The Boston Stranglers

by Susan Kelly

  Bottomly died in 1984. Although he and his wife made restitution for the missing bearer bonds, the bonds themselves were never recovered.

  Edward Brooke lost his Senate seat in 1978. He has a law office in Warrenton, Virginia.

  Phillip J. DiNatale resigned from the Boston Police Department to accept an offer from Twentieth Century-Fox to serve as technical consultant on the 1968 film The Boston Strangler. He later became president of his own private detective agency. He died in 1987.

  John Donovan, retired from the Boston Police Department, was most recently head of security for the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

  James McDonald, the Boston Police Department detective sergeant who investigated a number of the strangling murders, remains convinced that Albert DeSalvo committed none of them. He is retired from security work in the private sector.

  Edmund McNamara, who served ten years as Boston Police Commissioner, is retired from law enforcement.

  John Moran is enjoying his leisure after thirty-two years with the Salem Police Department.

  George Nassar, whose long association with Albert DeSalvo ended a month before the latter was slain, is an inmate at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Norfolk, Massachusetts. In 1968, the United States Supreme Court rejected his appeal for a new trial in the 1964 murder of Irvin Hilton.

  Francis C. Newton, Jr., brought an action against F. Lee Bailey in 1971 to recover monies owed Albert DeSalvo as a result of the release he had signed to Gerold Frank. Over the next six years, Newton scheduled numerous appointments with Bailey in order to take the latter’s deposition; unfortunately, Bailey always had to cancel these appointments at the last minute because of trial commitments. In 1977, four years after Albert’s murder, Newton received a payment from Bailey of $47,761.37, which, less an eight-thousand-dollar fee to Bailey and a two-thousand-dollar fee to Newton (for six years’ work) and other expenses, went into Albert’s estate.

  Mr. Newton practices law in Boston and pursues his avocation of Civil War studies.

  Ames Robey practices psychiatry in Stoneham, Massachusetts, and consults on various criminal cases.

  Thomas Troy practices law in Reading, Massachusetts.

  Andre Tuney is chief investigator of the Kuhn Bureau of Investigation, Inc., in Lynn, Massachusetts. He has taught for the Learning Adventure in Boston a course called “Be Your Own Private Detective.”

  Update

  On July 9, 1999, a front-page story in the Boston Globe reported that the Boston Police Department had announced it was searching for DNA evidence to establish whether Albert H. DeSalvo had actually committed the strangling murders that had terrorized the greater Boston area over three decades previously.

  The probe had actually begun in the summer of 1998, when the BPD’s Cold Case Squad examined fourteen boxes of evidence taken from the scenes of the crimes. “The Strangler case is one of the most notorious in the country,” said Captain Timothy Murray to the Globe. “If we can solve this, it might just spark other cities to use DNA to solve old crimes. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  As of July 9, 1999, the police had been unable to locate some of the physical evidence known to have been preserved. Among these missing items were semen samples taken from some of the victims as well as the knife that had been used to stab Albert DeSalvo to death.

  On November 7, 1999, Albert DeSalvo’s son Michael gave an interview to the Boston CBS television news affiliate in which he called for Massachusetts law enforcement authorities to perform the DNA testing that might exonerate his father.

  The Boston Police Department, however, seemed to have lost its enthusiasm for the project since the past July. A spokesperson for the department told the Boston Herald that “There is no biological evidence (from the women) that could give us a suspect. Things (evidence) get contaminated if you leave them out in the air.”

  Timothy Murray was promoted out of the Cold Case Squad.

  In February 2000, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, a British-born Massachusetts attorney who, with her lawyer husband Dan, ran a practice out of Marblehead, received an e-mail from Professor James Starrs of George Washington University. Professor Starrs wondered if Sharp would be interested in working on the Boston Strangler case. Starrs added that if she would prefer not to be involved, she should notify him.

