Search for the Strangler

by Casey Sherman

  Twentieth Century Fox chief Richard Zanuck assigned the director Richard Fleischer to make the movie and hired an Academy Award-winning writer, Edward Anhalt, to write the script. After reading the first drafts, F. Lee Bailey was angered that he would be only a minor character in the film, and he disassociated himself from the production. Fleischer wanted the movie to have a documentary feel and sought an unknown actor to play the DeSalvo role. More than two thousand men auditioned for the part. Unlike Fleischer, Twentieth Century Fox, which was putting $4 million into the production, wanted a big name to play the lead. Warren Beatty and Ryan O’Neal fought for the role. Other stars also auditioned, including Anthony Perkins, Peter Falk, and James Caan.

  If he had to use a big star, Fleischer thought Tony Curtis was the perfect choice, but studio executives were aghast at the idea. Curtis, who had costarred in the Billy Wilder classic Some Like It Hot, was known for romantic comedy, not drama. But Fleischer was not to be denied. He told Curtis to morph himself into the notorious DeSalvo and pose for some pictures for the studio executives. Curtis put a wool stocking cap on his head, tilted it to one side, and smeared some putty on his nose to give himself more of a menacing look. Richard Zanuck loved what he saw, and Tony Curtis won the role.

  Casting the role of John Bottomly was an easier task. Henry Fonda said he committed to the movie after reading the last scene in the script. “The end of the picture, when the character of Bottomly faces mano a mano the DeSalvo character and finally breaks him down to the admission that he is the strangler, is a fascinating scene to play,” Fonda said during a 1968 press junket to promote the film.

  Production began on January 21, 1968, with most of the shooting on location in Boston. Diane Sullivan Sherman remembers walking by the Hyannis Theater and seeing the movie poster with Tony Curtis’s fiendish eyes staring at her. The billboard read simply, “COME IN—HE DID 13 TIMES.” Diane wondered whether she would have the strength or the desire to see her sister’s murder enacted on the big screen.

  The Boston Strangler opened on October 16, 1968, though DeSalvo had sued to block the film’s New York premiere. No doubt he was angry that he had received no money and that the moviemakers never contacted him during the production. DeSalvo’s filing claimed he was falsely depicted in the movie. A judge threw out the lawsuit, and The Boston Strangler opened to glowing reviews. Film critics raved about the performances of Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda. Some said the movie broke new cinematic ground with its use of split screen and multi-imaging, bringing the audience right into the chaos and terror of the events it depicted.

  The film faced its harshest criticism from the men who had actually lived the events it depicted. “The movie showed John Bottomly rushing to the crime scenes. He’d never been to one murder scene,” bristled Jim Mellon. The film twisted other facts. In one scene, Bottomly comes face to face with DeSalvo during a chance meeting at a mental hospital, notices a bite mark on DeSalvo’s hand, and deduces that he’s the Boston Strangler. In reality, F. Lee Bailey handed DeSalvo over to the authorities. DeSalvo never received a bite mark from any of his alleged victims.

  Yet Hollywood convinced the world that Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. Granted, moviemakers had help from DeSalvo himself. But he was never tried for the murders in a court of law. Albert DeSalvo’s only trial came on celluloid, and audiences around the world came away convinced that what they saw was true.

  Along with the investigators, there was another nonbeliever in the film’s audience: Mary’s sister Diane, who had finally summoned the courage to go to the theater. Some theatergoers recognized Diane as a sister of a strangler victim, and whispers spread through the movie house. One hand gripped tightly around her husband’s, the other hand clenching the side of her seat as the opening credits rolled, Diane vowed not to leave the theater no matter how bad it got. Fortunately, the filmmakers had changed the names of the victims, so Diane had no idea which scene showed her sister’s murder. Still, she was angry with Tony Curtis. “I found it so disgusting,” she recalls. “This big Hollywood star playing such a fraud! I thought to myself, ‘DeSalvo must be loving this.’”

