receive psychiatric treatment.
On 26 November 1973 DeSalvo was found dead in his cell, stabbed through the heart.
No motive was ever established, and whoever was responsible was never caught.

In January 1964, while the Boston Strangler was still at large, the assistant attorney general of Massachusetts, John S.
Bottomly, decided to set up a committee of psychiatrists to attempt to establish some kind of ‘psychological profile’ of the killer.
One of the psychiatrists who served on that committee was Dr James A.Brussel, the man who had been so successful in describing New York’s ‘Mad Bomber’ (
see here
).
When he attended his first meeting, Brussel discovered that there was a sharp division of opinion within the committee.
One group believed that there were two stranglers, one of whom killed old women, and the other young girls; the other group thought there was only one strangler.

It was at his second meeting of the committee – in April 1965 – that Brussel was hit by a sudden ‘hunch’ as he listened to a psychiatrist pointing out that in some cases, semen was found in the vagina, while in others, it was found on the breasts, thighs, or even on the carpet.
When it came to his turn to speak, Brussel outlined the theory that had suddenly come to him ‘in a flash’.

‘I think we’re dealing with one man.
The apparent differences in M.O., I believe, result from changes that have been going on in this man.
Over the two-year period during which he has been committing these murders, he had gone through a series of upheavals . . .’

The first five victims, said Brussel, were elderly women, and there was no semen in the vaginas.
They had been manipulated in other ways – ‘a type of sexual molestation that might be expected of a small boy, not a man’.
A boy gets over his sexual obsession with his mother, and transfers his interest to girls of his own age.
‘The Strangler . . .
achieved this transfer – achieved emotional puberty – in a matter of months.’ Now he wanted to achieve orgasm inside younger women.
And with the final victim, Mary Sullivan, the semen was in her mouth and over her breasts; a broom had been inserted in the vagina.
The Strangler was making a gesture of triumph and of defiance: ‘I throw my sex in your face.’

This man, said Brussel, was a physically powerful individual, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, the time the paranoid reaction reaches its peak.
He hazarded a guess that the Strangler’s nationality was Italian or Spanish, since garrotting is a method used by bandits in both countries.

Brussel’s final ‘guesses’ were startlingly to the point.
He believed that the Strangler had stopped killing because he had worked it out of his system.
He had, in effect, grown up.
And he would finally be caught because he would be unable to resist talking about his crimes and his new-found maturity.

The rest of the committee was polite but sceptical.
But one year later, Brussel was proved correct when DeSalvo began admitting to George Nassar that he was the Boston Strangler.

In 1966, Brussel went to Boston to interview DeSalvo.
He had been half-expecting a misshapen monster, and was surprised to be greeted by a good-looking, polite young man with a magnificent head of dark hair.
(Brussel had even foretold that the Strangler would have well-tended hair, since he was obsessed by the impression he made on women.) Brussel found him charming, and soon realised how DeSalvo had talked his way into so many apartments; he seemed a thoroughly nice young man.
Then what had turned him into a murderer?
As usual, it proved to be the family and childhood background.
DeSalvo’s father was the worst kind of brute.
He beat his wife and children mercilessly – on one occasion he broke his wife’s fingers one by one.
He beat one son with a hosepipe so badly – for knocking over a box of fruit – that the boy was not allowed on the beach all summer because he was covered in black and yellow bruises.
He often brought a prostitute home and had sex with her in front of the children.
Their mother was also less than satisfactory.
She was indifferent and self-preoccupied, and had no time for the children.
As a child Albert had been a ‘loner’, his only real friend a dog that lived in a junkyard.
He developed sadistic compulsions at an early age.
He and a playmate called Billy used to place a dog and cat in two compartments of an orange crate and starve them for days, then pull out the partition, and watch as the cat scratched out the dog’s eyes.
But, like so many psychopaths (Albert Fish and Gary Heidnik, for example) he could display considerable charm and make himself liked.

