by Susan Kelly
Mr. Zobel indicated to the writer and Lt. Butler that there were currently pending five (5) charges or violations of the cannons [sic] of ethics of the bar association against F. Lee Bailey, Esquire, of Boston. He further indicated that there was a distinct possibility that information would be filed with the Supreme Judicial Court requesting Mr. Bailey’s disbarment. One of the areas of inquiry of the Boston Bar has been Mr. Bailey’s representation of the alleged or self-styled strangler, Albert H. DeSalvo. In some of the statements attributed to Mr. Bailey about the DeSalvo case are part of the charges and allegations against the said Bailey. Det. Lt. Butler and the writer indicated in a general way to Mr. Zobel that we were currently engaged in very delicate negotiations with Mr. Bailey as an attorney of record for DeSalvo and that we were not too happy with the prospect of the bar association getting into a current criminal investigation. It was further indicated [to] Mr. Zobel that since you cannot seperate [sic] Bailey and DeSalvo, that we would appreciate it if the bar association, for the moment, consider holding those proceedings in abeyance until the DeSalvo picture is clarified.
The Bar Association complied with the request. Bailey may never have known how close he came to getting his request for a certificate of approval rejected as well as losing his privilege of practicing law.
Having persuaded the Bar Association to call off its grievance committee dogs—at least temporarily—Conn had surmounted one of the roadblocks in the path toward indicting Albert for some if not all of the stranglings. The next day he interviewed a polygraph operator from Chicago who appeared to have the proper credentials for administering a lie detector test. The expert wanted the new Strangler Bureau to turn over virtually all its data on the murders to him before he questioned Albert. Although Conn was fairly impressed by the man and his qualifications, the assistant attorney general nonetheless felt that the polygraph operator would have to be “controlled” so that whatever case there was against Albert would not be jeopardized.
On June 2, Conn, Richardson, and Butler had a meeting in the attorney general’s office with Garrett Byrne, John Droney, and John Burke. After a lengthy wrangle, they hammered out a tentative agreement, and it is obvious from reading Conn’s record of the session that concessions on both sides were made only very grudgingly.
No one had a problem with the suggestion that Albert be moved from MCI-Walpole to MCI-Norfolk (a medium security prison a short distance from Walpole) before any interrogation of him took place. Everyone was amenable to the idea that Albert submit to lie detector tests. They all even eventually agreed to a consolidated prosecution, and that any indictments against DeSalvo not be sought until after his Green Man appeal had been heard and decided.
The real struggle took place over the issues of who would question Albert and when any psychiatric evaluation of him would be conducted. Burke, Droney, and Byrne insisted that their own representatives be allowed to interrogate Albert about the murders committed in their jurisdictions. Conn was violently opposed to anyone other than the attorney general’s designate handling any part of the questioning. To keep the political peace, Richardson decreed that a compromise between the two positions be worked out at some future date.
Conn, the irresistible force, wanted Albert checked out by the psychiatrists before he confessed. Burke, Byrne, and Droney, the immovable objects, wanted the examination to take place after Albert had said his piece. Again Richardson interceded with the suggestion that the psychiatric testing be done midway through the interrogation.
Droney again made it plain that he didn’t believe Albert had killed Beverly Samans. Burke, who was also still maintaining that Albert wasn’t the murderer of Helen Blake, Joann Graff, Mary Brown, or Evelyn Corbin, didn’t want to make any kind of legal move until George Nassar’s second trial had concluded. Burke’s assistant John Jennings—who would three months later prosecute Nassar—furthermore expressed grave doubt that it was even worthwhile to question Albert at this point. Or, as Conn phrased the comment, “Jennings raised the legal issue of whether or not Bottomley’s [sic] abortion so confused the legal rights of DeSalvo as to make it impossible for anyone ever to procure a valid confession from the said DeSalvo.” Whether Conn in using the word abortion was referring to his own or to Jennings’s estimate of Bottomly’s interrogation of Albert two years previously is impossible to say.