  The Boston Strangler grossed $16 million at the box office, and there was even talk of an Oscar nomination for Tony Curtis. In the end, he didn’t get the nomination, but some of those connected to the actual case were rewarded. Edward Brooke had won his race for U.S. senate. After serving as a technical adviser on the movie, Detective Phil DiNatale opened a private investigation firm in the Boston area. F. Lee Bailey set up Andy Tuney and a fellow task force alumnus, Stephen Delaney, in their own private investigation office. Others who had worked on the case rose quickly through the ranks of the Boston Police Department.

  Meanwhile, DeSalvo’s wife, Irmgard, filed for divorce and took the children back to her native Germany. DeSalvo had no money, no family, and no reason to continue his charade of being the Boston Strangler. The man who had caused widespread panic when he escaped from Bridgewater State Hospital now was relegated to dancing with elderly women on senior day at the prison. The only family member who did not cut ties with him was his younger brother, Richard. Richard and his wife, Rosalie, visited DeSalvo regularly at Walpole. It disturbed Richard that they never got to meet Albert alone; at Albert’s insistence, there always was another inmate there during the visits. That inmate was George Nassar. After being found guilty of the murder of a gas station attendant, Irving Hilton, Nassar had also been sentenced to life in prison at Walpole.

  During visits with his brother, Albert always tried to keep the conversation light. Richard recalls one particular visit when his brother told him he was not the Boston Strangler. “You wanna know who the real strangler is?” he asked with a grin. “He’s right next to me,” Albert said, nudging his buddy George. At that, Nassar’s teeth clenched, and he shot a hard look at DeSalvo.

  During a later visit by Richard, the usually jovial Albert appeared tense. He told Richard that something big was going to break and that he was getting ready to “blow the lid off this whole thing.” He then warned his brother not to visit him at Walpole for a while. “Things are getting hot,” he said. When the prison guard told DeSalvo he was out of time, he stood up and hugged his younger brother, not wanting to let go. “He had never done that before,” Richard remembers. “I knew something bad was about to happen.”

  Richard DeSalvo was not the only person Albert confided in. He also called the psychiatrist Ames Robey. Robey says, “I got a call from Albert, and he said, ‘I want you to come to Walpole tomorrow. I have a reporter who’s going to meet with me, and I want to tell the real story.’” Robey had not heard from DeSalvo for several years and was surprised by the telephone call. But he was also curious, and he told DeSalvo he would be there for the meeting.

  The next morning, November 26, 1973, after Robey got into his car and began the drive to Walpole, he turned on the radio and heard the news: the Boston Strangler had been found stabbed to death in prison. Robey almost drove off the road. What he did not know was that DeSalvo, afraid for his life, had put himself in the infirmary, the most secure section of the prison. Inmates had to clear six security checkpoints to get in and out of the infirmary. Yet the killer got through all six checkpoints, stabbed DeSalvo repeatedly in the heart, and went back through security covered in blood, and no one indicated having seen a thing. It was an execution, pure and simple. Some say DeSalvo was murdered because of a squabble over a few pounds of bacon. Others, including F. Lee Bailey, claim DeSalvo was heavily involved in the prison narcotics trade and paid the price for trying to undercut fellow drug dealers. Still others swear DeSalvo was murdered to keep him from talking about the Boston Strangler case. Some of these, former inmates, claim it was a contract hit: the killer was said to have been paid $50,000 by someone from the outside. The person who paid, the inmates say, was the one who had the most to lose if DeSalvo told the true story. DeSalvo’s killer was rumored to be Vincent “The Bear” Flemmi, a ruthless Mafia hit man who later died i
n prison of a heroin overdose. Three other inmates were eventually charged and tried twice for Albert DeSalvo’s murder; both trials ended in hung juries. But DeSalvo would continue to pique the public’s curiosity from the grave. A poem he wrote was discovered shortly after his murder.

  Here is the story of the Strangler, yet untold.

  The man who claims he killed thirteen women, young and old.

  The elusive Strangler, there he goes.

  Where his wanderlust sends him, no one knows.

  He struck within the light of day.

