There was an elevator in the center of a circular staircase. He was going to take it but saw it descending with a woman passenger. He kept out of sight until she left, then he went up the stairs to the fourth floor. “On the way I saw two crazy sisters, two floors below Nichols—I guess on the second floor. I knocked on their door. I remember I’d rung their bell first downstairs. When I hit their floor the door was open—I met the first sister—she was batty as all hell.”
What did he mean, batty as all hell?
“Oh, she was talking real ragtime; I could see right away I wasn’t making any sense to her. Behind her I saw the other sister—I guess it was her sister—back further in the apartment. So I kept on going up the stairs, and I heard, ‘Who is it?’ I was high up, I saw when I looked out the window. I bore to the right. Nichols’ door was to the right. She was standing at the door wearing a housecoat—something pinkish. She was wearing glasses.” He remembered “there was something funny about what she had on her feet.” Then it came to him. “Something different … like tennis shoes.”
“‘What do you want?’ she asked.
“I explained I come up to check the windows for leaks.” The night before it had been raining.
“She said, ‘Who sent you here? Did the superintendent, Mr. Burke,* send you?’
“I said yes.
“She said, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about it.’
“I said, ‘Look, you can call him up—’
“She said, ‘Oh, all right, go ahead—but make it fast, because I’m leaving—I’m on my way out.’
“I felt funny. I didn’t want to go in there in the first place. I just didn’t want it to happen. But I went in and I proceeded from one room to another. When we got to the bedroom I looked at the windows. She said, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to wrinkle your curtains—will you check that window?’ Then I told her, check this one’—and as she checked this one, she was turned away—that’s when it happened. Because I grabbed her and she fell back with me on the bed, on top of me. I was in this position, my feet around the bottom of her legs—”
“You really had her pinned, then?” said Bottomly, in an attempt to maintain a man-to-man approach.
DeSalvo said, embarrassed, “I don’t like to talk about this.”
“You’ve got to talk about it,” said Bottomly.
“I’d almost swear that it was here she took her fingernails and dug into the back of my hand—it didn’t bleed, she did pull the skin—and then she stopped. You must have found skin under her fingernails.”
How did he know she got skin under her fingernails?
“Because it was off of me,” said DeSalvo. “She kept doing it until she … went.”
Then he slid out from under her, picked her up and put her on the floor—
“Was she alive at this point?”
There was a silence. Then DeSalvo replied in a suddenly hushed, suddenly humble voice of a small boy who has been rebuked, “I don’t know.”
But he had told Bailey that Nina Nichols was still unconscious, that he had placed her on a rug there and had intercourse with her, then he had grabbed a belt, put it around her neck, and tried to strangle her, but the belt broke, near the buckle.
Had he left anything around her neck?
A silk stocking, he said, which he knotted three times.
Would he demonstrate the kinds of knots he tied?
Obediently DeSalvo bent over, untied his shoelaces, and tied them again. Bottomly noted it for the record: “He just tied his shoe by taking one strand and putting it twice over the second strand before pulling it tight and then tied a second knot on top of that to make it secure.” It was the Strangler’s knot.
Now DeSalvo described the room, the furniture in it, the camera equipment all about—
“You searched the apartment,” Bottomly said. “What were you looking for?”
DeSalvo said hesitantly, “I didn’t know at that time—probably anything.”
Money? “Possibly,” said DeSalvo.
“Checks? Ever pick up checks?” No, he did not, he said. Jewelry?
“To be honest with you, I never took anything from that apartment—from any of the apartments.” He corrected himself. He had taken that twenty-dollar bill from Anna Slesers’ apartment.
Bottomly asked, “How come you didn’t take any of those cameras? They’re pretty negotiable.”
“I wasn’t up there for money, for stealing.”
“But you ransacked the place.”
“That’s right,” said DeSalvo.
“Well, what did you do that for?”
