The Boston Strangler

by Frank, Gerold;

  He went through the record on Frank DeSalvo. He had been hauled into court eighteen times—five times for Nonsupport, brought by his wife, and five times for Assault and Battery on her—once with a revolver; and on numerous charges of B and E, Larceny, and similar offenses. He had served time in jail in 1943 and 1944. In 1944 Mrs. DeSalvo finally divorced him; a year later she remarried. In 1944 Frank DeSalvo had vanished, not to reappear in Chelsea until 1956; then he was immediately seized, brought before the court on a default warrant and ordered to pay restitution to the Chelsea Welfare Department “for its expenditure in behalf of his children.” From 1956 through 1962 he managed to pay back some $1100.

  Frank DeSalvo said that during the twelve years he was absent from Chelsea, he had been living in New York State with a common-law wife by whom he had had two children. When last heard of, he was known to be living with a third woman elsewhere in the state.

  That was the father’s record. What of the son?

  Greenspan produced the folder: Albert Henry DeSalvo, born September 3, 1931, in Chelsea, third of six children. Justice MacLeod read aloud: “As a kid he snatched purses, robbed—well, specifically, on November sixth, 1943, he’d be twelve then, he and a friend beat up a newsboy and robbed him of two dollars and eighty-five cents. They attempted to blame an older boy, saying he forced them to do it, but Albert later admitted it was their own idea. He said, ‘We didn’t plan anything. We were just walking up the hill and saw the paper boy and robbed him. Then we split the money.’ He was adjudged delinquent, the charge was reduced from Robbery to Larceny from the Person, and sentence suspended.

  “Five weeks later Albert and his friend were caught breaking into a house and stealing twenty-seven dollars worth of jewelry. Albert was committed to Lyman School for Boys December twenty-ninth, 1943. His oldest brother Joseph had been there, at intervals, over a four-year period. Albert remained until paroled October twenty-sixth, 1944. That’s ten months.

  “At the age of thirteen years and three months Albert DeSalvo was examined by Doctor Doris Sidwell, visiting psychiatrist to this court from Massachusetts Mental Health. He was found to have a mental age of twelve years and four months. His I.Q. was ninety-three. The record shows he had tonsillitis and mumps, began school at age six, failed in the second grade, was put in a special class in the fifth grade. He told Doctor Sidwell he disliked the special class. ‘They only put me in there for talking,’ he said. According to this”—Justice MacLeod scanned the page—“the boy gave no one trouble in and about school. He makes a little money by ‘cleaning porches and emptying and cleaning garbage pails for ladies.’ At home he and his three brothers fight among themselves. He is afraid of his father. Albert comes in at four P.M. and five P.M., and his mother does not allow him out at night. He is in fair physical condition, of normal intelligence, associates with a poor type of companion, and shows great suggestibility. Doctor Sidwell, under the heading, ‘Nature of the Problem,’ writes: ‘This boy needs adequate social supervision and redirection of his interests into supervised groups such as the Boy Scouts and the YMCA.’”

  Justice MacLeod riffled through the remainder of Albert’s police record. It dealt only with offenses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It included his repeated B and E’s, his arrest as the Measuring Man, his jail sentence, and his arrest as the Green Man. The last entries read: “Indicted by the Middlesex County Grand Jury—January, 1965, term—for Breaking and Entering and Larceny; Breaking and Entering with Intent to Commit Felony; Assault and Battery; Assault and Battery by Means of Dangerous Weapon; and Unnatural and Lascivious Act; committed February, 1965, ‘until further order of the court,’ to Bridgewater State Hospital.”

  Justice MacLeod snapped shut the file on the DeSalvos, father and son. “You know,” he said, “I’d talk to that boy by the hour, right in this office, knowing as I did about his father’s and mother’s troubles. I liked his mother. Came from a fine Yankee family. She was shy, soft-spoken, a nice little girl, and she deserved someone worthwhile.” He rose. “And now this,” he said sadly. “Her boy saying he’s the Strangler.”

