“That Graff thing—” Albert DeSalvo stared at the wall. “It was so senseless that it makes sense, y’know?” And again, the refrain: “To me it’s so unrealistic as to why these things occur.”
Outside, in the corridor, one heard the footsteps of the keepers making their rounds—powerful, massive men with jangling keys at their belts—and the indistinct sound of hundreds of men shuffling all through the day in the huge wards. Bottomly had seen them—men vacant-eyed, lost in their own world, insane men, each in his faded gray denim shirt and trousers and slippers.
Who was next? Bottomly had asked, and DeSalvo, going through the list of the murdered, snapped his fingers. “That must be the one in Salem—Evelyn Corbett.”
To Bottomly, DeSalvo’s repeated failure to get Evelyn Corbin’s name right seemed the final indignity. The man had killed her and yet could not fix her name in his mind.
“Yeah,” Albert was saying. In essence he told the same story that had been elicited from him under hypnoanalysis, save that he now went into the actual killing. Twenty minutes before he entered Evelyn’s apartment house at 224 Lafayette Street, Salem, that busy Sunday morning, he had walked into a nearby building. “I talked to an old lady on the second floor over a store but I didn’t go in—I heard voices from inside, so I took off.”
Then he walked into No. 224. He glanced at the names under the bells, saw a single woman’s name, rang her bell. A moment later, the door clicked open, he entered, walked down the hall, and knocked on Evelyn Corbin’s door.
“Who is it?” came a woman’s voice. “What do you want?”
“I have to do some work in your apartment,” DeSalvo said.
After a moment, the door opened a few inches and Evelyn peered out uncertainly. DeSalvo turned on his most winning smile. “There’s water seeping through your windows, and I want to check for stains behind the curtains.”
She let him in, apologizing for her caution. “You don’t know who can be knocking on your door these days.” Then she added, in an attempt at lightness, “How do I know you’re not the Boston Strangler?”
“Look, if you want me to leave, I’ll leave—” DeSalvo said. But he kept talking, “and I won her confidence. She was a small woman, about five feet five—she had a thirty-four-A bust.… I went in with her and she said she didn’t have much time, she was getting ready to go to church.” In the bathroom, as she was complaining of the peeling paint, he suddenly put his knife to her: “Be quiet and I won’t hurt you.” He ordered her into the bedroom. She began to cry. “I can’t do anything—I’m under doctor’s orders.”
DeSalvo said, “I was going to do it to her anyway, but she was all in tears; she said she’d do it the other way.” He sat on the edge of her bed, she took a pillow from the bed, put it on the floor next to the bed and kneeled on it, and it was done. “She got up … the next thing I know I had strangled her.” He said it almost wonderingly. She had turned her back to him to replace the pillow, and he grabbed her. He tied her hands in front at the wrists with a pair of her nylon stockings. “I got on top of her, sitting on her hands. I put the pillow on top of her face so I couldn’t look at her face … Her chin was partly showing … I strangled her manually.” Silence, for a moment. “She did try to bounce me off. She couldn’t do it, and then she didn’t breathe anymore. She didn’t move anymore.”
“How did you keep her quiet when you tied her hands?”
“She promised not to make a sound. I told her when I left I’d tell someone she was tied up in there. ‘You give me time to go,’ I said.” At one point, he thought he took another pair of nylon stockings from a dresser drawer and put them around her neck. “I must have cut her hands loose later—”
He left. No one paid any attention to him.
In the silence, Bottomly said, “You know, there is one you missed.”
DeSalvo looked at him uncertainly. He began muttering the names again. “Brown, Graff … which one … Oh, Jesus!” He remembered who it was. “I don’t want to talk about her.” It was Beverly Samans, in Cambridge. She had been killed before Joann Graff and Evelyn Corbin. “I don’t want to.” Was it because of the brutality, Bottomly wondered? Beverly had been viciously stabbed, again and again. Death had come from these wounds, not from strangling. Yet DeSalvo had talked about Mary Brown, beaten to death.
