by Susan Kelly
I had also been harassed and threatened with a lawsuit, although the harassment and threats came by telephone, and the harasser was a member of a news organization. This person felt I had secret information about the identity of the real killers, and wanted it.
The memory of such nonsense made me reluctant to make contact with the man who’d written to me in mid-April. Writer’s curiosity being what it is, though, I finally did e-mail him. I should add that the letter I received from him was clearly the product of someone not only sane, literate, and intelligent but averse to personal publicity. And he didn’t want money in exchange for a story.
I sent him an e-mail letting him know he’d found the right Susan Kelly. He replied immediately. The capsule information he gave was, to say the least, intriguing. Ultimately I agreed to meet him and his friend, at a restaurant in western Massachusetts of my choosing. I picked the place because I knew the people who owned it. If someone tried to kidnap me out of the parking lot, at least there’d be reliable witnesses to record the license plate numbers and furnish accurate descriptions of the kidnappers. I let a good friend know where I was going and what I was going to be doing. I also told the friend I’d telephone when I returned from the meeting. Which I did.
Since they wish to remain anonymous, for the present, I’ll call the people I met that Sunday afternoon Sarah and David. David was the letter writer. Sarah, his good friend, was the person who had the actual story to tell. Sarah, like David, was intelligent, highly educated, articulate, and possessed of a sharp memory and an eye for detail. In other words, the perfect witness. The three of us hit it off immediately.
Here is Sarah’s story.
In the summer of 1964 she was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sharing an apartment with three other young women. That season a professional acquaintance of Sarah’s father, like him a prominent Boston psychoanalyst, warned her to be careful: whatever party was responsible for the strangling murders that had taken place from June 1962 to January 1964 was still at large. Sarah—very young, very attractive, a student—fit the prototype of the second group of victims. So she should certainly take care.
I will refer to this psychoanalyst, whose identity is known to me, as Dr. G.
Sarah vividly recalls the warning he gave her. According to Dr. G., the strangler was a Harvard professor who had been arrested by the Cambridge police for beating his wife. Although unspecified authorities were positive he was the killer, there was insufficient evidence to pin the eleven murders on the man. Thus he was no longer in custody. So said Dr. G.
In the autumn of 1964, in conversation with Dr. G., Sarah raised the subject of the Harvard professor. To her shock, he denied ever discussing it with her. He denied it, she recalls, quite vehemently.
On March 30, 2001, David had done some intensive research of his own. He visited the Cambridge Police Department and asked to inspect their journals from late 1963 to August 1964. He was seeking the record of an arrest for wife-beating (it wasn’t called domestic violence back then) that might have corresponded to the one described—and subsequently denied—by Dr. G. What David found was that the journal was meticulously kept. With the following exception: some of the pages for November and December 1963 were loose rather than bound, and out of chronological order. Some had been tucked beneath the front cover of the journal.
There were no entries for arrests or incidents happening between November 29, 1963, and December 20, 1963. In David’s words: “Considering how meticulously these records were kept and the fact that their current availability at the time must have required that they be sequentially bound each day, this is unlikely to be an error by the clerk who typed the archival version of the pages. It seems like a good hypothesis that pages were excised at the time, and, after that occurred, the dutiful record keeper started the next day’s December entry on the last available clean page, which in this case happened to be on the back of a finished November day.” David, someone naturally endowed with investigative ability, adds that “the missing pages could be historically important since they fall between the murders of Joann Graff and Mary Sullivan.”
David also noted that in March 1964 the journal notes a case marked “confidential” and assigned to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. No hint of what crime the case might involve, who victim and perpetrator might be, is provided.
I explained to Sarah and David that cases thus marked, where no public information is given, usually involve sex crimes.
A point to bear in mind: Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to eleven murders and claimed to have committed two thousand rapes, never confessed to a sexual assault in Cambridge in March 1964. Nor was he charged with such an offense.