  In her small clapboard house on a muddy dirt road skirting the edge of a desolate factory town within a hundred miles of Boston, Albert’s mother spoke with a visitor. The little girl whom Judge MacLeod remembered was now a buxom woman who filled the rocker in which she sat. Under the coiffed blond hair, her round face with its heavy metal-rimmed spectacles was composed. Her thick-lensed glasses, so thick that her eyes were all but invisible behind them, glinted in the light that came through the Venetian blinds in the parlor window; her hands were folded in her lap. She wore a bright yellow housedress; over that, a half-apron with a scalloped edge and a gaily colored floral design. Seated next to her in the tiny parlor, his crutches leaning against his chair, was her second husband, who shall be called here Peter Khouri, an electrician. Khouri, a powerfully built man in his fifties with iron gray hair and intense black eyes, was convalescing from injuries suffered in an accident.

  The visitor had seen Mr. Khouri’s dark, rugged face only a few minutes before, framed in the parlor window. Because he had not wished to alarm the family, he had halted his car on the knoll of a hill some distance from the house, which was completely isolated from its neighbors, and negotiated the last hundred yards on foot. Halfway to the house he had looked up to see the face in the window: Khouri, only partly concealed by the Venetian blinds, stood there, humped forward on his crutches, his head down, peering out fiercely at him, not taking his eyes off him for an instant as he came nearer and nearer. Almost guiltily the visitor imagined what must be going through the man’s mind: It’s begun. They’ve finally found us. This is the first of the pack, and after him all the rest—the reporters, photographers, the sensation hunters … All the way to the house the visitor had felt that dark and burning gaze on him. Now Khouri sat beside his wife to help and protect her.

  “No,” Mrs. Khouri was saying. “I don’t read the newspapers. I can’t read. I haven’t been able to for thirty years. I’ve lost my sight”—there was a little chuckle, self-conscious but undaunted—“but I can get around.”

  With some embarrassment her caller brought the conversation around to Albert. She knew, of course, that Albert was telling people in Bridgewater that he was the Boston Strangler.

  Mrs. Khouri’s face showed no change.

  “I know my boy,” she said. She sat, solid and impregnable. “He’s supposed to have confessed but he’s mental, so it can’t be used against him.” She would not say anything more—no, even if it dealt only with Albert’s childhood, the kind of boy he’d been. The matter was in the hands of her attorney, and her visitor could speak with him.

  Did she mean F. Lee Bailey?

  “No, he came later.”

  Was it Robert Sheinfeld, then?

  She shook her head. The man she referred to was Jon A. Asgiersson.

  “Oh, of course,” her visitor said. “Mr. Sheinfeld defended Albert in 1959—” He was going to add, “—in the St. Valentine’s Day B and E,” but she interrupted him.

  “No,” she said, very precisely. “I see you have that wrong and I want to correct you on it.” At this point her husband tried to silence her, but she went on, her voice rising in pitch as though she were projecting her words to an audience of hundreds before her, an audience who could not be expected to believe and to whom the truth would have to be explained patiently again and again. “He was a boy when that happened. Another boy influenced him. He was hardly old enough to know what he was doing.” And she made the announcement again patiently, giving each word the same emphasis: “I want to correct you on that because I see that you have the facts wrong.”

  It was clear that she referred to the attack on the newsboy, but there seemed no point in pursuing the subject.

  There was silence for a moment. Moving about the kitchen, seeming lost and obviously terrified, was a tall, fourteen-year-old-girl—the daughter of this second marriage. She ventured only once into
the parlor, threw a frightened glance at the visitor, and as silently slipped out again.

  Mrs. Khouri spoke up. “It wouldn’t be so bad, all this, if it was just my husband and myself, but it’s another family concerned—we have this girl … I want to guard her from it. There are understanding people in the world, but there are mean people, too, who don’t care.”

  Her husband whispered to her: “Don’t talk, don’t talk.”

  But she spoke again. “May I ask you, have you talked to any of my other sons?” The visitor said, “Yes, with Frank, the youngest.” “And what did Frank say?”

