Search for the Strangler

by Casey Sherman

  Married life proved difficult for Irmgard DeSalvo. Albert was constantly demanding sex, and when she said she was too tired for it, he sought excitement elsewhere. On January 5, 1955, DeSalvo was arrested for molesting a nine-year-old girl. The girl claimed that a soldier had knocked on her front door saying he was looking for a place to rent. After she allowed the man inside, she said, he attempted to fondle her chest and thighs. The girl’s brother then came into the room, and the man fled. The brother told police that the suspect had a “Jimmy Durante nose.” Around that time, a woman in the area reported a similar story about a man trying to talk his way into her home. She had written down his license plate number, which was Albert DeSalvo’s. When DeSalvo was brought in for questioning regarding both cases, the nine-year-old identified him as the soldier who had attacked her. Denying the accusations, he was released on $1,000 bail. Fortunately for DeSalvo, the girl’s mother feared the publicity the case would bring and refused to press the complaint. The charges were dropped, and the army did not take action.

  Soon after, Irmgard DeSalvo discovered she was pregnant. The couple’s first child, Judy, was born later that year. The birth of a daughter did little to ease the growing tension between Albert and Irmgard. Judy had been born with a rare pelvic disease and wore specially fitted removable casts in order to correct her crippled hip. Father Albert would tie the cast with big colorful bows to keep it tight around Judy’s leg. It was something of a game between father and daughter.

  In 1956, DeSalvo left the army. He moved his family to his hometown of Chelsea and began searching for work. But honest work did not supply the kind of money and excitement he sought. In early 1958, he was arrested for trying to break into a house during the night. Found guilty, he received a suspended sentence, but less than a month later, he was arrested in Chelsea for two daytime break-ins. DeSalvo told the judge he committed the crimes because he desperately needed money to buy his wife and daughter gifts for Valentine’s Day. The story must have struck a chord because the judge gave DeSalvo another suspended sentence.

  In the summer of 1959, DeSalvo and his wife returned to Germany. While there, Albert hatched a scheme that he would later use to great effect back in the United States. He visited U.S. Army post exchanges, claiming that he worked for Stars and Stripes, the army newspaper, and selected female employees for a phony “Best Sweetheart of All” contest, taking their measurements and promising first prize to the one who kissed him. This ploy kept him busy for the two months he and his wife and child spent in Germany. But by the fall, DeSalvo was back in Chelsea and back in trouble with the law. In October 1959, he was arrested for breaking and entering and again received a suspended sentence.

  A healthy son was born to Albert and Irmgard in 1960. Michael’s birth appeared to bring about a brief change in Albert. For the first time in his marriage, he came home at night for dinner and played with the kids. But the interlude did not last long. On St. Patrick’s Day in 1961, while Irish-American revelers were cramming local pubs, DeSalvo attempted to break into a house in Cambridge. Spotted by two police officers, he fled on foot. After a brief chase, one of the cops, too exhausted to continue, fired a warning shot into the air, and DeSalvo froze. The officers found burglary tools in his jacket. After he was booked, DeSalvo was stripped down and thrown into a cell at Cambridge Police Headquarters, where he stayed for six days with barely anything to eat. He later told his family it was worst experience of his life.

  While in custody DeSalvo offered the first of many startling confessions to police. He boasted to investigators that he was the mysterious “Measuring Man,” the nickname given by police to an offender who had sexually assaulted several Cambridge women. The suspect would spot attractive women walking the streets around Harvard Square, follow them home, and then approach them at their doors. Passing himself off as a representative from a modeling agency, he’d ask the women if they ever dreamed about appearing in magazines or in the movies. Then he would take out his measuring tape and ask the aspiring models if he could size them up.

  The Measuring Man played the perfect gentleman until he placed the tape measure around a woman’s breasts, at which point he would grope and paw the victim. Most of the victims reacted angrily, and the Measuring Man would vanish quickly. The technique evolved from DeSalvo’s beauty contest scam in Germany. Concerning the fact that he had approached young women near the campus of Harvard University, DeSalvo said, “I’m not good-looking. I’m not educated, but I was able to put something over on high-class people.” Brought to trial in the Measuring Man case in May 1961, DeSalvo confessed to assaulting a dozen women but was found guilty only on two counts: assault and battery and lewdness. But this time there was no suspended sentence: DeSalvo was given two years at the Billerica House of Correction. The sentence was later reduced, and DeSalvo was freed in April 1962.