“I just don’t want to talk about it now,” DeSalvo said stubbornly.
About Mary Sullivan, then? There were left only three—Beverly Samans, Mary Sullivan, and the unidentified eighty-year-old woman DeSalvo said had died of a heart attack in his arms sometime in 1962; and Mary Sullivan was the last one, the most recent one—January 4, 1964.
“I don’t want to talk about her, either,” DeSalvo said. Why? “I say to myself it could of been my daughter, too. Mary Sullivan—oh, that bothers me a lot.” Suddenly: “I wish I was dead!”
“Albert, you must talk—”
He nodded, heavily. All right. Mary Sullivan. He knew her apartment at 44A Charles Street so well—“If you want to know, I knew every apartment on Charles Street, I been in them all, in and out, so many times in the last seven years—” It was the same as in Cambridge. New girls moving in every semester, and as the Measuring Man he’d been in every apartment house.
He knocked on Mary’s door midafternoon of Saturday, January 4, 1964. Mary opened it. “She had on blue jeans, short ones, with little ragged edges on the border, and a yellow blouse.” She was preparing a meal, he thought, for when she came to the door she had a little knife in her hand, “like you use for peeling potatoes. I said, ‘I came up to do some work in the apartment.’ She said, ‘I don’t know anything about it. My roommates are out.’” But he could come in and show her what had to be done.
“We went into the kitchen—it looked like she was fixing the shelves there, but I didn’t get too good a look at what was in the kitchen because that’s where I put the knife to her. ‘Don’t scream and I won’t hurt you,’ I said. I took her into the bedroom. There were two twin beds there with backboards. I brought her first to the bed just next to the parlor door and I tied her wrists with some long dark thing—”
“A necktie?”
“No, a scarf of some kind.” He described what might well have been the red ascot found in the toilet. “I tied her feet, also.” He stopped, and began to mumble. “This is what bothers me—to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’ve got to talk about it.”
“I know it.” He described how he put a gag in her mouth, then took a mustard-colored sweater and put it over her head. “I did it so she couldn’t scream. Then she said, ‘It’s hot under this—I can’t breathe too well—”
“She talked to you all this time?” Bottomly’s voice sounded incredulous. How could she have done this with a gag in her mouth?
“Wait a second,” said DeSalvo, uncertainly. “She did talk to me—I’m trying to get this thing straight.”
“What did she say to you?”
He tried to remember.
“Did she plead with you, ‘Don’t hurt me’?” Bottomly asked.
DeSalvo remained silent, thinking. Then, with an embarrassed giggle, speaking as if to himself: “I got to tell him—I got to tell him—” Aloud: “She did talk to me. I put that thing on her face, I covered it, I know she had no gag in her mouth, I just tied her hands in front of her and then while her hands were like this here”—he demonstrated, his wrists crossed on his stomach—“I got on top of her so she could not be in any position, you know, to reach up and scratch me.… I … strangled her.” His voice was dying away, but the last words were clear.
George McGrath, who had been forced to miss several earlier sessions, asked, “While she was lying on her back?”
“Yes.”
“You have the gag in her mouth now?” he pursued.
“No.” The word was hardly said, almost under his breath.
Bottomly: “You just have that thing over her head?”
DeSalvo
sighed assent.
“She still has her clothes on?” Yes, he said. “And this is before or after you tied her feet?”
DeSalvo sighed again. “It was after.” Then: “This is what I don’t like to talk about.” Silence. “The whole thing was … hands like this here”—again he demonstrated—“crossed, her feet tied right here, at ankles, right about here, her hands were tied here, and I straddled her so that her hands … I was sitting on them, really, because she was really fighting viciously, trying to get up … you know … for life …”
McGrath asked, “When did you get her clothes off, Albert? You strangled her with her clothes still on?” He said yes.