The real key to DeSalvo was sex.
From an early age he was insatiable, ‘walking around with a rail on most of the time, ready to take on any broad or fag come along, or to watch some broad and masturbate . . .
thinking about sex a lot, more than anything, and needing it so much all the time.
If only somebody could’ve seen it then and told me it was not normal, even sick . . .’ DeSalvo is here exaggerating; a large proportion of healthy young males go around in much the same state.
DeSalvo’s environment offered a great deal of sexual stimulus.
He participated in sex games with his brothers and sisters when he was five or six years old.
At the age of eight he performed oral sex on a girl at school, and was soon persuading girls to do the same for him.
Albert DeSalvo was turned into a sexual psychopath by the same kind of ‘hothouse environment’ that had nurtured Albert Fish.
Combined with the lack of moral restraint that resulted from his family background, his tremendous sex urge soon led him to rape – his own estimation was that he had raped or assaulted almost two thousand women.
During the course of the Green Man attacks, he raped four women in a single day, and even then tried to pick up a fifth.
This was something that Brussel had failed to recognise.
The Strangler had not been ‘searching for his potency’ – he had always been potent.
During his teens, a woman neighbour had asked him if it was true that he had a permanent erection, and when he modestly admitted it, invited him into her apartment.
‘She went down on her knees and blowed me and I come almost right off and she said: “Oh, now you went and come and what am I going to have to get screwed with?”, and I said: “Don’t worry, I’ll have a hard on again in a few minutes”.’ When he left her, she was exhausted, but he was still unsatisfied.
It was not potency DeSalvo was searching for, but emotional stability.

Yet Brussel was undoubtedly correct about the main thing: that DeSalvo’s murders were part of an attempt to grow up.
The murders of elderly women were acts of revenge against the mother who had rejected him; but the murder of the young black girl Sophie Clark signalled a change.
When he knocked on her door DeSalvo had no idea that she would be so young – he was looking for elderly women, like his mother.
Her white dress and black stockings excited him.
He talked his way into her apartment by claiming to be a workman sent to carry out repairs – the method he invariably used – then, when she turned her back, hooked his arm round her neck and squeezed until she was unconscious.
After that he raped her, then strangled her.
The experience taught him that he preferred young girls to older women, and caused the change in his method.

Yet from the beginning, DeSalvo suffered from the same problem as so many sex killers: self-division.
A month before he killed Anna Slesers – the first victim – DeSalvo talked his way into the apartment of an attractive Swedish girl, claiming that he had been sent to repair the ceiling.
‘She was laughing and she was very nice.
An attractive, kind woman.’ In the bathroom she turned her back on him, and DeSalvo hooked his powerful forearm round her neck.
As he began to squeeze, he saw her face in the bathroom mirror, ‘the look of awful fear and pain.’ ‘And I see myself, the look on my own face . . .
and I can’t do it.
I take my arm away.’ The girl asked him what he was going to do, and he admitted that he was going to rape her and possibly kill her.
‘I tell you now that I was ashamed – I began to cry.’ He fell on his knees in front of her and said: ‘Oh God, what was I doing?
I am a good Catholic man with a wife and children.
I don’t know what to do . . .
Please call the police.’ The girl told him to go home.
‘She was a kind person and she was trying to be good to me.
But how much better it would have been if she had called the police right then and there.’ The episode is an interesting confirmation of a theory advanced by Brussel to his fellow committee members: that the Strangler only attacked women who turned their backs on him, because it seemed a form of ‘rejection’.

After killing Sophie Clark, he came very close to sparing his next victim, Patricia Bissette.
‘She was very nice to me, she treated me like a man – I thought of doing it to her and I talked myself out of it.’ She offered him coffee, and when he offered to go out and get some doughnuts, told him she had food there.
‘Then it was as good as over.
I didn’t want it to happen but then I knew that it would.’ After he had throttled her into unconsciousness and was raping her, ‘I want to say that all the time I was doing this, I was thinking about how nice she had been to me and it was making me feel bad.
She had treated me right, and I was doing this thing to her . . .’

At other times, Mr Hyde took over – as in his next murder, that of Mary Brown in Lawrence.
This murder was not, at the time, recognised as one of the Strangler’s crimes, because its ferocity seemed untypical.
DeSalvo described how he had knocked on the door and explained to the grey-haired lady who answered that he had come to paint the kitchen.
She let him in without question.
In his pocket, DeSalvo had a piece of brass pipe that he had found in the hallway.
‘As she walked to the kitchen, her back was to me.
I hit her right on the back of the head with the pipe . . .
this was terrible, and I don’t like talking about it.
She went down and I ripped her things open, showing her busts . . .
she was unconscious and bleeding . . .
I don’t know why but then I hit her again on the head with the pipe.
I kept on hitting and hitting her with the pipe . . .
this is like out of this world . . .
this is unbelievable . . .
oh, it was terrible . . .
because her head felt like it was all gone . . .
terrible . . .
then I took this fork and stuck it into her right bust.’ As in so many other cases, DeSalvo was unable to say why he did it.
(Similarly, he had been unable to explain why he rifled the apartments after committing the murders: he was not looking for anything specific and apparently took nothing.) What he failed to recognise was that, like so many other serial killers, he had been taken over – literally possessed – by a sadistic compulsion, the sheer joy of destruction.
Yet even as he did it, he continued to feel ‘This is terrible.’