The Boston Strangler

by Frank, Gerold;

Sometimes Bottomly felt himself a participant in an unbearably tragic drama. Only the man before him knew the last hours of these women; only he knew the last words they uttered, the way their lives ended. And only now were these victims, whom Bottomly had studied and knew so well, really coming alive for him—this, in the final hours of their lives. Sometimes as DeSalvo revealed new facets of himself, Bottomly felt himself a participant in a grotesque masquerade, a mad parody of an inquisition. Surely it could not be real, this conversation, the words he heard, DeSalvo suddenly giggling, conspiratorial—

  “This is going to be comical,” he was saying. “We’re all at a New Year’s Eve party, the family, see? Well, I find out one of my sisters is taking judo to protect herself—against the Strangler! She and her friends, they all get together and they’re taking lessons at a gym. I says, ‘Sure you can handle the Strangler if you get him?’ She says, ‘Oh, I’m pretty well prepared for him.’ I says, ‘What would you do if he got you in this hold?’ And before she knew it I had her in that hold. She couldn’t do nothing. She says, ‘Well, I’m learning.’”

  He looked up with his boyish grin. “Her husband has eleven sisters, all beautiful—fabulous! I tried to make all eleven of them.”

  He began to chuckle. “One of them says to me one day, ‘You know what I think you are? I wouldn’t be surprised if you ain’t the Boston Strangler. The way we remember you as the Measuring Man, and how fast and sharp you were with all those women, and now this guy is operating the same way … Bah, it can’t be you!’” Hugely delighted, he mimicked her.

  Or, commiserating with Bottomly because the police had never been able to catch him. “I never knew where I was going, I never knew what I was doing—that’s why you never nailed me, because you never knew where I was going to strike and I didn’t either. So we were both baffled. You didn’t know and how did I know? I didn’t know so how could you know?”

  Or, in a sudden change of aspect, he spoke as if he were the impersonal tool of fate. He told of Gertrude Gruen, the German waitress who escaped him:

  “She was in the position, she was ready to go, she was good as gone.” He spoke with finality. “I had both arms around her from behind—but I couldn’t do it. I don’t know why. She grabbed my finger in her mouth, she was biting it down to the bone—I had a knife, I could have ripped her open … and I didn’t.”

  When he knocked on her door the morning of February 18, 1963, she opened it, a tall, sturdy, dark-eyed girl with a red coat thrown over her nightgown. “Go away,” she said, “I don’t feel well, I’ve got a virus, come back some other time.” But he said, “I got to turn off the water in the bathroom.” His fellow workers on the roof (he’d seen men working on the roof just before he entered the building) would give him a signal. She reluctantly let him in. While he waited, he took off his Air Force style jacket and draped it over a chair—a blue chair, he recalled—so that he was in his T-shirt. “You’re very pretty,” he said to her. “You could be a model.” At that she became quite nervous, and walked to the front window and opened it, saying, “It’s hot in here.” “No, you better not do that,” he said, and walked over and closed the window.

  “You didn’t stop thinking, did you?” observed Bottomly.

  DeSalvo went on as if nothing had been said. Bottomly had observed how earnest the man was; small talk, even the pleasantries Bottomly resorted to in an attempt to establish rapport, were either passed by or obviously resented. “She got a little more upset and opened a back window. I said nothing about it. Then I mentioned, ‘There’s some dirt on the back of your coat’—she turned and I had her.”

  She was a strong girl, she fought, kicked, bit, and still—“I couldn’t hit her. I could see her brown hair, dark brown hair, and when I turned and saw her face, I couldn’t put my hand to hit her. I said, ‘I’m going to let you go,” and I started to give up, but she still had my finger in her mouth and I was doing everything to get her to open her mouth and she wouldn’t. I could of laid her open, I could of hit her with my fist and knocked her out—I don’t know what held me back.” He broke free. “I ran out of the place, grabbing my jacket from the chair, my hand was all bloody—boy, was she screaming. She was really sounding off.

  “When I hit the stairs and came into the street, some guys were there, they’d heard the screams, they saw me. I yelled, ‘Quick, he’s upstairs, look at my hand, I couldn’t hold him,—you got to stop him, he’s coming down—’ So they shot up.

