by Susan Kelly
Delaney concluded his memo with the comment that “obviously it is my feeling that this woman is very possibly the latest victim of the multiple ‘Strangler.’ ”
Delaney, who would quit the police and go to work for F. Lee Bailey the following year, would later considerably modify his belief that as of the late spring of 1965 the Boston Strangler was still on the loose and not incarcerated in Bridgewater State Hospital trying to convince someone other than F. Lee Bailey of his guilt.
20
Origins of a Hoax
If Albert DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler, where did he get the information about the killings that enabled him to persuade F. Lee Bailey, Jon Asgeirsson, Gerold Frank, Edward Sherry, John Donovan, Phillip DiNatale, Andrew Tuney, and some members of the media that he was the savage murderer of thirteen women?
The answer is that there was a minimum of six excellent sources for the necessary data readily available to him.
Even so, how did Albert manage to absorb, assimilate, and retain so much varied and detailed information?
The answer to that question lies in a piece of testimony given by Ames Robey at the 1968 court proceeding launched by DeSalvo against the maker and distributor of the Strangler movie. Robey had commented of his former patient that the latter had “absolute, complete, one hundred per cent total photographic recall.”
Robey was not the only person to note—and remark on—this talent.
“He [DeSalvo] had a very retentive memory,” says one Cambridge detective.
“Albert had a phenomenal memory,” says Jon Asgeirsson.
“It was remarkable,” says Tom Troy.
Robey cites an example of how he tested Albert’s ability to make instantaneous mental carbon copies of people, places, and things: “We had a staff meeting [at Bridgewater] with about eight people. Albert was walked in and walked out. The next day we had him brought back in. Everyone had on different clothes, was sitting in different positions. I said, ‘Albert, you remember coming in yesterday. Describe it.’ ”
Albert did, perfectly.
The first source of information about the killings available to Albert was the press itself. Newspaper accounts of the stranglings had been extraordinarily detailed. With respect to the murder of Anna Slesers, the Globe, on June 15, 1962, reported that she had been found naked but for her housecoat, which had been ripped open, its cord tightly knotted around her neck, and that she had been beaten before being choked. On the same date the Traveler informed its readership that Anna’s body bore bruises and that she had been dead for about three hours before she was found by her son. The Traveler article included the further detail that there was blood from the victim’s right ear on the kitchen floor. The Herald repeated this latter finding, noting too that Anna lay on her back on the kitchen floor. On July 4, the Globe reported that the killer first tried to strangle her with a man’s leather belt, but it broke: “Police said he would have to be a man of unnatural strength to do that.”
Even the sexual assaults on the women were graphically described. Whoever glanced at the Globe’s account of Nina Nichols’s death could conclude that she had been not only strangled but abused with a wine bottle. That Evelyn Corbin’s killer may have forced or coerced her to perform oral sex on him was also a published fact.
As frank as the Globe, the Traveler, and even the Herald may have been, they were left in the shade by the Record American daily and its Sunday Advertiser. On January 9, 1963, the tabloid launched a series on the murders written by ace reporters Jean Cole and Loretta McLaughlin. The lead article the Record entitled TWO GIRL REPORTERS ANALYZE STRANGLER.57
On January 14, McLaughlin and Cole gave an exceptionally detailed account of the murder of Helen Blake. Included in it was not only an exact description of the layout of the victim’s apartment, but a step-by-step rendition of how the killer had rummaged though Helen’s belongings:
Some drawers are pulled out of a desk and a bureau. Others are removed completely and set on the floor. The drawers have been examined.
A large black trunk has been taken from the bedroom closet and placed on a chair. The lock has been released with a broken knife, and the tip of the blade, broken in the process, is still in the lock hinge. The handle of the knife and the rest of its blade rests [sic] against Helen’s moccasin-slipper on the floor under her bed.
Helen’s watches have all been examined and placed on the bureau. Her jewelry boxes have been opened and are on the floor. Her pocketbooks have been gone through. Even the sugar bowl and teapot have been looked into.
McLaughlin and Cole’s January 15 article gave even further details of the crime and the crime scene. (“Her coffee cup still clean was set out on a small table in the living room”) and the murderer’s actions (‘He opened a footlocker, storing bed lines and towels”).
It was brilliant investigative journalism. It was also practically all the information anyone needed in order to make a plausible-sounding confession to the murder.
On January 23, McLaughlin and Cole examined the death of Ida Irga. Again, the detail included in the story was astonishing: that a hand mirror lay on a table in Ida’s living room; that the toilet seat was raised (here, as in the case of Sophie Clark, a cigarette butt was found floating in the bowl); that Ida’s suitcase rested on the studio couch in the living room.
Toward the end of the piece was this paragraph:
When he rendered Ida unconscious, her assailant dragged her to the living room where he assaulted her, this time locking the feet of the victim in the slats of two chairs.
