“I trust you now,” said DeSalvo, and because he did, he would tell him exactly how it was. He had read the Record-American series by the two girls, he had seen the earlier newspaper appeal to the Strangler to turn himself in, but—“I got a wife and children. I didn’t understand what was happening to me but I also knew what happens to you if these things are brought out and how you can be put away for the rest of your life.” He had read a statement by Bottomly that the Strangler would be sent to a mental institution if he gave himself up, but he had also read another statement, made by Governor Peabody, who said that though he was against capital punishment he might consider the Boston Strangler “an exception.” So he did nothing.
Yet the need to tell was growing all the time. Once he had been about to confess to a detective lieutenant in Cambridge. “I thought he might want to do right by me but he could be pushed against the wall by a superior, thinking of promotions,” so he decided not to take the risk. “But you, Mr. Bottomly, I saw that nobody’s going to push you around, so that’s why I’m telling you everything.”
Bottomly nodded noncommittally and DeSalvo began with his arrest in November, 1964. One morning Detective Sergeant Duncan McNeill of Malden telephoned and left word with Irmgard to have him call back when he came home from work. DeSalvo did not know it but his photograph had led police to believe he was the man who had tied up and assaulted the twenty-year-old bride in Cambridge.
He had called back that evening. Sergeant McNeill said, “I’d like to talk to you, DeSalvo.”
“About what?” Albert had asked. “Well, you come down to headquarters tomorrow at East Cambridge and we’ll discuss it,” McNeill said. Albert wanted to know again what it was about, and McNeill finally said, “It’s about an assault on a woman.”
“When he said that,” DeSalvo said to Bottomly, “I looked at my wife. She was crying, sitting near me and the telephone. I knew she was crying and vomiting all day, ever since the call came that morning. I couldn’t see her cry any more. She was crying her eyes out, all red—she said, ‘Al, are you in trouble again?’
“I held my hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Don’t you worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll take care of it.’ I remembered Irm standing at the top of the stairs so many times and saying when I came home, ‘Where were you?’ and vomiting all day. I knew I couldn’t go on any longer. I told the detective, ‘Look, I’m coming down tonight.’
“He says, ‘What do you mean?’
“I says, ‘I’m going to come down now. Tomorrow might be too late. I want to get it all cleared up.’ He didn’t know what I meant, but I knew. I knew deep down this was the way it must end, I think I knew it from the very beginning. My little girl was getting bigger. I couldn’t stand seeing my wife in that state … It just wasn’t worth it. These things happened, I knew it, yet I couldn’t exactly make myself believe I did it.”
Bottomly asked, “Did you ever think of going to a psychiatrist?”
“I went to one in 1961,” Albert replied. “It was the hardest thing to go look for help. I told him about the drive I had and he told me it’s up to me. I couldn’t help myself. I was the Measuring Man then. I’d go into apartments day after day. I used to know the police were right there—some of the women complained—three or four patrol cars shooting right by me, looking for me, and yet I still got out of my car and walked right in front of them and did these things, knowing they were there.”
Wasn’t he afraid of being caught?
“I didn’t think of being caught. As the Measuring Man I wasn’t really doing anything wrong. When I started, I went all through Boston, Back Bay, inside and out. I used to go up these streets so many times, I knew every apartment inside out and backwards. I’d walk in, early in the morning, there’d be three or four girls just waking up, half-awake. I’d say, ‘Let’s go! Wake up!’” He clapped his hands smartly. “I’ll go down and get the doughnuts, I’ll be right back, get the coffee on, girls, get the coffee on!’ I’d shoot down the street, bring back half a dozen doughnuts. By the time I got back they’d have the coffee going. They’d be jumping around just scanty, or wearing baby dolls—and I was enjoying myself.” He would go from one apartment to another, talk to them about modeling. “One girl would send me to another, I’d start measuring her, playing with her—soon I had her.” Pause. Modestly: “I got a lot free.”
