by Bill James
On the other side of the ledger there are essentially only two facts:
1) That DeSalvo said that he committed the murders, and
2) That some of the cops and some of the prosecutors believed that he was telling the truth.
And some didn’t.
The Bottomly commission believed that DeSalvo was guilty, they said, because he knew things that only the killer would know. Ms. Kelly disputes this. Ms. Kelly argues that DeSalvo’s confessions, of which transcripts survive although the tapes themselves are missing, were so rife with inaccuracies that, in reality, they make it fairly apparent that he didn’t commit the murders.
Ms. Kelly savages the Bottomly commission with the theatrical outrage established by Anthony Scaduto in Scapegoat as the tone of the genre. I think it is unlikely that the Bottomly commission investigators were as inept as Ms. Kelly presents them, but this merely gets us to the issue of the evidence. What, ultimately, do you believe?
Albert DeSalvo was a very sick man. Ms. Kelly thinks he was too gentle to be a murderer, but, despite his easy charm, he carried a great deal of anger in a disorganized mind. I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that he did commit some of the crimes, particularly the later murders committed north of Boston, in Lynn, Lawrence and Salem.
But no one seriously believes that one man committed all of these murders. As noted by Kelly and most everyone else who has written about the crimes in the last twenty years, there are obvious indications that un-related murders were staged as Strangler murders to try to throw the police off the scent. DeSalvo confessed to all of these murders.
I don’t know what happened, and I’m not expert in any of this; I hope you understand that. My knowledge of the case is based on my reading of five books and numerous magazine and online articles, the five books being The Boston Strangler (Gerald Frank, 1966), The Defense Never Rests (F. Lee Bailey and Harvey Aronson, 1971), The Boston Stranglers (Susan Kelly, 1995), Search for the Strangler (Casey Sherman, 2003), and A Death in Belmont (Sebastian Junger, 2006). Frank and Bailey think that DeSalvo was guilty, Kelly and Sherman think that he was just making it up, and Junger is on the fence but leaning toward guilty.
It seems to me massively unlikely that Albert DeSalvo committed the “original” Strangler murders, the first batch of murders that started the Strangler panic. For four reasons:
1) There is no evidence that he did, other than his confessions.
2) The credibility of his confessions is tarnished by the fact that his confession consolidates murders that were almost certainly committed by different people.
3) His confessions, on several levels, lack the ring of truth.
4) DeSalvo, if he was in fact the murderer, is an exception to many of the things that we now know about serial murderers.
Massachusetts police interviewed 25,000 people in connection with the Boston Strangler homicides—but had never associated Albert DeSalvo with the crimes until he confessed. This is possible, certainly, but it is contrary to the usual experience of serial murder investigations. The normal experience of serial murder investigations is that the killer’s name surfaces early in the investigation, and his name appears in the files numerous times before he becomes the focus of the investigation.
Sebastian Junger says that DeSalvo’s “initial loss of control was the worst and most savage, resulting in four murders in two weeks. Subsequent binges of violence were limited to pairs of people and then, finally, to one person at a time.” But this is the exact opposite of the pattern normally described by experts in the field. The pattern which is normally described involves a gradual loss of control beginning long before the actual murders, breaking through in an isolated event, then culminating in more and more frequent attacks and more and more reckless behavior, until ultimately the killer commits suicide or begins killing people closer to him, people to whom he can be linked.
The Strangler victims were grouped together because the staging of the crime scenes was ornate and grotesque, women with big bows tied around their necks, left displayed to the world in gruesome ways. What seems most likely to me is that there were earlier murders that were not tagged to the Strangler because they were less ornate and grotesque. The murderer, when he committed his first murder, probably panicked and fled the scene immediately. Later, when he had committed two or three murders, he began lingering around the crime scene after the murder, enjoying what he had done, and celebrating what he had done by elaborately staging the crime scene.
