The Boston Strangler

by Frank, Gerold;

  DeSalvo: “‘I came here to fix the bathroom connection that you were complaining about.’ And then she said, ‘Who sent you?’ I told her the superintendent sent me. There was something wrong with the bathroom. There was a leak in it and I walked in and she walked in with me …”

  Dr. Bryan: “Relax. Relax, deep, deep, relax. I don’t want you to remember, Albert. I want you to be right there. Right there. Who sent you?” (A pause.) “Who sent you?”

  DeSalvo: “The superintendent.”

  Dr. Bryan: “For what? For what?”

  DeSalvo: “To fix the bathroom.” He stopped. Then, in a woman’s voice: “What’s wrong with it?” Then, his own again: “She walked in and when she went in she turned her back to me and I put a knife to her throat.”

  Dr. Bryan: “Relax, now, one moment, relax. You’re right back before then. You’re right back before then.” He repeated the sentence many times. “I’m going to count to two and at the count of two I’m going to stand you up; you remain deeply hypnotized in every way.” He counted: “One, two—stand right up.”

  DeSalvo rose, his eyes closed.

  “You’ve got a knife in your hand. Is that the hand it’s in?”

  DeSalvo: “No.”

  Dr. Bryan: “Which one? All right, all right, you’re coming in the door—”

  DeSalvo: “She says—” His voice became falsetto again, “‘Who sent you? Who sent you?’ ‘The superintendent. There’s something wrong with your bathroom. I’ve got to check it out.’ ‘Oh, just a second now,’ she said. ‘I’m going to church.’ She took me into the bathroom to the right.”

  Dr. Bryan: “All right, you’re in the bathroom now, you’re in the bathroom. She turns her back on you, she turns her back on you. Now what, now what?”

  DeSalvo: “I took her over to the bed and I—”

  Dr. Bryan: “All right, you take her over to the bed, now what, now what?”

  DeSalvo: “She says she can’t do nothing, the doctor told her no … She said, ‘Don’t hurt me, please.’ I told her I won’t hurt her.”

  Dr. Bryan: “All right, sit down.” DeSalvo sat in the chair again. “Now, deep, deeper, relax, relax. You don’t want to hurt her. Why do you want her on the bed? In your mind’s eye you see somebody on the bed. What do you want to do? Talk, talk, come on, talk.” DeSalvo had opened his mouth, but no words came. “Talk. What do you want to do? With her thighs, with her thighs, with her thighs, with her thighs. Get the feeling—” Dr. Bryan’s voice rose. “Get it, come on, get it! With her thighs, come on, it’s a good feeling. Go ahead, go ahead, what do you want to do? It’s okay to have it. Go ahead, go ahead, what do you want to do?”

  DeSalvo screamed—a piercing scream that shocked the spectators in the room.

  Dr. Bryan worked swiftly: “Deep relax, deeper, deeper and deeper and deeper. Now you had that feeling for a moment, didn’t you? You were doing something good. What was it? You won’t hurt anybody, you were doing something good. Come on, what was it?”

  DeSalvo spoke: “Judy!” It was like a groan.

  Dr. Bryan: “Judy, yes. That’s right, Judy. You were working on Judy with those thumbs, weren’t you? That’s what made her well, wasn’t it? With your hands you made her well. Isn’t that so?… Now, what about those people? What did you want to do with them? Did you want to hurt them? Well, what did you want to do?”

  DeSalvo began to cry. The tears squeezed from under his closed lids. “I don’t know.”

  Dr. Bryan: “Yes, you do. Come on. What is it? What did you do with Judy?”

  DeSalvo: “I massaged her.”

  Dr. Bryan: “You massaged her, that’s right, with your thumbs, and what happened?”

  DeSalvo: “She got well.”

  Dr. Bryan: “She got well, that’s right.” He paused, and said slowly, “You had her legs up there, you massaged her right on the thighs. Now, isn’t that what you did with every other victim, too? Yes, and you hadn’t told anybody that, not a soul, but that’s what you did, wasn’t it? You wanted to make them well. All right, now why was it necessary to keep repeating that? Why? Tell me why? Why was it necessary to make them well? She wasn’t Judy enough, eh?”

  DeSalvo: “I don’t know.”

