And no one had pursued it.
* Actually, the text of the reward offer stated that a ten-thousand dollar reward would be paid “for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murder of any one or all of the following persons,” and then were listed the names of the eleven victims. The reward would reach $110,000 only if each woman was found to have been murdered by a different man.
* Prominent on one wall of his waiting room was a framed diploma certifying that F. Lee Bailey had “completed with honors” the “Comprehensive Fall Seminar,” held in Los Angeles in November 1961, “devoted to the Study of Hypnosis, Hypnoanalysis, Hypnoanesthesia, Hypnotherapy, Interrogation, Use of Polygraph, Memory Recall, Fact Retention, the Art of Persuasion, the General Study of Psychiatry, all these subjects employed to educate the trial lawyer in the accepted medical uses and practices relating to these subjects and to aid him in his never-ending search for truth, making him a more proficient advocate.” The seminar was given by William J. Bryan, Jr., M.D., a Los Angeles hypnoanalyst of whom more shall be heard later.
19
Damn it, thought Dr. Robey in his office at Bridgewater, DeSalvo doesn’t fit. He can’t be the Strangler. Because, in his opinion, DeSalvo did not fit, Dr. Robey had not reported back to John Bottomly as he had done, months before, in the case of David Parker. No, said Dr. Robey to himself, reason as one likes, let DeSalvo say what he wants, he still doesn’t fit in my book. Which poses a fascinating question: if he does know more than he should about these crimes, from whom could he be learning what he knows?
Why, thought Dr. Robey, marveling at the simplicity of it, he could be learning it from his wardmate—from George Nassar.
Could Nassar be the Strangler?
The man fitted like a glove, thought Dr. Robey with mounting excitement. He possessed the required psychopathology to carry out such crimes. He was paranoid, schizophrenic, highly intelligent, and cunning. As he and the medical staff had noted from the day he arrived, George Nassar was an angry man, carrying a tremendous rage. And he was a killer.
Was it conceivable that Nassar had engineered a gigantic hoax? He might have sold the idea of confessing to DeSalvo, fed DeSalvo facts about the murders, announced to Bailey that he had discovered the Strangler, and then allowed matters to take their own course, depending upon Bailey’s energy and resourcefulness to force the issue.
Why should DeSalvo buy the idea of confessing? For the money, of course. He knew he would never be free again. How far that money would go to help his wife and children …
Dr. Robey turned it over in his mind. Now, he thought, the gaps were filled. He had always considered David Parker a prime suspect, but he questioned whether David could also have strangled the women outside Boston—specifically, Evelyn Corbin in Salem and Joann Graff in Lawrence. These towns, however, were Nassar’s home stamping ground: he had grown up in that area, and his mother still lived in Lawrence.
What, then, did this add up to? There must be two stranglers, as the Medical-Psychiatric Committee had speculated months ago: David Parker for the Old Women, because of his psychotic hostility toward the domineering mother-image; and Nassar for the Girls, the more psychosexually mature, the more heterosexual criminal.
Dr. Robey notified John Bottomly that he and his colleagues now were inclined to consider Nassar a more likely suspect than DeSalvo.
Nassar had never been questioned about the stranglings. Dr. Robey now proceeded to do so. Nassar appeared before him, quiet, poised, a man on guard. He said nothing, admitted nothing. To such questions as Where were you on January 4, 1964? What beer do you drink? Nassar replied with a stock sentence: “I will not answer any questions on advice of counsel.”
Was this really the situation? That the man who refused to admit he was the Strangler was the Strangler and the man who confessed he was the Strangler was not the Strangler? Dr. Robey thought, With every step I take it gets a little deeper, a little crazier, a little wilder. Where will it stop?
In his State House office, John Bottomly studied the information before him. He echoed Dr. Robey without knowing it: This, he thought, is the most fantastic caper of all. Was it DeSalvo? Was it Nassar? And what was Bailey’s role? The Boston Record-American had already carried a copyrighted story asserting that a “mental patient” in a Massachusetts institution, a married man who was the father of two, had “allegedly confessed” that he was the Boston Strangler. Why was Bailey releasing such information?