The eminent Dr. James Brussel—who had drawn up the “profile” of the Strangler, which turned out not to resemble DeSalvo at all—nonetheless testified for DeSalvo in DeSalvo’s sex crimes trial, testifying that DeSalvo was insane. He, too, had left the investigation to go to work for F. Lee Bailey. “It would start the night before with a burning up inside, like little fires, little explosions,” according to Brussel by way of Sebastian Junger’s A Death in Belmont. “And he would get up in the morning feeling hungry, yet he would not eat and he did not want to eat. And he would get in his car or truck and drive, sometimes not knowing where he was going, and on occasion he would suddenly look around and find that he was in Connecticut or Rhode Island and ask himself, What am I doing here? He would drive to an apartment house or a multiple dwelling that he knew, and he would go inside.”
That’s an account of DeSalvo’s sex crimes, for which he was on trial. But the Stranglings are entirely different. DeSalvo did drive all over hell and creation, committing sex crimes in random places hundreds of miles from his home—but the Stranglings—the ones that were probably the work of one man—were predominantly concentrated in Boston, forming a little “walking circle,” the center of which is somewhere near Coolidge Corner.
DeSalvo’s sex crimes were scattered over several states and hundreds of miles. Doesn’t it seem likely to you that if DeSalvo had in fact “graduated” to murder as his advocates claim, that the murder victims would also be scattered over several states and hundreds of miles?
Dr. Brussel describes a syndrome that starts the night before the crimes, and he volunteers the information, based on his interviews with DeSalvo, that “it would be early morning frequently” when DeSalvo acted out his aggressions. But the Strangler attacks almost all occurred in mid-afternoon; one occurred on a Sunday morning, and one about 6:30 in the evening, but for the most part they are tightly bunched in the mid-afternoon.
Of course, some people doubt that DeSalvo actually committed many of the sex crimes to which he confessed, either. It could be that he didn’t; he was a maddeningly prolific confessor. But if you lose the sex crimes, you lose all credibility for DeSalvo as the Strangler. The fact that he was a convicted sex criminal is one of the very few points in favor of the theory that DeSalvo was the Strangler. If he falsely confessed to the sex crimes, then he’s a very poor candidate to be the Strangler. If he did commit the sex crimes, then we have to expect the elements of those to parallel the elements of the murders to some extent. They don’t; the sex crimes were committed against young women, in the mornings, spread out across three states. The murders were committed against old women (primarily), in the afternoons, within walking distance of one another.
F. Lee Bailey reports in The Defense Never Rests that he asked DeSalvo whether the police should look for his fingerprints at the crime scenes. DeSalvo shakes his head dismissively, and says, “They’re wasting their time.”
But DeSalvo was never a clever criminal. DeSalvo had been arrested countless times over the years, mostly for MSMCF (Making Stupid Mistakes in the Commission of a Felony). How did he get to be, when it came to the Stranglings, this fantastically clever criminal who didn’t make any mistakes, and was identified only because he confessed?
While I am not a psychologist, it is difficult for me to see that the crimes of which DeSalvo was found guilty and the Stranglings would be natural products of the same psychosis. DeSalvo groped, fondled and eventually sexually assaulted attractive young women. Oversimplifying, that sounds lik
e extreme sexual frustration, hyper-sexuality, immaturity and poor self-control. The Strangler murdered and sexually humiliated older women. That sounds more like extreme anger, hatred of authority and sexual confusion.
Extreme anger and sexual frustration are not radically different things, and it is not impossible that one psychosis could contain both, in the same way that it’s not impossible to believe that a fire broke out on the third floor of an apartment building and an unrelated fire broke out about the same time on the first floor. It’s not impossible; it’s just unusual. It is not a common thing for a murderer to make leaps of that nature.