One wonders why the Cambridge police journal entries from the November-December period are missing. It is possible they were removed by the state police. At my request, the matter is being investigated. Perhaps the missing pages will reappear, as well as the confidential file from March 1964. Probably not. Except for unsolved homicides, the Cambridge Police Department, like virtually all police departments, routinely destroys the records of all cases after a certain period of time.
Since no one on the Cambridge police force ever seriously believed that Albert DeSalvo murdered Cambridge resident Beverly Samans in May 1963, that case remains officially open. As I’ve mentioned before, the principal suspect in that murder has long since died.
Final note: Sarah has been a lifelong friend of one of Albert DeSalvo’s sexual assault victims. Many years ago, Sarah reports, this woman had a dream in which DeSalvo appeared to her and asked her forgiveness. She gave it. The following morning she learned from the news that he had been stabbed to death in prison.
Since 1995, the following people, who contributed so much to this book, have died:
Former Boston Police Department Commissioner Edmund McNamara
Attorney Thomas Troy
Former Massachusetts and United States Attorney General Elliot Richardson
Former Massachusetts Governor Endicott Peabody
Former Cambridge Police Detective James Roscoe
George Higgins
F. Lee Bailey has suffered some serious reversals since 1995. In March 1996 he was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Maurice Paul to six weeks in a Tallahassee, Florida, jail on a contempt of court charge, specifically for failing to turn over to the government 400,000 shares of stock owned by one of the lawyer’s former clients, international drug trafficker Claude DuBoc. In January 2000, in Orlando, Florida, U.S. Magistrate James Glazebrook recommended that Bailey be held in contempt on a similar matter: a refusal to hand over to the federal government two million dollars in legal fees from client William McCorkle, infomercial king and convicted swindler. Said Judge Glazebrook: “[Bailey] has no right to accept fraudulently obtained and laundered money in payment of a fee.” Glazebrook further stated that while Bailey was being cross-examined, he “rarely gave a straight answer. The privilege to practice law is not a license to share in the proceeds of fraud.”
From May 30 to June 5, 2000, Collier County (Florida) Circuit Court Judge Cynthia Ellis refereed disciplinary proceedings against Bailey. The complainant was the Florida Bar. In her Amended Report of Referee, Judge Ellis recommended that Bailey be disbarred from practicing law in Florida on the grounds that he had committed the following violations:
• Commingling of Client Funds which were to be held in trust with the Lawyer’s personal funds and failure to maintain the client funds in a specifically identified lawyer’s trust account.
• Misappropriation of Client trust funds and failure to maintain said funds in a separate trust account.
• Misuse and misappropriation of client funds and disobedience of a court order and dishonest conduct before a tribunal.
• Violation of the rules prohibiting dishonesty and false statements to a tribunal.
• Violation of the rules proscribing conduct which creates a conflict of interest with the client.
• Disclosure
of confidential communication without authorization of the client.
• Use of information obtained during the course of representation to the disadvantage of the client.
—In the Supreme Court of Florida (Before a Referee); Case No. SC96767, TFB Number 1996-51,085 (15B), 1997-50, 110 (15A). Complainant: The Florida Bar vs. Respondent: F. Lee Bailey, p. 20.
Furthermore, Judge Ellis wrote,
The Court finds the following aggravating factors to be present under Standard 9.22 of the Florida Standards for Imposing Lawyer Sanctions
• 9.22(b) dishonest or selfish motive
• 9.22 (c) a pattern of misconduct
• 9.22 (d) multiple offenses
• 9.22 (f) submission of false statements
• 9.22 (g) refusal to acknowledge the wrongful nature of conduct
• 9.22 (i) substantial experience in the practice of law Ibid., pp. 20-21
Ellis concluded her withering assessment by writing that “Indeed, since the disciplinary actions noted above, Chief Judge Paul and Magistrate Judge Glazebrook and this Referee have had numerous opportunities to assess and characterize the demeanor and credibility of the Respondent. In each instance, the various Judges and Justices have employed circumspect and eloquent ways of saying the same thing: The Respondent is a liar ... At the end of the day, the Respondent has forfeited his privilege to practice law in the state of Florida. Frankly, it is difficult for this referee to conceive of a more egregious set of circumstances than those which Mr. Bailey has brought upon himself.” Ibid., p. 23.
