The Boston Stranglers

by Susan Kelly

  15

  From Jet Plane Lawyer to Helicopter Lawyer

  Today, at age sixty-five, Tom Troy is no longer the “two-fisted drinker” he describes himself as once having been. Heart surgery and diabetes have drastically altered his habits; the only bars he frequents now are the ones in the gym he had installed in his home. Six-feet-two-inches tall and trimmer than he was a decade ago, he can still fill a large room by himself. And he has lost not a whit of the color that has made him a Boston legend.

  Born in 1930, Troy was the son of a Boston detective killed in the line of duty. After a stint in the Marines, Tom followed his father’s career footsteps, first into the Wilmington, Massachusetts, police department and thereafter into the Metropolitan District Commission police. What might have been a lifetime in law enforcement was ended when he suffered a work-related injury. He retired with a pension from the force and enrolled in law school, from which he graduated in 1967. His specialty: defending the kind of people he’d once arrested.

  When Troy passed the Massachusetts bar in 1967, he celebrated—and announced—the occasion by renting a helicopter to fly him over Boston. He had the pilot land on the front lawn of the District Court in Dorchester. The gesture accomplished exactly what Troy intended it would—it served notice that a major presence on the legal scene had arrived, one who had quite literally descended from the heavens.

  Although Troy’s extravagant personal style would grate on some of his more conservative brethren, it won him a great deal of amused admiration from others—and considerable publicity. In 1983, Boston Magazine would designate him one of “The Toughest S.O.B.s in Town.” Troy accepted the accolade graciously.

  All this attention brought him a steady stream of clients. He rapidly developed a reputation as the defender of the indefensible. By March of 1984, when Troy received a court appointment to represent William Douglas, the Tufts University Medical School professor charged with bludgeoning to death the object of his sexual obsession, prostitute Robin Benedict, the lawyer had already tried about fifty-five murder cases. He had lost none of them.

  As it is for all successful litigators, the courtroom is Troy’s theater. The drawled sardonic remark or question is his most potent rhetorical weapon. Representing the accused in a notorious rape case, he demolished a prosecution witness with substance abuse problems by asking her if she chased the pills she took with the alcohol she guzzled. In his closing arguments, he traditionally includes a poem of his own composition.

  His philosophy as a defender has been honed by time and experience: “If somebody throws down the gauntlet, pick it up and beat the shit out of them.”

  Albert retained Troy as his attorney on September 4, 1968. The first meeting of client and lawyer took place under epic circumstances. Since Albert obviously couldn’t leave Walpole to visit Troy at his office, the mountain went to Mohammed—by helicopter. As the craft settled to the ground inside the prison wall, it was approached by machine-gun-toting guards unhappy, to say the least, with this intrusion. Troy emerged from the helicopter and pushed past the official greeters, barking, “Get the hell out of my way. I’m a lawyer.”43

  They let him through.

  Albert was thrilled with the bravura performance of his new attorney. In F. Lee Bailey he’d had a jet-plane lawyer. In Troy, he exulted, he now had a “helicopter lawyer.”

  Troy’s first legal move on behalf of his new client was to try to obtain a preliminary injunction preventing the local premiere of the movie The Boston Strangler. His primary argument was that a public screening of the film would make it impossible for Albert ever to receive a fair trial should he be indicted for any out-of-state criminal offenses or indeed for the Strangler murders. But the attorney’s real purpose, as he remarks today, was to demand an accounting from F. Lee Bailey. “Albert was due a reasonably substantial amount of money [from the sale of the rights to his life story],” Troy says. “And where was it?”

  The lawyer proposed to find out.

  Another crucial issue for Troy was whether Albert was competent to sign the various releases and contracts he had in 1966. Troy maintained that he was not, and that any agreements Albert had made then were invalid.

