The Boston Stranglers

by Susan Kelly

  Nassar’s new attorney, F. Lee Bailey, unlike the Reverend Mr. Moors, claimed to be quite satisfied with the pretrial publicity accorded his client. In a speech entitled “Trial by Newspaper,” given to the Greater Lawrence Men’s Brotherhood of Temple Emmanuel on November 23, 1964, Bailey said he was confident that any negative effects of the media treatment of Nassar could be blunted.

  Nassar himself seems to have had no problems with the Fourth Estate either. In an interview with Michael J. Carney of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, Nassar asked Carney, “What’s my chance of getting into the newspaper business as a reporter?” He had, after all, experience in the field—he’d worked on the prison newsletter during his incarceration at Norfolk.

  Nassar had interests other than the Russian language, theology, and journalism. When the cops searched his Mattapan apartment, they found among his effects a badly typed leaflet produced by an organization called the Guardians of Democracy. The group met every evening at a private home in Everett. Its membership drive appears to have been aimed at the previously institutionalized:

  MOST OF THE TROUBLES YOU SUFFER [the leaflet read] WITH RIGHT NOW STEM FROM THIS ENFORCED SOCIALISM AND NOT FROM ANY PRETENDED MENTAL ILLNESS. THE MENTAL HEALTH DEPT. IS NOTHING BUT ONE OF THE WEAPONS OF THE SOCIALISTS. UNLESS YOU GET BUSY IMMEDIATELY AND JOIN US, YOUR PROBLEMS ARE GOING TO GROW UNTIL YOU ARE THOROUGHLY FAMILIAR WITH THE HORRORS OF ALL OUT SLAVERY

  Perhaps over a decade and a half of imprisonment had created a joiner out of Nassar, the adolescent loner; the police also found in his apartment a copy of a letter addressed to “Dear Couple” and dated April 24, 1964. The letter is clearly a response to a solicitation for group sex. In it, Nassar furnishes a physical description of himself and a list of his interests: reading, writing, hosting parties, taking photographs, and going to the theater. “And, more and more lately,” he adds, “exploring the bizarre, exciting and unexplored.”

  Nassar himself is part of a couple: “I have a girlfriend who is in many ways more unconventional than I am.” [She must have been quite a gal.] He ends the letter with the hope that he and “dear couple” together can provide the woman with an opportunity to “blossom out.”

  The alleged contract killer had emerged from incarceration an aspiring swinger.

  Who was F. Lee Bailey, Nassar’s replacement for Paul Smith? In 1964, at the age of thirty-one, he was already a national figure on his way to becoming a legendary one like his brother defenders Edward Bennett Williams, Racehorse Haynes, Melvin Belli, and Percy Foreman. Perhaps he would someday attain the mythic stature of a Clarence Darrow. Alan M. Dershowitz, himself a major constellation in the legal firmament, who taught Bailey’s younger brother Bill in one of his Harvard Law School classes and who ultimately represented the elder Bailey when he was charged in 1973 with conspiracy to commit mail fraud, has called his former client’s cross-examination technique “masterful” and “spectacular.” Ames Robey, a perpetual courtroom adversary, praises Bailey’s summations as “brilliant.”

  Trial lawyers are a notoriously flamboyant and egotistical breed; Bailey extended the parameters of the stereotype. He carried enormous sums of money on his person (retainers, he told colleagues) and a gun to protect the wad. He once tried to pay an eighty-five-cent restaurant check with a one-thousand-dollar bill; with stunning aplomb, the coffee-shop waitress asked him if he had anything smaller. He blasted around Boston in a souped-up Pontiac GTO with the license plate TRIAL; he zoomed in and out of airports at the controls of his own twin-engine Cessna 310, single-engine Cessna 172, or Beechcraft Bonanza.

  “A high, wide, and handsome kind of guy,” comments Francis C. Newton, Jr.

  Bailey was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, on June 10, 1933, the son of an advertising man and a nursery school founder. In 1943, his parents divorced. He attended good private schools, earning the scholarships to do so. In 1950 he matriculated at Harvard as an English major.

  In his sophomore year, Bailey read The Art of Advocacy , by famed attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker. The book so impressed him that he changed his career plans—from writer to lawyer.