  Slowly, but with mounting excitement in his voice, the hypnotist led DeSalvo through it again: the massaging of his child’s crippled limbs to restore them to use, the sound of Judy crying—“I think I’m hurting her, I don’t mean to hurt her, I’m going to help her, she doesn’t understand, she’s a child, I’m trying to help her and I must hurt her to help her—”

  Dr. Bryan (triumphantly): “You want to help her and you’ve got to hurt her. Isn’t that the idea? All right, now, sleep … I am going to wake you in a minute or so, but I will give you one suggestion before you wake. Tonight while you are asleep, you will have a dream so vivid that it’s going to wake you up in the middle of the night. And you’re going to write down everything about this dream because it’s going to tie this in together. And why these women represented beauty, how you helped them and how you hurt them—”

  At this, DeSalvo uttered a loud, uncontrolled scream. For a moment, he seemed to be fighting to leap from his chair.

  Dr. Bryan, bringing both hands down heavily on DeSalvo’s shoulders, said authoritatively: “Sleep, sleep!” He put him in a deeper trance. “At the count of three, now, you’ll be wide awake, clearheaded and refreshed. One, coming up now; two, almost awake; three—awaken!”

  DeSalvo’s eyes opened.

  “How are you, Al? Okay? You okay, Al?” Dr. Bryan asked.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” he said. He yawned and was led back to his cell.

  The next day, Sunday, March 21, sitting in the chair before the hypnoanalyst again, DeSalvo told about the dream he had.

  “I went to bed about eight-thirty and fell asleep. About three o’clock I woke up in a sweat, my pillow was wet, and I was crying. I had a horrible dream with a person I had done something with. I got out of bed and walked back and forth. The guard walked by, shone a light in my cell, then kept going. I sat down on the edge of the bed where the light was and started writing. This morning I thought nothing about it—just a dream—and that was it until I got up out of bed and there was the pad on the floor with the piece of paper I dreamed I was writing on.”

  Dr. Bryan took the pad and read aloud:

  “Now, the dream you wrote is this, Al. You wrote: ‘I went in the apartment, rang a bell. It buzzed. I opened the door and walked down the hallway. E. C. was at the door. I said, “Hi.” She said, “Yes, can I help you?” I said, “The superintendent sent me to check the leak in the bathroom.” She and I went into the bathroom and then she said, “I don’t see any leak.” Her back was turned to me. I put a knife to her neck and told her, “Don’t scream, I won’t hurt you.” She said, “Okay—” then she said, “You’re not the Strangler, are you?” I said, “No, I just want to make love to you.” I took her into the bedroom. She said, “I can’t have intercourse, I am not well.” I said, “Okay, will you blow me?” She said, “Yes, but please don’t hurt me.” I said, “Okay.” I took a pillow from the bed, put her on her knees at the foot of the bed, I sat on the edge while she blew me. Before coming she reached over and got a white Kleenex tissue and finished it with her hand. After that she got up and I told her to lie on the bed and she did so I could tie her hands up in front of her. When I got on top of her and put my hands on her neck and pressed very firm and then I spread her legs apart and pre—’”

  Dr. Bryan stopped reading and looked at DeSalvo. “That’s where it stops. P-r-e—that word stops in the middle.” He put DeSalvo into a hypnotic state again, and again he ordered him to visualize himself tearing off the pages of the calendar from March 21, 1965, back to that Sunday, September 8, 1963, the day Evelyn Corbin was strangled.

  “You went into the apartment. You rang a bell. The door buzzed—” The hypnotist reconstructed the account in DeSalvo’s dream, sentence by sentence. “You tell her, ‘Don�
��t scream, I won’t hurt you.’ But the way you say it is the way you said it yesterday. The way you say it on September eighth, 1963, and the way you said it in the dream are all the same. You say it real lightly: ‘Don’t scream. I won’t hurt you.’ Yes. Yes. That’s what you said to Judy. She said, ‘Okay, Daddy.’ Isn’t that what she said? You’re not really in September of 1963. You’re all the way back with Judy. This dream isn’t about Evelyn Corbin. This dream is about Judy. Every bit of it. Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Isn’t that true? And all the other women are identified with Judy. Every time you’re doing it over and over again. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that so?”

  DeSalvo wept.

  Dr. Bryan: “Why are you crying? Please stop. Quickly!”

  DeSalvo breathed the word. “Judy.”

  Dr. Bryan: “Judy is going to be all right. But you have to hurt her before you can help her. ‘Don’t scream. I won’t hurt you,’ and she said, ‘Okay.’”