DeSalvo gave an embarrassed half-giggle. “That’s what I’m trying to find out myself. I done these things, I know, I went through them—”
“Now, Albert,” Bottomly said, reasonably. “You’re a professional B and E man, you’ve been in and out of a thousand places, you’ve got it down to a fine science, a work of art. If you hadn’t got mixed up in this sex thing you’d probably still be doing it. Now, you went into Nina Nichols’ apartment, you know how to go through a place, you knew what you were looking for, and you knew what you could sell.”
DeSalvo nodded.
“All right,” went on Bottomly. “You see a lot of valuable cameras—why didn’t you take one?”
“Because to be honest with you, I just didn’t want to take them.”
“Doesn’t that sound strange to you?”
“Yes,” said DeSalvo. “It also sounds strange to me why I went into the apartment in the first place.”
“It doesn’t sound strange to me,” Bottomly retorted. “This looked like an apartment which might have some valuable property in it—”
“Yes—why didn’t I take it?” DeSalvo demanded. “That’s what I’d like to know, too. I understand she had a diamond, too. Why didn’t I take that?” He thought for a moment. Yes, he always ransacked the apartments after his attack. “I don’t think I was actually looking for anything to steal. After this here thing happened, I think in my own mind I might have searched to make it look that way—that something was being taken. But I didn’t have in my mind the idea of taking anything.”
He sketched the rooms, the position of the body. There were a number of liquor bottles an arm’s length away. He picked up one bottle—“For what reason I don’t know, I stuck the bottle in her.” He thought he left it in her—a wine bottle that might have had wine in it.
Questioned again to go over what he had done, DeSalvo squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. “These things, I’m ashamed of what I done. I know I inserted the bottle, but I don’t want to talk about it now.”
“Why are you so reluctant about this?” Bottomly asked. “Because you don’t understand it?”
That was part of it, DeSalvo admitted. “And because it’s so unbelievable to me that it was really done by me. Why I done it I don’t really understand, but I know at this moment that to do it—” He ended up lamely. “Well, I wouldn’t.”
“You do now understand why you searched these places and mixed things up?”
Well, he knew he had said a moment ago it was to create the impression of burglary, but he only assumed this—he did not know the real reason.
“Do you remember ransacking the apartment, as you remember grabbing her?”
“No, I remember going through things but as to how I did it I don’t recall. I know I done it.”
Bottomly thought for a moment. “Albert, tell me what happened to you when you grabbed Nina Nichols. What was going on in your mind?”
“You mean the feeling I had? Well … as her back was turned to me and I saw the back of her head, and—I was all hot, just like you’re going to blow your head off—like pressure right on you, right away—I—”
“You just had to do something?” Bottomly prompted him.
DeSalvo all but stuttered. “I—I—to—to explain it or to express it, as soon as I saw the back of her head, right?—not her face, seeing nothing but the back of her head
, right?—everything built up inside of me. Before you know it I had put my arm around her and that was it. And from whatever happened through that time, I can remember doing these things. As for the reason why I did them, I at this time can give you no answer.” He remembered doing what he did, he remembered biting her breast—
“Did you draw blood?”
“Oh, no—” almost shocked. “Nothing like that.”
After everything had been done, the telephone rang. “I was sweating like anything and when it rang I just took off. It was still ringing when I went down the stairs. I stopped on the stairs for a minute when I saw a woman getting into the elevator—”
Once outside the building, he walked to his car. Two elderly women, carrying packages, were coming from the parking lot. He passed them, he looked at them, they looked at him. He got into his car and drove home. “It was coming close to six o’clock then.”
That was Saturday, June 30? Yes. In his shamed, small boy’s voice: “It was the same day I was in Lynn the morning Mrs. Blake died.”
The first session was over.
Bottomly and McGrath, driving back to Boston with Detectives Tuney and DiNatale, who had been forced to remain outside in an anteroom because of the legal technicalities, were impressed. Still, everything Albert had said could have been read in the newspapers or learned from some unofficial source.
