Search for the Strangler

by Casey Sherman

  My mother’s words gave me my life’s mission. I wanted to ease her pain, but how? I did not see myself becoming a police officer. Calling me undersized would be an understatement. At five foot, two inches, there was no way I could meet the law enforcement height requirement. So I decided to become a journalist. I realized that a pen and notepad could be just as effective as a gun and badge when it came to getting to the truth.

  At first, I wanted to prove that my mother was wrong and that Albert DeSalvo really was who he claimed to be. By doing so, I might close this heart-wrenching chapter in Mom’s life. I knew that DeSalvo had been murdered in prison and if we were certain he was Mary’s killer, we could gain a certain sense of Old Testament justice from that.

  As a journalism student at Boston University, I sat through countless lectures on story structure, lead writing, and interviewing. I showed an aptitude for the work and was an above-average student for the first time in my life. But my real training as a reporter would come at night in the bowels of the college library. Fortunately, the library had microfiche copies of all the local papers, dating back several decades. I grabbed a film reel labeled “The Boston Globe” dated 1964, fastened it to the machine, and started to read, scrolling up to January 5, the day after Mary had been killed. My aunt’s face staring up at me from the monitor, I read the news story, which made heavy use of the words strangled, murder, and rape. Suddenly I got up and ran to the nearest bathroom, where I lost my dinner. Mary’s murder had become real to me for the first time.

  I went back to the microfiche collection and kept returning there, night after night. The more I read, the more questions I developed about the case. Each newspaper story contradicted the one that had preceded it. Some reporters had left out key facts, while others had obviously created facts in an effort to tell a more sensational story. In short, newspapers were useless. To learn the truth, I would have to track down the people who had actually worked on the case. In the autumn of 1991, I went to a professor in the broadcast journalism department at the university and pitched the idea of doing a class project on the Boston Strangler case. “What is there left to tell?” the professor asked. “Everything,” I answered. She told me to go ahead and see what I could find out.

  The first person I called was Tom Troy, the Boston attorney Albert DeSalvo hired after firing F. Lee Bailey. Troy represented DeSalvo in his unsuccessful attempt to block the opening of The Boston Strangler. The six-foot, two-hundred-pound Troy rivaled Bailey for flamboyance. If Bailey had the private plane, Tom Troy often rented helicopters to make grand entrances in front of courthouses all over Massachusetts. Troy was the son of a Boston cop shot dead in the line of duty two weeks after Troy was born. His mother had to raise a family that included his brother and two sisters on a $35,000 trust fund established by a local newspaper. Troy argued his first case in front of a judge when he was just fifteen years old, saying that his father’s killer should not be paroled. The killer’s parole was denied. Troy was best known for defending a Tufts University professor, William Douglas, who had been charged with the murder of a Boston prostitute, Robin Benedict. Although no body was ever found, Douglas confessed to the killing just before his trial was about to begin.

  Needless to say, Troy had no reason to sit down for an interview with a college lad. “Look, kid, I’m heading down to Florida this afternoon and don’t have time for this stuff. Why are you interested in the story anyway?” he asked me. I told him who my aunt was and that I was beginning to doubt that Albert DeSalvo was the killer. “Casey,” Troy replied, “I’m sorry to hear about your aunt, I really am. Let me tell you something about Silky DeSalvo. He was no more the strangler than you or me.” “What makes you so certain?” I asked. He said, “First of all, the guy didn’t have a violent bone in his body. He was a lover, not a killer. And besides, he told me that the story was bullshit.” I wanted clarification. “You mean he told you that he wasn’t the strangler?” I asked. “That’s right,” Troy replied. “Albert DeSalvo told me that he was not the Boston Strangler.”

  The next name on my list was Dr. Ames Robey. The psychiatrist agreed to meet me on the BU campus. This time, I wanted to make sure I got the interview on tape. I negotiated with a classmate, offering to shoot his video project in return for use of his camera. The deal was struck just as Robey was making his way up the steps of the College of Communications. A large man, Robey cut an impressive figure, even in his seventies. After telling me he still saw patients regularly in his Stoneham home, Robey discussed with me DeSalvo’s psychological makeup, explaining that DeSalvo was not violent but prone to great exaggeration. Robey added that he thought George Nassar could have committed some of the Boston Strangler murders. “After so many years, is there any way this case can finally be solved?” I asked. Robey ran his hand over his bald head. “I know there was semen left at some of the crime scenes. With what’s now being done with DNA testing, I don’t see why not,” he replied. DNA testing, I thought. Could it be the key that would unlock the case?