  The matter of Albert H. DeSalvo versus Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation and the Walter Reade Organization (the movie’s distributor) came before Judge W. Arthur Garrity in the United States District Court in Boston on October 10, 1968. Attorney James P. Lynch appeared for Fox and Attorney Jerome P. Facher for Walter Reade. The first witness to take the stand was the plaintiff himself. Troy came right to the point by asking Albert if he was the notorious Boston Strangler. Albert replied that he really didn’t know who he was. Troy requested a clarification of this statement. Albert gave one:

  Well, the best way I can explain it is that I have been locked up now in a room, and everywhere I go, a guard is with me. I am not allowed to talk with anybody. My food is brought to me by an inmate. I can’t talk to anybody. Anywhere I go, I have to go with a guard with me. I am not allowed to talk. I am constantly being threatened that I will be locked up if I talk to an inmate or something. If I go out [of solitary] on weekends, which I have just recently been allowed to go out on Saturday or Sunday, I go to the movies, I look like Jacqueline Kennedy with all these guards around me. I am escorted to the movies [within the prison] and escorted back. I just don’t know what I can do or what I can’t do. I don’t know who to trust. I am constantly threatened that if I talk to this or that person, I am going to be locked back in my room again. I am allowed to vegetate. I mean I am allowed to work in the [prison] hospital there where I am isolated in a little area but unallowed to talk with people.

  Troy then asked Albert if he’d ever discussed with Bailey the publication of the book The Boston Strangler. Albert admitted that he had, sometimes. Troy asked him to describe these conversations:

  Mr. Asgeirsson and Mr. Bailey were my counsel. Mr. Asgeirsson would tell me, “Don’t listen to Mr. Bailey and don’t trust him,” and Mr. Bailey would tell me, “Well, we will get rid of him,” so I informed Mr. Asgeirsson about three or four times through Mr. Bailey telling me this here, because it happened I told Mr. Asgeirsson that Mr. Bailey wanted me to sign certain things and I told him I don’t understand what they are, and when it did come about that certain things were to be signed, Mr. Bailey, in front of George McGrath and Charlie Burnim,44 came to Bridgewater and Mr. Bailey got me first alone and says, “I want you to sign,” he said, “Don’t worry about what it is. I am going to get you into Johns Hopkins Hospital.” He said, “You will be able to buy two hospitals.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He says, “Look—I’ve got some papers I want you to sign. Sign them, and I will explain them to you later.”

  Albert demurred on the grounds that he’d promised his brothers he wouldn’t sign anything. Bailey insisted. Albert still refused to put his signature to the papers. Then Bailey delivered an ultimatum: If Albert didn’t do as he was told, Bailey wouldn’t get him a civil commitment (to a mental institution rather than a prison) when he went to trial.

  At this point, in the early summer of 1966, Albert was seemingly unaware that he would go on trial as the Green Man in January 1967. (Bailey says he and Edward Brooke had decided this in April 1966.) Shocked, he reminded Bailey that the lawyer had assured him this would never happen. “Well, things are changing now,” Bailey had replied, according to Albert, which if true is a cavalier way for an attorney to break such news to a client.

  Under this pressure, Albert told the court, he signed the documents. Did he know what was in them? No—Bailey had held them folded in such a way that their contents were invisible. All he could see was the lowest part of the page, where he was to append his signature along with those of F. Lee Bailey and George McGrath.

  I said, “Why can’t I read it?” And Mr. George McGrath was there and Charlie Burnim was there [at Bridgewater]. He [Bailey] said, “If any of the guards sees us or looks in the window, we are in trouble.” I said, “Yes, bu
t I don’t understand what is going on.” He said, “I am your attorney. Trust me. I will show it to you later.” I was scared, I know I shouldn’t sign it, but he said, “I will show it to you later,” and he was my attorney and I signed my name again, but he stressed to me after George McGrath left and Charlie Burnim, he grabbed me aside and said, “Look—promise me never to tell John [sic] Asgeirsson or your brothers or anybody that you signed these papers, or we are in big trouble.” I said, “But why?” He says, “Don’t worry about it. I am your attorney. Trust me.”45

  A year or so afterward, Albert told the court, he asked Bailey if he (Albert) had ever signed a power of attorney over to Bailey. Bailey told him he hadn’t, but Albert, apparently disbelieving, persisted in asking the question. He wrote letters to Bailey that, according to Albert, went unanswered. When Charles Burnim visited Albert at the prison, Albert would put the same queries to him. Burnim told his client he had no answers: “As you probably know, Mr. Bailey is sending me up here just to pacify you.”