  DeSalvo: “No.”

  Dr. Bryan: “What did she say?”

  DeSalvo: “She can’t talk. She’s only a baby.”

  Dr. Bryan: “She can’t talk, she’s only a baby. In other words, if these women were really going to be identified with Judy, the way they should be, they couldn’t talk. Is that it?”

  He paused. “How could you keep them from talking? Come on, how could you stop them from talking.” A pause. “Strangle them! That’s true, isn’t it? Isn’t it? That’s why the stranglings.” He emphasized each word. “It was after that that you used the thumbs to press the thighs. Isn’t that so? Now of course she couldn’t talk.” His voice dropped almost to a whisper. “She says, ‘I’m not well. Please don’t hurt me.’ You say, ‘Okay,’ and you take a pillow on the bed and put her knees at the foot of the bed, all right, tie her hands up. You tied Judy’s hands up.” His voice burst out, he shouted, “DeSalvo, come on! Have you ever tied Judy’s hands up so she wouldn’t bother you while you were working on her?”

  DeSalvo said no. Judy’s hands scratched him, but he did not tie her hands.

  The hypnotist sent DeSalvo into a deeper state. “Al, the reason why you didn’t finish that dream when you said ‘and pressed’—that’s p-r-e, that stands for pressed, doesn’t it? Isn’t there an s-s-e-d on the end of that? Pressed your thumbs against their thighs? Isn’t that true? That’s the rest of the dream, isn’t it?”

  Was it not the truth that DeSalvo identified each of his victims with his crippled daughter, and each strangling was a reenactment of his attempt to cure his daughter? Step by step the hypnotist led DeSalvo on. Wasn’t the real truth that DeSalvo secretly wished to strangle Judy, to eliminate her because she came between Irmgard and himself, because she took away Irmgard’s love and attention from him? Sitting knee to knee with DeSalvo, Dr. Bryan, leaning forward, cupped one enormous hand about the back of Albert’s head, drawing him to him until their faces were a few inches apart, and then brought his mouth to Albert’s ear, whispering, “Each time you strangled, it was because you were killing Judy, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? You were killing Judy …”

  DeSalvo cried out passionately, “You’re a liar!” and unexpectedly, his eyes still closed, his two hands, fingers outstretched as if to throttle, shot out directly at the hypnotist’s throat. Dr. Bryan, with astonishing speed, ducked back and his hands came down hard on Albert’s shoulders. “Sleep!” he commanded. “Sleep!”

  Albert’s arms fell to his sides and he sat in his chair, chin on chest, eyes still closed, limp.

  The others in the room began to breathe again.

  Dr. Bryan tried a different tack. “Now, Al, I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to give me the very first answer that pops into your head. The first answer. You don’t think of it, you just give the answer immediately. Can you give us any more important information today? Quickly. Quickly! Come on, come on!”

  DeSalvo: “Yes.”

  Dr. Bryan: “What is it then? What is it?”

  DeSalvo: “Irmgard.”

  Dr. Bryan: “What about Irmgard? Tell me about her?” He paused. “What about Irmgard’s neck? Is that important?”

  DeSalvo: “She don’t like nobody touching or going near her neck at all. Not even to touch it. She’d faint.”

  Dr. Bryan (with excitement): “She’d faint if you touched her neck, eh? Al, you’d like to have her faint, wouldn’t you?”

  DeSalvo: “No.”

  Dr. Bryan: “Isn’t that why you touched her neck?”

  DeSalvo: “Never.”

  Dr. Bryan: “You knew that if you touched her neck, she’d faint. That’s right. You didn’t want her to faint. You wanted to kill her altogether—”

  DeSalvo struggled in his chair.

  Dr. Bryan: “Sleep! Deep, deep, relax. Deeper and deeper.… Was Irmgard in on this? Come on, Al! Did Irmgard help you strangle these women? In what way is she in on this?”

  DeSalvo (weakly): “I don’t know.”

  Again and again the hypnotist hammered on this theme. Did DeSalvo want to strangle his wife? No, he said without emotion now. “I just wanted her to be nice and gentle.”

  A few minutes later the session was over.

  Slowly, the hypnotist brought DeSalvo awake.

  That night DeSalvo, given pen and paper, laboriously wrote to his wife. He did not know that his letters to her would pile up, unopened and unread. They had had the one hysterical telephone conversation a few days before and now he tried to express how he felt.