  Leaving not one clue astray.

  Young and old, their lips are sealed.

  Their secret of death never revealed.

  Even though he is sick in mind,

  He’s much too clever for the police to find.

  To reveal his secret will bring him fame,

  But burden his family with unwanted shame.

  Today he sits in a prison cell,

  Deep inside only a secret he can tell.

  People everywhere are still in doubt,

  Is the Strangler in prison, or roaming about?

  7 : All the King’s Men

  I n the years following the murder of Albert DeSalvo, key figures in the Boston Strangler case were plagued by a series of scandals, beginning with John Bottomly. The real estate attorney had gone back into private practice soon after the Boston Strangler movie was released in 1968. That same year, he “discovered” that bearer bonds worth $60,000 were missing from his law office. The bonds were part of a trust that Bottomly was overseeing. When beneficiaries pressed Bottomly about the status of the trust, he answered evasively, never explaining that their money was missing. Finally, they hired a lawyer to go after Bottomly. The missing funds were never recovered, but Bottomly and his wife ended up paying $150,000 to cover the bonds, interest, and related taxes and penalties. When the case finally reached the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1980, Judge Paul J. Liacos suspended Bottomly from practicing law in Massachusetts. Bottomly’s troubles did not cease there, either. In 1981 he pleaded guilty to charges that he had failed to pay his taxes from 1974 to 1977. Bottomly left Massachusetts in disgrace, moving his family to Salt Lake City.

  When he died of a heart attack at age sixty-three, during a return visit to Massachusetts in August 1984, John Bottomly left many unanswered questions about his role in the Boston Strangler case. Probably the most important concerns the confession of Albert DeSalvo. Bottomly, who tape-recorded sixty hours of conversations with DeSalvo in 1965, claimed he placed the tapes in a bank vault shortly thereafter. The original tapes have never been found.

  Edward Brooke’s reputation would also be tarnished. He lost his bid for reelection against Democrat Paul Tsongas in 1978, after revelations that Brooke had lied under oath about his financial situation while being deposed for his divorce. Brooke’s legal adviser at the time was his old friend John Bottomly. Edward Brooke would never again be a power player in Massachusetts politics.

  F. Lee Bailey would also fall from grace. He had been fired by DeSalvo in 1968 over the movie deal with Twentieth Century Fox. Business, however, had never been better. Bailey opened two more law offices, one in New York, the other in Florida. He had a helicopter pad built on his property in Marshfield, along the South Shore of Massachusetts, so that instead of having to abide a twenty-five minute commute to Boston, the flamboyant attorney could fly to and from the office. Bailey’s next big case after DeSalvo was defending the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst against charges that she had robbed a San Francisco bank in 1974 with members of a radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst, who had been caught on a bank surveillance camera wielding a machine gun during the holdup, claimed the radicals had kidnapped her from her Berkeley, California, home and forced her to participate in the robbery. The Patty Hearst case made headlines around the world. It was fitting that the beautiful granddaughter of the king of yellow journalism, William Randolph Hearst, would become fodder for tabloids and the mainstream press.

  During the Hearst trial, Bailey made the disastrous decision to put Hearst on the witness stand, where she exercised her Fifth Amendment rights forty-two times. Hearst was quickly convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to seven years in prison. What the young heiress did not know at the time, however, was that her attorney had signed a lucrative book deal during the trial. Hearst, whose sentence was later commuted by President Jimmy Carter, used Bailey’s alleged conflict of interest in a bid to overturn her robbery conviction.

  In October 1980, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that there were “serious questions” concerning whether Bailey and his cocounsel, J. Albert Johnson, were guilty of conduct unbecoming members of the bar. “Bailey’s potential conflict of interest is virtually admitted,” the court declared. Despite the serious questions raised, Hearst’s bid to overturn her conviction would eventually be denied. Nevertheless, the luster was beginning to fade on Bailey’s reputation.