  After the Robey interview, I went out to get footage of the outside of two of the apartment buildings where the women had been killed. With my borrowed video camera, I jumped on the subway, or the T, as it is called by Bostonians, and headed west on the Green Line, toward 1940 Commonwealth Avenue, the address of the Boston Strangler victim Nina Nichols.

  It was a busy Friday afternoon in that part of the city. Many neighborhood residents were college students getting an early jump on the weekend. While I was setting up my shot, a few guys entered the building with cases of Budweiser under their arms. I hoped no one would walk into the middle of my shot. As several young women made their way in and out of the building, I wondered if they had any idea of what had taken place inside.

  The last location on my shooting schedule was 44A Charles Street, an address I was in no rush to see. When I found my aunt’s apartment building, I was unnerved by the fact that it looked exactly as it had in news photos from 1964. For a few moments I let my imagination get the better of me, traveling back in time to the day of Mary’s murder. If I had been in my spot outside the building that day, would I have seen my aunt’s killer as he entered her building? Could I have stopped him from committing the crime? I was brought back to reality when what had been a light drizzle turned to a heavy rain. Quickly videotaping several exterior shots of the building, I then walked a couple of blocks and ducked into a small tavern called The Sevens. Two men in suits were sitting at the bar, and a couple of construction workers were in the middle of a heated game of darts. “Brown-Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison played on the jukebox. The bar seemed familiar to me, almost as if I’d been there before. What I didn’t know then was that The Sevens had been Mary’s favorite pub during her brief stay in Boston. Sitting down at the mahogany bar, I ordered a beer and got lost in my thoughts. If only someone had seen something, I told myself. At that moment, I began to understand the questions and guilt my mother had been haunted by for so many years.

  My obsession with the Boston Strangler case started to affect my love life. I didn’t see or talk to my girlfriend for days. Laura Russell was an Irish-American lass, a finance major at Northeastern University with an adorable smile and a sharp mind. When we finally got together, she told me she had been noticing a change in me. Even when we were discussing our hopes for the future, my mind was somewhere in the past. Fortunately for me, Laura refused to let my involvement with the case drive a wedge between us. “It’s really important to you, so it’s important to me. If the only way to be with you is to become involved in this . . . I will,” she told me one night, over pizza and beer at her apartment. And Laura turned out to be true to her word. She became my videographer.

  My final interview subject was my mother. I wanted her to tell the world what she had been telling me, that Mary’s killer could still be out there someplace. We shot the interview outside one sun-splashed autumn afternoon on the Boston Common. I gave Laura a crash course on filming and sat Mom down on a wooden bench f
or the interview. Making sure Laura was rolling tape, I asked my first question: “Mom, how does it feel being here in Boston, just blocks from the place where Mary was murdered?” My mother paused for a moment, searching her mind for the answer. “I don’t want Mary to be just another statistic, victim number eleven,” Mom said. “She was a real person, a beautiful girl and a loving sister.”

  Laura had never heard my Mom open up like that. “I can’t believe she’s carried this around for so long,” Laura would say later. “Now I really know why you want to solve this case.”

  9 : Laying the Groundwork

  A fter graduating from college, I began the job hunt. No Boston television stations were hiring reporters straight out of college, so I jumped from one low-level sales job to another. Frustrated, I would call my Nana Florry for a few words of encouragement. My grandmother and I were particularly close. She had watched my transformation from aimless teenager to driven adult. “You’re better than anyone I’ve seen on TV,” she said, trying to boost my confidence. By coincidence, the day I landed my first television job was the day Florry Sullivan died. I delivered the eulogy at her funeral. It was the spring of 1994, thirty years after Mary’s murder. The Sullivan family had gathered once again at St. Francis Xavier Church to say good-bye.

