A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  Despite its problems Chelsea remained in a prewar limbo of close neighborhoods and petty crime well into the sixties. There was a nighttime curfew for children—one of the few in the country—and paperboys had to dodge patrolmen in order to finish their routes in the morning. Middle-class families lived in graceful houses on Bellingham Hill, and everyone else was smashed into the neighborhoods of brick tenements and wood-frame triple-deckers that started a couple of blocks from the waterfront. There were acres of scrapyards in Chelsea, and iron foundries along Broadway, and lumberyards and varnish works on the waterfront, and Jewish rag shops that bought by the pound from old ragpickers who moved slowly through town on horse-drawn carts. When word came to Chelsea in 1963 that Israel Goldberg’s wife, Bessie, had been murdered over in Belmont, old men on carts were still creaking down cobblestone streets in the poorer neighborhoods, calling out for rags.

  The Poles and the Jews and the Italians and the Irish lived side by side in Chelsea without much trouble, and when violence happened it generally came from the outside. In 1963 a trio of small-time criminals drove into Chelsea, strode into the Goldberg Executive Building, and robbed the Lincoln National Bank. The police cornered them on Fourth Street, but they shot their way out, jumped into a car, and raced for the bridge out of town. The two who were caught immediately were arraigned in Chelsea District Court, where they faced a judge who happened to be president of the bank they had just robbed. Two years later a slope-eyed thug named Teddy Deegan was found shot to death in an alley behind the Goldberg building, having been lured there by several fellow gangsters who said they needed his help robbing a credit union on the second floor. The gangsters let Deegan walk into the alley first and then put two rounds in the back of his head and four in his chest.

  The murder was the eleventh in a gang war that would see forty people dead before it was over, and the alley was immediately named “Deegan’s Alley” in his honor. There were rumors that the men had then gone on to rob the credit union—and that Israel Goldberg was strongly advised to not report the matter—but that was never proved. One of Deegan’s murderers, Joe “the Animal” Barboza, would go on to be an FBI informant, and when Barboza showed up on the initial Chelsea police investigation, the FBI stepped in to quash the arrest. The Chelsea police files disappeared almost immediately after the crime and did not turn up until 1998, when a construction worker found them buried beneath the police chief’s floor.

  DeSalvo grew up in Chelsea’s odd blend of hard work and petty crime and quickly familiarized himself with both. He worked as a shoeshine boy and in a junk shop and on a pickle truck and spent his free time down along the waterfront looking for trouble and sex. From the waterfront he could look across Chelsea Creek at the flat-topped triple-deckers of East Boston. “There was always somebody to teach a boy over there about sex,” DeSalvo told Bottomly about those years. “There was queers and funny old men and Greeks and older women who weren’t getting what they wanted from grown men and they come around fooling with us kids. There was even a queer cop used to go under the piers. I used to swim a lot in the harbor in the summer, it was nice there in the water all alone with the city across the water and nobody to tell you what to do or how to do it. I used to shoot cats in the waterfront with a bow and arrow, put it right through their bellies, and sometimes they’d run away with the arrow right through them, yowling. Sometimes when I would see them, before the shot, I’d get such a feeling of anger that I think I could’ve torn those cats apart with my bare hands. I don’t understand this. I don’t usually hate cats or like them, either, for that matter. You understand me?”

  The wharves provided refuge to the town’s drunks and homeless and insane, and DeSalvo seemed to be able to hang out with them without getting drawn into their ruthless world. “There was kids there with no homes at all,” he told John Bottomly. “That was where they lived, under the piers and in the old warehouses and wharves. They was wharf rats, that’s what people called them and they was just like rats—I saw them roll a drunk one night, landing on him the way real rats would. They got that drunk down just like real rats and they practically tore him to pieces and then dumped the body into the water. We used to lie under a wharf near Maverick Square where the penny ferryboats came across from the Boston side and listen to the ship whistles in the harbor, funny, lonely sounds and the water slapping against the supports and the gulls out there sounding like cats.”

  At age fourteen DeSalvo stole a car and was sent to reform school. A few weeks into his sentence he escaped with two friends, but they were quickly tracked down and returned to custody. DeSalvo had to earn back three thousand demerit points even to be considered for parole. He got out the following year and returned to Chelsea, where he and his friends amused themselves by catching stray cats and dogs and starving them in boxes before releasing them to fight. The cats generally clawed the dogs’ eyes out before the dogs managed to kill them. “The war was going on and there was a lot of sailors and soldiers around,” DeSalvo told John Bottomly about those days. “We had a gang of kids used to hang around outside Arnie’s Bar and Grill on First Street looking to roll these guys when they was too drunk to fight us kids off. I never was much for that stuff. I was a B&E [breaking-and-entering] man mostly, there was something exciting, thrilling about going into somebody’s home…. I think now, too, that it had something to do with going into bedrooms where women had been sleeping or were sleeping and there was times when I would get a rail on just standing there outside the bedroom door listening to some woman breathe. It was only a matter of time before I would feel strong and tough enough to go into the bedroom when the woman was there alone and make her do what I wanted with her. But in those days I was a straight B&E man with a lot of sex on the side from the girls and the queers around the neighborhood. They…would pay for it, too, which was all right with me since I needed the dough and there was some relief from the urge that was pushing me to sex all the time, but it really was woman that I wanted, not any special one, just woman, with what a woman has.”