  Sharp knew next to nothing about the Boston Strangler case. A vague recollection suggested to her that it might have taken place around the turn of the twentieth century. (She comments that as someone English-bred, she might have confused the Boston Strangler with Jack the Ripper.) Sharp did, however, know a great deal about Starrs, an internationally famous expert in forensic science. Sharp, a bulldog litigator with an interest in medico-legal work and a specialization in traumatic brain injury and police misconduct cases, also shared Starrs’s professional interests: she had cocounseled or consulted in about sixty murder trials. Her highest-profile case to date was Commonwealth vs. Louise Woodward, in which she prepared the medical defense for the British au pair charged with the beating death of Matthew Eappen, infant son of Drs. Deborah and Sunil Eappen of Newton, Massachusetts. The trial made international headlines for nearly two years.

  In October 1999, Sharp attended the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Reno, Nevada, where Starrs gave a talk on expert testimony and scientific evidence. After the speech Starrs, Sharp, Sharp’s assistant, and a mutual friend had dinner, and later made a day trip to Virginia City, Nevada, to one of the city’s famous graveyards. “A place which held an equal and mutual fascination,” Sharp remarks.

  Starrs, a relaxed man with a quick dry wit, had in his career undertaken to solve some of American history’s great puzzles. He had spearheaded the effort to exhume the remains of explorer Meriwether Lewis, long thought to have died by his own hand, maintaining that the description of the gunshot wounds Lewis had died of—one in the head, the other in the chest—pointed to murder rather than suicide. Starrs led the team of scientists who performed the DNA testing on the body exhumed from the Kearney, Missouri, grave of Jesse James and concluded that the remains were 99 percent likely to be those of the legendary outlaw. This was disappointing news to Texas author Betty Duke, who claimed the real Jesse James was her great-grandfather James Lafayette Courtney, who died in 1943 at age ninety-six. In 1998, Starrs was granted access to the Washington, D.C., medical examiner’s records to determine exactly how FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had died. Starrs was dubious that Hoover—whose body had never been autopsied—died of a heart attack, since nothing in his medical history warranted such a diagnosis. “Hoover had numerous enemies in all walks of life,” Starrs told the Associated Press. “The man’s life was marked for death by all sorts of people.”

  Ambling about the Virginia City cemetery, Sharp told Starrs she’d like to work with him on an exhumation project. They agreed to join forces on the repatriation of an American member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade killed during the Spanish civil war and buried in a mass grave. Starrs entered negotiations with the Spanish government to proceed with the exhumation while Sharp, a journalist before she entered law school, used her press contacts to publicize the effort.

  “Given the events that follow[ed],” Sharp comments, “the repatriation project has not moved forward much.”

  She agreed to work with Starrs on the Strangler project. At Starrs’s behest, she telephoned a relative of Mary Sullivan, the eleventh Strangler victim. This individual was having difficulty obtaining information about the Sullivan homicide from the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office and from the Boston Police Department. Sharp received from him a copy of the hardcover edition of this book, read it, and decided on the basis of the information the book contained that the case should be reinvestigated, putting to use current forensic technology such as DNA testing.

  Sharp met with Mary Sullivan’s relatives and explained their rights to them under the Freedom of Information Act/Massachusetts Public Rec
ords Law

  (FOIA) and the Fair Information Practices Act (FIPA). She then decided that an alliance between the Sullivan survivors and the DeSalvo family might prove a powerful force in persuading the authorities to release the information about the homicide of Mary Sullivan. With this in mind, Sharp telephoned Timothy DeSalvo, Albert DeSalvo’s nephew, who was resistant to her idea but nonetheless eventually suggested she call his father Richard.

  Richard DeSalvo was, at first, Sharp says, “a bit hostile.” Sharp understands why, given the previous experience Richard had had with some of the lawyers involved in the matter of Albert DeSalvo. As Sharp explained what she wanted to do, Richard seemed to soften. He spoke of his brother’s murder, and of how Albert’s corpse had been found hours after the commission of the crime.

