A young man stood there, dark-haired, dark-eyed, wearing a sport jacket and blue slacks. He doffed his hat. “Ma’am, did you see a prowler looking through your window?”
No, she said with some alarm. There had been reports of a prowler in the neighborhood some time before.
“Is your husband home so he can look for him?” her visitor asked. When she shook her head no, he went on, “Well, do you mind if I look around?”
“Please do, I’d appreciate it,” she said nervously. The fact was that she was separated from her husband, awaiting a divorce, and she and her three small children, asleep in the rear, were alone in the house.
The man vanished. A few minutes later he was back at her door. “No—don’t see him anywhere now. He was a tall fellow in a dark suit.”
How had he happened to catch sight of him? she asked.
“I’ve been driving around the neighborhood looking for a house to rent,” he said. His name was Johnson, he added, and continued pleasantly, “When will your husband be home? I’ll come back with my wife.”
Mrs. Sloan suddenly became suspicious.
He said, “Would you like to have my flashlight?”
“No, thank you,” she said, and hurriedly closed and bolted the door. She watched from a window as he walked down the path from her bungalow and got into his car. He sat there for nearly ten minutes before driving away. Then, after another ten minutes, she saw the car return and park, and the same man, sitting at the wheel, flash his light from his car now on this bungalow, now on that. Frightened, she awakened and dressed her children and hurried with them out a back door to stay with a neighbor. She had jotted down his license number and she called the police the next morning.
The license was traced to Sergeant Albert DeSalvo, United States Army, stationed at Fort Dix. Wrightstown State Police questioned him. He had done no harm, he protested; he had seen a prowler and simply wanted to help—he had been looking for a place to rent for his wife and himself. He was permitted to go. On the following Monday came the report of Lucy’s molestation by a man with a Jimmy Durante nose. Though a soldier was involved in one and a man in civilian clothes in the other, the police acted on a hunch and brought DeSalvo before Lucy and her brother. The two children immediately identified him. Albert was not flustered. Yes, he had been in their house, he said easily—he’d been looking in that area, too, for a place to rent. The children had misunderstood him to say that he had come to collect the rent. He vehemently denied Lucy’s story. He had touched her on the shoulder—as one patted a little girl—but that was all.
Would he demonstrate exactly how he had touched her on the shoulder?
He refused. And on the advice of counsel, he would say no more.
Next day, January 4, 1955, he appeared in court, was released on $1,000 bail, and was subsequently indicted on a charge of Carnal Abuse by the Burlington County, New Jersey, Grand Jury. But Lucy’s mother, fearful of publicity, refused to press the complaint. County Judge Cafiero ruled that all proceedings against DeSalvo “be altogether and forever stayed.” The charge was nol-prossed. Accordingly, the Army took no action in the matter.
Irmgard was then pregnant with Judy, who was born at Fort Dix a few months later. Early in 1956 Albert returned to civilian life, moving with his wife and child to Chelsea. Then came St. Valentine’s Day, 1958, when Albert broke into a house and stole a few dollars to buy a valentine for Irmgard and a box of candy for Judy.
Reading over the record, something about the date Albert first appeared in court in New Jersey—January 4, 1955—would strike an echo. On January 4, 1964—nine years to the day later—Albert DeSalvo would strangle nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan.
24
On September 29, 1965, the extraordinary recital made by Albert DeSalvo came to an end. In order to convince completely the Attorney General’s office that he was who he claimed to be—the Boston Strangler, the murderer of thirteen women—he would now have to force himself to describe in detail the deaths of the two victims he had repeatedly avoided discussing: the woman, about eighty, who he said died in his arms of a heart attack, and Beverly Samans.
Tuney and DiNatale, checking the death reports of aged women, had come upon a Mary Mullen, eighty-five, found dead on her sofa in her apartment on June 28, 1962. Her death, which had occurred two or three days before, had been listed as caused by heart failure. She lived alone at 1435 Commonwealth Avenue, not far from Anna Slesers, who had been strangled less than two weeks earlier.
