Search for the Strangler

by Casey Sherman

  As Diane grew into her new and demanding role as a mother, she never lost sight of the Boston Strangler investigation. Because the family no longer received phone calls from the police, Diane had to rely on newspapers for updates on the search for Mary’s killer. Yet the story, which had dominated the news for so long, now was relegated to an occasional mention. John Bottomly was keeping Albert DeSalvo’s confessions a secret from everyone, including his own boss, Attorney General Edward Brooke, who was engaged in a tight race for the U.S. Senate, with his hope for success seemingly tied to a resolution of the Boston Strangler case. (Bottomly was concerned that Brooke would see the flaws in his interrogation of DeSalvo.) Brooke had promised the public swift justice when his office took over the case, and he believed the public would not forgive him if the killer or killers were not found soon.

  An FBI memorandum dated September 24, 1965, states that its Boston office had received information from the Massachusetts attorney general’s office and the Boston commissioner of police indicating that local authorities believed they had located the person responsible for the eleven strangulation murders that had occurred in Boston. Local authorities identified the suspect to the FBI as Albert Henry DeSalvo, then incarcerated at the Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts.

  Though the federal authorities were supplied with a name, they weren’t told much else. In a letter to James L. Handley, special agent in charge of the Boston office of the FBI dated October 29, 1965, John Bottomly wrote that “because of the present state of the investigations and the demands associated with the preparation of cases for possible presentation to grand juries, it does not appear to be appropriate at this time to divulge information about the modus operandi or possible admissions of Albert Henry DeSalvo. However, please be assured that this Department [the attorney general’s office] will cooperate at the earliest possible date when disclosure of such information could not possibly jeopardize investigations or legal proceedings.”

  John Bottomly was apparently trying to buy time. If he gave DeSalvo’s confession tapes to the FBI, serious questions could be raised about the man’s guilt. DeSalvo himself did not share these worries. He was now completely immersed in his new role as the Boston Strangler, a designation that certainly carried more weight with his fellow inmates than the Measuring Man. DeSalvo even added two more names to the victims’ list, sixty-nine-year-old Mary Brown and eighty-five-year-old Mary Mullen. As with his other confessions, DeSalvo did not let the facts stand in the way of a good story. Mary Brown had been stabbed to death on March 9, 1963, inside her Lawrence home. When asked to describe the place, DeSalvo said Brown lived in a gray clapboard house. The house was actually painted brown with asbestos shingling. DeSalvo also said that when he entered the home, he had had to open a door and turn right to go up the stairs. The stairs were in fact straight ahead from the door. DeSalvo then claimed that he had grabbed a fork from the silverware drawer and stabbed Brown in the right breast. Photos taken at the crime scene showed that Brown had been stabbed in the left breast. Finally, DeSalvo said he had not had time to steal anything from the apartment. But again, crime scene photos contradicted his confession. The victim’s apartment had been ransacked.

  Mary Mullen died nearly a year before Mary Brown. Albert DeSalvo remembered every detail in the Mullen case because he was there on the night she died. Mullen’s death was not a homicide, however; she had dropped dead of a heart attack when she saw DeSalvo. He had told his brother Richard that he had broken into an elderly woman’s apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston on June 28, 1962, having thought no one was home and he would have plenty of time to search for valuables. But when he entered the apartment, he was startled to find Mary Mullen in her bathrobe in the hallway. The fright was too much for Mullen, who collapsed on the floor. DeSalvo told his family that he had picked up the dead woman, placed her on the couch, and covered her body with a blanket. Mullen’s death is the only one DeSalvo was really responsible for, and it tore him up inside. Richard DeSalvo says Albert wept when he spoke about the experience and swore he would stop breaking into people’s homes.

  In the autumn of 1965, John Bottomly found himself at a crossroads. He knew he could never successfully prosecute DeSalvo for the Boston Strangler murders. First, there was not a shred of physical evidence against him. And because of his unusual agreement with F. Lee Bailey, Bottomly could not use DeSalvo’s confessions in a court of law. This agreement turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Bottomly because once a jury was made aware of the major discrepancies between the confessions and the actual crime scenes, the state may well not have been able to gain a conviction.

