by Bill James
We look back on the 1950s as a “conservative era,” the Eisenhower era. We look on the era in that way because the radicalism of the 1960s followed close behind it, and the mind contrasts a thing with that which stands next to it. The dominant American attitudes about crime and criminals in the late 1950s were far more liberal than those which prevail today. Birdman of Alcatraz assumes a culture that believes in the humanity of the convict. “A man may have done terrible things,” the book argues implicitly, “yet he remains a man.” The book argued for the proposition that all men are within the realm of redemption. This is admirable—yet the book was also romanticized, vague, one-sided and false.
Birdman of Alcatraz and numerous other movies of that era (The Wrong Man, 1956, I Want to Live!, 1958, and Compulsion, 1959) portray criminals as complex personalities capable of normal emotions, and often caught in a cruel and inefficient system of justice. I do not wish to demean the members of the Warren Court by presenting them as weepy eggheads who saw Birdman of Alcatraz and went out determined to make the world do better by these poor suffering wretches, but there is a close connection between the worldview encapsulated in these movies and the court decisions of the mid-sixties. That a man may commit a crime, yet he remains capable of dignity; that the prison walls contain more victims than truly evil people; that our society is responsible for its reprehensible treatment of the accused and convicted—these were, at the time, not liberal views. These were mainstream positions, widely accepted by common people in the 1950s, and up to the mid-1960s.
The Onion Field portrays actual policemen, dealing with the judicial swamp created in the backwash of this prevailing attitude. The irony is that these principles, simply stated, are undeniably true. A man may commit a crime, yet remain capable of dignity. Our society is responsible for the reprehensible treatment of its incarcerated. What is hard to accept is that these statements are one thing when stated as principles—and something entirely different when converted into judicial fiats. The careless application of the principles of prisoner’s rights empowered the worst that the human race has to offer, from Gregory Powell to Charles Manson. The sympathy generated by Burt Lancaster on behalf of Robert Stroud became a tool with which Gregory Powell could battle the world.
Even today, old liberals try to explain the explosion of violence in this country between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s in terms of demographic shifts. These explanations are logically preposterous. The damned foolishness of the Warren Court unleashed upon us a torrent of criminal violence which pitched the nation backward into atavistic attitudes about crime and punishment. We have yet to regain our footing. We will not regain our footing, I would argue, until Liberals stop making excuses for the Warren Court, and accept responsibility for the tragic consequences of the Warren Court’s runaway enthusiasm for essentially good ideas.
There was, before 1965, a long tradition of activism for criminal reform. That activism had led to the abolition of poorhouses (debtor’s prisons), to the end of the practice of cutting off hands and fingers of criminals, to the end of public hangings and to the virtual abolition of executions, to the end of the practice of shackling prisoners to the walls of madhouses, to the end of chain gangs, to the end of the practice of selling prison labor as slave labor. Prison reformers got job training programs into the prisons, and, for a brief time, meaningful access to psychological counseling.
And then, with the Warren Court, prison reform slammed into a wall and was killed on the spot. By 1980 prison reformers were outcasts in the corrections system; the very term “reformer” became a joke and a pejorative. Since 1975 we have allowed the evolution of huge, horrific prisons ruled by prison gangs. We have to move past that, and toward a vision of a punishment and reform system based on an effort to salvage those lives that can be salvaged. We will not move forward until we take ownership of our failings.
XIX
There are two statements that seem to appear in every online account of the Boston Stranglings, at least one of which cannot be true. One is that most of the murders occurred in the Back Bay section of Boston. The other is that most or all of the murders occurred in rundown apartment buildings. There is a problem here. The Back Bay is not exactly a slum.
As it happens, both statements are untrue. Of the fourteen murders that weave the narrative of the Boston Strangler investigation, only three occurred in the Back Bay, and most occurred in buildings that were then—and are today—very decent.
The series of crimes which are united now under the Boston Strangler label began on June 14, 1962, with the murder of a 56-year-old woman who lived just behind the Boston Symphony Orchestra, on Gainsborough Street.
