The Boston Strangler

by Frank, Gerold;

  On January 27, Dr. Robey sent the necessary papers to Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge and at a hearing on February 4, 1965, Judge Edward A. Pecce ordered Albert DeSalvo recommitted as mentally ill “until further order of the court.”

  He became one more inmate at Bridgewater.

  Four days after DeSalvo had been returned to Bridgewater, a new prisoner arrived for observation pending trial for murder. One might not have given him a second glance at this institution, where almost every other inmate might be a murderer, had it not been for his appearance. He could have been typecast as a gang leader out of the bloody 1920’s. He was nearly six feet, broad-shouldered, lean, with black hair and somber black eyes, a dark-complexioned face with furrowed cheeks; a man acutely aware of everything going on—in the psychiatrists’ words, “very paranoid, very bright, very angry.”

  He had been charged with a particularly brutal killing. At 3:50 P.M. September 29, 1964, Mrs. Rita Buote, forty, and her fourteen-year-old daughter Diana drove into a Texaco station in Andover, Massachusetts, to come upon a horrifying tableau: the attendant on his knees, pleading for his life, a lean, black-haired man in a tan trench coat standing over him, gun in hand, and as they watched, firing bullet after bullet—they heard four loud reports—into the kneeling man. As Mrs. Buote stared, unbelieving—was a movie being made here?—the man turned, saw her car, and gun in hand, walked swiftly toward her. She had sufficient presence of mind to snap the inside door catch. The killer was on her side, the driver’s side; she saw his face clearly on the other side of the glass, the gleaming black eyes, the furrowed cheeks. He raised his hand, he pointed his gun at her through the glass—she heard two clicks. The gun was empty. He pounded on the door. “Open up! Open up!”

  Mrs. Buote seized her daughter and slid down with her onto the floor, huddling under the dashboard. “Pray, Diana! That man has a gun! He’s going to kill us—”

  At almost the moment that Mrs. Buote drove into the station, William King and Reginald Mortimer of Andover in their truck pulled in from the opposite side. They saw the same terrible scene from another vantage point, and as of seconds earlier: the attendant suddenly crumpling before the man, the other standing over him. And they heard what sounded like firecrackers. The man wheeled—a gun glinted in his right hand—he walked to Mrs. Buote’s car. They saw him aim, squeeze the trigger soundlessly, saw him pound on the side, tug wildly at the door, then turn, run to a dark sedan parked near a gas pump, and drive off.

  A dead man lay sprawled before them, his blood staining the gray pavement of the station. He was Irvin Hilton, forty-four. His death actually resulted from a single stab wound in the center of the spine. It was not difficult to reconstruct what had happened. Hilton’s assailant had come up behind him and plunged a knife into his back. Hilton, dying, fell to his knees, turned to plead with his killer—and received six bullets at point-blank range. It seemed a cruelly senseless crime, for though robbery was assumed the motive, the cash register appeared untouched and Hilton’s wallet was intact in his trouser pocket.

  The dark sedan, found abandoned a few miles away, had been stolen from the parking lot at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge. Its owner, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student, told police two guns were missing—a black .22 pistol and a .32 revolver, with ammunition for both, which he kept under the driver’s seat. A .32-caliber slug was discovered in one of the gas station’s drains not far from Hilton’s body.

  Given an artist’s sketch based on Mrs. Buote’s description, it took police twenty-four hours to find the man they charged was Hilton’s murderer. His name was George Nassar, and he lived in suburban Mattapan; he was thirty-three, unmarried, a parolee who had killed a man in a grocery stickup in 1948, when he was only sixteen. He had been paroled in 1961, after serving eleven years of a second-degree murder sentence. In prison his intelligence, his willingness to rehabilitate himself, and his general ability had impressed several ministers, as well as the parole board. Indeed, since his release he had taught Sunday School classes, and on some occasions actually substituted for a minister in his pulpit. There was no question that he was an unusual man; he had been studying Russian, and planning to enter Northeastern University, and he had been working at various jobs from hospital attendant to newspaper reporter.