Bottomly had brought with him at this, their last session, a number of police photographs of apartment interiors. Yes, said DeSalvo, he recognized one as the old lady’s apartment—he recalled the black rocking chair, and under it, articles from her purse. “See, there’s the key from her safe-deposit box—I remember dumping everything out of the purse, and that was there.”
A moment before he saw the photographs, he had drawn his wavering line sketch of the apartment. Sketch and photograph complemented each other.
“I walked up to the second floor of this building, and I knocked on the door of the corner apartment. This old lady opens it—I said, ‘I got to do some work in the apartment.’ We went in together and sat down; I was in an armchair, she in a rocking chair. I—well, I—” He stopped, as if he had difficulty with his words.
“Does this bother you more than the others?” Bottomly asked.
“It all bothers me,” DeSalvo said suddenly, passionately. Since the confessional mood he had struck in his last session, he spoke with much more emotion. “It’s like a double nightmare, going back. She looked like my grandmother, my mother’s mother … Last time I saw her was in Danvers,* when I came back from Germany. I went to see her with my mother. She was out of her mind, just talking …” His voice rose. “It does something to you, remembering how she used to make apple pies for me, she used to care for me when I was small, when my father wasn’t living with us. She reminded me … She died in my arms, this woman—” He stopped. “Man, this is too much! I’m getting sick of it, talking about it—” He seemed on the edge of tears.
Bottomly said, “We’re almost through now, Albert—”
“She got up from the rocker, turned around—she was talking nice—and I don’t know what happened. All I know is my arm went around her neck. I didn’t even squeeze her … and she went straight down. I tried to hold her; I didn’t want her to fall on the floor.…” He said, slowly, despairingly, “It’s not a dream anymore—it’s true—all these things happened!”
Suddenly he buried his face in his hands and began to sob, unable to catch his breath. It was the first time he had broken down in the long interrogation that had now lasted several weeks. Bottomly sat quietly, watching DeSalvo, who was crying, his head cradled in his arms on the table. “I didn’t mean to hurt nobody,” he said brokenly, again and again. “I didn’t mean to hurt nobody.” Then for a moment he was silent save for his sobs.
In this silence, incredibly, music began to sound. Someone had turned on a radio in an adjoining ward, and the strains of a sentimental melody, plucked on a guitar, came filtering tinnily through to this room in which Bottomly and DeSalvo sat. The music sounded like an insane obligato playing counterpoint to his sobs—as though it all were a Tennessee Williams play, with the music far off-stage, and DeSalvo’s broken words, “I didn’t mean to hurt nobody, I never wanted to hurt nobody. They all think it’s a big joke, they think, ‘Oh, he’s trying to make money on this’—I don’t want a God damn dime!” He sputtered through his tears. “I got feelings as well as anybody else. It’s too much! These people … I stay awake, I wonder, my grandmother, my daughter … These things did happen. Why? Why? Why does it have to be me?”
Bottomly said, “You’ve come a long way, Albert. You couldn’t even talk about this before.”
“I have a daughter, and I have a son and a wife, but when my children grow older, I want them to get an understanding of me …” He blew his nose. “I never really wanted to hurt anybody. Why didn
’t I do this before, and why didn’t I do it after? I had these other ones the same way, the ones that followed these, and I didn’t do anything more to them. What drove me to do these? There’s got to be a reason. I don’t think you’re born like this. Why did I start? Why did I stop?”
It was not so much the shame of what people might be saying, he said, trying to control himself. It was his children. “I don’t want Judy and Michael to live as I did with no father, which I know they must because they’re separated from me, but I left them with love, not like my father left us. I never beat them. I just feel these things should never have happened. I want them to find out why I did these things so my name will be cleared for my children.”
He dabbed at his eyes and put his handkerchief away. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bottomly,” he said. “I shouldn’t of acted this way—”
Bottomly said, “I’m not surprised, Albert. You’ve got a lot to carry. It’s surprising you haven’t broken down more often.”
