Jim Mellon knew this was not true and was angered that Brooke was talking to the press as if he were an expert on the case. The attorney general had never been involved in a murder investigation before, and the man he had chosen to lead the task force was a bow-tied real estate lawyer named John Bottomly, a longtime friend and former classmate of Brooke at Boston University School of Law.
Though he had never argued a criminal case, Bottomly, like Brooke, was active in Republican politics. Unlike the charismatic Brooke, however, the introverted Bottomly had not found political success as a Republican in the Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts, having lost his only campaign, a bid for the state senate, in the 1950s. Brooke told the press he had not chosen his friend for his investigative skills but because he was a great administrator, and that Bottomly’s job was to coordinate information from the various police departments working on the strangler case.
Jim Mellon thought Brooke and Bottomly were using the Boston Strangler case for political ends. It was no secret that Brooke, the nation’s only African American attorney general, was eyeing a seat in the United States Senate, where no black man had served since Reconstruction. If Brooke succeeded, his good friend John Bottomly might have a shot at the attorney general’s office.
Nevertheless, Mellon discussed his theories about the Boston Strangler case with Bottomly on several occasions. Mellon believed an African American man working on the MacDaniels painting crew could have killed Anna Slesers and possibly Helen Blake. He also believed that a black man had strangled Sophie Clark. Mellon claims that Bottomly told him to keep those thoughts to himself. It would look very bad for Ed Brooke if the killers were black, Bottomly reportedly told Mellon. Bottomly suggested to Mellon that he did not want to complicate Brooke’s political career by adding race as an issue in the strangler case. Mellon concluded that the case had become a political circus.
The political circus would soon become a full-blown carnival. John Bottomly came under harsh criticism from the task force when he added a psychic, Peter Hurkos, to the strangler team. A native of Holland, the fifty-two-year-old Hurkos was a former housepainter who claimed to have gained his psychic abilities after falling thirty-five feet from a ladder and fracturing his skull. When he regained consciousness three days later, Hurkos claimed, he pleaded with his doctor not to travel, but the doctor didn’t heed the warning and died soon thereafter during a trip abroad. Hurkos first came to the United States in the 1950s, to help police in Miami catch a double murderer. He called himself “the psychic detective” and took credit for solving twenty-seven murders in seventeen countries.
Hurkos was in Los Angeles trying to close a deal for film rights to his life story when he was summoned to Boston. On the night of January 29, 1964, the Dutch psychic, accompanied by his six-foot, five-inch bodyguard, landed at the Providence, Rhode Island, airport, where he was met by John Bottomly. Attorney General Brooke had not wanted Hurkos to fly into Boston’s Logan Airport because he was worried about the publicity that might result from the psychic’s involvement in the strangler case. Reporters might raise a fuss if they knew a self-professed mystic was being hired to help find the killers. Just to be safe, Brooke called a secret meeting with the Boston media, asking the reporters not to run stories about Hurkos’s involvement unless it generated a break in the case. Such a request would be scoffed at today, but the reporters grudgingly agreed.
The day after the psychic arrived in town, investigators took boxes of evidence to Hurkos’s room at the Battle Green Inn in Lexington, the site of “the shot heard round the world,” which began the Revolutionary War. Hurkos, who checked in under a fake name, claimed he could see into a killer’s mind by touching an object the killer had come in contact with. A handful of crime scene photographs lay face down in neat piles on the bed. Hurkos slowly ran his pudgy fingers over them. Soon he focused his attention on one stack. “This one, the top one. Show dead woman. Legs apart. I see her. Here, I show you.” Hurkos, a tall and overweight man, fell to the carpet and demonstrated the position in which the victim had been left. A detective flipped the picture over and saw Anna Slesers lying on the floor with her legs spread apart in exactly the fashion that Hurkos had demonstrated.
Next, the detective pulled out several nylon stockings and scarves and placed them on the bed in front of the psychic. Hurkos once again ran his hands through the evidence. He claimed he saw a stick being stuffed inside a young woman’s vagina. It was clear to the police officers in the room that Hurkos was talking about Mary Sullivan. “I see . . . I see a priest!” Hurkos shouted to the stunned detectives. The psychic then corrected himself and said the killer was not a priest but dressed like one and had spent time with many real priests. Hurkos was convinced that the killer once had worked in a seminary and now sold shoes door to door. A job like that would certainly give someone easy access to his victims’ apartments.