  “I kept running, past my car I’d parked halfway down the block—it was too near for me to get into it—I ran around the corner, pulled off my jacket and threw it in the alley, circled back so when I came back to my car I’m only in my T-shirt; I get in and take off. I picked up my jacket later.”

  It was the nearest he ever came to capture.

  He drove immediately to the office of his attorney, Robert Sheinfeld, in Chelsea. “I wanted to establish an alibi”—at least his attorney could be witness that he was in Chelsea—“and he said ‘Hi,’ and put out his hand to shake hands with me and I wouldn’t. It was bleeding so much I had it wrapped in a handkerchief and kept it in my pocket. ‘What’s wrong with you? What did I do to you?’ he asked. He was hurt because I wouldn’t shake hands.” Albert sighed. “I felt pretty bad. I liked the guy because he was very concerned and kept me out of trouble. He was a very good attorney.”

  Attorney Sheinfeld was a warm, gregarious man of sixty-two who had practiced for more than forty years in a suite of offices above a drugstore on Chelsea’s main street. He had known the DeSalvo family before Albert was born. Time and again through Albert’s childhood Sheinfeld, acting for his mother, had haled his father into court for nonsupport and assault and battery. In 1944, when Albert was thirteen, Sheinfeld had finally gotten her a divorce, and a year later she remarried. In the years since, Sheinfeld had watched Albert grow up, had met Irmgard and the children, and had defended Albert on one petty B and E charge after another—charges so minor that Albert’s punishment had never been more than a suspended sentence. Sometimes no money was taken; once Albert escaped with nine dollars from a piggy bank he had broken open. In 1961, when he was seized as the Measuring Man, Sheinfeld had defended him again, and it had been his pleas that helped reduce Albert’s sentence in the House of Correction. Sheinfeld’s mother had died in early 1962 and Albert, behind bars, had written him a touching note of consolation. After his release Albert had faithfully called on the lawyer every three months to pay off, fifty dollars at a time, Sheinfeld’s $750 fee. Certainly Sheinfeld had no idea when Albert dropped in on him that February morning in 1963, his hand stuck doggedly in his pocket, that as Albert was to say later, he had just come from attempting to strangle a woman. He would not have believed it then had Albert told him so.

  Three weeks after his abortive attack on Gertrude Gruen, Albert found himself in Lawrence, twenty-seven miles from Boston. It was Saturday, March 9, 1963: Mary Brown was found murdered in her apartment that day, her head covered with a sheet and beaten repeatedly with a blunt instrument.

  DeSalvo, who was now much more free and animated in his recital, exclaimed, “Oh, that’s a terrible one!” when Bottomly wrote Mary Brown’s name in his notebook. “Whew! This is like out of this world! This is like something unbelievable!”

  Mary Brown was sixty or sixty-five, he said. He walked into her building, his eye caught sight of a nine-inch brass pipe, about an inch and a half thick, lying behind a door. “I picked it up, I don’t know why, but I picked it up. I had gloves on.” He paused. “Oh, this is terrible—”

  “Were you sober?” Bottomly asked.

  “I don’t drink,” DeSalvo replied, almost primly. Then: “I know you had to be drunk to do this one, but I wasn’t.” Unexpectedly, he said to Bottomly: “You’re thinking this is so different from the rest, right? And you’re saying to yourself, Well, this guy is trying to get a name for himself, why is he bringing in this one? He’s better off to leave her out because she doesn’t match—neither does
the other one in Cambridge match. Right?” He looked challengingly at the tall man seated opposite him, almost like a child testing a teacher. “I could just as well forget about it—I don’t have to explain nothing to you.”

  “That’s right,” said Bottomly, imperturbably. “You can do that with all of them, Al.”