  He vehemently denied Hilton’s murder. “If I had done it, I would have killed myself,” he exclaimed. One only had to look at his record since he had been paroled. It was all a case of mistaken identity. But both Mrs. Buote and her daughter identified him in a police lineup. They were positive he was the man.

  At Bridgewater, Dr. Robey and his staff found Nassar a man of extremely high intelligence—his I.Q. was above 150—but now showing paranoid and schizophrenic symptoms. After thirty-five days’ observation Dr. Robey recommended that he be kept for further study.

  Usually Bridgewater State Hospital has about seven hundred inmates. In January, when Nassar arrived, he found himself in the same ward as Albert DeSalvo. They struck up a friendship.

  To other inmates DeSalvo had always spoken freely of his sexual escapades. During group therapy he eagerly stood up and talked about his experiences. Once, he boasted, he had assaulted six—not four women—in one morning. Everyone knew of his sexual prowess. When he was on his measuring kick, how easy those girls were! Some stripped down right away. One girl was so excited at the idea of becoming a model she ran into her bedroom, changed to a tight-fitting jersey and leotards, then exclaimed, “Oh, these are too bulky—you’ll get the wrong measurements,” and slipped everything off. He couldn’t count how many times he had ended in bed with them. When he began tying them up, he learned still more about women. One actually paid him a hundred dollars and “begged me to come back again.”

  To his wardmate George Nassar, however, DeSalvo began to confide other matters. What he said so impressed Nassar that he sent for his attorney.

  Sunday afternoon, March 7, in her sister’s home in the Denver suburb of Northglen to which Irmgard DeSalvo had fled secretly several weeks before with her two children to escape the shame of her husband’s exposure as a rapist, she received a long-distance telephone call.

  “I’m Lee Bailey, an attorney,” said the voice at the other end. It sounded crisp and authoritative. “I’m calling from Boston. I am your husband’s lawyer, Mrs. DeSalvo. Now, please listen carefully to what I say—”

  Mrs. DeSalvo had never heard of Lee Bailey. She did not know that there was in Boston a youthful, driving attorney named F. Lee Bailey who had become nationally known when he had obtained the release from prison of Dr. Sam Sheppard, the Cleveland osteopath convicted of killing his wife ten years before. She knew only that her husband Al had a lawyer, Jon A. Asgiersson, who had been handling his case. But she listened to the voice on the telephone.

  What the man who called himself Lee Bailey was saying, in effect, was, as she recalled later: In the best interests of your children and yourself, you must take a different name and move away—go into hiding at once, because reporters and photographers from the national magazines will be searching for you day and night. “Something big is going to blow up about Albert—it will be on the front pages of every newspaper in twenty-four hours. I’m flying out to see you tomorrow so I can help you myself—now, work fast!”

  Mrs. DeSalvo, dazed, replaced the receiver. She thought she had left all this behind her. On her flight west she had already taken an assumed name for herself and her children. She planned to divorce Al anyway—she could never go back to him—and to change her name legally, but she hadn’t quite known how to go about it.

  What could the man who said he was Mr. Bailey be talking about?

  The next afternoon she received another call from Boston. This time a man on the wire spoke in German. He was speaking, he said, for Mr. Bailey, who did not want to get on the phone himself and use English because he believed his telephone had been tapped. Mr. Bailey, he continued, wanted her to know that a representative from his off
ice was en route by plane from Boston that very moment and would call on her in a few hours. Mr. Bailey, he said, was too tied up in the case to come himself. The representative was named Daniel Bloomfeld. She was to follow implicitly whatever instructions Mr. Bloomfeld gave her.

  “But—” began Mrs. DeSalvo. Another voice came on the phone. She recognized it as Frank DeSalvo, Al’s brother. “Irmgard, do just what you’re told because Al has confessed he is the Boston Strangler.” A moment later Al’s brother Joe got on the line. Yes, Al had confessed he was the Strangler. He’d given all sorts of details no one else could have known. She must follow instructions.

  Mrs. DeSalvo hung up in a state of near shock. Al—the Boston Strangler? Impossible!