Even as Bottomly pondered this, word came from Bridgewater that a TV camera crew was in the act of photographing the building in which DeSalvo was held. Superintendent Gaughan had succeeded in ordering them off the grounds, but this was obviously only the beginning. There were reports that other network reporters and cameramen had moved into the Hotel Lorraine and were waiting only for the moment when the entire case would explode. Bottomly consulted with Brooke, who went into Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court with a petition to prevent Bailey, Asgiersson, and others from releasing any details of the alleged confession, including the name of DeSalvo. Such publication might be detrimental to the prisoner and to “the due course of justice and the general interest of the Commonwealth.” It was interesting to remember that Bailey had won Dr. Sheppard’s release in Ohio on the ground that publicity had prejudiced his case.
Associate Justice Arthur E. Wittemore dismissed the petition after Bailey and Asgiersson assured him they would not release the information, but the jurist asked for a report on DeSalvo’s mental condition from “disinterested psychiatrists.”
On Wednesday, March 10, Lieutenant Tuney and Jim Mellon, armed with front and profile photographs of DeSalvo, showed them to Kenneth Rowe, the twenty-two-year-old engineering student who lived a floor above Joann Graff in Lawrence. Was this the man who rapped on his door the day Joann was murdered and wanted to know which was her apartment?
Rowe did not recognize DeSalvo as the man.
Lieutenant Tuney and Mellon showed the photographs next to Jules Vens, the bartender into whose tavern in Lawrence, down the street from Joann’s building, a man had walked that afternoon and asked for “Lucky Beer.”
Vens failed to identify DeSalvo as his customer.
Next day they showed the photographs to Sims Murray, who saw a man help a girl carry record albums into 44A Charles Street either on January 1 or January 4, 1964, the day of Mary Sullivan’s murder. Was this the man he saw?
Sims Murray did not identify DeSalvo as the man.
One of Albert DeSalvo’s most recognizable features was his prominent beaklike nose, particularly in profile. The witnesses said, in effect: If this had been the man, we would have recognized him at once.
On Wednesday, March 17, in her hideout in suburban Denver, Mrs. Irmgard DeSalvo spoke on the telephone to her husband in Bridgewater. She was hysterical. If he did not stop claiming to be the Strangler, she would kill herself—she would turn the gas on herself and the two children. She was still weeping when she hung up.
The next day, at Bridgewater, a woman psychologist on the staff was preparing a routine test for DeSalvo. He was already seated at her table, when he suddenly refused to go through with it.
“I don’t want to make you do anything you feel you shouldn’t,” she said finally. “So if you want to go back to your ward now, you may.” But DeSalvo seemed in no hurry. What did everyone think “about all the excitement” that had been going on at Bridgewater, he asked her?
She told him she had no wish to discuss the stranglings or anything in which he might be involved with the courts or his attorney.
“I understand that,” said DeSalvo. “Besides, I never confessed to being the Strangler. My name’s never been in the papers in connection with those things.” He looked at her calmly. He’d heard some patient had confessed, but he, Albert DeSalvo, knew nothing about it. He thought for a moment. But if the patient’s story was true, he said, then all the people connected with the case—the doctors, th
e police, the district attorneys, the Attorney General—they’d all be ruined. That’s why, he said, they were trying to disprove the patient’s story and “bury the whole case.” Anyway, this patient who said he was the Strangler—“He should be studied, not buried,” DeSalvo said. He sighed. The poor always got punished, he said. That’s the way the world was. Rich people could do all kinds of sex things and get away with it. They just bought their way out.
He rose and, brooding, left the room.
In an attempt to prove or disprove that DeSalvo was the Strangler, John Bottomly arranged to confront him with two more witnesses.
On Saturday morning, March 20, at 10 A.M., Detective DiNatale drove to Bridgewater accompanied by a woman. A few minutes later another car driven by one of Phil’s colleagues, also with one woman passenger, followed.
One woman was Gertrude Gruen, the twenty-nine-year-old German waitress who on February 18, 1963, fought off an assailant who tried to strangle her after gaining entrance into her apartment on the pretext that he had to turn off the water in the bathroom. Months before, she had failed to identify Paul Gordon as he underwent a sodium pentothal interrogation in Dr. Alexander’s office. She had since changed her name—her terror had never left her—and moved to another city. Now she had agreed to come to Bridgewater to see if she could identify DeSalvo.