As the questioning by both men proceeded, he grew more nervous, more embarrassed. Finally he burst out, “You know—this is—I hate to confuse you people—this is what I hate to even talk about. This is killing me even to talk to you people. I’d just as soon forget the whole thing.” All this was said jerkily, with nervous giggles. “But listen, here’s what it is.” Again he described how he had put her on the bed, placed the sweater over her head; she complained she could not breathe too well. “She was still alive when I had intercourse with her, she was alive, she allowed me to do it to her, y’understand me? I was mixed up at the time, but I did strangle her—with my two hands.”
McGrath: “Face to face?”
DeSalvo demurred. “Well, no—when you say face to face—”
McGrath: “Her face was facing you, but she has the sweater over her head—”
DeSalvo: “—so I couldn’t see her—”
McGrath: “—and you strangled her by using your thumbs against her—”
DeSalvo: “—throat.”
McGrath: “—her Adam’s apple, right? In the front?”
DeSalvo: “Yes.”
He was sure of it. But he was confused—had he had intercourse with her before or after removing her clothes? He remembered taking her to the other bed, “and I do recall ejaculating over there.”
Bottomly: “A second time?” DeSalvo said yes.
Slowly the full story came out. He tied her up on the first bed, using the ascot to bind her crossed wrists, ripped off most of her clothes, put the sweater over her head, had, intercourse with her with the sweater over her head “so I could not see her face,” strangled her, cut the ascot from her wrists with the paring knife, took the ascot—now in three parts—into the bathroom, flushed it down the toilet, returned to Mary, carried her to the second bed, removed her sweater, placed her on her back, straddled her facing her, masturbated so the semen struck her face, put the nylon stockings and blouse about her neck …
In the silence Bottomly managed to ask: How much time had elapsed? DeSalvo was not sure. “It could have been fifteen minutes, it could have been five.”
“Were you all heated up again?” Bottomly asked.
“I don’t think I was ever unheated … It was just that a different person altogether—”
“Was it like Nina Nichols?”
“It was all the same thing, always the same feeling,” DeSalvo said. He spoke with resignation in his voice. “You was there, these things were going on and the feeling after I got out of that apartment was as if it never happened. I got out and downstairs, and you could of said you saw me upstairs and as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t me. I can’t explain it to you any other way. It’s just so unreal … I was there, it was done, and yet if you talked to me an hour later, or half hour later, it didn’t mean nothing, it just didn’t mean nothing—”
Bottomly said, “Mary Sullivan was the last one. It should be the easiest to remember in point of time but it’s the hardest to remember because you don’t want to remember. Isn’t that right, Albert?”
“This could be possible,” he said slowly. “I mean, it’s just as if you were coming out of something, you understand me? This is the hardest one for me because—well, I’m realizing that these things are true, and that these things that I did do, that I have read in books about, that other people do, that I didn’t think or realize I would ever do these things.”
Where had he read about “these things”? McGrath asked.
In “detective books—I read a lot of sexy stuff.” When? The only time he read the “sexy stuff” was when he was in jail from May 1961 to April 1962.
McGrath, too, in the sessions he had attended, had been time and again affected by a sense of unreality. Here sat DeSalvo, now leaning forward, a hand across his brow, eyes closed, industriously trying to remember—murder. On one occasion he had offered a roll of mints to both men. “Anyone want a peppermint?” he had asked.
For fourteen years McGrath had been Chief Social Investigator for the Shelden and Eleanor Glueck Research Project in Delinquency and Crime, sponsored by the Harvard Law School. In his work then and since he had interviewed virtually thousands of criminals. Albert was atypical in that he never wavered in his story. This was not true of most criminals. Questioned, they were ready to concede this point or that, if only to avoid the stress of insisting on the truth. McGrath thought that DeSalvo talked both freely and convincingly; he was not dominated by Bottomly, he did not fawn, he was not trying to please either man.
McGrath, listening, recalled his first interview with him. It had been in Bridgewater on March 8, two days after he had been appointed his guardian. Joe, Albert’s oldest brother, who had been simultaneously named guardian for Albert’s estate, was visiting him when McGrath arrived. The three had talked together for several hours.