  At 7 P.M., a third telephone call. Mr. Daniel Bloomfeld had arrived in town. Twenty minutes later Mr. Bloomfeld walked into the house. She must move at once. Here was two hundred dollars to pay the cost. Mr. Bloomfeld wrote down the name of a local lawyer. Arrangements had already been made with him to start proceedings immediately to change her name legally and obtain her divorce at no cost to her.

  “Where’s the money coming from for all this?” Mrs. DeSalvo asked, bewildered.

  “Sufficient funds will soon be made available,” her visitor said cryptically. Any time she needed more money, she need only telephone Mr. Bailey in Boston. He gave her the number.

  What had happened to Mr. Asgiersson, Al’s lawyer? (The last she had heard from Mr. Asgiersson was a phone call during which he strongly suggested that Albert was insane and had been for some time.)

  Mrs. DeSalvo understood Mr. Bloomfeld to say that Mr. Asgiersson was representing Albert as the Green Man, but her husband’s wardmate “recommended Mr. Bailey to Al for this case two days ago.”

  Her caller left.

  All but distraught, Mrs. DeSalvo carried out her instructions. She moved from her sister’s home to a trailer court. Al could not be the Strangler, she thought miserably, confession or no confession. She knew her husband. But why would he confess to such a thing? Unless he really was insane. She could not believe that. A number of other reasons came to her. Perhaps he was revenging himself on her because she had fled from him with the children; because she would not answer the letters he constantly wrote her from Bridgewater. He always wanted to be important; that was why he bragged, lied, made up big stories. And Al was always chasing an easy buck. She gathered that there was a tremendous amount of money involved—a huge reward, and magazines and newspapers ready to pay a great deal for the story—the lawyer calling from Boston the day before had said she must hide from reporters from Time and Look. But if Al only knew what such a thing would do to his family, the damage especially to Judy, making her think she was the daughter of a murderer—a monster … She wept. It was too much, too much. Her mother used to send her clippings from the German newspapers about the Boston Strangler, warning her to be careful and keep her doors locked. Al had seen those clippings.

  When could he have had time to commit all these crimes? He had gotten out of jail on April 9, 1962. The stranglings, she remembered vaguely, began that summer, and continued for some time. But those were Al’s first months out of jail and when he was not at work he was with her almost every moment. He hadn’t even owned a driver’s license his first few weeks of freedom and she herself had had to drive him to and from work. Later he obtained a license, good only from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M., and in any event, he never got home from work later than 4 or 4:30 in the afternoon. When would he have had time to plan and carry out the murders? Besides, he had been renovating their house in Malden beginning early in 1963—he worked at that every weekend. And even if he had done those terrible things, he could not have kept it from her—not a husband from a wife who knew him like a book. She always knew when he was breaking into apartments and stealing small sums—guilt would be written all over his face when he walked into the house. And though he was a man sick with his need for women, he could never kill. He was so soft-hearted, so considerate—he could not torture, mutilate, strangle.

  Yet Mr. Bailey, she gathered, was a very important attorney. Would he be taken in by Al? Would Al’s own brothers be taken in by him?

  What was happening here?

  What had happened was that Albert DeSalvo had dropped a tantalizing hint to George Nassar that he was the Strangler. One afternoon he interrupted his tiresome boasting with an unexpected query: “George, what would happen if a guy was sent up for robbing one bank when there were really thirteen banks robbed?”

  It was an odd question and Nassar, who in his brief time at Bridgewater had already assumed a kind of authority because of his superior intelligence, looked at DeSalvo. “You must be a nut like the others around here,” he said to him. “Get away from me. I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

  DeSalvo had walked away, but after a few days, accosted Nassar again. “You thought that was a nutty question,” he said. “Well—.” Then he confided in Nassar, Nassar got in touch with his attorney, F. Lee Bailey—and Bailey moved with characteristic swiftness.

  Indeed, it became evident as one pulled together information from various sources that for some weeks De Salvo had been trying to claim—now explicitly, now by intimation—that he was the Strangler. In January, while in Cambridge jail awaiting recommitment to Bridgewater, he had suddenly asked his attorney, Jon Asgiersson, “What would you do if someone gave you the biggest story of the century?”