  So how do you convince the public a case is solved without ever securing a conviction in a court of law? The answer was to serve DeSalvo to the media as the Boston Strangler but to prosecute him as the Green Man. DeSalvo was eager to sign a book deal for his life story. F. Lee Bailey also wanted to hurry along the book project because that would give DeSalvo the money to pay Bailey. Bottomly set the plan in motion, but then he made a surprising report on April 8, 1966. He announced his resignation from the attorney general’s office effective immediately, giving no reason for the departure. This was Bottomly’s last chess move, and he played it well. By resigning, he might be spared any fallout the strangler case might have. Bottomly did not turn in the keys to his office until he made certain his successor would go along with the plan. In a confidential memo dated just six days after Bottomly’s resignation, the successor, Herbert Travers, wrote to Attorney General Edward Brooke that “there is at present no admissible evidence that can be used to convict DeSalvo on any of the [now] 13 deaths. The District Attorney of Middlesex County however does have strong evidence against DeSalvo on a dozen or so lesser sex offenses.” The stage was set: Albert DeSalvo would stand trial for four rapes he had committed as the Green Man, but not for the Boston Strangler murders. In May 1966, DeSalvo was paraded before the cameras and declared the prime suspect in the Boston Strangler case. Diane Sullivan Sherman was rocked by the news. “I couldn’t believe it. I still don’t,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘Who is this guy? Look at how he straightens his hair and tie every time a camera is on him.’ He wanted too much to be the Boston Strangler. Call it intuition, but I just knew in my heart that this creep didn’t kill my sister.”

  Still, the newspapers took the bait. They were so eager to call DeSalvo the Boston Strangler that they failed to note the fact that DeSalvo had not been charged with any of the murders. DeSalvo the Strangler sold newspapers, while DeSalvo the Green Man did not.

  In July 1966, a judge ruled that DeSalvo was competent to stand trial for the Green Man rapes. The highly anticipated trial began the following January. In his opening statement, F. Lee Bailey told the jury his client had committed the sex assaults. DeSalvo had done it, Bailey argued, because he was insane. What sane man, he asked, would rape four women and also strangle thirteen more? Bailey was trying to slip in evidence from the Boston Strangler case to bolster his position in the Green Man case. The prosecutor quickly objected but was overruled. Bailey also called several psychiatrists to testify that DeSalvo was insane. The first was Dr. James Brussel from the New York State Department of Mental Health. Brussel told jurors that DeSalvo was driven by overwhelming sexual urges that he could not curb. “He has created by means of a schizophrenic process a world of his own where he simply reigns supreme,” Brussel maintained. Another psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Ross Mezer, told the jury that he, too, believed DeSalvo was a schizophrenic, insisting that although the defendant knew he was committing crimes, he did not have the capacity to conform to the requirements of the law.

  When the state got its turn, the prosecutor, Donald L. Conn, surprised observers by putting an ex-convict on the stand. Stanley Setterlund, a former inmate, testified that he had met DeSalvo at Bridgewater State Hospital in January 1965. “He said he had something bigger than the Brink’s robbery and the Plymouth mail robbery,” Setterlund told the jury. When asked
to elaborate, Setterlund testified that DeSalvo had spoken of murders that were worth a lot of money, $10,000 apiece. Setterlund also swore that DeSalvo boasted of magazine offers of more than $100,000 for his story and claimed there was talk of a movie deal worth a million.

  In his closing argument, the prosecutor emphasized that Albert DeSalvo was not a sex maniac or a sick man but a cunning and clever manipulative criminal who should be sent to prison for life. And on January 18, 1967, DeSalvo was indeed convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In the public mind, the Boston Strangler was being punished for his crimes, and the case that had held the region in fear’s grip for almost five years was finally over.

  Diane Sullivan Sherman did not share this feeling. She was working at the beauty salon on the day of the verdict. Afterward, she drove to her in-laws’ house to pick up her infant son, Todd. Diane still had a lot of cooking and cleaning to do in preparation for his first birthday party the next day. Her mother-in-law met her at the front door with the baby and a copy of the Cape Cod Standard Times, whose front page featured a headline story about DeSalvo’s conviction. Diane crumpled up the newspaper and threw it in the trash. Then she picked up her baby and held him gently. “How can Mary rest with her killer still out there?” Diane wondered.