The day before Thanksgiving 2001, F. Lee Bailey was disbarred in Florida.
What of Albert DeSalvo’s other attorneys?
Jon Asgeirsson has told Elaine Sharp that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
Francis C. Newton, Jr., is a judge.
In the spring of 2001 someone gave me a copy of an interesting document: a transcript of an “interrogation” of Albert DeSalvo conducted at Bridgewater State Hospital on March 6, 1965. This was not an interrogation made by a police officer or other law enforcement official. March 6, 1965, was one of the days F. Lee Bailey visited Albert DeSalvo at Bridgewater. At the top of the document is a handwritten note partially cut off by the photocopying process. What is visible of the inscription reads “Bai Tape.”
The transcript consists of a series of questions posed to DeSalvo about the murders of Anna Slesers, Ida Irga, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, and Sophie Clark. The document is jumbled and oddly annotated: next to the typed heading of a portion of the transcript that identifies it as detailing the murder of Nina Nichols is handwritten “Ida Irga.” Whether this is a correction is difficult to determine. A footnote to the dialogue about Helen Blake states that the “rest of the tape did not record.”
The Helen Blake discussions preserved in the transcript contain, nonetheless, some striking passages. One occurs when Albert DeSalvo describes his rape of Blake: “She was a well-built woman, and I picked her up, took off her clothes, and rather than doing anything more to her, took off her clothes and had intercourse with her.”
The autopsy of Helen Blake found no spermatozoa present in either her vagina or her rectum.
The autopsy additionally found that the ligatures around Blake were a bra, tied in front, and two stockings tied at the nape. DeSalvo was quite clear on March 6, 1965, that the reverse was true.
The Sophie Clark portion of the March 1965 transcript contains equally interesting details. The interrogator asks DeSalvo what he did with Sophie’s halt-slip.
A: I put it around her throat.
Q: What color was it?
A: A white one, if I’m not mistaken.
Q: Okay, that’s it.
Q: Is that it? Is that right?
Surely a killer with a much-vaunted photographic memory should have recalled such a detail. And not have demanded assurance that his memory hadn’t played him false.
On page eighteen of John Bottomly’s personal transcript of Tape One of DeSalvo’s confession to the murder of Sophie Clark, recorded on August 24, 1965, Bottomly notes that Albert has already viewed the police photographs of the crime scene.82 The March 6, 1965, transcript of the interrogation of DeSalvo at Bridgewater records the following dialogue about the murder of Helen Blake.
Q: If you stand in the middle of the bedroom door looking in, where would the bed be?
A: To your right.
Q: What kind of bed was it? Now c’mon ...
A: Let’s see. The bed would be ... yes, the bed would be to your right. I’ve got the picture now. I’ve got the picture now, and the dresser would be to your left. The dresser to your left, the bed to your right, and there was windows there, because one was half open.
A distinct picture forms in the mind of whoever reads the above passage, and the picture is not a pretty one.
The lawsuit of the DeSalvo and Sullivan families against the Attorney General of Massachusetts is set for trial in June 2002. Elaine Sharp considers using the following quote from Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece in her closing argument.
Time’s Glory is to calm contending kings
To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light To stamp the seal of time in aged things
To wake the morn and sentinel the night
To wrong the wronger till he render right To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours And smear with dust their glitt’ring golden towers.
Shortly after eight on the morning of October 26, 2001, the body of Albert DeSalvo was exhumed from a cemetery in Peabody, Massachusetts. I was present, as were Elaine Sharp, Richard and Rosalie DeSalvo, and Timothy DeSalvo. James Starrs oversaw the procedure; he and his daughter-in-law and assistant Traci Starrs recorded data as the grave was opened and the coffin raised. Videographer Mitchell Calhoun and photographer Gaetan Cotton documented every step of the process.