The atmosphere at this meeting must have been thick with hostility. The district attorneys, Conn wrote, “repeatedly made reference to the old strangler bureau and the lack of trust they have for the Attorney General of Massachusetts. They repeatedly talked about money motives of Bailey and DeSalvo. Particularly stressing movies and releases. They particularly were concerned about reward money feeling that Nassa [Nassar] would make a move to collect the reward money if DeSalvo was indicted. Their hatred for Bailey seems to be matched by their hatred for the Brooke Administration and the strangling bureau. The only point of importance which revolved [sic] from this continual discussion of past events was that they were assured by the writer and the Attorney General that both Bailey and DeSalvo would be interrogated on a public record about a financial involvement in movies and other rights pertaining to the story of the Boston Strangler.
“Repeated reference was made to the fact that many people apparently are in possession of records of the strangling bureau including John S. Bottomly and [they] asked the Attorney General when he was going to make some definitive moves to get those records back. As a good faith position [I] suggest it would appear wise that the Attorney General should make a serious attempt to get those records back.”
Conn had one of his assistants research various legal issues relating to the possible prosecution of Albert. One question that might arise was whether Albert could claim that Bailey had been incompetent as a defender in allowing him to make his initial confession. Another gray area was whether separate indictments—in the case of the stranglings, one for each killing—could be prosecuted jointly. And would a joint prosecution deprive Albert of his constitutional rights?
The points were all ultimately moot. The drive to prosecute Albert for the strangling murders lost momentum over the summer and on into the next year, slowing, sputtering, and finally grinding to a halt. The matter never went to a grand jury. No indictments were ever handed down in any of the murders.
Did Donald Conn believe that Albert was the Strangler? Bailey today says yes. Ames Robey today says no. Conn died suddenly in 1986 at the age of fifty. Whatever his private beliefs may have been, they were buried with him.
George Nassar’s retrial was a fiasco for Bailey. The prosecution produced eighteen witnesses, the defense three, far fewer than it had the first time around. One of the prosecution’s witnesses came as a surprise to Bailey: a woman who claimed to have seen Nassar in Andover shortly before the murder of Irvin Hilton. Nassar took the stand—and admitted that in 1964 he had lied to his parole officer about being employed at the time. He also told the court that he had forged pay slips in order to foster this deception.
The jury took less than three hours to find him guilty. He was back in Walpole that night.
Bailey vowed to seek a third trial for his client. He also asked that the court appoint him as the now-indigent Nassar’s attorney so that he could be fully compensated by the state for his efforts on his client’s behalf. Judge Donald Macauley denied his request because Bailey hadn’t been a member of the Bar for a minimum of ten years, which one had to be in order to qualify as a court-appointed attorney.
John Bottomly, the target of so much derision40 on the part of his colleagues in the criminal justice system, had long since returned to the private practice of law in Boston. One of his clients was a woman named Sonya Marie Anderson Nichols. In a previous life, she had been known as Irmgard Beck DeSalvo. In August, Bottomly would negotiate with Twentieth Century-Fox an agreement whereby Sonya (she had married one Earl Nichols and was now returned from Germany and living in Denver) authorized the use of the names Irmgard, Judy, and Mich
ael DeSalvo to be used in the movie to be made of Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler.
The payment she received in return for this consideration was twenty-five thousand dollars.
As for agent Bottomly, he went to work for Twentieth Century-Fox himself, as a consultant to the Strangler movie. For the use of his name, and his services as a technical adviser, he was paid a reported one hundred thousand dollars.
The Bottomly character, played by Henry Fonda, would be the hero of the film version of the story.
14
Hooray for Hollywood
On January 4, 1968, Albert DeSalvo’s appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts for a new trial was denied. The justices found no basis for Bailey’s and Asgeirsson’s claim of “errors of law” in the standard of criminal responsibility to which Albert had been held. Neither did they agree that the guilty verdict reached by the jury in any way contradicted the psychiatric testimony presented at the 1967 trial. “Criminal acts have been committed,” the justices wrote, “and the evidence not being conclusive, a determination was required whether the perpetrator was responsible or irresponsible under the law. No better way appears to determine that than by leaving to the twelve citizens of the jury the application of a reasonable and understandable rule after a fair trial and under fair and full instructions. That is what happened in this case.”