  Hi, Irm,

  I hope this letter finds you and the children well. As for myself, I’m okay and even though I have a lot of trouble I am still concerned mostly about you and how you feel about me. I don’t blame you for my troubles or blame anyone else. But you will admit that if you treated me different like you told me all those years we lost, the love I had been searching for, that we first had when we were married. Yes, Irm I stole them. But why. Think Irm. What happened when Judy was born and we found out she may never walk. How you cried Al please no more babies. Irm from that day on you changed. All your love went to Judy. You were frigid and cold to me, and you can’t denie this. That’s why we were always fighting about sex, because you was afraid to have a baby. Because you thought it would be born abnormal. Irm I even asked doctors what was wrong with our sex life and they all said—until you have another baby, and it is born normal will you then be free to love again.

  Irm they were right, the doctors. Remember how much you were worried after Michael was born, how many times you went to doctor Karp and when Michael was born the first thing you asked doctor Karp was is he normal, and you went every week to his office til you were sure he was okay. Irm then you came to me and gave me love I had been starving for—it was to late. More than four years you made me suffer, from the time Judy was born till Michael was born.

  I went to jail. Why Irm. Even Hilda knew. She told you. But you didn’t believe or want to. I didnt no how to make you love me. I found out to late why you were to frigid. Because you were afraid to have a baby, but I was in jail and this is what hurts me now. When I came out I believed in you and thought you kind and good. But later I found out different. Instead of you saying Al lets start out clean now, forget the past no matter what and think of the future,—no not you Irm. My suffering a whole year in jail was not enough for you. All alone in one room while you were free outside doing what you wanted.

  You knew how much I loved you. But when I came out the first thing you said was you waisted one year. And if I hurt you again you would leave me with the children. And you said I would have to prove myself to you. But you forget about the four years witch put me in jail because of you—in witch you made me suffer. Yet because I loved you I didn’t leave you. You gave me no love. To prove I’m right, when we went to Germany, two months, look how cold you were. Love is a two-way affair not one Irm, not just when you want it.

  Irm I’m not saying this is all your fault. Because I am the one who did wrong. But I had reason I loved you. After I came out
of jail—despite everything I tried to do—you denied me my rights as a husband you constantly told me I had to prove myself and in short you tried to make my life a hell wether you knew it or not. I am really and sincerely sorry for what I have done and I will have to pay for it with years of my life. But apparently that is still not enough for you. You tell me not to write or if I write not to express in any way my love for you. So that even in this critical time when I need you most of all you are still making me feel hopeless and if I cant turn to you, I have no hope, no ambition.… You can’t no how awful it is to wait for letters that do not come, or to love someone and be laugh at for that love. As for myself I will all ways feel the same in regards to my love for you and I can only hope that some day, you may realize, the extent of my love and feelings for you … I will close for now wishing the best for you and the children. P.S. Give my love to my Judy and Michael—there Daddy always.

  I will love you forever always

  Love,

  Al

  He turned the letter upside down and filled the space that remained on the last page with another postscript, a bitter postscript:

  Only untill things started changing, us going out weekends, having everything you wanted, house fixed up, all the money coming in, did you change and start showing a little love for me. Our last two months together you made me feel for the first time like a man. You gave me love I never dreamed you had to give. But why—only because you had just about everything you dreamed of. If you really loved me as you said you did, you would love me now. But you closed the house and everything in it. you lost that and everything you dreamed of. all your love was in the house and now you hate me again. When you really love someone, no matter what they do if you really love them you stay by them.

  Those who witnessed the hypnoanalysis wondered how much DeSalvo had been led or influenced by Dr. Bryan, so forceful and domineering. If they were to consider this man at all seriously, how significant was his sense of sexual rejection by his wife and how significant was her apparent fear of being touched about the neck? Again, DeSalvo’s references to Evelyn Corbin made it clear that he spoke with knowledge of the apartment, and what might well have taken place there. Semen had been found in her mouth; on the floor next to the bed a tissue had also been found with semen. Had DeSalvo learned that (after all, the newspapers had all but spelled out everything) or had he known it? Or had his suggestibility been so great that—like Daniel Pennacchio—he saw himself enacting what he read, or had been told by Nassar, or perhaps unwittingly, by Bailey’s questions?