A similar crime occurred two weeks later, out by the Chestnut Hill Reservoir—four and a half miles from Gainsborough Street—and a body was found up in Lynn, Massachusetts, two days after that. Lynn is twenty minutes north of Boston. The Boston Globe implicitly united the three crimes, and referred to them as “the Silk Stocking Murders.”
There was another murder nine days later at a cheap hotel out in the Dorchester area, and two more a month after that. By late August, 1962, there had been six murders in just over two months, all but one within a five-mile radius of the first, similar victimology and similar staging of the crime scenes. Media attention started with the third murder, and would roar a little louder with each event over the next sixteen months.
One in October, back over near the symphony, but this was a young woman, and black, and murdered in the street. The eighth murder, in December and a block away from the seventh, was another young black woman. The ninth, later in December, was a young secretary, murdered in her apartment near Kenmore Square.
The victimology disintegrated first, and then the geography. The first murders were of white women with white hair. That pattern broke up, but the press kept counting. Then the murders, which started in a tight geographical knot, moved out of town. Lawrence, Massachusetts, is 25 miles northwest of Boston; Belmont is next to Cambridge, six to eight miles from downtown Boston. In March, 1963, two elderly women were murdered, one in Lawrence, one in Belmont. The Belmont murder was quickly “solved” with the arrest of a handyman, and until years later was not generally connected with the series.
The eleventh murder was in May, in Cambridge, a college student. In September, 1963, a 58-year-old woman was murdered in Salem, up north of Lynn. In November, just after the death of President Kennedy, a young woman was murdered in Lawrence. In the opening days of 1964 a young woman was murdered in a low-rent apartment near Beacon Hill.
Fourteen murders, fourteen women in nineteen months strangled in and around Boston, by persons unknown. In early January, 1964, Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke, later Senator Edward Brooke, moved to take over the investigation. There had already been many investigations into the killings, of course, but Brooke now proposed to organize a massive state investigation, sparing no effort to find the end of it.
Brooke placed in charge of the operation an old buddy from law school, John S. Bottomly, who was selected for the job, according to Brooke, “because he had no experience in criminal law per se.” If this seems a head-scratching explanation, let me point out the striking similarity between this and the almost simultaneous appointment of the Warren Commission to examine the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission took the investigation of the President’s murder out of the hands of police officers, and turned it over to … lawyers; bright, energetic lawyers with stunning résumés, but little or no experience at investigating a murder. They made a hash of it, staging an overproduced investigation with tunnel vision, and emerging from it with a too-pat explanation for what happened, which ultimately failed to satisfy the public precisely because it was designed to satisfy the public.
What happened in Boston was the same: Brooke took the leadership of the investigation away from police officials, and turned it over to a group of very bright lawyers who didn’t have a clue what they were doing. The Boston police
continued their own investigation; over time the parallel investigations became increasingly competitive, and increasingly frustrated. The killings stopped just before the state investigation started, and the investigation ran into dead ends and blind alleys. A long year passed, with several public embarrassments for the Bottomly team, but no solution. The investigation was consuming mass quantities of police resources, and its failure was stalling careers.
So they did what the Warren Commission had done: they made up a pat explanation, and told the public that they had the whole thing figured out, go to bed now, we’ve got it all figured out.
At least, that’s one theory.
In March, 1965, Albert DeSalvo began telling people that he had committed the murders. DeSalvo was insane; in fact, he was locked up in the Bridgewater Loony Bin at the time he began to talk. He was, however, a certified sex criminal, and he was able to get the attention of F. Lee Bailey. Bailey, just emerging as a superstar lawyer, had another client in Bridgewater, George Nassar. DeSalvo told his tale to Nassar—a murderer of some standing himself—and Nassar persuaded Bailey to come hear what DeSalvo had to say.