On July 7, 1968, DeSalvo’s appeal for a review of his sentence received this response: “The Appellate Division has ordered that no action be taken on this appeal for the reason that it was not filed in compliance with the provisions of the General Laws, Chapter 278, Section 28B, and, therefore, the Appellate Division is without authority to act.” A copy of this notice was sent to F. Lee Bailey.
Meanwhile, the Robert Fryer production of the movie version of Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler had gotten under way. It would be filmed on location in Boston and Cambridge, providing the occasion for a great deal of media ballyhoo. Along with Henry Fonda as John Bottomly, actor Tony Curtis would portray Albert and actress Carolyn Conwell would play Irmgard. Sally Kellerman would have a small but crucial role as the only survivor of a Strangler attack. The director was Richard Fleischer, the screenwriter Edward Anhalt.
In January 1968, Phillip DiNatale, who had spent the last four years on special assignment to the old and new Strangler Bureaus, resigned from the Boston Police Department to work as a technical adviser on the movie. The department gave him a choice—us or them, according to former BPD Detective Sergeant James McDonald—and DiNatale chose the latter. McDonald adds that John Bottomly—who apparently was not merely acting as a consultant to Twentieth Century-Fox but trying to recruit other consultants for it as well—went to each member of the Boston homicide squad (including McDonald) to ask if he’d be interested in emulating DiNatale. He got no takers.
For his services, DiNatale was paid a reported sixty thousand dollars. Actor Mike Kellin played him in the film. Later DiNatale would go on The Tonight Show to discuss his show business experiences with Johnny Carson.
Bottomly and DiNatale were virtually the only law enforcement (or ex-law enforcement) personnel in the state who would cooperate with the movie company. The Boston Police Department, which clearly hated the whole project, provided at best only one or two officers to divert traffic when scenes were being filmed at the city locations. Elliot Richardson flatly turned down a request from Fox for the assistance of the attorney general’s office, citing his displeasure that the movie would actually name Albert as the Boston Strangler and expressing concern that the film might jeopardize any future trial in the case. Edward Brooke rejected first a five-figure and then a six-figure offer to portray himself. He too disliked the first script he was shown, for the same reasons as had Richardson. And neither the past nor the present attorney general was happy with what each perceived as the tremendous number of factual distortions in Edward Anhalt’s screenplay. Nor did Brooke care much for the way his role had been written. He dropped a few broad hints that he might consider legal action if the part wasn’t changed to reflect reality.
Brooke wasn’t the only one to make such a threat. Edmund McNamara declared that he’d sue Twentieth Century-Fox if the shooting script so much as mentioned his existence. Detective Lieutenant Edward Sherry also declined to grant the moviemakers permission to use his name. The studio was going to get around this impasse by rebaptizing Sherry “Lieutenant Brandy,” but a wiser head at Fox fortunately prevailed. In the end, Sherry was incarnated as Detective Lieutenant Joe Corsi, a name not on the rosters of the BPD, and the role was filled by actor George Kennedy.
Casting director Marty Richard had problems of his own finding suitable extras to play crowd and incidental scenes. Some of the hundreds of aspiring bit players did not take kindly to rejection. One such woman, denied her chance at five seconds’ worth of screen immortality, chased after the hapless Richard and bludgeoned him with her handbag. This made the headlines of the following day’s Record American; the front-page story was illustrated with a cartoon rendition of the fracas.
Richard was also having difficulties finding women to enact the corpses of the Strangler’s elderly prey. He issued a plangent appeal to reporter Marjorie Adams: “Do you know a lady with seventy-year-old feet? We are looking for one whose legs and feet will be right to portray a victim of the Strangler. Her face and body won’t be shown.”