  Once out of jail, the young father of two found steady work as a painter and laborer with the Munro Company in Chelsea. DeSalvo usually worked alone but would sometimes ask his younger brother, Richard, also a Munro employee, to help him. As the body count began to rise in the so-called Boston Strangler case, DeSalvo began to take notice. “He was always looking through the paper, reading about the murders,” Richard recalls.

  In September 1962 Albert got a new job, as a handyman for a Malden contractor, Russell Blomerth. His work put him in close contact with many housewives, likely a dangerous temptation for DeSalvo. Yet he doesn’t seem to have acted on his sexual urges while doing jobs for Blomerth in various homes, even though he worked in close contact with several women, including Mrs. Miguel Junger of Belmont, Massachusetts, whose son Sebastian would grow up to write The Perfect Storm, a best-selling book about doomed Gloucester fishermen.

  Albert DeSalvo’s family would soon face a storm of its own, however. On the morning of October 27, 1964, the wife of a Boston University professor was startled awake by a strange man standing in her bedroom. In a soothing voice, the dark figure whispered, “You know me.” Then, walking toward the bed, he told her he was a police officer and wanted to ask her a few questions. The frightened woman, leaping out of bed, noticed something shiny in the intruder’s hand. It was a knife. Ordering her not to look at him, the intruder tied her hands, blindfolded her, and forced a gag into her mouth. Continuing to whisper, he said, “I won’t hurt you.” Then he lifted the woman’s nightgown and began fondling her breasts, all the while asking for her forgiveness. The victim was certain she was about to be raped, but the intruder apologized once again and left the room as quietly as he had come.

  At Cambridge Police headquarters, the shaken victim gave investigators a detailed description of her attacker. The suspect had slick black hair, a hooked nose, and a medium build. He was wearing some kind of work uniform consisting of a dark green shirt and green pants. Investigators were familiar with the suspect the victim had described. An alert had gone out to all law enforcement agencies in New England to be on the lookout for a sexual predator known as the Green Man, who was wanted in Connecticut for several sex assaults and break-ins. A Cambridge detective took one look at the police sketch and knew he had seen this man before. The detective didn’t know him as the Green Man, though. He knew him as the Measuring Man.

  In early November 1964, ten months after the murder of Mary Sullivan, Albert DeSalvo was positively identified by the Cambridge victim and placed under arrest. During his lengthy confession, DeSalvo admitted breaking into four hundred apartments in the greater Boston area and sexually assaulting three hundred women in Connecticut and Rhode Island. During one trip to Connecticut, DeSalvo claimed, he had assaulted four women in one day.

  There is no question that Albert DeSalvo was a sexual predator, but the sheer volume of his claimed exploits should have raised eyebrows. If DeSalvo had committed three hundred sex assaults in Southern New England over a two-year period, one would think he had no time for anything else, including his job and his family. Yet DeSalvo’s employer, Russell Blomerth, would later tell the
police that DeSalvo was both hardworking and reliable. In any case, DeSalvo was booked on rape charges and shipped to Bridgewater State Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

  Although he was a veteran of reform school and jail, nothing prepared DeSalvo for what he saw at Bridgewater. Called “the chicken coop” because of its unsanitary conditions, Bridgewater was a sprawling asylum for the insane and sexually dangerous. Built in the 1800s, the institution housed many of the region’s forgotten souls. The forensic psychiatrist Ames Robey recalls a story he heard when he first started work at Bridgewater. “Lives were expendable at Bridgewater,” he says. “The place was a real pit. Guards told me that back in the 1940s to amuse themselves they’d put a patient in a cell in his underwear. Then they’d open the windows and place bets on just how long it would take the patient to die from the cold.”

