A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  DeSalvo now had out-of-state warrants against him and a bail of one hundred thousand dollars. He was sent to Bridgewater State Hospital for pretrial observation and was quickly diagnosed with “sociopathic personality disorder marked by sexual deviation, with promi-nent schizoid features and depressive trends.” His mental health appeared to deteriorate over the next couple of months, and at his pretrial hearing the judge ruled that he was incompetent to stand trial and sent him back to Bridgewater indefinitely. The date was February 4, 1965.

  One month later DeSalvo met with a well-known lawyer named F. Lee Bailey and spent an hour in an interview room trying to prove that he, Albert DeSalvo, was in fact the Boston Strangler. Bailey took the information and went straight to Ed Brooke, state attorney general.

  TWENTY

  ALBERT DESALVO, Bridgewater Correctional Institution:

  “Well, I been riding around all day like in the middle of the world and I got to this parking lot down on Commonwealth Avenue and I left my car there and I walked to number 1940. It was awful hot and I could feel the sweat on me and smell it, too, and I don’t like that because I like to keep my body very clean. I look at the names on the mailboxes and the bells inside number 1940 and pick out a couple of women’s names and press the first one. I stand there waiting, feeling the image build up and not thinking about what I’m going to say to her because I know something will come to me like it always does. Nothing happens. I press the second doorbell and in a few minutes she buzzes the door, twice, and I walk into the hallway. The stairs are curved around an elevator and to the right and I go up them, not in a hurry or nothing, just taking them one at a time. Its funny, isn’t it, how the first woman didn’t answer the bell or wasn’t home or something and just that little chance, you understand what I mean?

  “She had on a robe, you might say a housecoat, the color was reddish to me, pinkish. She was wearing glasses and blue sneakers, I remember that, don’t I? What do you want, she said, and she sounded kind of mad, kind of impatient, as if I was a bother to her. I said, ‘We been wanting to check your apartment for leaks.’ It always came to me what to say and it was always something simple and easy and that could happen natural, you know? And she said, ‘Oh, all right, come in but make it fast I’m just getting ready to go out.’ But I already know she aint going nowhere after I close that door behind me even though I fight it all the way. It’s funny, I didn’t want to go in there in the first place I just didn’t want it to happen. I go in and go from one room to the other with her. In the bedroom she turned her back on me and I see the back of her head and I was all hot, just like my head was going to blow off as soon as I saw the back of her head, not her face. I got her from behind and both her and I fell backward on the bed. Now I am not telling this as it happened. I don’t like to talk about this. I grabbed her and she fell back with me on the bed, on top of me. We just missed one of the bedposts, I guess you call them, and I was in this position—here, you see, my arms around her neck and my feet around the bottom of her legs, do you understand?

  “This is very hard and I’m sorry to be mixed up like this but what come later was something I don’t like to talk about, you understand me? I mean about the bottle and her privates—what was the word you said?—yes, that and her lying there and the thing with the bottle, you know? That’s very hard for me. I thought I remembered at first she had shoes on, she may have had shoes on or house slippers or something on. Just until now I wasn’t sure about that. I’m trying to respond to your questions, sir, in a way that will make it all clear to and help me to clean myself inside which is what I wish to do and I answer, yes, as she fell she fell back on top of me and she was still conscious and I took her off the bed and I don’t know, did I put her on the floor? I would say that I lied her on the floor, I don’t know if it was a wooden floor or if it had a rug on there, and I opened her housecoat, tearing some of the buttons and she was wearing something underneath. I believe that it was at least a bra and panties and that I lifted them off—no it was just a slip and I lifted it above her waist and I had intercourse with her there in the floor and for a minute I felt good and then I looked at her and she still looked alive and so I went and got two nylon stockings, I put a silk stocking around her neck and knotted it, tight, three times like this and all the time the thing is building up in me again and I’m getting mad, very angry as I look at her there without her glasses on and her eyes wide open which she might be dead or not but she aint moving and it gets me mad, very very angry to see her like that so I take another silk stocking and put it around her neck, hooking it and twisting it with the other one and knotting it and pulling them so tight that they cut into her neck and I know she aint about to breathe no more.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  DESALVO TOLD BAILEY that he wanted to confess to thirteen murders in exchange for immunity from prosecution and transfer to a medical facility where he could get treatment for his psychological problems. He also wanted to sell the book rights to his story so that he could support his family from prison. Over the next several months DeSalvo submitted to an interrogation under hypnosis and recorded fifty hours of detailed confessions for John Bottomly, head of the Strangler Bureau. The transcripts were eventually released to the public in the form of highly processed excerpts in a book called Confessions of the Boston Strangler, by George William Rae. In the first chapter of his book, Rae explains to his readers that in order to protect DeSalvo’s legal rights, the words attributed to him “are not presented as legally exact quotations—although they come from impeccable sources and follow closely his intellectual and grammatical formulations.”