Film costumer Billy Travilla, favorite designer of Marilyn Monroe, lamented the dreary state of Boston fashion. But he was nonetheless game to do a great deal of taxing on-site research. “I’ve just come from the gutters of Cambridge,” he confided to Herald-Traveler41 writer Romola Metzner. “I’ve been living in a big parka, ski sweater, heavy underwear, and boots.” The designer envisioned “the atmosphere of Albert DeSalvo in low-tone green get-ups.”
It was breathlessly reported that Tony Curtis would definitely not undergo a nose job in order to resemble more closely the character he was playing.
The subject of The Boston Strangler may have been high tragedy; the circumstances of its filming were indubitably low farce.
As Brooke and Richardson had assumed, the movie version of The Boston Strangler, which had its U.S. premiere in the fall of 1968, bore little resemblance to the truth. It didn’t even stay close to the book on which it was based. In the film, the murders are out of sequence and in the wrong cities—two, for example, take place in Cambridge. The Strangler Task Force is formed well before the death of Sophie Clark.42 The character played by Sally Kellerman is beaten into a coma by Curtis-DeSalvo. Albert is finally arrested in Boston after being chased by a man who spots him trying to break into an apartment. He is then committed to Boston City Hospital, not Bridgewater, where a psychiatrist diagnoses him as a multiple personality. He is shown attempting to strangle Irmgard when she and the children visit him in the hospital.
Interestingly, no mention of F. Lee Bailey is made in the film. Albert’s lawyer is instead identified throughout as Jon Asgeirsson. Harold Banks reported in the Record American that Bailey had been dropped from the movie because he didn’t care for the script, nor for the payment he was offered for the use of his name.
The meatiest and most sympathetic role in the film goes to Fonda-Bottomly. He is initially reluctant to take on the responsibility of Strangler Bureau chief, but is talked into it by the Brooke character, who tells him he is “uniquely qualified” for the post because he has one of the finest minds the attorney general knows. Bowing to this pressure—and flattery—Fonda-Bottomly throws himself wholeheartedly into the undertaking, going so far as to prowl the mean streets of Boston at night in search of the killer. He spends sleepless nights brooding in his book-lined study. He even directs the interrogation of a suspect at Boston police headquarters, and when the man being questioned becomes violent, he lunges across a desk and punches him into submission, thus rescuing the armed cops in the room.
“If you ever met Bottomly,” says a retired Boston police detective, “that scene would
make you cry laughing. Bottomly had to get permission from his mom to swat a fly.”
The movie ends with Fonda-Bottomly taking Curtis-DeSalvo’s confession to the murders. The Task Force chief urges the Strangler to unburden himself because if he does he’ll “feel better.” And the Strangler complies in a series of stream-of-consciousness revelations punctuated by catatonic fits.
A former Cambridge police officer gives a succinct two-thumbs-down to the production: “It was a crock of shit.”
Later that year, it would also become a bone of contention.
George Nassar’s appeal for a third trial in the Irvin Hilton slaying was rejected by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts on May 6, 1968. Bailey had contended that at Nassar’s 1967 retrial, the defense had not been given sufficient opportunity to question potential jurors; that Nassar’s constitutional rights had been violated by excluding as jurors people opposed to capital punishment; and that the judge had erred in not instructing the jury that eyewitness identifications were often unreliable. Bailey lodged eight other complaints; the Supreme Judicial Court justices found no basis in the record for any of them. They did, however, authorize the Superior Court to compensate Bailey for his efforts on Nassar’s behalf.
Nassar moved immediately to get himself a new lawyer: William Homans of Boston. Homans would take the case to the United States Supreme Court in October of 1968.
That summer Albert, perhaps following Nassar’s lead, would also fire Bailey. To represent him he retained Thomas C. Troy.
Bailey says today that he and DeSalvo remained firm friends until the latter’s death. Events subsequent to the summer of 1968 seem to indicate otherwise.