The Boston Strangler

by Frank, Gerold;

  He put his hand in his pocket but Nancy had already drawn back. Everything had happened so quickly she had hardly had time to react sensibly. “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m not at all interested.” She showed him out.

  On February 17, 1961, a Boston housewife opened her door to a man who said he came from a talent agency. He named the friend who had recommended her, brought out a tape measure such as tailors use, and began, as she said, “to measure me all over.”

  “I didn’t stop him at first, I don’t know why,” she said later. “He actually lifted my skirt and touched the skin of my thigh—I jumped away then.” When he had finished jotting down her measurements, he said, “You’re good for at least forty dollars an hour—why don’t you talk to your husband about it tonight?” gave her a handshake, and left.

  Three weeks later the story began to take on darker overtones. Sarah Craig and her roommate, Sylvia McNamara, were at breakfast in the kitchen of Apartment 3 at 268 Harvard Street about 11 A.M. Saturday, March 11, 1961, when they heard a soft tapping. Was it at their door, or someone knocking at the apartment across the hall? Sarah unlocked the door and swung it open to disclose a young man standing there, dark-eyed, with dark hair, and obviously nervous.

  “Can I come in and talk to you, please?” he asked. She led him into the living room. The reader must remember that this incident took place before the Strangler appeared on the Boston scene. Standing in the room, the young man said, “I was sent to Apartment Number Three. I’m an artist’s agent. Are you a model?” When Sarah said no, he began to speak so rapidly that she couldn’t make out what he said, though she asked him twice to repeat his words. Apparently it was about photography, modeling, sculpture, Harvard University, and a fee of forty dollars an hour. She finally broke in, “You really must have the wrong party—”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Could it be your roommate?”

  When she shook her head, he said, “Well, in case you’re interested, Mrs.—” —she could not make out the name—“from the agency will be in the building later and she’ll have papers you can fill out.” He was gone, out the door, as nervous as when he entered.

  The two women decided the whole thing was a fraternity stunt—probably a student carrying out a silly assignment for his initiation. But next day their janitor showed them metal shavings outside their door. Around the lock were marks of a screwdriver used in an attempt to jimmy it.

  That, then, must have been the tapping they heard. Had their caller of the day before been trying to force his way in?

  Why did he not simply knock?

  The following Friday, March 17, just before dusk, the elusive dark-haired man was seized. There had been a series of housebreakings in Cambridge and six police cruisers were on the alert for the burglar. Sergeant Leo Davenport, cruising in one car, heard a call over his radio: “We’re chasing a man who just ran into the yard at Ellery and Harvard.” Sergeant Davenport, finding himself at that very intersection, jumped out and was about to vault a fence when he heard a gunshot. Someone shouted, “Colleran shot!” Colleran was a fellow policeman. Davenport leaped the fence, gun in hand, just as a dark-haired man of medium height raced across the yard thirty feet in front of him. Davenport shouted, “Stop, or you’re dead!” just as someone else boomed out, “Halt, or I’ll shoot!” It was Colleran, unhurt, his gun also trained on the fleeing man. The latter stopped in his tracks. Half a dozen detectives surrounded him. Behind him he had dropped a two-foot-long screwdriver with a bright yellow handle. Skeleton keys and a jackknife were in his pocket. In his car parked nearby were four more screwdrivers. He had just tried to break into an apartment, he admitted to Lieutenant Chester E. Hollice, who was leading the search. Earlier in the week he had measured two nurses who lived there—“I just wanted to get into the apartment and wait for them to come home.”

  Why? He could not think of an answer.

  His name was Albert H. DeSalvo, and he was twenty-nine years old. A check showed that he had a juvenile record and had once been committed to Lyman School, an institution for delinquent boys. In 1958 and 1959 he had been arrested for numerous breakings into apartments and houses, stealing small amounts of money he found. Now, he admitted, he was engaged in a different type of activity. In the past weeks he had measured more than a dozen women, promising them modeling jobs with nonexistent agencies. He lived in suburban Malden, and he was married—his wife was a German girl he had met while serving abroad in the Army of Occupation. He had two small children, a six-year-old daughter being treated for a congenital pelvic dislocation, and an eight-month-old son, and he worked as a press operator for a rubber factory.