  One other person shocked by the conviction was Albert DeSalvo. He had been promised that if he confessed to the murders, he would be sent to a state-of-the-art psychiatric hospital, one with fresh linens and decent food, where he could sit for hours with doctors, explaining to them what drove him mad. He would gain respect for being one of the most infamous criminals ever.

  In fact, there would be no cushy hospital treatment. Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Cornelius J. Moynihan ordered DeSalvo to Walpole State Prison for the remainder of his natural life. The trip to the state penitentiary was put on hold, however, because Bailey appealed the sentence, at which point Moynihan suspended his order and DeSalvo was returned to Bridgewater. There DeSalvo and two other inmates, George Harrison and Frederick Erickson, launched a daring escape attempt in the frigid predawn hours of February 24, 1967. Erickson was serving a life sentence for murder after having stabbed his estranged wife to death. Harrison had been sentenced to fifteen years for armed robbery. The inmates planned the escape carefully. One of them stole a key to the cells, and all three stuffed their bedsheets to make it look as if they were still in bed sleeping. Then they crept down the corridor to where a new elevator was being installed. There they pried open the elevator door and climbed down the shaft to freedom. They were wearing prison clothing consisting of gray jackets and trousers, and DeSalvo reportedly was carrying an eight-shot .32 caliber Beretta, while the other two were armed with scissors.

  When they got away from the hospital grounds, the escapees stole a car and drove to Boston, where DeSalvo dropped his fellow fugitives off at Haymarket Square in Boston’s North End. DeSalvo knew he would have to change his appearance to avoid being recognized. His hooked nose was easily his most distinguishing feature, and he had told the others he was going to fly to Canada for a nose job. He would then kill the doctor who performed the operation and head to Mexico.

  This was probably no more than a sensational story DeSalvo had concocted to impress the other men. In any case, by 6:20 A.M., it became known that the inmates were missing from their cells, and every police department in Massachusetts was notified. Meanwhile, panic spread among the citizenry. Women and children were told to stay in their houses. FBI dispatches were rolling off the teletype at the agency’s branch offices in Ottawa, Canada, and Mexico City. Airports were checked, and flyers describing Albert DeSalvo were circulated throughout the country. The hunt for the so-called Boston Strangler was on.

  A man fitting DeSalvo’s description was spotted driving a white Ford four-door sedan in Washington, D.C., and DeSalvo was reportedly “seen” at a Greyhound Bus terminal in Richmond, Virginia, arguing with a clerk over a refund for a bus ticket. The Boston Record American offered a $5,000 reward for the strangler, dead or alive. In addition, the newspaper issued this warning: “Women Beware! He’s a Cutie—Keep Chain Lock Bolted.” Reached by the media in North Carolina, where he was working on a case, F. Lee Bailey said he’d double the Record American reward to $10,000, but only if his client was brought in alive.

  Despite all the rumors, DeSalvo made it only forty miles from Bridgewater. After parting ways with Erickson and Harrison, he drove just north of Boston to Everett, where he met up with Joe, his older brother. Dumping the stolen car, he asked Joe to drop him off in Lynn. By now it was getting late, and DeSalvo had nowhere to sleep. He did not know that his fellow fugitives were already under arrest, captured just thirteen hours after their escape while drinking beer at a bar in the town of Waltham.

  DeSalvo knew he had to get off the streets before he was spotted. Cold, hungry, and tired, he broke into someone’s cellar. He was still wearing the gray prisoner’s uniform from the state hospital, but he rummaged through the cellar and found a Navy pea coat and bell-bottom trousers. He stayed hidden in the cellar until mid-morning the following day, when he strolled back into town, aiming to pass himself off as a sailor on leave, although he was not wearing the mandatory kerchief with his uniform blouse, and he had on brown dress shoes under his bell-bottoms.

  In mid-afternoon, he walked into the Simon Uniform Store in Lynn, having decided to give himself up. The store owner and four salesmen were sitting around having coffee. “Can I use the phone?” DeSalvo asked sheepishly. “I want to call F. Lee.”

  None of the salesmen seemed afraid. “He knew [that] we knew who he was,” the store owner told the Associated Press. “He wasn’t a very big person, and he never went after men anyway.”