On January 23, under full-face photographs of Anna Slesers, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, Jane Sullivan, Sophie Clark, and Patricia Bisette, the Record printed THE FACTS: ON REPORTERS’ STRANGLE WORKSHEET. Rather than an article, this was a chart that listed the names of the victims, their ages, the times of their deaths, the times their bodies were found, the causes of their deaths, the probability of sexual assault, where the bodies had been found, where the victims had been killed, what they had been wearing, and whether their apartments had been ransacked. There were also detailed notes on the victims’ hobbies and personal interests, on their employment, and on their affiliations—if any—with area hospitals.
That DeSalvo had memorized this chart is apparent because in his confession to John Bottomly, he regurgitated not only the correct data on it but the few pieces of misinformation it contained as well.
A second source of information about the crimes was law enforcement. “The case had leaks all over it,” says Edmund McNamara, his disgust with this state of affairs obvious even today.
One of the major leaks was Suffolk County Medical Examiner Richard Ford, who according to McNamara held frequent unauthorized press conferences at which he liberally distributed information about the autopsy findings on the victims. Ford was at odds with—and in direct competition with—his colleague Dr. Michael Luongo. In terms of personality, the two men were polar opposites. Luongo was a reserved, methodical, thoughtful man who, as procedure dictated, submitted his findings directly to the district attorney’s office and gave minimal information to the press. Ford, in contrast, was handing out copies of the autopsy protocols to reporters. Understandably, they loved him for his largesse.
Former Boston Police Department Detective Sergeant James McDonald says today that the Strangler Bureau itself was appallingly lax in its handling of the confidential files on the murders. Rather than being kept under lock and key, McDonald states, the files, or casebooks, were left strewn around the State House headquarters of the Bureau, readily available to be leafed through by any visitor who wished to do so. One of McDonald’s colleagues on the Boston Homicide Squad, having business to discuss with the Strangler Task Force, entered the Bureau offices one afternoon and bumped into a group of State House pages goggling over the crime scene photos and trading them back and forth like baseball cards.
The Strangler Bureau’s failure to exercise tight control over the material it had accumulated concerning
the murders is confirmed by the Task Force members themselves. In the February 1967 memo to Herbert Travers written by Sandra Irizarry, Andrew Tuney, and Phillip DiNatale, they described how in April of 1964 they had been ordered by Bottomly to throw open the murder files to Gerold Frank, an order to which they objected vehemently, but to no avail; The trio also stated:
During the monumental task of xeroxing the casebook files to be distributed to the Boston Police Department, the Department of Public Safety, and the Cambridge Police Department, several different Eminent Domain Division office boys were pressed into service. They had, therefore, the opportunity to read over certain material. In addition, it must be remembered that until the files were organized and sent to the other police departments involved, the lack of space available at the time required that much of this material was spread out over every available desk and table. They were subject to the casual perusal [emphasis added] of the regular staff members of the Eminent Domain Division. Also, all outside telephone calls and conversations between staff members took place within probable hearing distance of both eminent domain staff members and casual visitors to the department [emphasis added].
The end result of the Strangler Bureau’s carelessness was that any leaked or purloined so-called secret information about the murders that wasn’t published in the newspapers ended up public property anyway. That Mary Sullivan had been found dead with the handle of a broom inserted three inches into her vagina had never been printed or broadcast. The general population was nonetheless quite aware of this ghastly fact. Even Gerold Frank reports that “it was common knowledge on the streets.”
Where, presumably, anybody, including Albert DeSalvo, could have picked it up.
A third source of information on the murders was the “research” Albert had done himself. After DeSalvo was convicted on the Green Man charges, Robey asked him how he’d obtained the familiarity he’d shown with the layouts of the Strangler’s victims’ apartments. That was child’s play for him, Albert maintained. So fascinated had he been by press accounts of the murders that he’d taken the trouble to visit—and tour—each crime scene. He’d had no trouble slipping in and out of each dwelling.
He was, after all, a past master of the art of housebreaking.
What data Albert didn’t procure through the street grapevine, from the newspapers, or through his own investigations, may have been fed to him before and after he began confessing—inadvertently in some cases and quite deliberately in others.
On March 20 and 21, 1965, Bailey had brought hypnoanalyst William Joseph Bryan III to Bridgewater for the purpose of putting Albert into a trance in order to elicit from him further details of the murders that might be buried in his subconscious mind. In their respective books, Gerold Frank and Bailey offer partial transcripts of these sessions. According to both, Bryan urged Albert to think of the strangling victims as substitutes for his wife, Irmgard, and his daughter, Judy—the true targets of Albert’s homicidal rage, Bryan opined. As Frank himself wrote, “those who witnessed the hypnoanalysis wondered how much DeSalvo had been led or influenced by Dr. Bryan, so forceful and domineering.” And indeed, Bryan’s questions seem to have been highly suggestive: “Each time you strangled, it was because you were killing Judy, wasn’t it? You were killing Judy . . .”58
Bryan drew a further connection between the kind of massage Albert had been taught to perform on Judy as therapy for her hip disease, which entailed placing painful pressure with the thumbs on the child’s thighs, and the sexual molestation of the murder victims.