  Why had he done these things? What was the purpose of measuring women and promising them jobs?

  He just liked to talk to women, he said. But later, the day before his court appearance, he poured out a story of a wretched upbringing, a childhood of deprivation in a large family frequently on relief, tyrannized and later deserted by a father who abused his wife and six children and went openly with prostitutes.

  “Can you accept a man after what he’s done to his family?” DeSalvo demanded. “What kind of a man is that?” He spoke almost in tears. “I have three brothers and two sisters. All of us brothers graduated from jail. To show you how bad it was, my own brother and father were in jail at the same time.”

  Visiting the girls about Harvard, measuring them, gave him “a big kick. I’m not good-looking, I’m not educated, but I was able to put something over on high-class people,” he told probation officers. “They were all college kids and I never had anything in my life and I outsmarted them. I felt they were better than me because they were college people. Telling those girls they could be models built up their egos, so they let me do it. Anybody with any sense would have found me out, because, gee!”—he flashed his dark-eyed, boyish grin—“they never even asked me for proof and I never had a camera. It was a real crazy idea.”

  Police officials looked at him. So this was the Measuring Man. A harmless figure who derived some kind of pathetic sexual satisfaction from touching strange women? Or just another small-time burglar who posed as a model’s agent in order to have an excuse for loitering about hallways?

  After psychiatric examination at Westborough State Hospital, he was diagnosed as a sociopathic personality—a man whose behavior and emotional reactions deviate from the normal—and on May 4, 1961, sentenced on charges of Assault and Battery, brought by some of the women he had measured, and attempted Breaking and Entering, to a two-year term in the Middlesex County House of Correction. He was found not guilty of two counts of lewdness. Later the judge, sympathetic to DeSalvo’s tearful promise that he would turn over a new leaf and his attorney’s plea that his family needed him, reduced the sentence to eighteen months. Shortly after, the Parole Board took a similarly sympathetic view. The result was that with good behavior this dwindled to eleven months and DeSalvo was released in April 1962.

  Nearly three years elapsed—years in which a DeSalvo and his petty sickness were eclipsed by the overwhelming presence of the Strangler.

  In early November 1964, while Jim Mellon was beginning his reinvestigation of Christopher Reid as a suspect in the Mary Sullivan case, and Phil DiNatale was checking the death of Daniel Pennacchio who had falsely confessed to killing Beverly Samans, and Steve Delaney was trying to determine if Pietro Achilles had been in Rockport when Joann Graff visited there the night before her death, Albert DeSalvo was seized again by Cambridge police.

  This time the accusation was far uglier.

  A week before, on Tuesday morning, October 27, a twenty-year-old co-ed, a bride of a few months, was in bed in her Cambridge apartment. It was a few minutes after 9:30 A.M.; her husband had just left for his teaching job. She dozed off for a moment. When she opened her eyes, a man stood in the bedroom doorway, staring at her. He was of medium height, his eyes hidden behind huge green aviator’s sunglasses, his dark hair combed back, wearing a dark waist-length jacket and green slacks.
“Don’t worry,” he said quickly, “I’m a detective—” But as he spoke he was approaching her bed.

  She managed to find voice enough to say, “You leave this room at once!” She struggled to sit up in bed.

  He pushed her down, hard, and she screamed. She felt the blade of a knife against her throat. “Not a sound, or I’ll kill you,” he warned. As she lay there all but paralyzed, he stuffed her underwear into her mouth, and using her husband’s pajamas and her own clothes, tied her in a spread-eagle position on the bed, each ankle tied to a bedpost at the foot of the bed, her wrists to those at the head. Then he kissed her about the body and otherwise sexually abused her. “Don’t look at me,” he said again and again. Then, after a long while, she heard him say, “How do I leave this place?” She could only think, Oh, God, get him out—She told him how to find the front door. He bent over her, his face averted, and loosened her hands and feet so she would be able to free herself. “You be quiet for ten minutes”—he warned, then added apologetically, “I’m sorry,” and slipped away.