Sebastian Junger’s A Death in Belmont is a serious and intelligent book about a murder case which has many of the hallmarks of the Strangler murders, but which was not included in the Strangler case because it was quickly “solved” by the conviction of a black man who had been working at the house on the day of the murder. As fate would have it, Albert DeSalvo is now known to have been near the scene of the murder on that day, because he was working at Sebastian Junger’s house; it is actually the only Strangler-related murder for which there is any independent evidence that DeSalvo was in the neighborhood—if one accepts as evidence the 40-years-later recollections of the Junger clan.
Junger starts with the premise that the man convicted of the murder may have been an innocent auxiliary victim of a crime committed by Albert DeSalvo, but he is intelligent enough, and honest enough, to realize that there are serious doubts about whether DeSalvo was actually the Boston Strangler—thus, the fact that he was nearby when this Strangler-type crime occurred may be simply a weird coincidence.
Junger argues that if the Strangler killings were “the work of several men, it is almost certain that some of them would have been caught.” But this is fallacious, because the murders that are identified as the Strangler killings are picked from the list of unsolved murders. Any similar murder that was solved was simply stricken from the list.
Some of Albert DeSalvo’s confessions, at least as edited and released by the police, may have the ring of truth. But many of DeSalvo’s confessions, in all honesty, don’t sound right. They’re based too much on visual recall. All of the books about DeSalvo note this visual recall at least in passing. He would “close his eyes,” wrote F. Lee Bailey in The Defense Never Rests (p. 151). “Then, as if he were watching a videotape replay, he would describe what had happened” (emphasis mine). Two pages later, Bailey recounts DeSalvo telling police that, at one victim’s apartment, he had knocked a pack of cigarettes to the floor beside a bureau. He named the brand of the cigarettes. At this, says Bailey, the police investigator “grabbed his briefcase and pulled out a photo showing the bureau and a pack of cigarettes just as Albert had described it.”
My reaction, on reading that, was “that sounds like DeSalvo had seen the same photograph that the cop had.” I did not know, at that time, that Dr. Ames Robey had been claiming for years that that was exactly what had happened: the police showed DeSalvo photographs of the crime scenes.
“Whether or not DeSalvo had ever been at the Goldberg house,” wrote Junger in A Death in Belmont (p. 223), “the newspaper photo was clearly the source of his description” (emphasis mine). DeSalvo had studied the photo of a house where a murder occurred so intently that, years later, he could still describe in detail what the photo contained—square drainpipes, shades pulled down. He remembered the outside of the house from studying the photo in the newspaper.
“I went into number 77,” said DeSalvo in supposedly recounting the first of the murders. “I remember it said that on glass over the door in gold letters.” It doesn’t sound right; to me; it doesn’t sound like he was really there. It sounds like he had seen the pictures.
I don’t get into visiting crime scenes, but I lived in Boston during most of the time I was writing this book. I noticed that one of the Strangler murders occurred at 515 Park Drive, and I would often catch the T at St. Mary’s Square, on the Green Line. 515 Park Drive is just about a one-minute walk from St. Mary’s Square. It is close enough that, if you came out the door of 515 Park and saw the train, you might be able to catch it before it left.
Then another time my wife and I were going to the Boston Symphony, and we were a little early and walking around the neighborhood, and we happened to walk past 77 Gainsborough Street, where the first of the Stranglings occurred. I noticed that it’s just a block or two off the Green Line. Two of the later murders, which occurred within a quarter-mile of the first, are actually on the other side of that Line, so that the three murders crowd around one stop on the Green Line.
And then one time I was walking out near Boston College, just getting a little exercise, and I realized that I was near another of the murder scenes, at 1940 Commonwealth Avenue, so I took a moment and looked at that building. And there, not thirty feet from the door of 1940 Commonwealth, was a T stop. It’s the Green Line.
Another of the murders occurred at 1435 Commonwealth. It’s another stop on the same spur of the same line.
There’s more to it than that. The Green Line has several spurs. 515 Park Drive, which is about a one-minute walk from the C spur of the Green Line, is also about a two-minute walk from the B spur; it is near the place where they split off from one another, so that one can get quickly to either line.