He was then working the three to eleven P.M. shift at the American Biltright Rubber Company in Chelsea. When he found himself put on the seven A.M. to three P.M. shift, he was just as successful in the afternoon. “From work I’d shoot over the Mystic River Bridge, took me into Boston in five minutes. I’m not there more than an hour—I’d shoot right back, so I’m home in Malden by four. All my things were done in a matter of ten or fifteen minutes—bing! bing! All apartments, all young girls. Be there about three ten—work that area in twenty minutes—I’d get a piece right away—be back home by quarter of four sometimes.” Irmgard, he said, was keeping a close watch on him, “so I had to work fast.” If he spent too much time in Boston, he would get caught in the bridge traffic going home—“and I wanted to be home before four or four fifteen, latest.”
He had been speaking animatedly. But now, as though suddenly remembering, his voice dropped. “Still, I could not stop what I was doing. This thing building up in me—all the time—I knew I was getting out of control.”
“Were you ever afraid you’d hurt your wife?” Bottomly asked, thinking of the extraordinary exchange months earlier between DeSalvo and Dr. Bryan, the hypnoanalyst.
“You mean, like strangle her?” If his reference under hypnosis to Irmgard’s great fear of being touched about the neck was any key to his motivation, he was not reacting here. He simply shook his head. “In her own way she was hurting me more than anything. If she’d given me the proper sex I wanted, at least treated me like a person and not degraded me all these times, I wouldn’t be going out to find out if I was a man or not.” Why had he not taken it out on her? Bottomly asked. Was he afraid he’d lose her?
He nodded. “Even at this moment, I love her more than anything else in this world. I’m willing to do anything to see she’s well taken care of. The most important factor—I treated her too good. The worse she treated me, the more I did, the less she respected me. If she only gave me her love … ‘I used my sex to hurt you,’ she told me. I couldn’t understand why she, who I loved, treated me like dirt. She’d say, ‘Don’t go out at night—’ For two, three years, I didn’t. I stopped bowling. She once said, ‘Don’t ever leave me—you’re the only one I know in this country.’ I did everything for her.” He mused silently, wretchedly.
“In 1955 Judy was born when we were at Fort Dix. My wife called me to her bed. She had what they call natural childbirth. ‘The pain I went through,’ she told me. ‘Al, I’ll kill myself if I have another baby. Promise me, Al, no more babies.’ I promised her. “Six weeks pass and I notice one of Judy’s legs is shorter than the other, and her legs wouldn’t open. Then we brought a doctor in. He told my wife—she was alone, I wasn’t with her, she couldn’t understand English too much—he says, ‘Your daughter will never walk again in her life.’ You can figure out how my wife felt. They put Judy in a frog-type splint, the doctor says, ‘Take your thumbs, put them between her legs and keep massaging them.’ We did this for the first two or three months until my thumbs almost went right through her body. Her skin was so raw. We kept doing this night after night, staying up, changing her diapers … My wife and I worked together.”
But from then on, “There was no more for me. It was always Judy, always Judy, and this went on for one year, then two years. There was nothing there for me. So I cut out. My brother said to Irm, ‘Al’s cutting up.’ The way she was treating me would hurt anyone’s ego. I was like any other normal guy, trying to make out.
“I asked the doctor. ‘She’s so frigid,’ I said. But she was afraid to have sex because we might have babies. She said, ‘Our next baby might be born without arms’—like what happen
ed to one of her girl friends. She said to me, ‘If we’re going to have any sex, I’ll let you know.’” His voice was heavy with sarcasm. “She’ll let me know! I used to think, what’s wrong with me? Am I undersexed or oversexed or what? I bought some Kinsey books and read them. I wanted her to read them. She said ‘I don’t want to read that kind of stuff.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s go to the doctor, let’s talk this over.’ But she don’t want to hear nothing.”
In the little room DeSalvo wrung his hands.
“How can I be all wrong, Mr. Bottomly? Even her own girl friend told Irm, ‘You know damn well Al was stealing and you accepted all that money in 1961.’ Irm wanted to go back to Germany when they put me in jail. Then when I came out she says, ‘If you ever get in trouble again I’m taking the children and I’m leaving you and never come back.’
“It’s like my mother says: ‘If this woman loved you—if your father loved me like you loved your wife—even though your father did what he did to your sisters and me—I still would have forgave him and loved him. You washed the floors, you did all the work in the house, you did everything for her—that’s what killed it. You were too good to her.’ My mother told me that, Mr. Bottomly; can I be all wrong?”