  But she had looked at him. She would never forget his face, she told detectives. An artist’s sketch was made from her description: Detective Paul Cloran, studying it, said, “This looks like the Measuring Man.” He had operated in the same area, and knew how to enter locked apartments. Police telephoned DeSalvo at his home. Would he come down to answer a few questions about an assault on a woman? On Wednesday, November 3, DeSalvo came to Cambridge Police Headquarters. Sitting in the interrogation room he denied any knowledge of the attack, but even as he spoke the girl herself stood in an adjoining room, studying him through a one-way mirror; and after making doubly sure by hearing his voice through a partly opened door, she identified him. Still denying it, he pleaded innocent to charges of Breaking and Entering, Assault and Battery, Confining and Putting in Fear, and Engaging in an Unnatural and Lascivious Act. He was released on $8,000 bail for hearing two weeks later.

  As a matter of routine, his photograph went over a six-state teletype network. Within thirty-six hours it brought detectives from Connecticut where similar sexual assaults had taken place through the summer and autumn—in every instance, a man tying up women on their beds. He had become known as the “Green Man” because he wore green work pants. Sometimes he was in the uniform of a building maintenance worker. His energy was extraordinary. If the records were correct, on one day—May 6, 1964—between 9 A.M. and midday, he had bound and assaulted four women in four towns—Hamden, Meriden, New Haven, and Hartford.

  Acting on this new information, police on November 5 suddenly descended on DeSalvo’s home, a modest, neatly kept one-family house at the end of a dead-end street in Malden. He was away. They waited. DeSalvo drove up, saw the police cars, attempted to reverse his car and drive off, but was trapped and seized. He was brought again to Cambridge Police Headquarters. This time several women victims from Connecticut were on hand to identify him.

  He would not talk to anyone, he said, until he spoke to his wife, but he begged police not to let her see him in handcuffs. That was agreed to. Mrs. Irmgard DeSalvo, a tall, dark-haired woman of thirty, and Albert’s sister Irene came to the station. For nearly an hour he talked to them in the presence of three detectives.

  Toward the end, he broke down in tears. “Please,” he pleaded with his wife, “please, Irm, let me be a man just this once. I’ve done some very bad things with women—I’ve broken into houses, I’ve used a gun but it was a toy gun, I used a knife but I never killed anybody—I’m tired of running, I want to get it off my chest, I need help, I want help. When they had me before I didn’t know how to ask for it.”

  His wife, who suspected he had been “doing something,” was not surprised at his sexual assaults on women. She could not bring herself to tell police now, but the man was insatiable—no one would believe how oversexed Al was. It was a shameful thing. He wanted her in the morning; he wanted her again when he came home for lunch; then in the early evening after supper, and again before they fell asleep at night. On weekends, when he was home from the job he now had as an outside maintenance man for a construction company, he needed her five and six times each day. Nor was that enough. When they went out he made suggestive remarks, even in her presence, to attractive women. It was impossible to satisfy him; she had given up trying to do so. He had complained she was frigid to him, and they had argued bitterly about it.

  Aloud, she said in her heavy German accent, “Al, tell them everything, don’t hold anything back,” and the two women left the room.

  DeSalvo turned to the detectives. “I’ve committed more than four hundred breaks, all in this area, and there’s a couple of rapes you don’t know about,” he said. They drove him about Cambridge and he pointed out fifteen apartments he had broken into. He never had difficulty getting into them. At first he slipped the locks by using the cardboard corner of a stenographer’s pad. Later, he perfected his technique, using 2½-by-6-inch strips of polyethylene foam which he cut from bottles containing household detergent. These were stronger than cardboard, left no mark, and made no sound.

  Other women came forward. In one instance he had blindfolded his victim, held a knife to her throat, and had his way with her for nearly an hour. As the investigation widened, it became clear that DeSalvo had been sexually assaulting women not only in Massachusetts and Connecticut, but in New Hampshire and Rhode Island as well. Police estimated that his victims numbered more than three hundred women.