The other was Mrs. Marcella Lulka, the housewife who lived in the building adjoining Sophie Clark’s and who on the day of Sophie’s murder was visited by a stranger with “honey-colored hair,” who had checked the painting in her apartment and then talked about hiring her as a model.
Was it DeSalvo? He had used this technique before.
Or was it Nassar?
Both women were to have a chance that morning to see DeSalvo. They did not know that George Nassar would also be on display. The idea was that DeSalvo would be brought down to the visitors’ room to speak to Dr. Samuel Allen, Dr. Robey’s associate. This chamber was a large room divided down the center by a wide table with benches on either side. Inmates sat on the inner side, their visitors opposite them on the other. The two women were to pose as relatives waiting for other inmates.
Neither DeSalvo nor Nassar would know the true reason for their appearance. While Dr. Allen spoke to DeSalvo, a social worker would talk with Nassar as if checking details of his history.
George Nassar was the first to enter the visitors’ room, wearing a slight, sardonic smile on his face. Gertrude Gruen, waiting for the patient she was told would sit opposite Dr. Allen, glanced idly at Nassar as he walked in. The latter darted a sharp glance at her, and then a second. She thought, There’s something upsetting, something frighteningly familiar about that man. Could he know her?
At that moment, DeSalvo entered and took his place across the table from Dr. Allen. Miss Gruen looked at him. No, he was not the man who talked with her, attempted to strangle her, the man with whom she fought, the man who fled when her screams brought workers on the roof peering into her windows.
But the man now talking to the social worker, the man who had turned his dark eyes on her so sharply—
Moments later, in Dr. Robey’s office, surrounded by police and staff members, she said agitatedly, “I don’t know what to say … I’m so upset—” She appeared on the verge of a breakdown. She was taken to another room and left alone to compose herself, but when Dr. Allen entered a few minutes later he found her sobbing. Finally, she was able to talk.
It was not Albert DeSalvo, she said. When she had been shown his photographs a week earlier, she’d thought she saw certain similarities. “Now, I know he is not the man,” she said. But the first man who entered—George Nassar—“I realize how shocked I was when I saw him. To see this man, his eyes, his hair, his hands, the whole expression of him …” He looked like the man who attacked her, walked, carried himself like him, his posture … from where she sat in the visitors’ room she had been unable to hear Nassar’s voice. His prison clothing and prison haircut had also thrown her off. She could only say, “My deep feelings are that he has very great similarities to the man who was in my apartment.”
But—she was not sure. She wept with frustration. She wanted so badly to identify this man.
And Marcella Lulka, who had also been brought to identify DeSalvo?
She had not been sure when shown his photographs a few days before. Now, she said, seeing him in person, she must definitely eliminate him. But the patient who preceded him—Nassar—when she saw him enter, her heart jumped. In every way but one—his eyes, his walk, his furrowed face, his dark, speculative gaze—he was her mysterious caller of that dreadful afternoon. Only his hair was different. “Mr. Thompson” had honey-colored hair, as she had told detectives. This man’s hair was black.
Might it not have been dyed the day she saw him, the day of Sophie Clark’s murder?
Confusion was added to confusion. After leaving the visitors’ room, Albert DeSalvo walked up to William Lewis in their ward. He nudged him. “They had a couple of women here just now looking me over,” he said, Lewis reported later. “I know both of them.” One, he said, was “the colored girl in the Sophie Clark building—I was in her apartment.” The other “is a German girl—I was in her apartment, too.”
Bailey labored to prove that DeSalvo’s story was true. That afternoon, Saturday, March 20, he arranged for Albert to be hypnotized by Dr. William J. Bryan, Jr., the Los Angeles hypnoanalyst* with whom Bailey himself had studied. Dr. Bryan was a huge man, weighing nearly three hundred pounds; blond-haired, blue-eyed, and bespectacled, a man capable of great enthusiasm. Not only did he conduct seminars in hypnosis and allied subjects for lawyers, but he was Executive Director of the American Institute of Hypnosis, whose address was the same as his offices on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles. He was also author of a book, Legal Aspects of Hypnosis,* in which he described at length his hypnoanalysis of a twenty-nine-year-old man who had strangled three elderly women on the West Coast a few years before. Bailey had remembered the case and was excited by the apparent parallel.
