by Colin Wilson
I read your paper of December 26—placing myself in custody would be stupid—do not insult my intelligence—bring the Con Edison to justice—start working on Lehmann—Poletti—Andrews . . .
It was signed “F.P.”
The men named were the former governor of New York State, a former lieutenant governor, and a former industrial commissioner. The bomber went on to promise a “truce” until mid-January, and to list fourteen bombs he had planted in 1956, many of which had not so far been discovered. The police later found eight pipe bombs: five were dummies, but three were still live and unexploded—the crude chemical detonating mechanism had failed to work.
Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy asked the newspaper not to print the letter, in case it caused public panic; instead, the editor inserted an advertisement in the personals column:
We received your letter. We appreciate truce. What were you deprived of? We want to hear your views and help you. We will keep our word. Contact us the same way as previously.
But other newspapers spotted the item, and the secret was out. The Journal American decided to print most of the bomber’s letter, together with yet another appeal. The result was another letter from the bomber, promising a truce until March 1, and offering an important piece of information:
I was injured on a job at Consolidated Edison Plant—as a result I am adjudged totally and permanently disabled. I did not receive any aid of any kind from company—that I did not pay for myself—while fighting for my life—section 28 came up.
Section 28 of the New York State Compensation Law limits the start of any legal action to two years after an injury. The letter-writer went on to accuse Con Edison of blocking all of his attempts to gain compensation, and to criticize Lehmann, Poletti, and Andrews for ignoring his letters. Like the previous letter, this was signed “F.P.”
Here, then, were clues that could lead to the bomber’s identity. Yet, Con Edison is a giant energy company, supplying New York City with its electric, gas, and steam, and has numerous power plants. If the bomber had been injured before 1940—the date of the first bomb—the chances were high that his records had long ago been destroyed or lost. The same problem applied to Lehmann, Poletti, and Andrews; they probably received a hundred letters a day during their terms of office, and most of them would have ended up in the wastepaper basket. No politician files all of his crank letters.
The police decided on a curious expedient—to consult a psychiatrist for his opinion on the bomber. This was the decision of Inspector Howard F. Finney of the crime laboratory. The man he chose was Dr. James A. Brussel, who had been working for many years with the criminally insane. Finney handed Brussel the file on the bomber, together with the letters. Brussel studied the letters, and his first conclusion was that the bomber was an immigrant; the letters contained no Americanisms. Further, stilted Victorian phrases such as “they will pay for their dastardly deeds” suggested a member of the older generation. The bomber, said Brussel, was obviously a paranoiac, a man far gone in persecution mania, one who has allowed himself to become locked into an inner world of hostility and resentment; everyone is plotting against him and he trusts no one. But because he is so close to the verge of insanity, he is careful, meticulous, highly controlled—the bomber’s block-capital letters were beautifully neat. Brussel’s experience of paranoia suggested that it most often develops in the mid-thirties. Since the first bomb was planted in 1940, this suggested that the bomber must now be in his mid-fifties.
Brussel was a Freudian—as were most psychiatrists of that period—and he observed that the only letters that stood out from the others were the Ws, formed from two rounded Us, which resembled breasts. From this Brussel deduced that the bomber was still a man with strong sex drives, and that he had probably had trouble with his mother. He also noted that the cinema bombs had been planted inside W-shaped slashes, and that these again had some sexual connotation. Brussel’s final picture of the bomber was of a man in his fifties, Slavic in origin, neat and precise in his habits, and who lived in some better part of New York with an elderly mother or female relative. He was—or had been—a good Catholic. He was of strong build. And finally, he was the type who wore double-breasted suits.
Some of these deductions were arrived at by study of the letters—the meticulousness, obsessive self-control—and others by a process of elimination: the bomber was not American, but the phrasing was not German, Italian, or Spanish, so the likeliest alternative was a Slav. The majority of Slavs are Catholic, and the letters sometimes revealed a religious obsession . . .
Meanwhile, the Journal American had printed a third appeal, this one promising that if the bomber gave further details of his grievances, the newspaper would do its best to reopen his case. This brought a typewritten reply that contained the requested details:
I was injured on September 5, 1931. There were over twelve thousand danger signs in the plant, yet not even First Aid was available or rendered to me. I had to lay on cold concrete . . . Mr. Reda and Mr. Hooper wrote telling me that the $180 I got in sick benefits (that I was paying for) was ample for my illness.
Again, the signature was “F.P.”
Now that investigators had a date, Con Edison clerical employees were put to work searching the corporation’s voluminous personnel files. There was still no guarantee that a file dating back to 1931 would exist, but a worker named Alice Kelly eventually located it. The file concerned George Metesky, born in 1904, who had been working as a generator wiper in 1931 at the Hell Gate power station of the United Electric & Power Company, later absorbed by Con Edison. On September 5, 1931, Metesky had been caught in a boiler blowback and inhaled poisonous gases. These caused hemorrhages, which most likely brought on his subsequent pneumonia and tuberculosis—although there was no definitive proof. His doctors sent him to Arizona to recuperate, but he’d been forced to return to Waterbury, Connecticut—where he lived—because of lack of funds. He had received only $180 in sick benefits, and the file contained letters from the men called Reda and Hooper that he had mentioned.
The police lost no time in getting to Waterbury, taking with them a search warrant. The man who opened the door of the ramshackle four-story house in an industrial area wore gold-framed glasses, and peered mildly at the policemen from a round, gentle face. He identified himself as George Metesky, and allowed the officers to come in. He lived in the fourteen-room house with two elderly half-sisters, May and Anna Milausky, daughters of his mother’s previous marriage. On that matter, Brussel’s “guess” had been remarkably accurate.