Who can say to what extent, too, the resolve of Albert (who had been injected with sodium pentothal as well as hypnotized) to be known as the Strangler might have been strengthened by Bryan’s words?59
It may be possible, too, that F. Lee Bailey, when conducting his initial interrogations of Albert, accidentally let slip some of the confidential information Donovan and Sherry had given him.
Beyond that, what kind of questions did Bailey pose? How did he phrase them? How difficult were they to answer?
In a book entitled Confessions of the Boston Strangler, published in February 1967 by Pyramid Books, author George Rae wrote that “[John] Donovan primed Bailey with half-questions and key words such as ‘What was Nina’s last name?’ ... ‘What happened on June 30, 1962?’ ‘What kind of foreign objects figured in the stranglings’ . . . ‘How were these foreign objects used?’ . . . ‘What was the color of this chair?’ . . . ‘Miss Clark’s first name’ ... and so on.”60
If Rae is accurate, then Bailey was asking questions that could have been answered by any reasonably alert newspaper reader—even one not blessed with a photographic memory.
Two people are suspected by local law enforcement authorities of having deliberately provided Albert with information about the stranglings so as to make his confession to them the more substantive and therefore believable. One of these individuals was a Boston police detective, now deceased, who resigned from the force when Edmund McNamara relieved him of his investigative duties and returned him to uniformed patrol. When this person left the department, he took with him handwritten copies of sensitive and privileged information (in enormous quantity) about the murders. He was known, prior to April 1965, to be in regular contact with Albert at Bridgewater. Some of this man’s ex-colleagues believe he may have been motivated by revenge against the Boston Police Department to feed data on the stranglings to Albert. Others think he did so in order to solve the case and claim the reward money.
The second person investigators speculate might have coached Albert for his role as a serial killer was George Nassar.
There is, however, a third party, who beyond the shadow of a doubt, did knowingly and quite intentionally provide Albert with information about the murders—while he was taking the latter’s confession to them.
That was John Bottomly, during August and September of 1965.
As a tutor, Bottomly was persistent but ultimately inept. Lengthy as the confession was that he extracted from Albert, it is remarkably thin in incriminating detail, which explains why the only versions of it ever made public were abbreviated and heavily doctored.
The full version virtually exonerates DeSalvo.
21
The Confessions of Albert DeSalvo, I
When Bottomly quit the attorney general’s office in 1966, he took the original tape recordings of DeSalvo’s confession—some fifty-four hours’ worth—with him. It was clear he didn’t want the contents made public. Elliot Richardson, who succeeded Edward Brooke as chief law enforcement official of the Commonwealth, suspected that Bottomly had removed the recordings, but he wasn’t sure of it until Globe reporter Ronald Wysocki confirmed the fact on February 14, 1968.
Interviewed by Wysocki, Bottomly agreed that the tapes were the state’s property. He also told the reporter that he’d asked Richardson, Donald Conn, and Herbert Travers (the head of the attorney general’s office’s criminal division) what they wanted him to do with the tapes, but none of the men bothered to respond to the question.
“Does anybody want them now?” Bottomly blandly inquired of Wysocki.
Richardson apparently did. And he emphatically denied that Bottomly had ever said anything to him about the disposition of the recordings.
In the story he wrote for the Globe, Wysocki compared his effort to get Bottomly to reveal the location of the tapes to “playing ‘20 Questions.’ ”
“Do you know where they are?” Wysocki asked.
“Yes,” Bottomly replied.
“Where?”
“In a bank vault,” Bottomly said.
“Who got the vault?” Wysocki asked.
“I did.”
“Who has the key?”
“I have.”
“Are there any other keys?” Wysocki wanted to know.
“Not to my knowledge,” Bottomly said.
“Then you have the tapes,” Wysocki deduced.
“No,” Bottomly said. “The bank has them.”
“To the best of my knowledge,” Bottomly replied. Then he said, “Why don’t you ask the really important question? Why hasn’t the Attorney General come and gotten the tapes—because they’re not going to try the guy anyhow.”
That much was true.
Shortly after Albert’s murder in 1973, there were calls from the press that the tapes be made public. And in fact some news organizations did eventually acquire recordings of one sort or another of Albert describing some of the murders. At least one of these tapes seems to have been made in 1967, well after Gerold Frank’s book had been published—and well after the purported Strangler had read it.
Bottomly’s own transcript of the 1965 interrogations still exists. It includes a list of the questions Bottomly would put to Albert, and some notes to himself that the Task Force chief had scribbled.
“Start by learning all you can about Albert,” one of these notes reads. “Learn all you can.”
Having made what preparations he felt were necessary, Bottomly went down to Bridgewater in early August of 1965 to begin interrogating the man who so badly wanted to be known as the Strangler.
Albert was eager to talk, which Bottomly encouraged by adopting a jocular yet sympathetic manner toward him. (In this respect, at least, Bottomly showed some ability as an interviewer.) Albert boasted of his sexual exploits. Bottomly responded with the appropriate exclamations (“Fantastic!”) of awe and admiration. Albert, warmed by the flattery of this important man, began to regard the Task Force chief as his buddy—precisely as Bottomly had intended he should.