  He, too, had said, “See my lawyer.” Her visitor did not tell her that Frank, big, burly, with the same piercing eyes as Albert, had said bitterly, standing on the sidewalk outside the small-town repair shop where he was employed, “I don’t want to have anything to do with him. I don’t want people to know we’re related.” His stepfather had had three heart attacks over what was happening—this, in addition to his terrible injuries. His mother was so overwhelmed she didn’t know what to do. Yes, he supposed that sooner or later he, Frank, would be sought out; they’d want to talk to him, interview him—

  He burst out, “What am I supposed to do? Run away? I’ve invested two hundred dollars in a Doberman pinscher—my house is bolted and the dog has the run of the place. I got to protect my wife and myself.”

  Almost distraught, he had turned abruptly and gone back into the shop.

  Now Mr. Khouri cleared his throat. “There’s nothing we can tell you—as my wife said, it’s up to the lawyers.” Mrs. Khouri sat, silent, her hands folded in her lap. There was so much she might have told—about herself, leaving school at fourteen in the seventh grade, fighting a futile battle against the congenital eye disease which ultimately blinded her, about her marriage to Frank DeSalvo and the home she tried to maintain for him and the six children that came, one every two years. There were so many things she did not wish to tell about the DeSalvo family, but the story of their lives had already been written in the pages of reports by social workers, welfare investigators, probation officers, psychiatrists. The violent, abusive father, who taught his children to shoplift, who abandoned his family when Albert was eight, but came back at intervals on drunken rampages to “tear up the house,” to beat his sons, to rip their clothes to shreds, destroy the furniture by drilling holes in it, to smash glasses, dishes, and cupboards. One of the other sons brought into court for carnal abuse; another for fathering an illegitimate child, B and E, and larceny; a third for B and E and larceny. The mother, repeatedly assaulted after the attack that Justice MacLeod still remembered. Albert was seven. He saw it all. The elder DeSalvo reeled down the stairs. Albert ran after him and hurled a glass vase at his father; it struck him on the head just as he reached the foot of the stairs and shattered into pieces.

  She did not now want to tell how she had poured out her heart to a social worker in the spring of 1944. Albert, then thirteen, was in Lyman School, with his brother Joe. She and her husband were separated, her divorce would become final July 1, but the man still gave her no peace. He was under court order to pay her twenty dollars each week for the children’s care but it was never that—sometimes it was fifteen, sometimes only ten dollars. He wrote her filthy, abusive, threatening letters: he would find ways to give her less and less money; if she wanted more, he suggested obscenely, she could sell herself; she was diseased, he wrote, and he would make her pay “for neglecting the children.” She had recited the catalogue of his accusations, adding resignedly, “Lies, all lies.” She would get her divorce, no matter what. She had suffered too long at his hands and “I won’t suffer any longer.”

  As for her children—she did her best to control them. She knew she wasn’t very successful. Albert was not a bad boy. Now and then she’d be called to school because of some trouble he was supposed to have started “but it was always something like laughing in line—nothing serious.” She felt that the other boy was really responsible for Albert’s being sent to reform school; he had suggested they rob the newsboy, she said, and he thought up the idea of breaking into the house and stealing jewelry. Bad companions, she thought, probably led Joseph into trouble, too. Albert—what Albert needed was the right kind of friends. If he “got the right kind of company,” she said, “he’d be an ideal boy.”

  The social worker who interviewed her noted on his report that husband and wife had been in the courts repeatedly, making charges and countercharges against each other. “It is difficult to discover which parent is at fault.… The various agencies and the courts have had considerable trouble trying to straighten the matter out.… There is little here for the boy—only hardship and a loose-living environment. It might be well, and only fair to the boy, were he placed in a reasonable environment for the time being, or until the parents come to realize that they have responsibility to their children.”

  Nothing had been done.

  Now, in her home, Mrs. Khouri rose. She walked with her visitor to the door, smiled unseeingly at him, shook hands pleasantly, then closed and bolted the door.