DeSalvo’s hypnoanalysis was held in a room off the dispensary at Bridgewater. The witnesses included Dr. Robert Ross Mezer, Dr. Samuel Allen, and other psychiatrists. Dr. Bryan, who had a habit of calming his patient by placing both hands heavily on his shoulders, used no drugs. DeSalvo sat at his ease in a chair while the hypnotist sat facing him, so close they were almost knee to knee. Speaking gently and persuasively, Dr. Bryan began slowly moving his right forefinger back and forth before DeSalvo’s eyes, assuring him that he would not become unconscious but would at all times know everything that went on. It was not sleep, but a state more relaxing than sleep. In sleep one tossed and turned, but in hypnosis one was utterly at peace. As Dr. Bryan spoke, his finger slowly moving from one side to another like a pendulum, DeSalvo’s eyes grew heavy. They closed.
Dr. Bryan’s voice went on gently, smoothly, with relentless, insistent repetition: “I am going to raise your right arm and as I raise your right arm it becomes stiff and rigid as a steel bar, all the way to the fingertips, stiff and rigid, stiff and rigid as a steel bar, stiff and rigid as a steel bar, stiff and rigid as a steel bar all the way to the fingertips. As it becomes stiff and rigid as a steel bar, in your mind’s eye, in your mind’s eye, it becomes cold and numb. Cold and numb from the shoulder to the fingertips. Cold and numb. And you imagine in your mind’s eye that a cake of ice is surrounding the arm. It is frozen in a cake of ice. Frozen, cold and numb, cold and numb.” His voice never ceased. “And you feel pressure, lots of pressure, but no pain. Pressure, lots of pressure, but no pain. Pressure, lots of pressure, but no pain. Pressure—”
Without changing the hypnotic rhythm of his words he slowly pushed a two-inch darning needle through the fleshy part of DeSalvo’s upraised right arm. “Cold, cold and numb, cold and numb, and you sink deeper and deeper, way down, and you feel pressure, lots of pressure, but no pain. I’m going to count to two, and you’ll remain deeply hypnotized.” The needle was all the way throug
h now. “You remain deeply hypnotized, your arm will remain very stiff and rigid, but you’ll open your eyes, your eyes will be wide open. Deeply hypnotized when I count to two.”
He stepped back. “One. Two. Open your eyes.”
DeSalvo’s eyes opened.
“Look at your right arm.” DeSalvo did so. “There’s a needle clear through it,” said the hypnotist. “That’s all right, close your eyes. Sleep, sleep, deep, deep, relax. Deeper and deeper and deeper …”
In the same fashion, never ceasing his words, he told DeSalvo he would remove the needle, he would feel no pain, and “at the count of five your right arm will be normal and completely relaxed.” He counted one, two; DeSalvo opened his eyes; he saw Dr. Bryan slowly pull out the needle. At five, DeSalvo’s right arm dropped to his side, as before.
DeSalvo’s eyes closed again. “You see a calendar, a desk calendar, the top page shows the date March twentieth, 1965, today.” The hypnotist paused. “Now you tear off that sheet, and you see March nineteenth; you tear that off and you do it with each sheet, back, back farther and farther, back farther and farther, right back, deeper and deeper, all the way back.” He took him through the months, through the years, “to a page reading Sunday, September eighth, 1963”—the day Evelyn Corbin was strangled in Salem.
“Now, Al, you’re right back there now. You see everything that’s happening. You feel every feeling you felt then. You’re right there, and right there will be Evelyn Corbin. Sunday, September eighth, 1963, and you’re approaching her apartment door. Now tell me what’s happening. You can talk, tell me what’s happening—”
DeSalvo spoke slowly, his eyes closed. “… I walk into the apartment house through the front door … The buzzer rang and I opened the door and I walked down the corridor, all the way down to the left. I moved open the door. I talked to her …”
Dr. Bryan: “Now you’re talking to her. You hear her voice. You hear your own voice. Right now, what are you saying?”
The Boston Strangler Page 31