  Albert said that he finally had to threaten to discharge Bailey in order to get the lawyer to meet with him at Walpole. “What happened was, Mr. Bailey did come in and I did confront him, and he said, ‘Well, yes, you did sign a power of attorney, but it was limited.’ ” Albert then asked to see any and all documents he might have put his signature to. Bailey promised to provide copies, Albert claimed, but he never did.

  Albert asked Charles Burnim if there was any way to prevent people from writing about him (such as Parade magazine author Lloyd Shearer and Record American gossip columnist Harold Banks), a question he’d also posed to Bailey, and Burnim offered a reply similar to Bailey’s: Albert’s story was in the public domain and whoever wanted to print some version of it couldn’t be stopped. Albert inquired about the possibility of suing such authors. Burnim answered that such a course of action would be disastrous because “everything would be exposed then.”

  Albert noted that Jon Asgeirsson, when informed of these developments, told his client, “You’re being taken right down the drain.”

  Albert had read Gerold Frank’s book, and was shocked and angered that, among other things, his most intimate family correspondence had been reproduced in it. He asked Bailey how this could have happened. Albert was particularly upset that a letter he’d given Bailey to deliver personally to Irmgard had been printed in the book. Bailey told him that the attorney general’s office must have handed over all those materials to Frank.

  Troy asked Albert if Bailey had made clear to him what payment he’d receive for Frank’s use of his life story.

  It was just so much he would explain. He mentioned [again?] something about I will be able to buy two hospitals, and then he said something about money being hidden in the name of McKay, money he has secretly hidden, that if the public knows about it, that suits would be brought against it. I said, “Well, what do you mean?” He said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of everything,” and it is placed under the name McKay or something, money, but he would never explain, and that is why I have always asked Charlie Burnim to please explain, and he says, “I can’t. I wish to hell I never got into this mess.”

  Albert did recall endorsing a check for fifteen thousand dollars made out to Robert McKay and presented to him by Bailey for that purpose.

  Troy asked his client what his mental state had been in the summer of 1966.

  ALBERT: Scared, pressured, under complete pressure. I didn’t know what to do, but I had to rely on my counsel, and I did everything he told me.46

  TROY: Were you aware of everything that was going on around you?

  ALBERT: No, sir, I was not aware, because my counsel wouldn’t tell me anything. He kept everything to himself, and Mr. Burnim said that “Mr. Bailey is neglecting you and his other clients.”

  THE COURT: Excuse me. The question is, how did you feel, and you have stated you felt scared and under complete pressure and not aware of what was going on. If you have anything further to state in response to that question, don’t go off on some other subject.

  TROY: At some time while you were at Bridgewater, Mr. DeSalvo, were you subject to hypnotism? ALBERT: Yes, sir.

  TROY: Were you subject to multiple psychiatric interviews?

  ALBERT: Yes, sir. I was put under hypnosis many times, and I was subjected to all kinds of doctors and everything.

  TROY: Sure. And were there people coming and going all the time to talk with you, either with or without your attorney?

  ALBERT: Yes, sir.

  TROY: People from the Attorney General’s Office?

  ALBERT: Yes, sir.

  TROY: Various doctors?

  ALBERT: Yes, sir.

  TROY: Outside consultants?

  ALBERT: Yes, sir.

  TROY: And hypnotists?

  ALBERT: Yes, sir.

  TROY: Were you a little confused?

  ALBERT: Yes, sir.