From that point the B and C spurs of the Green Line diverge, being at one point separated by more than a mile. Then they converge again. You know where they almost meet again? 1940 Commonwealth, where the second of the murders occurred, is right on the B spur—and a five-minute walk from the C spur. That’s where they come back together. The closest point is 1940 Commonwealth.
77 Gainsborough Street, where the first murder occurred, is just off the E spur of the Green Line—but that’s not how my wife and I got to the Symphony. We got there on a different spur, which is a short walk away.
The T system in Boston is good, but it does not have fantastic coverage of the city. There are substantial portions of the Boston area where you can’t really use the T, because it takes too long to get to it.
Several of the Boston Strangler’s murders occurred not only right on the T system, but in areas that were served by multiple lines of the T system—as if perhaps the murderer had thought ahead, “I might have to come out of here and go this way, or I might have to go down that way. I need to be able to get out of this area as quickly as I can no matter which way I’m heading.”
Albert DeSalvo, in his “confessions” to the crime, claimed that he drove to the murder scenes. I wonder. Where did he park? Why didn’t anybody find a parking receipt? Why did he drive, one time after another, into areas that are notoriously difficult to drive to? The murders up in Lawrence and Lynn and Salem … somebody may have driven to those. The “original” Strangler murders, the ones that started the panic … I’d be willing to bet that whoever committed those murders got there and left on the T.
There’s actually more to it than that. We lived not in Boston but in Brookline, which is an independent city so close that you could walk from our apartment to the Boston Common. It’s a couple of miles. “Did any of the murders occur in Brookline?” my wife asked.
Well, no, not quite. 515 Park Drive is in Boston—but if you cross the street, you’re in Brookline.
1940 Commonwealth is three miles away from there, in the Brighton Section of Boston, near Newton—but you can throw a rock from there back into Brookline.
1435 Commonwealth is in Brighton—but it’s a four-minute walk from Brookline.
4 University Drive, where one of the victims lived, is in Cambridge—but it’s not a half-mile from Brookline.
The Green Line of the Boston T system serves Brookline (and other areas); one spur goes down the north and west sides of Brookline, another along the east side, and a third goes through the heart of the little city.
In serial murder cases, if you plot the crime scenes on a map and connect the dots, very often they will form a sort of circle, and very often the mur
derer will live near the center of that circle. This is well known now, although it wasn’t recognized until about 1980. If you draw a circle on a map which is a one-mile radius from Coolidge Corner, it doesn’t include any of the murder scenes. But if you draw a circle which is a three-mile radius around Coolidge Corner, it includes virtually all of the murder scenes in Boston and Cambridge—all but one—and there are murder scenes at all points of the compass.
I am not saying that this is true, but it is possible. It is possible that the Boston Strangler lived in Brookline, perhaps between Coolidge Corner and Brookline Village, and that he deliberately left Brookline to commit his crimes, knowing that Brookline has its own police force, and that it might be in his best interests not to have his local police force looking for him.
Actually, there are two circles here—one that is formed by the murders in Boston, and a much larger circle formed if you include the murders in the northern towns. DeSalvo lived nowhere near the smaller circle, the “walking” circle—but he was near the center of the larger circle. I don’t know what to make of it. It seems odd to me that this killer came in from several miles to the north and committed these murders that accidentally trace a neat pattern around the edges of Brookline. If the real Strangler did live near Coolidge Corner, and if he did use the T to move around, he could have been back in his apartment ten minutes after leaving most of the buildings where the crimes were committed.
Why did DeSalvo confess? He was crazy, to begin with, and was notorious for telling self-aggrandizing whoppers. According to Bailey, the very first thing that he heard from DeSalvo, by way of Nassar, was “would it be possible for him to publish his story and make some money with it?” The last thing anybody heard from DeSalvo was, he was suing people because the money he had been promised disappeared before it reached his pockets.