Bailey decided that DeSalvo was telling the truth. He could tell. He had magic ears. Once Bailey decided that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, then, he had a very interesting situation. He had a client who was making a credible claim to be the most wanted criminal in America—and the police had never heard of him.
Well, actually, they had heard of him; they had just never connected him with the Stranglings. Bailey’s problem, anyway, was how to accommodate DeSalvo’s need to confess, and the public’s need to keep him out of old women’s apartments, without getting him executed.
Bailey handled this brilliantly. He says so in his autobiography.
Repeatedly.
Bailey tried to negotiate a deal with the Bottomly commission: I will bring you the Boston Strangler, he told them, if you will agree not to use the information we volunteer to prosecute him. You prosecute him for the things you already have him in jail for, and I will plead him innocent by reason of extreme nuttiness. To show the court exactly how nutty he is, we will tell the court all about the murders, even though he is being prosecuted for something else. You agree to allow him to be certified as insane, and we will put him away in an asylum. You can tell the public that you’ve solved the case, Albert won’t be prosecuted for the murders, and I can sell the rights to his story for a book and a movie and make a lot of money. Everybody wins.
Probably he didn’t talk about the money.
Bailey—who genuinely was (or is) a brilliant man—was a lawyer in the Perry Mason mold. He had worked his way through law school by operating a private-eye business, employing several detectives. When the movie was finally made Bailey had disappeared from it, apparently unable to make a deal with the producers. Meanwhile, back in real life, there remained the problem of convincing the nice folks on the Bottomly staff that a) Albert had actually committed the crimes, and b) they should accept the deal because they couldn’t prove it otherwise. There is a dispute about whether any bargain with the Bottomly investigation was ever reached, and there is a dispute about how eager the Bottomly investigation was to believe the confessions. DeSalvo had quite a bit of information about the crimes, it is true, but
a) A substantial amount of information about the crimes had appeared in the newspapers over the years,
b) Albert, fascinated by the murders, had absorbed and retained all of it,
c) He was, after all, incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital that was teeming with violent criminals, and
d) By the time DeSalvo got to court, several of the top investigators on Bottomly’s staff had resigned from the investigation and were working for Bailey.
When doubts about DeSalvo’s confessions first surfaced, in the 1980s, many people suggested that DeSalvo may have been fed information about the crimes by another inmate, who was the actual murderer. George Nassar is prominent in this theory.
Another theory is that the police themselves may have fed DeSalvo information about the crimes to bolster his credibility, thus allowing them to declare victory and go home. In any case, the investigators on Bottomly’s staff bought into the confessions. DeSalvo, on trial for serious crimes, talked to psychiatrists about the Stranglings, and Bailey acknowledged in open court that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. He was gambling on an insanity verdict.
He didn’t get it. DeSalvo was found guilty of the sex crimes, and sentenced to life in prison. Bailey declared victory, claiming that he had saved DeSalvo from the electric chair. An alternative interpretation is that he had allowed a small-time hood to talk himself into a life sentence. In either case a writer, Gerald Frank, was brought in to talk to DeSalvo, and to write the inside story of the case. Bottomly allowed him complete access to the case files. Shortly after the trial the Boston Record began printing excerpts from the book. A couple of murders were taken out of the account, because DeSalvo said that he didn’t commit them, but another murder was thrown in, because DeSalvo said that he did.
A movie was made from the book, starring Tony Curtis as DeSalvo and Henry Fonda as Bottomly, and the public bought into the story lock, stock, and barrel. As an avid reader of crime books and crime stories, I never heard anyone, from 1967 until the 1980s, question that DeSalvo had in fact committed the crimes. The person who really changed that—and, in a sense, the hero of our story—was Susan Kelly.
You have to remember: in 1964 there was no such term as “serial murderer,” and there was very little in the way of organized discussion of them. In the late 1970s Ted Bundy and Robert Ressler and John Wayne Gacy and John Douglas and some other people changed that. By the early 1980s serial murderers were red hot.