“I do it in my room,” said DeSalvo.
He was able to return to the case of Mary Mullen. When she slumped to the floor, he picked her up and put her on the couch—a green couch. He knew she had died. He didn’t know how he knew it but he knew it was not a faint—that it was death—and he assumed the police would think it was from natural causes. “I didn’t touch her, I didn’t do anything to her—she went, just like that. She passed out. If I close my eyes, as I do now, it’s just like being there. I picked her up and put her on the couch and I left.”
After a silence, Bottomly asked, “Albert, how did you con all these women? How did you know what to say to them?”
DeSalvo pursed his lips. “It’s hard to explain—I don’t know how, but the minute the door opened, if I got a glance at a crack in the ceiling, or anything—somehow, I could tell about whoever answered the door in a split second and size them up. I knew right away what she was, what I should say to her, how I should act—I had an answer for everyone who came to the door.”
Was he ready, at last, to talk about Beverly Samans?
He was not, but there was no way out. Two or three days before he found himself in Beverly’s apartment in Cambridge, he said, he had been at work painting a house in Belmont. “In the cellar I opened some drawers and I found a sharp, push-button switch knife, the blade came straight out—whew!—I never saw anything like this.” Without knowing why he put it in his pocket.
On a weekday morning a few days later, on his way from home, “I shot over to Cambridge.” As with so many apartment houses, he knew Beverly’s building well. “I’d been in it five or six times before, as the Measuring Man.” He rang the bell in the vestibule, walked up, and knocked on her door. She opened it. “She was wearing a zipper-type housecoat. It seemed she was reading my lips when I talked to her.”
Beverly, Bottomly recalled, was hard of hearing and always sat in the front row in her classes in order to hear the lecturer. “Oh, it was dark in her room. She didn’t know me, I didn’t know her. I closed the door and said, ‘Don’t scream, I won’t hurt you …’” He stopped and shook his head. “Jesus, I don’t want to talk about it!” Almost a scream. “I don’t want to say how I did it!”
Bottomly used an approach he had not employed before. “Do you want me to come back in two or three days?”
“No—” DeSalvo expressed utter hopelessness in the monosyllable. Almost in a singsong voice, “Whether it’s today or tomorrow or the next day I got to tell you when you come back. It just takes a minute to tell it, but it’s so shocking, telling you—”
“Where did you put the knife to her? In the bathroom?”
“As a matter of fact I didn’t … I mean, she never knew she was stabbed. We were both sitting on the bed—”
Carefully Bottomly led him back to the moment he entered Beverly’s apartment and finally, haltingly, the story came out. It was quite early—about 8 A.M., Albert said—when he knocked on her door. She appeared half awake when she opened it.
Had he seen anything in the apartment other than the usual furniture?
“I’m trying to think,” Albert said, after a moment, “if there was a piano.” Then: “Yes, there was.”
“Baby grand or upright?”
Albert wasn’t sure. “But I can draw it.”
On the blue-line notebook paper he drew an upright. It was the kind Beverly Samans had in the room.
“Write ‘piano’ next to it,” Bottomly told him. Albert scrawled a p, then an a, realized it didn’t look right, and stopped. Bottomly spelled it aloud for him: “P-i-a-n-o,” and Albert dutifully wrote the word next to his sketch.
When Beverly—“a heavy, well-built girl”—opened the door to him he said, “I got to do some work in the apartment.” She said, “Can’t you come back later?” He said he could not, and she said, “Oh, well, come in and get it over with.”
“I closed the door, I showed her the knife, I said, ‘Don’t scream and I won’t hurt you. I want to make love to you—’”
She said, “I won’t let you—”
“I won’t have intercourse with you,” he said. “I’ll just play around with you and go.”
She was frightened at the sight of the knife. “Promise me you won’t get me pregnant, you won’t rape me—”
When he said, “No, I’ll just make love to you and leave—” she said, All right then, she would wash up. He followed her into the bathroom (was it a ruse so she could lock herself in there?), then out again. She lay down on the bed, he tied her wrists behind her, then put a gag in her mouth and “tied a cloth around her head over her mouth so she couldn’t scream but she was still able to talk.” Then he tied a blind over her eyes.