Apparently investigators took these words to heart. According to Sidney Kirkpatrick (who wrote about this episode for the Los Angeles Times Magazine), they began to keep a close eye on fifty-six-year-old Daniel Moran, a shoe salesman. In his article titled “The Psychic, the Shoe Salesman, and the Boston Strangler,” Kirkpatrick reports that Moran’s family tried unsuccessfully to get him committed to a mental institution. Moran’s own physician reportedly told police Moran was beset by the fear that he had become the strangler during mental blackouts. The shoe salesman lived in the shadow of Symphony Hall, a few blocks from where Anna Slesers and Sophie Clark had been strangled. Kirkpatrick also writes that Moran spent a brief period studying at St. John’s Seminary after graduating from college. But besides a psychic’s vision, the police had no evidence against the man. Daniel Moran never was charged with any of the strangler murders and died in 2001 in a Massachusetts mental hospital. As for Hurkos, he left Boston as quietly as he had arrived.
The cover on the Hurkos experiment was blown a few days later, however, after the FBI arrested Hurkos in New York City for having impersonated a federal agent. His involvement in the Boston Strangler case was revealed, and the media pounced on the story. In response to the resulting furor, Attorney General Edward Brooke assured the public that Hurkos had been paid for his cooperation not by the state but by two private citizens’ groups.
Meanwhile, Jim Mellon continued to focus on the Mary Sullivan murder. Mellon thought there were two strong suspects. One was Mary’s former boyfriend, Nathan Ward. Mellon had traveled to Cape Cod several times in the weeks following Mary’s death. No one there had a good thing to say about Ward. In addition, Mellon had retrieved three buttons from a man’s shirt that lay next to the toilet where the killer had attempted to flush a red ascot. A local tailor told Mellon they were of Asian design and probably came from Japan. Nathan Ward had been stationed in Japan while serving in the army.
Mellon was also disturbed by the fact that Ward married a woman he barely knew just three weeks after Mary Sullivan’s murder. But what frustrated the investigator most was Ward’s alibi. He swore he had been working at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant the night of the murder. Yet Mary Sullivan’s younger brother David claimed he had visited the restaurant twice that evening and could not find Ward. And while Ward’s boss backed up the alibi, Mellon could not discount the fact that David had not seen Ward at the restaurant that night. Mellon had a feeling the boss was lying.
Another likely suspect was nineteen-year-old Joseph Preston Moss, Delmore’s fiancé. Mellon felt the young man had been too cooperative with the police and reporters in the weeks following the murder. Moss would constantly call the Boston Strangler Task Force, asking for updates on the investigation. Moss also claimed to have visited the apartment the night of January 3, the night before the murder. He said when he knocked on the door and asked for Pat Delmore, Mary told him that she was visiting her parents. Moss told police he also heard a man’s voice behind the door. Moss never saw the man, yet he described him to investigators as being tall with a protruding Adam’s apple. In addition, Pat De
lmore told the police that her apartment key had disappeared from her key chain the night before the murder. Delmore had spent much of that day with Moss. During a polygraph test requested by Mellon, the suspect denied having stolen his girlfriend’s apartment key. The polygraph suggested he was lying. Mellon then asked Moss if he had anything to do with Mary Sullivan’s murder, and he denied that. But again, the polygraph suggested he was lying. Moss’s lawyer claimed the young man had not understood the questions and demanded that he be allowed to retake the polygraph test. Mellon granted the request, and Moss failed the test again. Besides his suspicious eagerness to assist the investigation and the two failed polygraph tests, another piece of evidence could also point to Moss. Two months after Sullivan’s murder, her former roommate Pam Parker received a frightening phone call at her parents’ home. “Is, is this Pam?” the caller asked. “Yes, it is,” she answered. “I’m, I’m gonna do to you what I did to that Mary bitch,” she was warned. The caller had a severe stutter. The only person Parker knew with such a speech impediment was Moss.