  DeSalvo made it to age seventeen without going to jail and—much like Roy Smith—enlisted in the army as soon as he could. He trained in New Jersey and then was sent to Germany, where he was promoted to the rank of sergeant in the military police. He boxed his way to the army middleweight title in Europe despite having been injured when a shell misfired and exploded in the breech of a tank barrel. He met a young German woman named Irmgard Beck and eventually married her, but that did not prevent him from getting a lot of sex on the side. He claims he seduced the wives of American servicemen as well as German women who were just looking for a good time. He also pretended to be a scout for Stars and Stripes and would take the measurements of American nurses for what he called the “Best Sweetheart of All” contest. First prize was supposedly a trip to Italy. DeSalvo wasn’t tall, but he was powerfully built and had a tough, handsome face and a surprising sweetness that many women must have imagined was especially for them.

  Plenty of young men with violent fathers have gone on to lead turbulent lives, and DeSalvo was no exception. His troubles took a disturbing turn, though, when he was charged with carnal abuse of a young child in January 1955. He had been reassigned to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and was living there with his new wife, Irmgard. One afternoon he had knocked on the door of a private home in a nearby town and found himself talking to a nine-year-old girl whose mother had gone out to buy food for dinner. He told the girl he was looking for a house to rent, and the girl claimed he had then proceeded to put his hand on her chest and between her legs. He stopped and left the house only when the girl’s younger brother wandered into the room. DeSalvo was picked up by the police because he was already under suspicion for entering another woman’s house, and the girl positively identified him as the man who had touched her. The charges were eventually dropped because the girl’s mother was reluctant to subject her daughter to the publicity of a trial.

  After DeSalvo was honorably discharged from the military h
e moved back to Chelsea with Irmgard, got a series of low-paying jobs, and embarked on a breaking-and-entering spree that would see him arrested four times over the next year and a half. Every judge he faced gave him a suspended sentence. His luck finally ran out on March 17, 1961, when a Cambridge cop fired his revolver into the air and stopped DeSalvo in his tracks as he was fleeing an apartment building near Harvard University. The police put handcuffs on him and searched him and found a screwdriver, a skeleton key, and a jacknife in his pockets and four more screwdrivers in his car. DeSalvo’s explanation for his situation was disarmingly innocent if disturbing: Yes, he’d tried to break into an apartment, but he hadn’t intended to steal anything, he’d just wanted to surprise the two young nurses who lived there. How did he know that two nurses lived there? Well, a couple of weeks earlier, DeSalvo said he had knocked on their door and passed himself off as a scout for a modeling agency—his old Stars and Stripes routine. He’d asked the two women if they were interested in working as models and they said no, but he had remembered where they lived. And he had gone back.

  The police were well aware of this scam. For months women had been calling the Cambridge police department to complain that a dark-haired young man named “Mr. Johnson” had knocked on their door and asked if they were interested in working as models. If they were, the man would pull a tape measure out of his pocket and measure all over their bodies—their legs, their waist, their bust—and then tell them that a representative from the “Black and White Modeling Agency” would be in touch with them. Of course no one ever called.

  Just the week before, a man by the same description had tried to break into another Cambridge apartment where two young women lived. It was a Saturday morning, and, hearing a tapping at the door, one of the women had opened it to find a strange man standing there stammering that he was an artist’s agent. In fact, the tapping had been his attempts to jimmy the lock with a screwdriver. Are you a model? the man asked. When the young woman said no, the man tried to interest her in the idea. He finally left, saying that someone from the office would be in touch with her soon. The date was March 11, two years to the day before Bessie Goldberg was killed on Scott Road in Belmont. The question he asked was the same one that DeSalvo had asked my mother’s young art student, Marie, before grabbing her around the waist and pulling her toward him.

  The police had started referring to this intruder as the “Measuring Man,” because he never attacked anyone, he just measured any woman who would let him. DeSalvo not only admitted to being the Measuring Man but boasted that some of these women had taken their clothes off so that their measurements would be smaller, and a few had even slept with him. “I’m not good-looking, I’m not educated, but I was able to put something over on high-class people,” he explained. “They were college kids and I never had anything in my life and I outsmarted them.” DeSalvo went on trial for assault and battery, for breaking and entering, and for lewdness and was convicted of the first two charges and acquitted of the third, which should have resulted in consecutive two-year sentences at the Middlesex House of Corrections. Judge Edward Viola first allowed DeSalvo to serve his sentences concurrently and then reduced them to eighteen months; the parole board ultimately let him out after ten.