He fondled her. “Then I was going to have intercourse with her, anyway, and she began talking, ‘You promised, you said you wouldn’t do it to me, don’t, don’t, I’ll get pregnant.’ The words kept coming and coming, I think because she couldn’t hear me saying, ‘Keep quiet! Keep quiet!’ I can still hear her saying, ‘Don’t do it—don’t do that to me.’ Just like hearing something over and over again. She made me feel so unclean, the way she talked to me. Everything I was doing to her, she just didn’t like it. No matter what I did, she didn’t like it. And she just wouldn’t keep quiet. I’d do one thing, she didn’t like it. I’d do another, she didn’t like it. And she wouldn’t shut up. I did have the knife out. I promised I wouldn’t hurt her. I’d put the knife on the edge of the coffee table, the typewriter was there, she said she wouldn’t scream, but she started to get loud and loud and loud … She was stripped naked on the bed, her hands under her—”
Bottomly interrupted. “Then she got scared?”
DeSalvo was silent.
Bottomly said, “You have to make it, Albert.”
“Jesus Christ, do I have to?”
“Yes, you have to. You know that.”
“Oh, God!” he said. “Her hands were tied underneath her, I put a handkerchief over her eyes so later when you found it you thought it was around her neck. It was to cover her eyes …” He stopped. “I don’t want to talk about it!” Then, swiftly, “You know what happened? I stabbed her three, four times, maybe five—”
“You strangled her?”
“No. She didn’t get strangled. The stuff you found around her neck, I told you … She was stabbed two times right over her heart. Right in the throat and neck.”
“Did you have sexual relations?”
DeSalvo said he did not think so. “She kept saying, ‘Don’t do it! Don’t do it!’ She didn’t want it. In other words, she was ready to do anything else. She said, ‘You lied, don’t do it!’ She wouldn’t stop screaming, trying to scream with the gag in her mouth, she kept yelling, ‘You’re going to do it to me, you’re going to do it to me!’ I was playing with her breasts, she was louder and louder, the knife was just on the corner of the table …”
“Are you getting ready to do it to her?” Bottomly’s voice was very soft.
“It was so dark in there, so dark!”
He stopped, to get control of himself. “There was a window open. I tied her up, put the gag in her mouth, closed the window, put the shade down—it made it dark, completely dark in there.… And I didn’t see her anymore. I don’t know what happened then … I was playing with her, she was lying right on top of the bed. She kept yelling or trying to yell … and I stabbed her. Once I did it once … I couldn’t stop.”
DeSalvo sat, his head down, and Bottomly realized that he was crying, not with the deep sobs that had marked him earlier but in a kind of child’s intermittent weeping. “Her eyes were covered,” he was saying through his tears. “I held her breast. I reached over, got the knife … and I stabbed her in the throat. She kept saying something. I grabbed the knife in my left hand and held the tip on her breast and I went down, two times, hard …” He drew a deep, shattering breath. “She moved, and next thing you know, blood all over the place—”
“Was there blood on you?” DeSalvo shook his head.
“You jumped back?”
“I don’t know that I did,” DeSalvo managed to say. “After I hit her two times, nothing happened.”
“Then you hit her again and again—”
DeSalvo groaned. “Jesus!”
“It’s almost over,” Bottomly said.
“I kept hitting her and hitting her with that damn knife,” DeSalvo wept. “When I think about it now—you don’t do a thing like that and forget it … She kept bleeding from her throat … I keep asking myself, Why was it about the same as Mary Brown? I stabbed her two times in the breast, too. I hit her and hit her and hit her. Why? Hard, all the time. Why did I do that? She did something to me. That’s what I’m trying to tell you—”
“She refused you,” Bottomly said.
“What I’m trying to tell you … It was just like my—”
Bottomly broke in. “She refused you and you—”
The Boston Strangler Page 42