Details of the murders—some unprintable—were in the very air; over the months they had been told, whispered, confided to friends, family, colleagues by any number of persons: the janitors, the police, the technicians on the scene: photographers, stenographers, chemists, artists. Anna Slesers’ bath, her hi-fi partly turned off in the living room; Helen Blake’s rugs hanging out her windows, the knife blade broken in her footlocker; Nina Nichols’ cameras, her haste to leave that afternoon, the telephone call that had frightened DeSalvo—all. To be sure, his sketches were accurate. By his own admission, however, he knew the apartments in these neighborhoods: he had been breaking into them for the past seven years. Nothing he had said so far proved he had been in each apartment at the time of each murder.
And how explain the lack of evidence, in the autopsies of the Old Women, of sexual intercourse?
“Unless he’s lying,” suggested Tuney. DeSalvo might use the term “sexual intercourse” to cover other acts which he was too embarrassed—at least, so far—to reveal.
They would check Army and Navy stores. Surely a clerk should recall a bare-chested man buying a shirt. They would seek out the “crazy sisters” in Nina Nichols’ building. They should remember DeSalvo, perhaps even establish the exact hour they saw him continue up the stairs. DeSalvo said he had taken Anna Slesers’ raincoat. They had an excellent check here. Mrs. Slesers’ daughter Maija, two months before the murder, had bought two identical raincoats, one for herself, one for her mother. When her mother’s effects were sent to her, the raincoat was missing. They would ask Maija, who lived in Maryland, to send hers to Boston: they would hang it on a rack with a dozen others, and challenge DeSalvo to pick out the one most resembling the one he had taken.
They would check, check, check. And Bottomly would have to hear more—much, much more.
At the next session, a few days later, Bottomly brought with him a folder of sixty photographs of women aged between forty-five and seventy-five. These were the faces of women derelicts, victims of other murders, alcoholics, taken from police files. Among these he had interspersed photographs of the eleven victims. All had appeared in the press with one exception—Nina Nichols. Her family had refused to release any photograph to the newspapers. Now, however, to assist Bottomly, they had given him one that he included in the album.
Would Albert go through these carefully and each time he recognized one of his victims, identify her?
Albert studied them, photograph by photograph. Yes, this was Anna Slesers. This was Sophie Clark. This was Mary Sullivan. This was Evelyn Corbett. (He always called her Corbett instead of Corbin.) He chose ten—correctly. Then he went through the album again.
“This one bothers me,” he said, tapping it with his finger. “I’m not sure, but it could be Nina Nichols.” Bottomly tensed. It was the Nina Nichols photograph. “She was frail, her hair was a lot grayer than it is here,” DeSalvo was saying. “Yeah, sure—this is her, okay, but she’s a lot older.”
Bottomly placed the album on the floor beside him, saying nothing. The Nina Nichols likeness, her family had told him, had been taken five years before, but it was the most recent they had. Well, thought Bottomly, I’ll accept Albert for Nina Nichols. Else how could he have recognized her? Yet she might have been pointed out to him before—he was forever in and out of those apartment houses. And Bottomly could not forget that Peter Hurkos, handling sealed manila envelopes, had accurately described the photographs inside them, and that Paul Gordon had pinpointed a pile of hidden cigarette butts and a nailed service door …
“All right, Albert,” he said aloud. “Whom do you want to talk about next?”
After a moment, Albert said, “Ida Irga.”
“When was that?” Bottomly asked.
Albert sat lost in thought. He began muttering under his breath. It was an astonishing scene to be repeated more than once: Albert sitting there, thinking half-aloud, running through the chronology of the murders he said he committed: “Slesers was June fourteenth, then Blake, Nichols … it had to be Saturday, the last Saturday in June, the thirtieth—that was Blake. July … Then two and a half weeks—around the twentieth—no, the twenty-first—it was hot weather, mid-August—no, the nineteenth, it’s around the nineteenth.” He looked up. “It could possibly be a Monday,” he said. He fixed it as Monday, August 20.