  “When a person dies, they stop bleeding, right?” Richard asked Elaine.

  She said yes, that was indeed what happens.

  “Well, there was blood all over the mattress and I think they [the prison authorities] left my brother to bleed to death,” Richard replied bitterly.

  At that moment, Sharp says, she knew she would do whatever was necessary to ease Richard’s decades-old anguish.

  She and Dan Sharp, who would serve as her cocounsel, visited Richard and Rosalie DeSalvo and their son Timothy at the DeSalvos’ home in April 2000. A vital order of business was to have Richard and Rosalie sign a waiver of conflict of interest: the Sharps were representing the family of Albert’s alleged victim Mary Sullivan as well; and suppose, after a thorough investigation was completed, it should emerge that Albert had indeed killed Mary? Insistent that all they wanted was the truth, Richard and Rosalie signed the waiver.

  On May 11, 2000, the Sharps, the DeSalvos, and members of the Sullivan family held a press conference in Boston to announce their intent to reopen the Sullivan homicide. The goal, as Elaine Sharp explained to the media, was to exonerate Albert DeSalvo and, ideally, establish the identity of Mary’s true killer. Timothy DeSalvo stepped forward and, in a statement prepared for him by Elaine, threw down the gauntlet: “Let the investigation begin and let the chips fall where they may.”

  The Sharps distributed copies of letters they had written to various law enforcement agencies, including the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office and the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, requesting the release of materials these agencies held relating to the murder of Mary Sullivan.

  Following the press conference, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly told a reporter from the Boston CBS news affiliate that he sympathized with the Sullivan and DeSalvo families and was inclined to grant their request for access.

  On May 12, 2000, the Boston Police Department issued the following statement: “Due to the passage of time, the deterioration of the evidence, and the likelihood that successful testing cannot be performed on the evidence which remains in Boston Police custody, the Boston Police Department has declined to participate in further investigation into the Boston Strangler case.”

  On September 14, 2000, the families of Mary Sullivan and Albert DeSalvo announced that they had filed suit against Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly, the Boston Police Department, and other law enforcement agencies to compel the release of old evidence collected during the investigation of the murder of Mary Sullivan. Elaine and Dan Sharp would serve as cocounsel for the two families in the suit. James Starrs was on hand to oversee the scientific testing on whatever evidence was released. This did not appear likely to happen soon, if ever. According to Attorney General Reilly, Mary Sullivan’s murder was unsolved—despite Albert DeSalvo’s confession to it—and thus was an open case.

  Nonetheless documents pertaining to it had leaked all over the place. Elaine Sharp obtained a copy of Mary Sullivan’s autopsy report. She read it and compared it to DeSalvo’s confession. The report stated that no spermatozoa had been found in Mary’s vagina, nor had the hyoid bone in her neck been broken.

  If Albert DeSalvo had strangled Mary manually, as he said in January 1965 he had, the hyoid bone would have been fractured. If he had penetrated her vagina with his penis, that too would have left its traces.

  The Sullivan family had Mary’s body exhumed in October 2000. At a funeral home in Marstons Mills, Michael Baden reautopsied the corpse, a process that took more than eight hours. Elaine Sharp watched the procedure, which was recorded by a videographer.

  No sign of trauma could be observed on Mary’s skull. Albert DeSalvo had confessed to knocking her unconscious with a blow to the head before he strangled her.

  Baden removed sixty-eight samples of hair, tissue, and possible semen from the body.

  Subsequently Attorney General Reilly ordered DNA tests to be conducted on the evidence in the Sullivan homicide the A.G.’s office had retained in its custody. Investigators had found some long-missing case files, as well as semen samples taken from the crime scene.

  In mid-November 2000 a Christmas card signed by Albert DeSalvo sold for $202.50 on the E-Bay Internet auction site. A letter written by DeSalvo sold for $600 at the same site, and, in late November, yet another letter went up for bid. The author, who so desperately wanted to be world-famous, could never have imagined such a thing happening.