  After making his phone call, DeSalvo calmly stood by the water cooler and waited for police to arrive. The scene was serene inside the store, but word spread quickly, and two thousand people gathered outside the store to watch the notorious Boston Strangler surrender. “Kill him!” shouted some in the mob, which was growing more and more unruly. DeSalvo played to the crowd, winking at some newsmen he recognized as he was ushered into a waiting squad car.

  The judge remanded DeSalvo to the maximum-security prison at Walpole. DeSalvo told reporters his escape was not an attempt to get free and quench his blood thirst but an effort to call attention to his need for rehabilitation. “Maybe people will know what it means to be mentally ill,” he told reporters. F. Lee Bailey went even further than his client had, suggesting to the press that the move to Walpole State Prison could cause his troubled client to commit suicide. Bailey swore to seek a writ of habeas corpus to get DeSalvo sent back to Bridgewater. The request was denied. DeSalvo would spend the remainder of his life behind the concrete walls of Walpole.

  But all was not lost for DeSalvo. He made money from Gerold Frank’s book The Boston Strangler, having signed over the rights to his life story. Frank never interviewed DeSalvo; he got his information from F. Lee Bailey. While Bailey says he never received a nickel from the book, he did collect his attorney’s fees from the DeSalvo estate, and the only funds in the estate were proceeds from the book, a best-seller and the basis of a movie. Jim Mellon also spent several hours with Frank and was impressed by the reporter’s grasp of the complicated case. “Finally, someone was going to tell the story right,” Mellon said at the time, but his optimism did not last long. He says, “I picked up the book, and couldn’t get through the first few pages, it was such bullshit.” Mellon says he received a telephone call from Frank soon after the book was published. “He asked me if I was upset by the book. I said, ‘Hell yeah! There’s no way that DeSalvo is the strangler.’ He told me that I wasn’t alone, and he apologized and blamed his rush to judgment on a strict publishing deadline.”

  The best-selling book was the beginning of what DeSalvo had hoped would become a lucrative business. He recorded a song entitled “Strangler in the Night” shortly after going to Walpole, and he set up a small business in the prison gift shop, selling c
hoker necklaces with his name on them. He had other inmates do the work, and he collected the money. The necklaces still come up for sale on eBay from time to time.

  The Boston Strangler case made F. Lee Bailey internationally famous. The day after DeSalvo’s escape and subsequent capture, the Washington Post reporter Nicholas von Hoffman wrote a glowing article about Bailey that carried the headline “Bailey Plays Perry Mason in Case of Boston Strangler.” Von Hoffman’s article read like a Mickey Spillane novel. He described Bailey’s office as an absolute mess, full of dirty ashtrays and empty whiskey bottles. “Even the brass replica of the scales of justice was out of balance. A throwback to Bogart,” von Hoffman wrote. “I think the fun has just begun around here,” Andrew Tuney, Bailey’s investigator, told the reporter. “Wait till you see our new penthouse offices. And we’re buying Frank Sinatra’s Learjet for $400,000.”

  Von Hoffman reported that Tuney had gone to work as a private detective for Bailey after quitting his job with the Massachusetts State Police. The article did not mention that Tuney had been the lead investigator for the Boston Strangler Task Force.

  6 : Lights, Camera, Action!

  While F. Lee Bailey was shopping for Learjets and searching for his next high-profile client, Hollywood was beginning to take an interest in the Boston Strangler case. The Broadway producer Robert Fryer secured the film rights to The Boston Strangler, for which Albert DeSalvo did not receive a dime. By taking the option on the book, Fryer avoided buying the rights to DeSalvo’s life story. But other key figures in the case were in a position to make big money. John Bottomly commanded the highest price. Twentieth Century Fox paid him $25,000, a sum that grew to $29,000 when Bottomly sold the life story rights of his wife and six children. According to Rick Davis, producer of the History Channel documentary “History through the Lens: The Boston Strangler: A Legacy of Terror,” Edward Brooke, at the time a U.S. senator, received $20,000. Today Edward Brooke would be scrutinized for taking money while still in the senate, but back in the 1960s no one appeared concerned about this obvious conflict of interest. Meanwhile, Mellon’s former partner, Phil DiNatale, quit the Boston Police Department and took a job as a consultant on the film, for which he was paid $4,000, a lot of money in the 1960s. While DeSalvo got no money, the studio paid his wife $25,000 for the right to use the names of their children in the film.