  Soon his problems would get worse. In 1982, Bailey was arrested in San Francisco for drunk driving after being pulled over in a borrowed Mercedes-Benz after running a stop sign. The arresting officers said they had been forced to slap handcuffs on Bailey after he became belligerent. San Francisco police sergeant Lawrence McKenzie, who participated in the arrest, said Bailey was “very arrogant and pompous and extremely obnoxious to everybody in the immediate vicinity.”

  At the police station, Bailey refused to take a sobriety test and would not sign a property sheet for his belongings or sign for his allowed telephone call. The prosecution called thirty witnesses at Bailey’s trial in April. Each testified that Bailey had acted peculiarly and irrationally. Bailey’s attorney, Robert Shapiro, had one ace in the hole, however: a lack of concrete evidence that his client was drunk at the time of his arrest. It was good enough to gain an acquittal. Nonetheless, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Bailey’s driver’s license for six months because of his refusal to take the sobriety test.

  A year later, Massachusetts made public the names of more than a thousand of the worst tax evaders in the state. One name on the list was that of F. Lee Bailey, who owed $57,562 in back taxes. In response to this news, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis asked the state legislature to suspend Bailey’s license to practice law, but lawmakers never took action against Bailey. The default eventually was settled, and Bailey would remain out of the public eye until the “trial of the century” a decade later, the murder trial of football legend O. J. Simpson.

  8 : The Portrait on the Mantel

  The Sullivan family sought to move beyond Mary’s murder. Their home on Sea Street in Hyannis, once filled with Mary’s cheerful voice, was now ringing with the sounds of grandchildren. As Diane’s second son, born on January 19, 1969, I was part of the baby boom in the Sullivan family. My earliest memories of my grandparents’ house are joy-filled. It was always the setting for large family gatherings during the holidays. My brother, Todd, our cousins, and I would spend hours exploring the old house, finding new spots to hide. Our favorite place was in a spare bedroom just above the kitchen. A small vent in the bedroom allowed us to listen to the conversations the grown-ups were having on the floor below. Their talk usually bored us, though. They’d discuss the news of the day, work, and us kids.

  One topic that apparently was off limits was my Aunt Mary’s death. I knew Aunt Mary only from her portrait on the mantelpiece, the same picture that had fallen and whose frame had been smashed after her funeral. Her reframed portrait stood among those of other family members. I would stare at the photo often as a child, mesmerized by Mary’s chestnut hair, brown eyes, and the sober look on her face. She appeared very sad to me. My mother, for her part, was not fond of the picture. “I prefer to remember her smiling,” she would say. Still, Mom never told me what had happened to her sister. An inquisitive little boy, I would always ask her who the sad lady in the picture was. “She was my sister and my best friend,” Mom would reply. “Where is she?” I
’d ask. “When you’re older,” she would say and kiss my cheek. “When you’re older.”

  Years passed. During the summer of 1988, before I entered college, I was sitting on the couch at home with the remote control in hand, flipping through television channels, when I came across the movie The Boston Strangler on Channel 38. I sat glued to the television set watching Tony Curtis go from apartment to apartment, offering women his killer smile and then something even more deadly. “So this is how it happened,” I thought.

  The next day, I felt uncomfortable, not knowing how to broach the subject with my mother. She had already experienced enough pain in her life. My mother’s third child had been stillborn, and we were both grieving the loss of my father, Donny Sherman, who had died suddenly in 1986. Over breakfast, we chatted about my summer job and even the pitching rotation of the Red Sox. Finally, I got up the nerve. “Mom,” I said, “tell me what happened to Mary.” She put her cup of coffee down on the kitchen counter. “I remember the last time I saw her. It was Christmas,” she recalled. “We were having such a great time. I remember twice saying, to her, ‘Mary, why move up to Boston now? Stay another week. We’re having so much fun.’ I always wonder if she would have stayed if I asked her one more time.” Mom spent the next several minutes telling me about Mary’s murder. I could hear the pain in her voice. Trying to console her, I walked over to her chair and placed an arm on her shoulder. “At least they got the guy,” I said. Mom looked up at me sadly. “No, no, they never did,” she replied.