A search of the house revealed nothing, but in the garage police found a workshop with a lathe, and a length of the same kind of pipe used to construct the bombs. Rechecking the house, they found in a bedroom a typewriter that would later be identified through forensic examination as the one used to write the letters. An hour later, at the police station, Metesky confessed that he was, indeed, the Mad Bomber, and that the initials “F.P.” stood for “fair play.” A photograph of him taken immediately after his arrest showed that, as Brussel had predicted, he wore a double-breasted suit.
Psychiatrists at Bellevue Hospital found Metesky to be insane and therefore incapable of standing trial; he was committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Beacon, New York, where he spent the remainder of his life.
The next major investigation involving “psychological profiling” was rather less successful, and brought a certain amount of discredit to the new science.
Between June 1962 and January 1964, thirteen women were strangled and raped in the Boston area; the press referred to the unknown assailant of eleven of them as the “Boston Strangler.” But on January 4, 1964, the killings suddenly stopped. The Strangler’s last presumed victim was nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan; he bit her all over her body, masturbated on her face, and left her with a broom handle rammed inside her vagina.
A rash of rapes continued in the Boston area, but this rapist seemed to be a polite and gentle sor
t of person; he always apologized before he left, and if the woman seemed too distressed, even omitted the rape. The descriptions of this “gentle rapist,” known as the “Green Man” because he wore green pants, reminded the police of an offender who had been jailed for two years in 1960. He had been dubbed the “Measuring Man” because he talked his way into apartments by posing as an executive from a modeling agency, and persuaded young women to allow him to take their measurements. Occasionally he ventured a few indecent caresses. A few of the women allowed him to make love to them as a bribe—although the promised modeling jobs, of course, never materialized.
Self-confessed “Boston Strangler,” Albert DeSalvo, minutes after his capture on February 25, 1967. Described as “charming” by many people who met him, DeSalvo may be the only serial killer who killed his way to some kind of “maturity.” (Associated Press)
The Measuring Man was arrested, and proved to be a husky young ex-soldier named Albert DeSalvo; he was sentenced for “lewd and lascivious behavior,” as well as for attempted breaking and entry.
DeSalvo was identified by the Green Man’s rape victims after his arrest in November 1964, and in February 1965 was sent to the Bridgewater State Hospital for observation; there he was diagnosed schizophrenic and deemed incompetent to stand trial. Soon after his permanent committal to Bridgewater, he confessed to fellow inmate George Nassar that he was the Boston Strangler. Nassar informed his lawyer, who happened to be the controversial F. Lee Bailey, well-known for his involvement in the Sam Sheppard murder case. In taped interviews with Bailey, DeSalvo confessed in detail to the thirteen Boston murders. The police were at first inclined to be skeptical, but soon became convinced by DeSalvo’s detailed knowledge of the crimes. As a result, DeSalvo was sentenced to life imprisonment; he had served only six years when he was found stabbed to death in his cell by a fellow prisoner who was never identified.
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 the Mad Bomber. 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 older women, and the other young ones. The opposing group thought that there was only one Boston Strangler. (To this day, the controversy continues over the irrefutable identity of the culprit, or culprits.)
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 was 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 MO, 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 four victims, said Brussel, were women between the ages of fifty-five and seventy-five, and there was no seminal fluid found at the scenes. The women 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. 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 age at which the paranoid reaction reaches its peak. He hazarded a guess that the Strangler’s nationality was Italian or Spanish, since garroting 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 newfound maturity.
The rest of the committee was polite but skeptical. But one year later, Brussel was vindicated when DeSalvo began admitting to his cellmate George Nassar that he was the Boston Strangler.
In 1966, Brussel traveled 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 realized how DeSalvo had talked his way into so many apartments: he seemed a thoroughly nice young man.
What then had turned him into a murderer? As usual, it proved to be the family 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 hose 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. His mother was also less than satisfactory. Indifferent and self-preoccupied, she 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 a cat in two compartments of an orange crate and starve them for days, and then pull out the partition, and watch as the cat scratched out the dog’s eyes. But, like so many psychopaths he could display considerable charm and make himself liked.
The real key to DeSalvo was sex. And in that sense he is typical of a majority of serial killers. 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. And DeSalvo’s environment offered a great deal of sexual stimuli. 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. 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 recognize. The Strangler had not been “searching for his potency,” as Brussel speculated; he had always been potent. During his teens, a neighbor 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 motivation: that DeSalvo’s murders were part of an attempt to grow up. The murders of older women were acts of revenge against the mother who had rejected him; but the murder of a young black woman named Sophie Cla
rk signaled a change. When he knocked on her door DeSalvo had no idea that she would be so young—he was looking for elderly or middle-aged women, like his mother. Clark’s 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 and then strangled her. The experience taught him that he preferred girls to older women, and caused the change in his method. Hence the change in the type of victim he selected that so misled the profiling team that they assumed there were two stranglers.
Brussel was also correct about the reason DeSalvo stopped killing. The last victim, Mary Sullivan, tried to reason with him, to talk him out of raping her. Her words struck home. “I recall thinking at the time, yes, she is right, I don’t need to do these things any more now.” And as he tied her up he realized, “I would never be able to do it again.” It was his last murder, and he returned to rape, the only known serial killer to have murdered his way to some kind of maturity.
2
Fighting Monsters
By the mid-1970s, it was obvious to some of America’s leading analysts that the police were losing the battle against the rising murder rate. In 1960 it had been around 9,000 a year; by 1975 it was 20,500. Twenty years earlier, virtually all murders had been solved, but by the time the figure had risen to 20,000 a year, a quarter of the cases were remaining unsolved. And the rate was still climbing.