In 1981 Ms. Kelly was researching a novel about a serial murderer. Much of her research consisted of talking to Boston policemen. To her surprise, Ms. Kelly kept running into old Boston cops and prosecutors who categorically didn’t believe that Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, or the Boston Strangler’s brother, or the Boston Strangler’s uncle, or the Boston Strangler’s drinking buddy. They didn’t think he had anything to do with the murders. In April, 1992, Ms. Kelly wrote an article for Boston magazine, laying out the case against DeSalvo’s guilt as best she understood it at that time. By 1995 she had built this into a book, The Boston Stranglers (Birch Lane Press).
Ms. Kelly’s research is outstanding. Her thesis is that the murders which came to be united under the Boston Strangler flag were in fact the work of several different men, none of them DeSalvo. This is a credible enough thesis; it is very likely or certain that several of the crimes were copycat crimes, and not the work of the original Strangler. What I think that Ms. Kelly doesn’t quite get is that the old cops that she talked to, in the 1980s and 1990s, had been trained in the 1950s and 1960s to believe that virtually all murders were committed by someone in the victim’s life, and that the random crazy stranger was just a storybook boogeyman. What these cops told Ms. Kelly is what cops from that era always believed: there’s no monster on the loose here, these are unrelated crimes. We know who committed these crimes, it was the brother or the uncle or the drinking buddy. We just can’t quite prove it yet.
But here is another way in which 1995 was very different from 1965. In 1965 there were very few books written by ninnies claiming that Jack the Ripper was Thomas Hardy, the Lindbergh baby was stolen by Secret Service agents working for Eleanor Roosevelt, Errol Flynn was secretly Batman and the Black Dahlia was murdered by my Uncle Harry. By 1995 there were many such books.
When I first heard that someone had written a book claiming that Albert DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler, then, I thought, “Yeah, yeah, right; I’m sure you have a better candidate.” By 1995 I had accepted for thirty years that Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, and it was not easy for me to move away from that.
But when you finally reach the point of asking, “OK, what is the evidence against DeSalvo?” it is quite astonishing how thin th
e case really is.
First, Albert DeSalvo was never charged, indicted, accused or prosecuted by any court for any action in connection with the Boston Stranglings.
Second, there appears to be absolutely no physical evidence of any kind tying him to the crimes. Gerald Frank, who was convinced of DeSalvo’s guilt and wrote the book convincing the rest of the nation, repeatedly makes this point in The Boston Strangler: that there is an absolute void of evidence tying DeSalvo to the crimes.
Third, there is no eyewitness testimony from anyone placing DeSalvo at or near any of the crimes to which he confessed. In several of the Strangler cases, a person in a neighboring apartment reported a man behaving suspiciously just before a murder was committed. This man or these men were seen by numerous witnesses—none of whom thought that DeSalvo was the man.
There was a survivor of one attack that may have been by the Strangler. That survivor said it was not DeSalvo.
There was a palm print left on a television at one scene, police thought perhaps by the Strangler. It was not DeSalvo’s.
Dr. James Brussel, who had earned fame ten years earlier by drawing up what was widely reported to be an uncannily accurate profile of the Mad Bomber, George Metesky, also drew up a profile of the Boston Strangler. DeSalvo bears basically no resemblance to that profile.
F. Lee Bailey was certain that DeSalvo’s story was true, but Dr. Ames Robey was a psychiatrist at Bridgewater who knew DeSalvo much better than Bailey did, and who was much better trained to make that determination. About a month before DeSalvo began confessing to the crimes, Dr. Robey testified under oath that DeSalvo was delusional and was mentally incompetent to stand trial. Dr. Robey was always convinced that DeSalvo was lying, and that he had nothing to do with the murders. Thomas Troy, the attorney who represented DeSalvo after Bailey, did not believe that DeSalvo had committed the crimes, and Francis Newton, who represented DeSalvo after Troy, didn’t believe it, either. DeSalvo’s wife didn’t believe that he was the Strangler, and thought that it was just another of DeSalvo’s endless Big Lies.