  Repeatedly Cambridge detectives questioned him. DeSalvo was by turns truculent and agreeable. But he was especially grateful to Sergeant Davenport, who had him in his gunsights but did not fire, and spoke more easily and familiarly with him. Sergeant Davenport’s general air of breeziness helped matters considerably.

  “Leo,” DeSalvo said at one point during an interrogation, “if you knew the whole story you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Al, what are you doing—bragging or telling the truth or lying? What the hell you doing?” the detective demanded.

  DeSalvo took a long breath. “It’ll all come out, Leo,” he said. “You’ll find out.”

  Sergeant Davenport considered the man before him. What DeSalvo had said about breaking into apartments had turned out to be true. Sometimes the women he said he had measured—and often been intimate with—denied having ever seen him. That was understandable. In the instances where DeSalvo had tied up his victims, none had given all the details to police. But the horror in their eyes indicated that DeSalvo had told the truth as far as he wanted to tell it. The lengths to which he had gone—the actual indignities he had committed upon them or forced them to commit—most likely would never be completely revealed by his victims. Davenport followed a train of thought. At the time DeSalvo broke down before his wife, detectives had asked him about the strangulation murders. “No, no,” he had said. It was as he told his wife Irmgard. Terrible things with women—but he had never killed anyone. But, thought Sergeant Davenport, he was a powerful man—swift, agile, athletic. He knew how to slip in and out of buildings, how to enter apartments silently. And he had a gift of gab, too, so he was able to talk his way into apartments. Sergeant Davenport suddenly said, “Al, what do you know about the Beverly Samans killing on University Road?”

  DeSalvo shot a hurt glance at him. “You can’t put that one on me, Leo. I don’t go that one at all.” Then: “Where is that street? Is that the one down near the post office?”

  So DeSalvo knew Beverly Samans’ street and did not mind revealing that he knew it. But DeSalvo, begging that his wife be spared the sight of him in handcuffs, apologizing profusely to his victims for attacking them, certainly seemed to lack the murderous hatred for women exhibited by the Strangler. Nothing here seemed to fit the Medical-Psychiatric Committee’s psychiatric profile—no consuming rage toward his mother, no Oedipus complex, surely no problems of potency—rather, fear and contempt for his father, and shame for the way his father had treated his mother.

  “Okay, Al,” said Sergeant Davenport.
Next day DeSalvo appeared in court again, this time with the out-of-state warrants against him. He was held in $100,000 bail and sent to Bridgewater for the customary thirty-five-day pretrial observation. When the reports on DeSalvo reached the Attorney General’s office, Lieutenant Tuney asked Jane Downey to telephone Dr. Robey to say that a man named Albert H. DeSalvo had been sent to Bridgewater pending trial for sexual assaults; he had denied knowing anything about the stranglings and Cambridge police thought he was telling the truth. Nevertheless, would Dr. Robey look him over as he had the others?

  Dr. Robey and his staff concluded that DeSalvo suffered from “a sociopathic personality disorder marked by sexual deviation, with prominent schizoid features and depressive trends.” In short, a borderline psychotic, but competent to stand trial. On December 10 he was returned to Cambridge jail. But he began to behave strangely. One night he claimed to hear voices. He insisted to a guard that his wife was in his cell, denouncing him; he begged her not to be indifferent to him. A moment later he turned on her furiously, ordering her out of his cell. Then he became despondent and threatened to kill himself. On January 14, the court ordered him to be returned to Bridgewater for a second evaluation. This time Dr. Robey and his colleague, Dr. Samuel Allen, concluded that the stress of waiting for trial—in Massachusetts rape is punishable by life imprisonment—had pushed DeSalvo over the brink. Sometimes he appeared sane, in touch with reality; at other times he heard voices, was “potentially suicidal and quite clearly overtly schizophrenic.” If brought to trial he would most likely be unable to advise his counsel: he was judged not competent to stand trial.