  U.S. District Court Judge William Young attempted, on December 14, 2000, to mediate between the Sullivan family and the DeSalvos and the law enforcement authorities of Massachusetts. “Why don’t you give [the families the evidence] or at least share it with them?” Young asked Judy Kalman, Senior Counsel for the Attorney General’s Office. “They want to hire their own people. Why not let them do that?”

  Said Dan Sharp to the Boston Herald: “We have met with the Attorney General’s Office and we have been given zip, zilch, zero, zed.”

  Kalman maintained the need for the A.G.’s office to hold on to the evidence in the Sullivan case: “This is an open, ongoing criminal investigation.”

  Young urged Kalman and the Sharps to get together and work out their differences amicably. Negotiations were attempted; the attempts did not prove fruitful.

  On February 20, 2001, Attorney General Reilly announced that DNA testing of the evidence in the Sullivan case had been “nonproductive.” A second group of tests was being conducted, from which, Reilly told the press, he would expect results in another four weeks. The Sharps filed a motion in U.S. District Court demanding a halt to the state’s testing. “The defendants are in the process of destroying evidence even as we speak,” Dan Sharp stated.

  James Starrs was attending the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Science in Seattle, Washington. On Friday, February 23, he had called a press conference to discuss the results of the tests he had performed on the samples taken from Mary Sullivan’s body. The announcement he made to the two hundred people gathered to hear him speak was, however, something no one in the audience anticipated. He said that he had been ordered by Judge Young not to talk.

  Elaine Sharp was present. Masking her frustration, she turned to the members of her team and stated formally, “It is my duty to inform you that you are gagged.” Young’s order covered the attorneys as well as Starrs.

  On February 28, 2001, Judge Young held a session at the Harvard Law School. During this proceeding he rejected the major counts in Attorney General Reilly’s motions for dismissal of the lawsuit brought by the DeSalvo and Sullivan families.

  The litigation continues. It appears nowhere near a speedy resolution.

  How do the relatives of Albert DeSalvo and Mary Sullivan—other than those behind the lawsuit—feel about the reopening of the Strangler case? Distinctly unhappy, in several instances. Helen Sullivan Rapoza, Mary Sullivan’s sister, was quoted in Newsweek (March 5, 2001) as telling Diane Sullivan Dodd, the sister behind the litigation, that “I hate what you’ve done. I don’t want to talk about it.” Albert DeSalvo’s children are in favor of the effort to exonerate their father; most of Albert DeSalvo’s siblings are unwilling to join in Richard’s quest to clear his brother’s name,
although one brother, Joseph, has softened his opposition to the idea.

  Kathleen Johnson, sister of Patricia Bissette, told Newsweek she could see no happy outcome to a reinvestigation of the murders: “I feel it can only cause more hurt. I wish they’d leave it alone.”

  In mid-April 2001 I received a letter from a man living in northern New England. He began the letter by asking if I were the Susan Kelly who had written The Gemini Man, and went on to hint that a close friend of his had information that might bear on the Strangler case. He provided his business address, voice-mail number, and e-mail address. He ended the letter by requesting that I e-mail him if I happened to be the Susan Kelly he sought.

  For several days, I debated whether to do so. Over the years I had received a lot of mail from individuals claiming to know something crucial about the Strangler case. Almost none of them did. A good number of the writers appeared to be demented. Some were demented and venal: one correspondent demanded “a lot of money” before he would divulge a tale of how the FBI, the CIA, and a certain famed attorney conspired (in a Manhattan hotel room) to frame Albert DeSalvo for the stranglings. Interestingly, the late father of this person was an ex-police officer suspected by some of his colleagues of feeding details of the killings to DeSalvo while the latter was incarcerated at Bridgewater in later 1964 and early 1965.