On a Sunday morning in August Albert’s mother had visited him. She was a heavy-set woman, of fifty-five. From childhood poor eyesight had forced her to wear thick glasses. Now she was virtually blind, but in her son’s presence attempted to hide the fact. As Albert told Bottomly later, “I tested her. You see, I know she’s blind, but she won’t let on to me. So I tested her. ‘Gee, Ma,’ I said, ‘your hair looks beautiful. You had it fixed. How do you like mine?’ She says, ‘I like it the way you got it nice and short.’ Is my hair short?”
“No,” said Bottomly.
“But last time she was here, my hair was short, and she knew it.”
They had talked together, with long periods of silence. Of her four sons, Albert had always been her favorite. He had been more attentive to her, more considerate, going out of his way to drop in to see her, even if only for a few minutes. Now she said to him, almost coaxingly, “Tell me something. You didn’t hurt anybody?”
Albert, telling the story to Bottomly, said, “That’s what’s killing me. Her saying, ‘You didn’t hurt anybody.’”
He had looked at his mother sorrowfully. “Ma, where you been?”
She had said, “But it can’t be you. I’ve been thinking back about your childhood, your growing up, how good a son you were, how good a husband you were to your wife—it can’t be you. I don’t think you could hurt anybody.”
Albert had said, “Ma, I can’t answer you, I can’t answer you or anyone, but in a little while the truth will come out, and whatever it may be I’ve got to tell it.”
His mother had shaken her head. “I’m not going to believe it’s you. If you did do it, if you get the proper treatment, they’ll find out how it did happen, and they’ll find a reason—if you did do it. There must be a reason.”
“Okay, Ma,” Albert had said. He had put his arm around her. “Okay.”
DeSalvo rose and paced back and forth. He dug into the pocket of his beltless, faded gray trousers and brought forth a battered wallet from which he pulled out a snapshot. It was of his daughter Judy and his son Michael—dark-haired, smiling children. “My little girl’s eleven,” he said. “Michael’s going on seven. Some day they’ll know the true story. When my daughter gets married, they’ll ask, ‘Who’s your father? The Boston Strangler—’” He replaced the snapshot. “Don’t you think I know what it means?” he said in a despairing voice. Then: “It’s true, it’s true. I wish it wasn’t. Maybe it’ll help society. Maybe they’ll learn something from this—”
What would it do to his family, he asked, rhetorically. “My brother Frank, he’s very immature. He said to me, ‘You’re all washed up.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? I’m not washed up. I still have to live my life in this institution.’” His sisters, Albert went on, were very concerned. “They think that I’m going to involve them.…”
He had not seen his father for twenty years, he said. Then they met one evening, his father took him to dinner and offered to buy him a car. Albert told him, he said, “I don’t ever want to see you again. Do you think you can buy my love now?”
He had heard that his father was very concerned. “My brother came down last Sunday and told me. I said, ‘Maybe this is some way God has of shooting the works to him now for what he did to his children.’” DeSalvo thought bitterly about this for a moment. Then the words came out in a rush: “I saw my father knock my mother’s teeth out and then break every one of her fingers. I must have been seven. Ma was laid out under the sink—I watched it. He knocked all her teeth out. Pa was a plumber, he smashed me once across the back with a pipe. I just didn’t move fast enough. He once sold me and my two sisters for nine dollars, sold us to some farmer in Maine. No one knew what happened to us. For six months Ma hunted for us and couldn’t find us.
“My father—” DeSalvo spoke dully. “We used to have to stand in front of him, my brother Frank and me, every night and be beaten with his belt. I can still to this very moment tell you the color of the belt and just how long it was—two inches by 36—a belt with a big buckle on it. We used to stand in front of him every night and get beaten with that damn thing—every night, whether we did anything wrong or not. We were only in the fourth or fifth grade …”
Bottomly had been listening to this recital with growing horror. He could only ask now, “Was he drunk?”