  THE POLICE HAD no cause to think about Albert DeSalvo for the next three years. Eleven women were strangled and sexually assaulted in Boston without his name ever coming up. DeSalvo got his job with Russ Blomerth and started working at my parents’ house and did painting jobs on the side and by all accounts was a good husband and a hard worker and a decent neighbor. He and his family lived on a dead-end street in the working-class suburb of Malden, and the only tragedy in their life was a medical problem with their young daughter, Judy. She had been born with a hip deformity that threatened to cripple her for life, and the doctor fitted her with a brace and taught DeSalvo how to massage her. Every evening DeSalvo would place Judy on her back and unlace her brace and knead her thighs as hard as he could, and then tie the brace back up.

  DeSalvo later claimed that his wife stopped having sex with him after Judy was born because she was terrified of having another deformed child. He even tried to get her to read the Kinsey Report so that she could see that his desire for sex was normal. Irmgard, for her part, told investigators that Al’s sexual demands were so incessant that no woman could possibly have fulfilled them. Years later Al wrote Irmgard a six-page letter from prison explaining how much her rejection had hurt him. The letter is written longhand on notebook paper and is so filled with anguish that the sentences barely make sense. It reads, in part:

  I don’t blame you for my troubles, but you will admit that if you treated me different like you told me all those years we lost, the love I had been searching for, that we first had when we were married. Yes, Irm, I stole them. But why. What happened when Judy was born and we found out she may never walk. Irm from that day on you changed. All your love went to Judy. After I came out of jail—despite everything I tried to do—you denied me my rights as a husband. I am really and sincerely sorry for what I have done and will have to pay for it with years of my life. But apparently that is still not enough for you. You tell me not to write you or if I write you not to express in any way my love for you. So that even in this critical time when I need you most of all you are still making me feel hopeless. You can’t [know] how awful it is to wait for letters that do not come. I will love you forever, always.

  The year in jail DeSalvo referred to was his stint at the Middlesex House of Corrections after his Measuring Man escapades. He was released in April 1962, and apparently went home hoping that Irmgard would see his criminal behavior as a cry for help and change her own behavior accordingly. Judging by this letter, she didn’t. If DeSalvo was indeed the Strangler, it may be significant that the murder of Anna Slesers happened two months after he got out of jail. She was the first woman to be killed, and it happened around the time that DeSalvo realized that nothing in his marriage had changed. According to him, at least, that was what had triggered his first, impulsive murder.

  Al was known as a B&E man, not a sexual offender, so his name did not appear on a list of Strangler suspects until March 1965. By that time he was already back in prison for a series of sexual attacks in the Boston area. He’d been picked up the previous November because he strongly resembled a police sketch of a man who had appeared unexpectedly one morning in the bedroom of a young Cambridge woman. The man wore aviator glasses and a dark waist-length jacket and green pants and his hair was stylishly combed back with grease, and he put a knife to the young woman’s throat and tied her to the bed and commenced to molest her. Before he got very far, however, he seemed to have second thoughts and asked the woman how to leave her apartment. And then he was gone.

  A detective who saw the sketch thought it looked like the old Measuring Man, and Cambridge asked police in Malden to bring DeSalvo in for questioning. He was put in a lineup and immediately picked out by the woman who had been attacked, who recognized his voice as well. The police knew of three other women who had been attacked in a similar way, including an old lady who managed to give DeSalvo pause by demanding to know what his mother would think of his activities. She wouldn’t like it, DeSalvo admitted before masturbating in front of her and leaving.

  None of these four women had been raped or seriously molested, and again, the timing of this may be significant. In his letter to Irmgard, DeSalvo added a postscript that said, in part: “Our last two months together you made me feel for the first time like a man. You gave me love I never dreamed you had to give.” The two months he referred to were September and October 1965, immediately before he was arrested. If DeSalvo was indeed the Boston Strangler, as he claimed, the timing would make sense. According to him he killed because of rage at his wife, and now that things were better at home, he could continue his lifelong compulsion of breaking into women’s homes and still catch himself before things got out of hand. He even apologized to one woman as he left.

  D
eSalvo was arraigned and again charged with B&E, assault and battery, and engaging in unnatural and lascivious acts, though this time the court added confining and putting in fear because he had tied his victims up. He was released on eight thousand dollars’ bail, but was rearrested almost immediately because his photograph—which had gone out by teletype to police departments across New England—matched descriptions of a man who was wanted by the state police in Connecticut. Maybe DeSalvo hadn’t raped anyone in Massachusetts, but the previous spring and summer a man who looked exactly like him had raped dozens of women in other New England states—including four women in one morning in the Hartford–New Haven area. In almost every case a dark-haired man wearing green cotton work pants had broken into a woman’s home, tied her to her bed, and then raped her. None of the women were killed. Because of his clothes the rapist was known in Connecticut as the “Green Man.” Women who were shown the teletype photograph of DeSalvo said they were absolutely sure that he was the man who had attacked them.