  Rae altered DeSalvo’s testimony to give him some legal protections, but there is no reason to believe—and no one has ever suggested—that he invented anything outright. Compressed into the kind of smooth-flowing narrative that Rae created, the tapes certainly did seem to provide an abundance of information that only a killer could know. The raw transcripts tell a different story, however. In them DeSalvo’s descriptions of the murders are clumsy and halting, and he often gropes his way through the details only with the help of John Bottomly, who breaks with accepted procedure and keeps hinting at the right answers.

  Doubts about DeSalvo’s confession arose almost immediately. Not only did many cops dismiss DeSalvo as a braggart and a punk, but they deeply resented the fact that John Bottomly had been handed the Strangler Bureau without any experience in criminal investigation. To make matters worse, any number of important people had something to gain from a successful conclusion to the Strangler investigation, and that fact alone cast doubt on virtually everything that DeSalvo said. Bottomly could clear the entire slate of murders and disband the Strangler Bureau, which would be a tremendous boon to his political career. Attorney General Ed Brooke could make good use of the success in his upcoming senate campaign. F. Lee Bailey could take credit for yet another high-profile case. And Albert DeSalvo—already facing life in prison for serial rape—could sell the rights to his story and become a star in his own psychological drama.

  Certainly jailhouse confessions are a dubious proposition. Of the two hundred or so convicted murderers in this country who have been released from prison because they were later proved to be innocent, one out of five confessed to the crime. The interrogation process can be so coercive, in other words, that innocent and guilty alike cooperate simply to put an end to their misery. And DeSalvo wasn’t a run-of-the-mill criminal; he was a high-profile rapist who had every reason to cooperate. Comfortably settled in prison with a high-profile lawyer and a flourishing drug racket, DeSalvo stood to reap huge financial benefits from movie and book deals by claiming to be the Boston Strangler. But the fact that he—or anyone else—stood to gain does not, in and of itself, prove that his confessions are false. The people who thought so were falling for a classic logical fallacy known as “asserting the consequent.” Rain makes the ground wet, but wet ground doesn’t prove it has rained; someone could just have turned on the sprinkler. Likewise with
DeSalvo: The fact that some murder suspects falsely confess in exchange for movie deals doesn’t mean that every suspect with a movie deal has falsely confessed; guilty men like movie deals as well.

  The other main reason people doubted DeSalvo’s confessions were the numerous errors and blank spots in his memory. The extent of these errors was not commonly known until 1995, when a journalist named Susan Kelly reexamined transcripts of the original confessions in a book called The Boston Stranglers. According to Kelly’s thoroughly researched book, much of DeSalvo’s confessions was wrong, and the parts that weren’t wrong could easily have come from newspaper accounts and prompting by John Bottomly. Every murder had these errors. When questioned by Bottomly about Anna Slesers, for example, DeSalvo could not easily remember the color of the lining of her housecoat, whether there was a wastebasket in her bedroom, or what kind of music was playing on her phonograph. And there were more significant errors as well: He could not remember the date Nina Nichols was killed—even though it had appeared in the newspapers. He could not remember her street address. He could not remember what floor she lived on. He said he raped Helen Blake when in fact she was not raped; he said he raped Ida Irga when in fact she was not raped; he said he raped Mary Sullivan when in fact she was not raped.