“He was feeling good,” DeSalvo said indifferently. “And he used to take my younger brother, Dickie, my mother will tell you this, took him, picked him right up and smashed him against the wall. My father used to go around with prostitutes in front of us … My sisters always had blacked eyes … My mother had a hard life. Six kids to bring up, and she was working all the time … When you’re under the environment of sex all day long … You go up on the roof of our building and there’d be a couch up there … They’d give you a quarter and say, ‘Beat it, kid.’… Always in the bedroom something being done …
“I’m starting to realize what I’m really involved in.” He moved from one subject to another as they occurred to him. “I knew what I had to do, but I never knew the true consequences. I’m not going to back down. I told Frank, ‘You tell Ma I don’t care if I get the chair. I’ve got to go through with it. I just got to go through with it all the way.’”
Bottomly said, “You’re taking a great risk.” He pointed out that DeSalvo’s plea in a trial would undoubtedly be not guilty by reason of insanity, but there was always the possibility that a jury would refuse to believe the defense medical testimony and find him guilty.
DeSalvo sighed. “There’s no problem there because I figure, what good am I anyhow? If you’re going to die for telling the truth, to hell with it. You only live once.”
“Well,” remarked Bottomly, “you’ve reached a point where you’ve got to get this off your chest—”
“One way or the other,” DeSalvo said. “What good am I alive? If there’s any way of curing me—” He knew that those with money could always buy their way out of trouble, that they could pay for medical help to cure themselves if they could be cured. But—“if the rich people live and the poor people die, then I die. There’ll be other people coming along.” He brooded for a moment. “What made me do it, and why? At least if the doctors find this out, it’s something to give my kids. Even though I knew my father did what he did, I wanted him to love me. I want my son to love me … Because I think there’s a lot more involved than just being a rape artist and cutting out and stealing … What really happened to me? This is what I can’t understand.”
Again he was silent, sitting at the table, chin in hand. “It’s true, God knows it’s all true. I wish it wasn’t. I don’t want to be the person who did these things. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. I’m not a man who can hurt anyone—I can’t do it. I’m very emotional. I brea
k up at the least thing. I can’t hurt anyone and here I’m doing the things I did …” Suddenly he burst out, “Thank God they had no loved ones, no children—all single women. I can be very thankful for that … But, still and all, a life is a life.”
Later.
DeSalvo, to Bottomly: “Mr. Bottomly, how do the police feel toward this person?”
Bottomly said, “I think it’s a tragedy. There’s no other way to put it. It happened. You killed people. We can’t undo that. You don’t know why. We don’t know why. Maybe the medical profession can figure it out. Maybe you can be rehabilitated.”
“I’m not even looking to be free,” DeSalvo said heavily.
“With your mind and ambition—you’re a very intelligent fellow basically, Albert—”
“Do you know what my I.Q. is?” DeSalvo interrupted him.
“I was told it’s seventy.”
DeSalvo was indignant. “Oh, no. It’s a hundred and twenty-five, a hundred and thirty.”
“With your mind and ambition you might make quite a contribution, even in an institution,” Bottomly went on. Had he ever seen the film “Birdman of Alcatraz?”* DeSalvo had not, and Bottomly summarized the story of Robert Stroud, murderer of two men, sentenced to prison for life, into whose cell one day a crippled bird flew, and how he devoted the rest of his life to a study of birds, taught himself to cure them of disease, even to operate upon them, and became such an authority that he wrote a treatise used as a textbook.
DeSalvo devoured this, his eyes shining. He was all eagerness. “Mr. Bottomly, right now I shave all the old men, I wash them up—I could help these people, give them a better life. Even if I may never be released, I’ll be doing something for them. I could help younger kids coming in here, seventeen, eighteen, give them the better outlook on life. Not things like teaching them how to blow a safe—I don’t want to hear that kind of talk. There’s a good world out there—I got off the track. Why, I don’t know but I’m going to do everything to find out so some day my children won’t look at me in shame and disgrace.” He thought for a moment, and then in a voice reflective and suprisingly modest, said, “I think I have a fairly decent attitude towards this whole thing. I still think I can make a contribution. Many people have died for a good cause. I think these people may not have died in vain.”
The Boston Strangler Page 39