He had been driving around aimlessly, he remembered, as always when this mood came upon him, and finding himself in a narrow street—it turned out to be Grove Street—he saw a place to park along the curb, and he did so.
“Did you know Ida Irga?”
“No, no, no. I didn’t pick her out in advance. I didn’t pick a building. If there was no parking place on Grove Street, if I’d parked on some other street, I’d never even’ve gotten to her. I just happened to walk into her building. I rang about four different bells—somebody buzzed the door, it opened, and I went up the stairs. Whoever came to the door first, that was it. She was the first to answer. When I get to the top of the stairs, she’s on the landing, looking down over the iron railing, waiting for me. I told her I was going to do some work in the apartment but I could see she didn’t trust me. So I said, ‘If you don’t want to be bothered by me going in, I won’t bother you.’
“‘But I don’t know who you are,’ she said. She spoke in a kind of accent—Jewish type. She was heavyset, about a hundred and sixty pounds, white-haired with streaks of black hair in it. She was wearing a black and white checked cotton housedress. We talked, and I said, ‘If you don’t want it done, forget it. I’ll just tell them you told me you don’t want it done,’ and I started to walk down. She says, ‘Well, never mind, come on,’ and I walked in on her. We went into the bedroom to check the windows and when she turned around—I did it. My right arm around her neck, she went down—”
He paused. “She passed out fast. I saw purplish-dark blood, it came out of her right ear …” He stopped again. “… just enough for me to see.” His voice almost died away. “I saw it more clearly when I put the pillowcase around her neck, but I strangled her first with my arm, then the pillowcase.” He had intercourse with her—“I think I had intercourse …” He was not sure. Bottomly pressed him. Finally, reluctantly, “I would say yes.”
“You don’t sound very positive to me,” Bottomly said.
“It’s—to me—” DeSalvo mumbled. “To me it’s sickening even to talk about this. It’s so damn real—that blood coming out of her ear—”
Yet other details, he admitted, were blurred.
When Bailey had interrogated him, Bailey had remarked that Mrs. Irga, aged seventy-five, could not be thought of as sex
ually attractive. DeSalvo had bristled. “Attractiveness had nothing to do with it,” he had said. “She was a woman. When this certain time comes on me, it’s a very immediate thing. When I get this feeling and instead of going to work I make an excuse to my boss, I start driving and I start in my mind building this image up, and that’s why I find myself not knowing where I’m going.”
Now he told Bottomly how he looked through Mrs. Irga’s apartment. He opened the drawers of a dark walnut dresser, “but there was nothing in them, nothing at all.” He recalled “putting her legs in a wide position, one leg in each chair. I got them from the dining room, they were dark straight-backed chairs; I moved them away from the table and put her legs on the chairs between the slats—”
“Were you thinking of anything?”
“No, I just did it.” He could give no further explanation.
Next was Jane Sullivan. It was two days later—Wednesday, August 22.
He drew a sketch of her building: “You have to step up, you walk inside, there’s a little hallway, black and white tiles, with another step up. There’s a buzzer—if they don’t buzz the buzzer, I can open the electric lock downstairs—”
Albert stopped, as if waiting to be prompted.
“How?” asked Bottomly.
“All I need is a plastic toothpick. Why, my daughter once took her plastic ruler from school and slipped the lock of the door of our house. ‘I put this in and the door opened, Daddy,’ she said.”
Jane Sullivan was a heavyset woman, about a hundred and fifty pounds, five feet seven, who spoke with a “from Ireland” accent. Her apartment was on the first floor.
“Albert, how did you talk your way in?”
“I did it fast,” said Albert. “She was in the midst of moving in. I saw all these cartons—things’s weren’t set up. Now, she’s looking into a closet to show me something—that’s where it happened. I’m behind her—”
The Boston Strangler Page 35