  Bored with higher education, he dropped out of Harvard at the end of his second year and joined the Naval Flight Training program. A year and a half later he switched to the Marines and became a jet fighter pilot. He also volunteered for his group’s legal staff. Very shortly afterward, the chief legal officer died in a plane crash and Bailey took over his position. The experience he garnered was invaluable. Upon leaving the Marines, Bailey was admitted to Boston University Law School (alma mater of John Bottomly and Edward Brooke), despite his lack of an undergraduate degree. He would graduate first in his class.

  Just three months after passing the bar, Bailey took on and won his first sensational case—the Torso Murder. A Lowell, Massachusetts, auto mechanic had been accused of killing his wife and tossing her headless, dismembered body into the Merrimack River. Bailey obtained an acquittal for his client, George Edgerly, in part by suggesting to the jury that the prosecutor in the case was willing to send an innocent man to the electric chair just to insure his own reelection. The ploy worked.

  (Several years later Edgerly was arrested again, this time on a charge of taking an ax to a Lawrence auto dealer. He was convicted—but this time he didn’t have Bailey defending him.)

  In 1964, Bailey would have an even more spectacular success representing another accused wife-killer, Cleveland osteopath Samuel Sheppard. Bailey contended that Dr. Sheppard, who had been convicted and imprisoned in 1954, had been the victim of a smear campaign conducted by the Cleveland Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The adverse publicity, Bailey maintained, had made it impossible for Sheppard to get a fair trial. A decade later, Bailey got a judge to agree. Sheppard was freed from prison on ten thousand dollars’ bond and tried two years later. Bailey represented him in this courtroom battle and Sheppard, the second time around on the same charges, was acquitted.

  If George Nassar had confidence in his new attorney, it seemed well placed.

  9

  The Cuckoo’s Nest

  Albert DeSalvo hated Bridgewater, for which he can hardly be blamed, and was vocal about his discontent with the conditions of the place. Albert didn’t much care for Ames Robey, Bridgewater’s medical director, either. Robey, in his turn, found Albert, with his constant bragging and demands for attention, exasperating. Nonetheless, Robey, like some of the Cambridge police, would develop a grudging fondness for his troublesome patient. Maybe it was the Smile. Or maybe it was Albert’s ability as a natural-born comedian with a flair for practical jokes.

  Not that Albert had much occasion or, probably, inclination to be funny during his first sequestration in Bridgewater. He suffered through the court-ordered thirty-five days, during which he was diagnosed as having a sociopathic personality disorder with schizoid features. It was possible that he might become acutely psychotic. Nonetheless, Robey found Albert initially competent to stand trial for the various offenses with which he had been most recently charged. The doctor’s diagnosis would change radically over the next few months.

  On December 10, 1964, Albert was returned to the East Cambridge jail, where he began behaving in a way that seemed to confirm Dr. Robey’s worst fears of a psychotic breakdown. He claimed that he heard voices; he claimed that Irmgard had appeared in his cell and berated him for his misdeeds. He also became depressed and suicidal. He was sent back to Bridgewater on January 14, 1965.

  Albert also had a new lawyer, Jon A. Asgeirsson, his previous attorney, Robert Sheinfeld, having given up in disgust. Sheinfeld, who had labored mightily on behalf of Albert for so many years, obtaining for him light or suspended sentences, threw in the towel after Albert was accused of assaulting Suzanne Macht, Muriel LeBlanc, Virginia Thorner, and Geraldine Surette. Albert understood Sheinfeld’s point of view, and in fact thanked the attorney for his past efforts.

  In any event, it was Asgeirsson who appeared on behalf of Albert at a hearing in the case of Commonwealth v
. DeSalvo in Middlesex Superior Court on February 4. The sole witness was Ames Robey.

  Asgeirsson told Judge Edward Pecce, “I have been connected with this case since last November, and I have been very disappointed with [Albert’s] reaction to me—to my questions, I should say, not to me personally, but to my questions. He’s been cooperative as much as to his ability as he can, but I question his stability and his ability to know what is going on around him.” The judge asked if Asgeirsson was satisfied that Albert was mentally incompetent to stand trial. Asgeirsson replied that he was.