  Troy then brought up the issue of whether Albert might be indicted or tried for offenses he’d allegedly committed in Rhode Island and Connecticut. The lawyer was questioning Albert on his knowledge of any out-of-state warrants pending against him when James Lynch, the attorney for Twentieth Century-Fox, asked permission to approach the bench. Lynch told Judge Garrity that F. Lee Bailey, who was present in the courtroom, had just informed him that he (Bailey) had to leave to make an afternoon appointment. In view of this emergency, Lynch wondered if it would be possible to postpone Albert’s cross-examination so that Bailey, who had been scheduled to testify later in the proceedings, might take the stand now. Garrity ruled that Albert’s cross-examination be suspended to accommodate Bailey, unless of course Counselor Troy had an objection. Troy did, on the grounds that Bailey hadn’t been sequestered but allowed to listen to Albert’s entire testimony.

  THE COURT: Excuse me. I don’t get your point. You object to Mr. Bailey testifying at this time?

  TROY: No, no.

  THE COURT: That is all I am ruling on.

  TROY: I do.

  THE COURT: You say you do object.

  TROY: I do.

  T HE COURT: On what grounds?

  TROY: I think cross-examination of DeSalvo should come first.

  THE COURT: Why?

  TROY: Not that Mr. Bailey would tailor his testimony, he would insert his testimony for the benefit of the respondent, but it might just happen that way.

  Garrity was not swayed by Troy’s objection. Bailey mounted the stand and took the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  Questioned by Troy, Bailey said that he’d first met Albert at Bridgewater in late February of 1965 and that three different parties (he didn’t say which ones) had requested him to make this visit. He thought that it had been reported to him that Albert had escaped from incarceration in February of 1967.

  Bailey identified a copy of the June 17, 1966, release given to Gerold Frank and verified his own, Albert’s and George McGrath’s signatures at the bottom of it. He said that a lawyer for New American Library, Frank’s publisher, had drawn up the document. Bailey didn’t know the lawyer’s name.

  Troy asked Bailey if he’d explained the meaning of the release to Albert and Bailey testified that he had, “in painful detail.”

  TROY: Was one of these painful occasions the date of the signing?

  BAILEY: The occasion wasn’t painful, the detail was, and that was one of the occasions.

  TROY: And did you explain to Mr. DeSalvo what the word “perpetuity” means?

  BAILEY: Yes, in somewhat more simple terms.

  TROY: I see. And did you explain the word “biographical” to him?

  BAILEY: Yes.

  TROY: You took all these words that you felt might not be familiar to Mr. DeSalvo and you explained them in detail, didn’t you, Mr. Bailey?

  BAILEY: You mean word by word?

  TROY: Yes.

  BAILEY: No, I did not.

  Troy kept hammering at the same point.

  TROY: Did you give [Alb
ert] a capsule explanation of the document?

  BAILEY: I explained it to him in simple lay terms, as

  I would to any client, yes.

  TROY: I see. And, of course, your testimony will be that he understood, is that correct?

  THE COURT: Well, now, don’t ask the witness what his testimony will be. Ask him questions, please.

  TROY: Do you think he understood you?

  BAILEY: He said that he understood.

  TROY: You didn’t answer my question, Mr. Bailey. Do you think he understood?

  BAILEY: I thoroughly believed that he understood, yes.

  TROY: Did George McGrath hear this explanation? BAILEY: My recollection is that he was sitting three or four feet from me at the time I gave it, so I would have to say that he probably did. I cannot say what his aural stage was at the time.

  TROY: He probably did.

  BAILEY: I would assume that he did, yes. I think he commented on it at one time.

  TROY: Do you know if Mr. McGrath saw Albert peruse it?

  BAILEY: I don’t know what Mr. McGrath saw.

  At this point, the exchange between Troy and Bailey began to take on the quality of an Abbott and Costello routine.

  TROY: Was Mr. Burnim there?

  BAILEY: I think that was the first occasion Mr. Burnim met Mr. DeSalvo, but I am not sure.

  TROY: And did he witness this signing?

  BAILEY: If he was there he witnessed it, yes.

  TROY: If you know.

  BAILEY: You mean did he sign as a witness or did he observe what went on?

  TROY: Did he observe it?

  BAILEY: He was in a room so small facing toward DeSalvo that I would say he must have observed it if that was the occasion of his first visit, I am not sure.