Kevin Watts and Leo Barry of the John-Lawrence Funeral Home in Marstons Mills, Massachusetts—the funeral home that had provided, free of charge, the facilities for the autopsy of Mary Sullivan—loaded the casket into the back of a black SUV. Just before the door of the SUV was closed, Timothy DeSalvo kissed his right hand and laid it on the casket to wish the earthly remains of his uncle Godspeed.
There was no way to tell that the SUV was a hearse except by looking at its license plate. The choice of an innocuous vehicle was deliberate: Elaine Sharp and the DeSalvos wanted to attract as little attention as possible.
After some business was finished at the cemetery office, the convoy—the hearse in the lead, Gaetan Got-ton, Elaine Sharp, and I in a bright red SUV loaded with photographic equipment, and James Starrs, Traci Starrs, and Mitchell Calhoun in a black pick-up truck equally loaded with photographic equipment—set off for Pennsylvania. The autopsy of Albert DeSalvo would be performed at York College of Pennsylvania.
The purpose of the autopsy would be twofold: to recover physical evidence that might lead to the solution of the 1973 murder of DeSalvo and the 1964 murder of Mary Sullivan. The York College site for the procedure had been chosen because it was convenient for the many experts being called in from various parts of the country to participate.
There was already considerable certainty that Albert DeSalvo had not—as he insisted he had—murdered Mary Sullivan. Tests on the samples of material taken from her body compared with samples of mitochondrial DNA taken from Richard DeSalvo indicated this. Tests run on nuclear DNA extracted from the tissue of Albert DeSalvo himself would merely affirm those results.
The mood of everyone in the convoy—we communicated vehicle to vehicle by walkie-talkie—was tense, punctuated by moments of hilarity. The drive south through Massachusetts had everyone a little on edge. Would the press find out and follow us? Would we be stopped by law enforcement? The latter possibility was remote, but hovered nonetheless. In exhuming DeSalvo’s corpse and transporting it out of state, could we be said to be tampering with the evidence in an ongoing criminal investigation?
We crossed the border into Connecticut a
nd stopped for breakfast to celebrate. “It’s like a road trip with friends,” Leo Barry remarked. “And then you remember what we’re doing.” That knowledge was with us every time we made a rest stop during the ten-hour journey. We would glance at tourists in their RVs, stretching their legs, walking their dogs, eating burgers, and think, “You have no idea of what’s in the cargo bay of that black SUV.”
One of the convoy vehicles ran low on gas in New York and made an urgent plea by walkie-talkie to get off at the next exit and seek a service station. The exit we took led to the Poughkeepsie airport. “There has to be a gas station around here somewhere,” someone said. After a half mile we ran into a traffic jam. As the cars ahead of us inched along, I noticed a huge roadside sign. It read HIGH SECURITY AREA. ALL VEHICLES SUBJECT TO SEARCH. I looked over at Gaetan Cotton, who was driving. Judging by the expression on his face, he had also noticed the sign. So had the passengers in the other two vehicles. As one, the hearse, the truck, and our SUV pulled out of line, U-turned, and sped back to the highway. When we did stop for gas twenty minutes later everyone rolled out of the cars laughing uncontrollably. It was the hysteria of relief.
“What would you have done?” I asked Kevin Watts. “If the police had told you to open the...”
He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “I don’t want to think about it.”
Night had fallen by the time we drove up to the rear entrance of the York College building where the autopsy would take place. John (Jack) Levisky, a professor of anthropology, was waiting to admit us. Kevin Watts and Leo Barry rolled the casket on a wheeled gurney into the building and onto an elevator. Gaetan Cotton and Mitchell Calhoun swarmed like paparazzi with their cameras. It was essential that every step of the process be photographed. Cotton and Calhoun would indeed film the autopsy from beginning to end.