  Even in the 1960s, many cells at Bridgewater lacked toilets or beds. Inmates had to wrap dirty wool blankets around themselves and try to find a soft place on the cold concrete floor. Bridgewater, in short, resembled a medieval dungeon more than a hospital. Dr. Robey was the first to interview DeSalvo when DeSalvo arrived at Bridgewater. “I asked him how many women he had assaulted,” Robey recalls. “Albert first said six hundred. Then, a bit later, it was up to a thousand.”

  Robey says he quickly realized his new patient had a vivid imagination. “He wanted to be important,” Robey recalls. “If you said you broke into five homes, he’d say he broke into fifty.” DeSalvo was a liar, Robey knew, but he also had an undeniable charm. “You had a tendency to like him,” the psychiatrist says, “and the thought of him becoming violent just wasn’t there.” After meeting with DeSalvo once a day for the thirty-five-day court-ordered observation period, Robey concluded that DeSalvo had a sociopathic personality but was competent to stand trial in the Green Man case.

  In December 1964, DeSalvo was sent to the East Cambridge jail to await trial. Once there, his cocksureness disappeared, and he began acting like some of the mentally ill patients he’d seen at Bridgewater, telling his jailers he heard voices and also that he thought of killing himself. After one month in the jail, he was returned to Bridgewater.

  In February 1965, DeSalvo would get his first hearing in front of a judge on the Green Man charges. Robey, the only witness testifying on his behalf, said DeSalvo’s condition had grown worse and he was no longer competent to stand trial. DeSalvo then took the stand and told the judge he was competent to stand trial, but he needed better psychiatric care than Bridgewater could provide. DeSalvo maintained he was treated like an animal and that doctors at the hospital were not interested in helping him gain control over his powerful sexual urges. The judge was not swayed, and DeSalvo was sent back to Bridgewater.

  Robey, who continued to treat DeSalvo, found himself awed by the man’s memory. “He had a photographic memory,” Robey says. “I’d bring him into a room full of doctors, and he’d tell us the exact seats we sat in two weeks before.” Robey also noticed that DeSalvo had struck up a friendship with George Nassar, another inmate.

  Nassar had been sent to Bridgewater for observation after his arrest for the cold-blooded murder of a gas station attendant in Andover, an upscale Boston suburb near Lawrence, where another Boston Strangler victim, Joann Graff, was killed. On September 29, 1964, the attendant had been checking gas pumps when a man in a tan trench coat came up behind him and plunged a knife into his back. Irving Hilton, the victim, begged for his life, but to no avail. The attacker pulled a .22 automatic from his trench coat and shot Hilton six times. At that moment, Rita Boute pulled into the service station with her fourteen-year-old daughter. When Boute heard the gunfire, she and her daughter ducked beneath the steering column. The killer, who had seen the car pull in, calmly walked up and stared at the terrified pair. He tried to open the car door, but, finding it locked, he instead tried to fire a shot through the windshield. Fortunately, no bullets were left in the gun. The man in the tan trench coat got into his car and sped away.

  Rita Boute gave a near-perfect description of the killer. She said he had wavy, brown hair, rigid cheekbones, and black, soulless eyes. A police artist drew a picture that bore a striking resemblance to George Nassar, a Lawrence native who had been released from prison in 1962 after serving time for murder.

  Nassar had been arrested at age fifteen for fatally shooting a grocery store owner during a holdup and sentenced to thirty years to life. While in prison the young man showed a keen aptitude for learning and convinced local ministers that he had changed his ways. The ministers petitioned for Nassar’s release and he was freed after serving almost fourteen years. When they compared Nassar’s mug shot to the police sketch, investigators were sure he was the one who had murdered the gas station attendant. They traced Nassar to an address in Boston’s South End, only a few blocks from several Boston Strangler crime scenes. When they searched Nassar’s apartment for evidence in the gas station murder, they found a police and a doctor’s uniform in his bedroom closet. Nassar could have used these disguises to gain access to the strangling victims’ apartments.