Of the two suspects, Nathan Ward seemed more likely. He certainly had a motive—jealousy—and had been verbally abusive toward Mary Sullivan. He had a fiery temper and was skilled in karate. It would not have been difficult for Ward to overpower Mary and choke her to death. The rare Japanese shirt buttons found at the crime scene also pointed to Nathan Ward, as did the ascot that had been cut up and stuffed into the toilet. Mary Sullivan’s family and friends reported that she loved to buy Ward ascots as gifts. Perhaps the cut-up ascot was meant as a symbol of their fractured relationship. Joseph Preston Moss, on the other hand, had been interviewed outside Mary Sullivan’s apartment the night of the murder. A neighbor put a man matching his description inside Mary’s bathroom around the time she was killed. And the results of the two polygraph tests could not be ignored. If the killer was not Nathan Ward, then Mellon was sure it was Preston Moss.
Mellon discussed his conclusions with John Bottomly in December 1964. Bottomly shocked the investigator by dismissing the evidence out of hand. Instead, he said the task force was now focusing on Albert H. DeSalvo, an inmate at the Bridgewater Psychiatric Hospital. Mellon was familiar with all the suspects in the Boston Strangler case, but he had never heard of DeSalvo. Yet Bottomly said there were rumors that DeSalvo was going to confess to all of the murders.
During the same discussion, Bottomly asked Mellon to help locate DeSalvo’s family. It was known that he had a young wife and two small children, but they had vanished from the family’s home. “We know he had an apartment in Medford. Why don’t you start there?” Bottomly instructed. It took all of one afternoon for Mellon to find Albert DeSalvo’s wife. Driving to Medford, just a few miles north of Boston, he inquired about the DeSalvo children at a local elementary school. There he learned that the records of Albert DeSalvo’s daughter, Judy, had been sent to an elementary school in Golden, Colorado. DeSalvo’s son, Michael, was too young to be enrolled in school. Mellon returned to the task force office and handed the information to Bottomly. “Pack your bags, Jim. You’re going to Colorado,” he was told.
That night, Mellon took a commercial flight from Logan Airport to Denver. During the long and bumpy flight, Mellon chain-smoked Pall Malls and read the police file on Albert Henry DeSalvo.
3 : The Making of Albert DeSalvo
A lbert Henry DeSalvo was born on September 3, 1931, on the outskirts of Boston in the port city of Chelsea. Chelsea, which covers roughly one square mile, is known as Boston’s poor sister to the north. Today the city has a strong Latino population, but during the Great Depression it was a haven for destitute immigrant families from Italy and Ireland.
Like Mary Sullivan, Albert DeSalvo was the third of six children. His mother, Charlotte, was the daughter of a Boston firefighter. His father, Frank DeSalvo, was a plumber by training but a petty thief by trade. Albert was five years old when his dad took him to a store and taught him the art of shoplifting. When the elder DeSalvo wasn’t training his son to become a modern-day Oliver Twist, he was treating his family to what seemed like a never-
ending series of beatings. At age seven, young Albert could only look on as his drunken father punched Albert’s mother in the mouth, scattering several of her teeth across the room. Frank DeSalvo then made his children watch as he snapped each of his wife’s fingers, pulling them back until they broke.
His father beat not only Albert’s mother but Albert as well. During one drunken rampage, Frank DeSalvo struck his young son across the back with a lead pipe. Officers from the Chelsea Police Department were constantly called in to break up domestic disputes in the DeSalvo household. They would usually find Frank DeSalvo drunk and screaming and a tearful Charlotte on the floor in a pool of her own blood. The elder DeSalvo was arrested many times for beating his wife, but she always took him back.
Money was extremely tight in the DeSalvo household. Although Charlotte did make some money as a seamstress, the DeSalvos were always on welfare. Frank DeSalvo spent his days drinking, his nights cavorting with women in the family’s cramped Chelsea tenement. When Charlotte was out of the house, he brought prostitutes home and made his children watch while he had sex with them.