  On and on the list went, thirteen murders half remembered by a man who claimed he’d committed them but who mainly seemed able to recite details that had already appeared in the papers. Even more damning, some of the facts that he got wrong were also reported incorrectly in the newspapers. It looked, in other words, as though DeSalvo had just studied the newspaper accounts and absorbed everything, correct or otherwise. Kelly’s explanation for DeSalvo’s errors was that he was lying, and that’s certainly a possibility. But it’s not the only possibility. Perfect recall by criminals—by anyone—does not exist, and exceptionally violent incidents are known to trigger temporary amnesia not only in eyewitnesses but in the perpetrators as well. Sirhan Sirhan readily admitted killing Robert Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel in 1968, but he remembered almost nothing of how he had done it. Soldiers who have won the Medal of Honor for heroism during combat typically remember very little of the incident that won them the medal. Furthermore, murderers read the newspapers like everyone else, so not only correct details but incorrect ones as well could conceivably work their way into a confused killer’s memory. DeSalvo, in fact, told John Bottomly that one of the reasons he remembered the names of his victims was because he read them in the newspaper the next day.

  In 1984 in Annapolis, Maryland, a teenage boy named Larry Swartz had a brief, unpleasant exchange with his foster mother and then shocked himself by suddenly grabbing a ten-pound splitting maul and burying it in the back of her head. He went on to kill his father with a knife before going to bed and then called 911 in the morning. Swartz eventually confessed to the police, but his memory was highly distorted by the sheer violence of the scene. He remembered growling like a dog while he was doing the killing and also remembered looking down from the ceiling as if watching someone else. His memories were fractured and distorted and significantly inconsistent with the evidence. Those memories, however, may well show what murder looks like through the eyes of a murderer.

  “He told me his body was working very quickly, his mind was working very slowly,” Swartz’s lawyer explained to a local reporter. “He would see himself stab [his mother] in the throat. His mind would somehow say, ‘God, you’ve got to stop that!’ But by the time the thought had formed, he would see himself stabbing her again. He described it to me as, ‘My mind never caught up with my body.’ Then he turned around and saw his father standing there on the landing with what he called a blank look. He heard himself growl like a wolf or a dog and realized it was himself. He sensed himself taking one giant step and his father fell back into the computer room. He recalls his father trying to shut the door and Larry just brushing it aside. Larry told me it was like the door wasn’t even there.”

  The psychological term for this is “dissociation”; it is an adaptive mechanism that allows people who are undergoing extreme trauma—either killers or victims—to insulate themselves from reality. Dissociation does not open the door to violence; rather, it is triggered by the first puzzling blow. After that both killer and victim find themselves in a slow-motion dream that neither can escape. It is an odd and sluggish dream where the inner narration in the mind of the killer—“I can’t believe I’m strangling this woman”—is roughly mirrored by the inner narration of the victim, who is thinking, “I can’t believe this man is actually strangling me.” Victims of near-fatal car accidents often dissociate, as do people who survive falls from great heights or are attacked by wild animals. Time slows down in a dissociative state. There is a sense of unreality, as if what is happening has to be a dream. Certain details become very vivid, and others are completely wiped out. In Swartz’s case he hit his mother with the splitting maul and then had a memory of her breathing so loudly that he felt compelled to make it stop by cutting her throat with a knife. In reality his mother was so badly wounded that her breathing must have been nearly inaudible, but Larry Swartz’s mind fixated on it to the point where it overwhelmed every other sound in the room.