  Asgiersson, a bright, personable lawyer in his middle thirties who knew little about DeSalvo—he had been brought into the case by DeSalvo’s brother Joe, whom he had once represented in a civil action—said, “Albert, what are you talking about?”

  DeSalvo went on, “Bigger than the Brink’s robbery.” On January 17, 1950, masked bandits robbed the Boston offices of Brink’s, Incorporated, of securities valued at more than a quarter of a million dollars.

  Asgiersson searched his memory. “You mean the Plymouth mail robbery?” Little more than two years before, a gang of half a dozen men and women had waylaid a U.S. Mail truck near Plymouth, escaping with more than a million and a half dollars in cash—the largest cash robbery in the country’s history.

  “No, not like that,” said DeSalvo, whereupon the lawyer, annoyed, said, “Stop playing games with me, Albert. Come out with it. What is it?”

  Albert rubbed an ear. “It only happens once in maybe two million times,” he said slowly. “Like Jack the Ripper.”

  Asgiersson stared at him. Albert went on, “I’ve been known as the Cat Man—the Green Man—the Phantom Burglar—and now the Boston ‘S’ Man.”

  Did he mean the Boston Strangler? Asgiersson asked. Yes, said Albert. “Are you mixed up in all of them, Albert?” the lawyer asked again, as calmly as he could. “Did you do them all? Did you do some of them?”

  All, said Albert. He added in a troubled voice that he thought his story might bring some money to support his wife and children, but “I don’t want to die for it.”

  Asgiersson was in a dilemma. If the man was mentally ill, could one accept this self-incrimination? If one could accept it, was it a lawyer’s duty to protect his client from himself, or protect society from one who might be a mortal enemy if he was ever freed? Assuming that the man, incredibly enough, was telling the truth. Even as he pondered the question, Asgiersson began a discreet investigation.

  A few days later, on January 13, one of DeSalvo’s Army friends, Edward M. Keaney, visited him. Al and Ed had served together in Germany. They had double-dated, Al with Irmgard, Ed with her girl friend Hilda. In fact, the two girls had introduced the two Americans to each other. After both couples married and came to the States, they saw each other three or four times a year. Now Al was in trouble and Ed paid him a call.

  DeSalvo looked strange, he remembered later. His eyes would fix and stare as they talked. Ed pretended to observe nothing. He understood Al was wanted in four or five states for rape. “Al,” he said, “you know you’re going to get life imprisonment for this.”r />
  Al looked at him with his queer, unblinking gaze. “Eddie, I could get life fifty times and they couldn’t pay me back for what I’ve done. My family would have to change their name.”

  Ed was not too impressed. Al was always topping everyone. Whatever you had, he had three of. The man never stopped talking about his power over women. “Oh, I think I know what you’ve done,” he said.

  Al wasn’t satisfied. “Yeah, Eddie, you know but you don’t know.” And he stared at him as if he were not there.

  Ed Keaney drove home, thinking, He’s really gone off his rocker. Then it struck him. Could Albert mean that he was the Strangler? For all his boasting, Al was quite a fellow. Keaney had seen him box in the service, and he could surprise you with his power, ferocity, endurance—Al could do almost anything, if he put his mind to it. But this—this was ridiculous. When Ed arrived home he said to his wife, “I think Al has flipped.” He did not tell her more.

  It was the next day, January 14, that DeSalvo was sent back to Bridgewater. For some time then he tried to see Superintendent Charles Gaughan. Inmates constantly demanded to see administration officials, and DeSalvo had to wait his turn. He fidgeted under the strain. On February 2, while being interviewed by a social worker, he said, unexpectedly, “I’m known as the Green Man now but soon I’ll be known by another name.” That cryptic notation was put down in his file for whatever significance it might have.

  DeSalvo tried to talk to his fellow inmates, but most of them avoided him. Rapists are cordially disliked in prisons because their victims might be anyone’s mother, wife, or sister. Al was so eager to talk he followed his wardmates about. Finally he cornered twenty-five-year-old William Lewis (which is not his real name), who was under observation pending trial for murder. Lewis had killed his young wife because he thought she had been unfaithful, then tried to kill himself.