  DeSalvo sighed. “I picked up the pipe, put it in my back pocket; I knock on her door. I tell her we got to paint the kitchen and I got to see it. There’s a table there with a little yellow radio, to the right a refrigerator, a sink with brass faucets, a back door in the right back corner of the kitchen, when you look out the kitchen window you see a slate roof—” He rattled off these details as if compelled to prove beyond any doubt that he had been there, that he had committed this untypical Strangler murder—

  “As she walked from the kitchen, her back to me, I hit her right on the back of the head with the pipe. She went down. She had on a blue square-print housedress with buttons—she was gray-haired, a big woman. Her things were ripped open, her busts were exposed.” Again, the description of events taking place as of their own accord. “I got a sheet from a chair and covered her. I kept hitting her and hitting her …” His voice faltered. “This is terrible … because her head felt—it felt like it was all gone. Terrible!” He rubbed his hand over his face and began again. He found himself with a fork in his pocket. Perhaps he had picked it up from the kitchen table. He wasn’t sure. “I remember stabbing her in the bust, the right one … and leaving it in her.”

  With an effort, Bottomly recalled that Mary Brown had difficulty sleeping in a bed because of asthma. She found it easier to doze off at night seated upright in a living room chair covered with a bed sheet. Could anyone but her murderer know that a sheet was on the chair? Would not anyone else have said he got the sheet from a drawer or a closet?

  “That sheet you covered her with must have been bloody,” he said aloud.

  “Oh, was it, my God!”

  “Were you upset? Did you check your clothes for blood?”

  “No,” muttered DeSalvo, almost as if to himself. Then, again, emotionally: “Oh, it was really bad … My God!”

  Bottomly did his best to keep the recital flowing in chronological order, although it was difficult because DeSalvo might or might not go into one murder or the other, as the mood was upon him. Many of his replies were as circuitous as those of a patient on a psychoanalyst’s couch: one image would lead to another one, having no relationship to the first; and this would often serve to sharpen details that had been blurred earlier.

  Each time a session opened, DeSalvo ran through the roll call of his victims under his breath until he reached a woman he had not yet discussed. At one session he suddenly remembered that a week before Anna Slesers he had almost strangled a girl in her Boston apartment. She was Scandinavian, she had long dark hair like Irmgard. “I looked in a mirror in the bedroom and there was me—strangling somebody! I fell on my knees and I crossed myself and I prayed, ‘Oh, God, what am I doing? I’m a married man, I’m the father of two children. Oh, God, help me!’” The words came out in a rush. “Oh, I got out of there fast. It wasn’t like it was me, Mr. Bottomly—it was like it was someone else I was watching. I just took off.”

  Now he spoke about Joann Graff, the shy pattern designer in Lawrence.

  “I was in Lawrence maybe two months before the Graff thing,” he said. “You don’t know where you’re going, you’re just driving around, and I see I’m in Lawrence and I spot this building.” It was on Essex Street, across the street from Joann Graff. “I saw a woman’s figure, she was about thirty or thirty-five, in a third-floor window. It stuck in my mind. So this time, two months later, when I come back through Lawrence, I go to this building and up to the third floor where this woman lived, but nobody was there.”

  He came down and wandered across the street into Joann’s building, and glanced at the names on the mailboxes. Many were commercial; one was a union headquarters. “I spotted her name. I didn’t know who she was, what she looked like, but it was the only single girl’s name, all the others were businesses or married couples. It was the only logical name, right? The apartments weren’t numbered, so I didn’t know which one was hers.” He climbed the stairs and rapped at random at one door. “A guy opened it. Naturally I didn’t want to talk to a man,” DeSalvo said. “I kept my hand over my face. I said, ‘Can you tell me where Joann Graff lives?’”

  Bottomly remembered the story told by Kenneth Rowe, the twenty-two-year-old engineering student who lived on the floor above Joann Graff, and who was waiting for his wife to return from the Laundromat that Saturday afternoon.

  “So this guy points to an apartment across the hall and says, ‘You see that apartment there?—it’s the same one down one flight.’” DeSalvo went on: “I kept my hand over my face and kept talking and walking away at the same time, I just kept going. I wanted to get away from him, period.”