  Ames Robey took the stand then and testified that his observations and those of other doctors at Bridgewater had indicated that Albert’s illness had indeed grown worse. With medication he might be able to stand trial a few months from now. At the moment he was not competent to do so, although Robey felt that Albert was still able to comprehend the nature and severity of the crimes he had committed at the time he committed them. Robey declined to give a definitive opinion as to whether Albert had been driven by an irresistible impulse when he broke into the homes of Suzanne Macht, Muriel LeBlanc, Virginia Thorner, and Geraldine Surette.

  The outlook for a complete remission of Albert’s schizophrenic symptoms was not, according to Robey, very favorable: “The defendant is presently thirty-three, I believe, and this is getting into an age group that certainly causes the prognosis to be more guarded than if he were, for example, seventeen, twenty, twenty-two, or in this area.”

  Albert then asked to speak for himself. Judge Pecce granted him permission. Albert took the stand—and promptly contradicted Asgeirsson and Robey by stating that he was fully competent to stand trial. He talked about his previous incarceration at Westborough State Hospital, where he told the doctors that an irresistible impulse had indeed compelled him to act out the Measuring Man charade. He spoke of how he had hoped to be returned to Westborough in November of 1964, and that the Cambridge police had told him they’d make such a recommendation to the court. But a number of recent escapes from that institution had dashed Albert’s hopes. He had to be sent to a more secure facility.

  Albert then spoke bitterly about life in Bridgewater. There, he was sure, he would never receive proper treatment. Throughout his denunciation of the place ran a vein of prudish, almost puritanical horror at some of the things he’d heard and seen. It was an odd reaction on the part of someone who otherwise spoke in such frank terms of his own sexual desires and exploits:

  My first day I entered [Bridgewater] and first thing they do is rip off my ring, which is their procedure. Good. They use the words on you right away. And that doctor that they have come to interview you, he sits down at a desk with a set of officers there and inmates all around like animals, and he in turn starts to interview about dirty words. The first thing he asks you. And I looked around. I ask, “This is a doctor interviewing me?” And all you see is these cells and these inmates jumping around and looking at you, and this doctor interviews you. Every second word is filth that he’s talking about.

  So to make a long story short, they then send you into the room for five days, twenty-four hours a day locked up. I came and I wanted to, as I read in the papers and told by officers, if a man is sick and is asking help, they’ll help him. Well, if that is being helped, put him naked on the floor, which they do, throw him in the cell twenty-four hours for the next five days, and then throw him in a room afterwards, and then they let him outside for fifteen hours—he sits at a table, walking back and forth, and then the next thing he just goes to bed for eight hours. All right, that’s their way of rehabilitation. You say okay.

  And the next thing I go to staff the first time, which I talked to Dr. Robey. I walked in. Maybe five or ten minutes at the most. He says, “Well, we’ll get you ready for staff. The trial as soon as possible.” That’s my first time. I see him two weeks later. He says, “Well, you are capable of going to trial now and we find you are an emotionally disturbed person,” and that’s it. As far as I was concerned I saw a psychiatrist there—which is a personality test that they take and this and that for about an hour and a half, but possibly two hours—but that is the only time I seen what they call a doctor on my first time.

  So my second time coming there, where they have already found me sane they couldn’t understand why I am back again, and I personally didn’t want to go back ... If they treated me as a person, not like an animal, then I would freely give what’s inside me to let out, but myself, when I saw I was being brought in, I froze, I revealed nothing. What I really wanted to do—I just gave them the other things. What I am trying to say, I feel I am competent to stand trial. However, Your Honor, you think so or not, the doctors, that’s entirely up to them. But on my second time I was told by other people that if I am committed there to go ahead and play the game that I am depressed and seeing things in my room [emphasis added], and if I was committed there I would probably get two or three years and be free. I found this to be untrue. And after such time, thinking of it here, I went and told Dr. [Samuel] Allen and in turn the other supervisor I had lied to them. I did not see these things [emphasis added], and I am willing and capable of standing trial and I made this all up to them.

  Judge Pecce thanked Albert for his testimony. Then he informed Albert that he would be recommitted to Briegewater until further order of the court.