  Ames Robey interviewed Nassar when he arrived at Bridgewater. “He had a real hatred toward women,” recalls Robey, who already had interviewed several suspects in the Boston Strangler case and had helped the task force create a psychological profile of the killer. According to Robey, “Albert DeSalvo did not fit the profile at all. But George Nassar fit it ideally. He had a real hatred of women and was prone to homicidal urges.” In any case, after meeting Nassar, DeSalvo underwent a personality change. Robey says that before Nassar arrived at Bridgewater, DeSalvo was quite friendly with the other inmates and even the guards. But after Nassar arrived, he behaved as if he and Nassar were the only two inmates in the hospital. The two spent most of their time together, in the common room in the facility. “The other inmates knew they were not to be disturbed, unless you wanted to be the victim of an accident, like falling in the shower and breaking your neck,” says Robey. When hospital guards got too close, the two would immediately stop talking. One former Bridgewater inmate says he heard the men discussing the Boston Strangler case. The inmate remembers Nassar quizzing DeSalvo about details, after which the pair would go over the story again and again. “DeSalvo was a punk, but I was scared shitless of George,” the former inmate says.

  The once chatty DeSalvo also stopped talking to Robey, but in this case, the psychiatrist claims DeSalvo was merely acting on the advice of his new lawyer, a brash young attorney named F. Lee Bailey.

  Francis Lee Bailey was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1933. His father was in advertising, and his mother was a nursery school teacher. Lee, a fair athlete and a star pupil, finished high school at age sixteen and entered Harvard University. After Harvard, where Bailey was an average student, he joined the U.S. Navy and enrolled in naval aviation school. Finishing there, he transferred to the U.S. Marine Corps with his heart set on flying Sabre Jets. However, when his squadron’s chief legal advisor was killed in a plane crash, Bailey was ordered to fill the position. His chance of becoming a pilot was over, but his legal career was born.

  Bailey worked on several cases during his two remaining years of military service. Sometimes he worked as a prosecutor, other times as a defense attorney, all the while soaking up the protocol and nuances of military law. After his discharge, he worked as an investigator for a Boston lawyer and put himself through law school at Boston University. He graduated in 1960 and hung out his shingle that fall. Bailey quickly built a reputation around local courthouses as a lawyer willing to use any method at his disposal to help his client and promote himself. Working hard to become a superstar lawyer, even more famous than Clarence Darrow had been, Bailey hired a driver and was the first attorney to customize his automobile with a swivel chair in front on the passenger side so he could swivel around to chat with reporters tagging along in the backseat.

  Bailey’s first high-profile case came in 1961, when he got a call from the brother of Sam Sheppard. Sam Sheppard, a ph
ysician, was serving ten years in an Ohio prison for the murder of his pregnant wife, who had been bludgeoned to death in the couple’s Cleveland area home in 1954. Sheppard claimed he had walked in on the killer, who had knocked him unconscious with a blow to the head, but prosecutors argued he had murdered his wife after she discovered he was having an affair with a medical technician. During Sheppard’s trial, the jurors were allowed to read every salacious detail of the affair in the newspapers and even permitted to talk with reporters. The case, which made headlines across the country, would later spawn the television series The Fugitive.

  F. Lee Bailey filed an appeal of Sheppard’s conviction, claiming the defendant had not received a fair trial because the jury had been polluted by the publicity surrounding the case. A federal judge agreed and released Sheppard in the summer of 1964, pending a retrial. The case was retried two years later, in the fall of 1966. This time, with Bailey as his defense attorney, Sam Sheppard was found not guilty of his wife’s murder.

  Bailey claims he first heard about Albert DeSalvo from his client George Nassar in March 1965. In his book The Defense Never Rests, Bailey relates that Nassar mentioned DeSalvo and the possibility of making money from the Boston Strangler case. “If a man was the strangler,” George Nassar said, “the guy who killed all those women, would it be possible for him to publish his story and make some money with it?” “I had to smile,” Bailey writes. “It’s perfectly possible to publish, but I wouldn’t advise it. I suspect that a confession in book form would be judged completely voluntary and totally admissible. I also suspect that it would provide the means by which the author would put himself in the electric chair.”