  After the murders Swartz regained his senses enough to try to hide the evidence, but police easily linked him to the crime. When he finally gave his confession, he sobbed so violently that he could barely speak. He spent hours with the police trying to reconstruct what had happened that night, but his memory never matched the evidence that was found at the scene. The most puzzling of these inconsistencies were shoeless footprints in the snow that left the Swartz house and meandered half a mile around the neighborhood before returning home. Larry Swartz was the only person who could have left those tracks, but he had no memory of it. All he had was an unexplained gash on one foot and a dim recollection of a “burning sensation”—because his feet were frozen?—at some point after the murders.

  If Swartz could run a half mile barefoot through the snow and not remember it the next day, DeSalvo could forget the color of Anna Slesers’s housecoat or even the exact manner of her violation. DeSalvo took credit for thirteen murders in all, including the brutal clubbing death of Mary Brown several days before Bessie Goldberg’s murder, and the death by heart attack of an elderly woman who caught him breaking into her apartment. Neither the clubbing death nor the heart attack had been considered “Boston Stranglings,” and yet he had claimed them anyway. The amount of raw information in even the most cursory newspaper articles was enormous, on the order of fifteen or twenty core facts for each murder. And there was probably an equal number of lesser details—the color of Nina Nichols’s housecoat, for example—that would never have made it into the papers. Had DeSalvo not killed anyone, he would have had to memorize as many as five hundred random facts about the murders, a sort of grim trivia contest. But what would constitute a “high” or a “low” score in such a contest? If DeSalvo got, say, half the details correct, was that a lot or a little?

  Put another way, if a man went on blind dates with thirteen different women and was asked years later what the women had worn the night he took them out, what they’d ordered for dinner, what music was playing, and what the waiter looked like, would a score of 50 percent be reasonable? Ten percent? These were not dates, though, they were murders, and killers who dissociate tend to fixate on certain details of their crimes and block out others. That could make a culprit’s testimony both very compelling and very spotty. DeSalvo’s testimony, if true, pointed strongly toward some degree of dissociation.

  “When it turned, it did it fast,” he told Bottomly about his sudden slide into violence. “I was only angry at two of the Strangler’s women, both of them had said something to me that made me angry. The rest of them, I don’t know, I just found myself doing it to them…either in a daze or like a dream or standing there watching myself do it. And sometimes after, I would not think it was me with my arm around the old woman’s neck, or me with my hand
on a woman’s throat and she hadn’t done nothing to me, in fact she’d been very good to me. All I know is that something would happen and I would have my arms around their necks.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  IT WAS ONLY a matter of time before someone remembered Bessie Goldberg. DeSalvo never mentioned her name, but the murder was almost identical to many others that he confessed to, and those confessions were filled with references to Belmont. Any alert investigator would eventually get around to wondering whether there was some connection between the two. My mother, like a lot of people, always thought that Roy Smith might be innocent, so she was not surprised when a detective from the Strangler Bureau called and asked if she would answer some questions about Albert DeSalvo. Sometime in early 1966, Lt. Andrew Tuney and Detective Steve Delaney drove out to Belmont, parked in front of our house at 21 Cedar Road, and walked up the brick path to our door.

  Delaney was not new to the Goldberg murder. Two years earlier, just after he’d started working at the Strangler Bureau, Attorney General Ed Brooke had stopped by his desk to ask a favor. Delaney’s job was to read through the crates of files, looking for patterns to the murders, and Brooke wanted him to add the Goldberg murder to the list. Were there similarities, Brooke wanted to know, between the modus operandi of the Goldberg murder and the other murders?

  It was a politically risky request because Smith had already been convicted—in fact his case was currently under appeal—and Brooke was essentially suggesting that someone else might have committed the murder. If the press found out, they would have a field day with it. A couple of weeks later Brooke ran across Delaney in the office and asked him if he’d had time to go through the Goldberg file. Delaney told him that he had, and that the MO had seemed to him exactly the same.