Albert later would claim that his father had once sold him and two of his sisters to a Maine farmer for nine dollars. According to this story, which was printed in several books as factual, the three children were held captive for several months until their father brought them home. But Richard DeSalvo, Albert’s younger brother, says the claims of child slavery are altogether bogus. “Albert was a great storyteller,” Richard says.
But even if the DeSalvo household was only half as bad as Albert claimed, it still was no place for a young boy to grow up. To escape his father’s drunken beatings, young Albert ran away several times, usually sleeping under the docks in nearby East Boston, an area that was popular with the city’s urchins. Here, under the massive wooden pylons, Albert DeSalvo would learn many skills from the other young ruffians.
DeSalvo was only twelve years old when he was arrested for beating up and stealing $2.85 from a neighborhood paperboy. Because he had no prior criminal record, he was given a suspended sentence. Five weeks later, after he and a friend broke into a house and stole jewelry worth $27, DeSalvo was caught with the stolen goods. The judge was not so lenient this time. DeSalvo was committed to the Lyman School for Delinquent Boys on December 29, 1943. Opened in 1848, the school was in 1943 the oldest reformatory in the United States and home to some eight hundred boys, most of them sentenced for violent crimes. The school taught the standard reading, writing, and arithmetic, but most left with what they may have deemed more useful skills. Lyman was a farm system for the streets, where boys would teach each other things like pickpocketing and the fastest way to hot-wire a car.
Albert DeSalvo would stay at the Lyman School for ten months. During this time, he was examined by a state psychiatrist, Dr. Doris Sidwell, who concluded that Albert was of normal intelligence. She also noted that the boy was deeply afraid of his father and was highly suggestible.
DeSalvo stayed out of trouble while at the Lyman School and was paroled in October 1944. That same year, his father vanished, taking with him the dark cloud that had hung over the family. Charlotte DeSalvo divorced him a year later. Thus, when Albert returned to his family in Chelsea, he no longer had to fear another violent eruption from his father.
Though he showed little aptitude for schoolwork, Albert DeSalvo received a different education outside the classroom, where he was romancing a thirty-five-year-old woman with a son his own age. And sex was not the only thing on DeSalvo’s mind. It did not take long for him to return to his life as a thief. In 1946, he was arrested for stealing a car and sent back to the Lyman School.
Paroled in 1947, DeSalvo went back to school. This time, he took honest jobs, completed the ninth grade, and then tried to enlist in the United States Marine Corps, which rejected him for being overweight. DeSalvo then gave the U.S. Army a try. H
e passed the physical and took the oath to defend his country on September 16, 1948, at Fort Banks, Massachusetts. After basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, he was shipped overseas to Bremerhaven in Germany to join the 7720th European Command. DeSalvo was stationed at Headquarters Command for the fourteenth Armored Cavalry for three months before being transferred to Company G in Bamberg, Germany. There he served as an assault rifleman and light weapons infantryman. He also worked as a truck driver and motor messenger clerk. DeSalvo’s superiors seemed to like the young man from Boston. His efficiency ratings ranged from “good” to “excellent.” The army also awarded him a good conduct medal, the Army of Occupation Medal with a Germany Clasp, the National Defense Service Medal, and the Sharpshooter Badge with a Rifle Bar.
DeSalvo also found success in the military boxing ring. Standing five feet, ten inches and weighing by this time 155 pounds, the young DeSalvo was a fighter to be reckoned with, a veteran of many street wars in his hometown who had learned defensive moves from fighting with his own father. Crowned middleweight champion of Company G, he rose to the rank of sergeant but then was brought up on charges for failing to obey a lawful order from a noncommissioned officer. Tried by a summary court-martial on August 17, 1950, he was reduced to the rank of private and fined fifty dollars. Later that year, he was honorably discharged as a private first class and reenlisted for another tour of active duty.
It was during this time that DeSalvo met Irmgard Beck, a young German woman, at an army dance. Beck, who lived with her parents in nearby Frankfurt, spoke English and was captivated by the smooth-talking DeSalvo. The two were married on December 5, 1953. DeSalvo took his young wife back the states, where he was first stationed at Fort Hamilton, New York, and then at Fort Dix.
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