  On the second floor of Williams School, a weathered red-brick building at 62 Fifth Street, Chelsea, hurrying students filled the long corridor with their noise and chatter. Classes were changing. On the right wall, opposite the principal’s office, hung a large blue-and-green pennant proclaiming the school’s motto: TRUTH, HONOR, COURAGE. On the opposite wall, to one side, hung the class photographs of the nineteen-forties. Among the faces of the Class of 1948—142 boys and girls, graduates of the Junior High School—there was the smiling one of Albert DeSalvo, aged sixteen. He was older than the others, having been held back in the earlier grades, but the face was unmistakable, a youthful miniature of his police photograph: the black hair matted, almost like a wig, framing like a heavy black arch the low forehead; the nose, not so formidable but already threatening; the mouth smiling. It was a frank, open face, the smile confident, the eyes shining. Albert wore a light gray suit, a gray tie tied in a generous knot, larger, more rakish, than his fellow students.

  There were teachers at Williams who had been there twenty years and more, among them Joseph A. Browne, now principal. Few recalled anything about Albert save his name. To Browne, Albert was one face in a sea of faces. Though all four DeSalvo boys—Joseph, then Albert, then Richard, then Frank, Jr.—had gone to Williams, one DeSalvo merged with the other. They had all been something of a disciplinary problem, but not so much as to stand out. No one really remembered Albert. He had passed through his classes and through his school as unnoticed and unremarked as he had passed through the streets of Boston.

  Neither Justice MacLeod nor Principal Browne had in his files a copy of Albert’s Army record. He had left their jurisdiction as soon as he could, for he had enlisted on September 16, 1948, three months after graduation from Williams School. He had just turned seventeen. He had been sent overseas with the United States Army of Occupation in January 1949 and assigned to the Military Police. On August 17, 1950—he had been in the service nearly two years-he refused to obey an order, was court-martialed, and fined fifty dollars. But his record from then on was excellent. He was promoted to sergeant, and received other commendations. He entered boxing competitions and emerged the middleweight Army champion in Europe. On December 5, 1953, in Germany, he married Irmgard, who lived with her parents near Frankfurt. He had met her at a dance three years before. In April 1954, he returned with his wife to the United States and was stationed at Fort Dix until February 15, 1956, when he received his honorable discharge.

  Aside from his court-martial, only one other black mark was to be found against his name. This was his indictment while stationed at Fort Dix for carnal abuse, the molestation of a nine-year-old girl living in a nearby town.

  The date of his alleged offense was Monday, January 3, 1955. A distraught mother had telephoned the police. That afternoon she had been preparing a roast for dinner. It was about two o’clock. She had to hurry out briefly to shop. She left b
ehind nine-year-old Lucy and her two younger children, Billy, eight, and one-year-old Allan, asleep in the bedroom.

  When she returned forty-five minutes later, Lucy told her they had had a visitor—a soldier “who said he was here for the rent.” This was puzzling, for the house was their own. Lucy said, “He asked if he could come in, I said yes. He talked to Billy and me, then Billy said, ‘Would you like to see my little brother?’” The soldier smiled and said he would. Billy went into the bedroom, picked up Allan, and carried him proudly into the living room. The man looked at the baby and said how cute he was. Then Billy carried Allan back to his crib. Here Lucy said, “And, Mommy, I don’t like that man.” “Why?” asked the mother, still unable to make sense of the incident. “Because he touched me here and here.” Lucy indicated her chest and between her legs. “I said, ‘Stop it,’ but he said, ‘I won’t hurt you.’” At that point Billy had come back into the room and the man left quickly, “just like someone was chasing him.”

  A few hours later New Jersey State Troopers were questioning the children. Did they know what happened to boys and girls who told a lie? The two nodded soberly. Lucy repeated her story. She did not change it.

  Was there anything else either could remember about the soldier? Lucy giggled. “He had a Jimmy Durante nose.”

  Albert might never have been seized had it not been for a woman living in another town near Fort Dix. One week earlier—Monday, December 28, 1954—Mrs. Alice B. Sloan (which is not her name) was reading in her bungalow about nine in the evening when she heard a knock on her door.