  Albert was shipped back to the institution he so despised. And there he renewed his acquaintance with another recently arrived inmate: George Nassar.

  10

  Bailey Takes Action

  In The Boston Strangler, Gerold Frank quotes a letter written on January 9, 1965, by Albert to his former attorney, Robert Sheinfeld. In the letter, Albert apologizes to Sheinfeld for having caused the lawyer so many headaches, and expresses his gratitude for Sheinfeld’s representation. He speaks of his sexual offenses with considerable regret and shame. “But still,” he adds, “thank God I neaver [sic] got to hurt anyone.”8

  At the same time Albert was writing to Sheinfeld of his relief at not seriously injuring any of his victims, and sitting in the East Cambridge jail conjuring up visions of a furious and reproachful Irmgard, he was, according to Gerold Frank, intimating to his new lawyer Jon Asgeirsson that he might be “the Boston ‘S’ man.” But Albert, again according to Frank’s version of the story, had to lead up to this revelation with a series of coy yet typically self-aggrandizing hints: The story he was about to tell Asgeirsson would be one bigger than that of the Brink’s robbery. Asgeirsson asked him if by that he meant the recent Plymouth, Massachusetts mail robbery (four suspects in that major heist were, coincidentally, successfully defended by F. Lee Bailey). Albert said no, his story wasn’t like that at all, it was a bigger one even than the saga of Jack the Ripper. Asgeirsson, Frank relates, told his client to stop vamping around and spit out whatever it was he had on his mind. Then Albert blurted to his attorney that he had committed all of the Boston stranglings.9

  What was Asgeirsson’s reaction?

  “I did do a lot of things involving lawyers,” he says today. When asked to specify, he answers, “I don’t want to tell you.”

  Whatever Asgeirsson did took place between January and the beginning of March 1965.

  In The Defense Never Rests, an account of his greatest cases published in 1971, F. Lee Bailey writes of how his first meeting with Albert DeSalvo came to pass. He was sitting in the prisoners’ waiting room of Essex County Superior Court in Salem with his client, George Nassar, when Nassar said to him, “ ‘If a man was the strangler, the guy who killed all those women, would it be possible for him to publish his story and make some money with it?’

  “I had to smile [writes Bailey]. ‘It’s perfectly possible,’ I said. ‘But I wouldn’t advise it. I suspect that a confession in book form would be judged completely voluntary and totally admissible. I also suspect that it would be the means by which the author would put himself in the electric chair.’

  “ ‘I’ll pass on the information,’ said Nassar. ‘I promised
this guy at Bridgewater I’d ask you. He’s been after me to have you come in and talk to him, but I know you’re pretty busy.’

  “I was vaguely curious. ‘What’s the guy’s name?’

  “ ‘Albert DeSalvo,’ Nassar said.”10

  On March 4, 1965, Bailey paid his first visit to Albert at Bridgewater.

  That initial visit, according to Ames Robey, lasted a half hour. Bailey was asked to leave the premises because he wasn’t Albert’s attorney of record. Then Robey called Jon Asgeirsson, who was Albert’s attorney of record and thus the only one permitted to visit him at Bridgewater. Robey asked Asgeirsson, “What the hell is going on?”

  According to Robey, Asgeirsson replied, “I don’t know.”

  According to Bailey, he had lunch with Robey a week or so before he paid his first visit to Albert.11 In the course of the meal, Bailey asked Robey if he knew Albert. Robey laughed and replied that he certainly did, and furthermore that while the man claimed to have an ungovernable sex drive, he had probably fantasized most of his encounters with women. And he was by no means a killer, Robey commented.

  Bailey adds that Albert’s brother Joe called to tell him that Albert wished to consult him. The lawyer’s next move, by his own account, was to get in touch with Lieutenant John Donovan, head of the Boston Police Department’s homicide squad. “I told him I might be talking to a man who was likely to claim he had committed some of the stranglings. I needed a few clues—things known to the police but not to the general public that would help me judge the man’s validity. Donovan sent his close assistant Lieutenant Edward Sherry to my office, and Sherry gave me a few leads.“12

  It was more than a few. Speaking today, Donovan characterizes what was provided Bailey as “a lot of information.”