Joe, short, heavyset, quick-thinking, had said, “Al used to come over to see me. He could never sit still. He always had to be going. I knew he was going off—as far as sex was concerned, I knew his problem because I got it too—we both need a lot. But,” said Joe, “when I learned it got so he was carrying a knife, I knew he needed some kind of help, he was sick, he was dangerous.”
McGrath had come away then with a picture of Albert DeSalvo as a man who required an unusual number of sexual experiences to be satisfied.
Now, Bottomly asked, unexpectedly, “Ever strangle anyone in Germany, Albert?”
DeSalvo shook his head.
“But you had a lot of sex exercise over there?”
DeSalvo said in a matter-of-fact voice, “Anybody did who went to Europe. That was common for any GI … no more than what you can make out with. In Europe there was all you wanted.” Not only German girls—American girls, too.
In 1959 he and Irmgard had returned to Germany for a two-month vacation so that Irmgard could spend some time with her parents. In Germany, he robbed a number of cafes, so he had plenty of money. “I knew where they kept their cash and to me it was nothing—”
“Like taking candy from a baby?” Bottomly suggested wryly.
DeSalvo was not amused. “Irm made it a point while we were there that there’d be no sex, period. So you sure as hell know that I had my sex while I was there.” He had gone about the U.S. Army post exchanges posing as a representative of the Stars and Stripes, selecting girls for the Army’s “Best Sweetheart of All” contest. The prize was a trip to Italy. There was, of course, no such contest. He would visit the post exchanges between eight and twelve o’clock, when the girls were on duty, take their measurements, and tell them, “A man will come down and take your photograph this afternoon,” adding, “If you really want to make out, I’ll come down myself the first thing this afternoon and I’ll make sure you get first prize.” He was kept quite busy, he said. While Irmgard stayed with her parents he had driven all over Germany. After he had worked one Army area, he went to another—“I moved right to the Russian border and all the way back.” He was never caught. I was always able to spot anybody spotting me. It always came to me if I was being watched, and then I’d do nothing.” He could not explain how he sensed such things.
Slowly Bottomly brought him back to Mary Sullivan. There was more that had to be told. It was not easy for DeSalvo to tell it. He squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. He struggled for words. It seemed to McGr
ath, as he listened, that DeSalvo had never really integrated these experiences, these murders, into his consciousness. He had kept them outside himself, and thus had been able to maintain a kind of mental health—had been able to report them as things done by someone whom he recognized was himself yet not done by himself. Now it was torture for him to relive these events: he sank back in his chair, he moved forward, he covered his face with his hands, perspiration broke out on his forehead … How far dare we push him, McGrath thought, before he cracks? Both McGrath and Bottomly realized they must guard against this for then it might never again be possible to interrogate him; yet they must learn as much detail as they could for purposes of verification.
Yes, said DeSalvo, finally. There was something else. He had “done something” with a broom. He did not understand why. “Still, I feel I did not insert it, at least I hope I didn’t, to hurt her insides. You might say, ‘What do you mean, hurt her insides? She’s dead anyhow.’ But it still—it’s—it’s to me a vicious thing.”
He wore gloves. He went on reluctantly: “After I did everything to her, right, and as I put my gloves on so I’d leave no prints, so when I went by the door I wouldn’t touch the door—as I was going out the broom happened to be there and I picked up the broom and did that …” His voice began to tremble. “Mary Sullivan was the last one. I never did it again. I never killed anyone after that. I only tied them up, I didn’t hurt them … Once in Cambridge I was in three places in a row after that and I started to cry and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m here,’ and I took off.
“My wife was treating me better, I was building up, you might say, my better self, the better side of me, I was very good at my job, they liked me, I got two raises …”
22
Through the weeks DeSalvo had been telling his story.
Why had he confessed at all? Bottomly asked. And why had he waited so long? Why had he not confessed months before, when he was seized as the Green Man?
The Boston Strangler Page 38