  Once he got to the floor below, he knocked on Joann’s door. She opened it slightly: “The super sent me to do work in the apartment,” he said. Joann was nervous about letting him in, “but I kept talking to her; I said there was repairs to be done in the bathroom, and she said she didn’t know about it and who sent me? I said again, the super. So she finally let me in. It was a one-room apartment.” He spoke disdainfully. “It was a very cheap apartment with really cheap furniture—even the Salvation Army wouldn’t take it. Just like she was living out of a suitcase. The kitchen was terrible, the flooring was very bad—”

  Joann wore a leotard with something over it, he said. He walked directly to the bathroom, she following him. “But she wouldn’t go into it at first. So I said, ‘See, that’s bad.’” Joann stood outside the bathroom, looking in. “What is?” she asked. DeSalvo said, rebukingly, “Well, look at it—I mean, this is your place. If you want it fixed, then I’ll fix it for you. If you don’t want it fixed, I’ll leave right now—”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m expecting some company. Somebody’s coming to pick me up for dinner.”

  Finally, she took two or three reluctant steps into the bathroom, and he cornered her. She tried to fight her way out; he grabbed her; “‘Don’t scream and I won’t hurt you … Now, walk over to the bed.’ That’s when she walked from the bathroom to the bed.”

  “How’d you keep her from screaming? Or was she too scared?”

  “I had a knife,” said DeSalvo. “Now, here’s what happened. I says, ‘I’m going to tie you up.’ She didn’t want no part of being tied up. She was lying first on the bed, and she refused to allow me to tie her up. I put the knife away—I let her get up—somebody went by the door outside, I told her to be quiet, she was standing up, she turned around, and I put my hand right around her neck and pulled her backwards on the bed, and we fell on the bed, she was on top of me … and she passed out. I got from underneath her, I took off her clothes, I ripped off her blouse. Her busts were large, thirty-eight, very smooth—hefty, well-built, beautiful body, but she had no face.” He was completely matter-of-fact. “Five feet six and a half … I’m sure I stripped her naked. That’s how I see her in my mind, her head, the bed not made up, the legs over the edge of the bed toward the door.

  “I played with her busts. I know I possibly may have bitten her—not to draw blood,” he said hastily. “Possibly on her body. I just had intercourse with her, and that was it.” He thought for a moment. “It was very fast—all over within a matter of probably ten minutes, maybe fifteen, from the time I went in. It only took two minutes at most to talk to her, right? It only took about a minute, a minute and a half, to get her to the bed, right?”

  Bottomly could not help observing dryly, “And you were ready?”

  “Well, when you say you were ready—this word ‘ready’—any way you want to use it, it happened,” De Salvo said, with a hint of annoyance in his voice. “No matter how it happened, it happened.” Then he paused. When he grabbed her, he said, “at the same time the leotards came off and went tight a
round her neck.”

  “This seems a blur in your mind?”

  It was, he said. He added, “There is a possibility that a stocking was around her neck.” He remembered that when he was about to leave the apartment—it had all been so fast because of the visitor she expected—he opened the door just as a man was coming down the stairs. He closed the door silently, waited, then opened it, left the building, and drove home to Malden—about forty minutes. Then, “I had supper, washed up, played with the kids until about eight o’clock, put them to bed, sat down and watched TV—it came over about her.”

  “Did you get any kick when news of Graff broke?” Bottomly asked, thinking, I had supper, washed up, played with the kids, watched TV …

  DeSalvo said no. “I knew it was me. I didn’t want to believe it. It’s so difficult to explain to you. I knew it was me who did it, but why I did it and everything else—I don’t know why. I was not excited, I didn’t think about it; I sat down to dinner and didn’t think about it at all.”

  He was vague about the date. Bottomly tried to lead him into an association between the date of Joann’s death and the assassination of President Kennedy the day before. How had DeSalvo felt when he heard of the President’s death?

  “I cried,” he said. He was then employed by Highland Contractors, and had been sent with another workman to put in a new retaining wall in a factory near Andover. “I went across the street to the Dairy Maid to get two milkshakes” for himself and his companion “when people started talking about how the President was shot—then, that he was dead. I just stood there and cried.” He stopped for a moment now, thinking hard. “Could the President be killed that day and I went out and still did something? Could I have shot out that way toward Lawrence that day, that afternoon? I heard someone say later it wasn’t bad enough the President died but someone had to strangle somebody …” He seemed confused. “To me, I think that day, it could be the Graff girl …” But later he realized that he had attacked her the following day, Saturday, November 23.