  The day after the funeral, I began work at WHDH Channel 7, which was then the CBS affiliate station in Boston. My first job was organizing scripts for the news anchors and running the teleprompter, for six dollars per hour. It did not matter to me that my friends were making $20,000 and more in their first year out of college. Television news was where I wanted to be. I was drawn to its frantic atmosphere. There were deadlines for each of the daily newscasts, and they had to be met: your job depended on it. Assignment editors barked orders over the two-way radio to news crews out in the field. Producers pounded on their typewriters, quickly absorbing news stories as they came in, then sending them out as coherent scripts. As a production assistant, I ran script to the studio, most times just before the previous story was read. I would have considered myself lucky if anybody at the station even knew my first name.

  Soon I was growing more concerned with my work at the station and less concerned with the Boston Strangler case. Then, in the fall of 1994, the name of Albert DeSalvo was suddenly in the news again. That’s when Sean M. DeSalvo, his twenty-seven-year-old nephew, was arrested for the kidnapping and attempted rape of a forty-three-year-old Lynn woman. Of course, the newsroom had a field day. The file tapes of Albert DeSalvo and the Boston Strangler crime scenes were taken out of storage. “Imagine if we had another Boston Strangler. Now, that would be good for ratings,” one veteran reporter said. I just bit my lip, hoping this story would go away and the references to the Boston Strangler case with it. However, the case of Sean DeSalvo would drag on for months and get even more bizarre. “He has tried to strangle me in my sleep,” his wife, Claudia, claimed when she filed for divorce. “He has slept with a butcher knife under the pillow and told me he would not strangle me. If he killed me, he would stab me to death. I live in fear that my son could grow up to be the next Boston Strangler.” How much of what she claimed was accurate and how much was rhetoric is unknown. However, kidnapping and attempted rape charges against Sean DeSalvo were eventually thrown out because of lack of evidence.

  I was promoted to a newswriting position just as the Trial of the Century was getting under way in Los Angeles. The legendary football player O. J. Simpson faced a double murder charge for butchering his ex-wife, Nichole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. Representing Simpson was the so-called Dream Team of lawyers. The biggest name on the team was F. Lee Bailey. When the trial began, I was surprised to see the flamboyant and camera-conscious Bailey take a backseat to two legal eagles of a new generation, Johnnie Cochran and Barry Scheck. The trial was to rely heavily on scientific evidence and this was not Bailey’s strong suit. The prosecution team of Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden had a mountain of evidence incriminating Simpson, but evidence was no match for emotion. African Americans in Los Angeles were still seething from the Rodney King beating, and Simpson’s lawyers recognized that many blacks distrusted the Los Angeles Police Department. There was a change in strategy and the Dream Team elected to play the race card and place F. Lee Bailey on center stage. It was Bailey who painted LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman as a racist because of the investigator’s use of the word nigger in a taped interview.

  Allowing Bailey to conduct Fuhrman’s cross-examination was a bold move by the defense, considering that Bailey himself had been chastised for using the same word to describe Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall during a speech in the 1970s. Bailey claimed he had only spoken in fun that time. Anyway, Bailey was back on top with his solid performance in the O. J. Simpson case. But his triumph in that case was his last great victory before his downfall a few years later.

  The O. J. Simpson trial was still the hottest news story when I left WHDH for an associate producer job at WTNH in New Haven, Connecticut. I needed to learn the details of news producing at a small station before I could jump to a producer job in Boston, the country’s sixth largest media market. In New Haven I was quickly promoted to morning producer but had second thoughts when I realized the extent of my responsibilities. Producers not only choose which stories will be covered in a newscast; they also do the bulk of the writing and design the overall format of the show. But the biggest challenge facing most producers is dealing with the fragile egos of the on-air talent. Many anchor teams are not as chummy as they appear on-screen, and because news is so competitive, some coanchors will do just about anything to put down their on-air partners and get more time on-screen. It’s the producer’s job to divide the news fairly. I thought seriously about leaving television news, but where else would I find the forum to expose the inept investigation of the Boston Strangler case and identify Mary’s killer? Television has long been our most powerful medium of communication. Newspaper stories lack the raw emotion conveyed by a good TV news story. But it takes a strong photographer, reporter, and producer to bring a television news story to life. I wanted to get back to Boston so I could work on the case, and I wanted to get back to spending time with Laura. Our relationship had grown stronger, but the three-hour commute from Boston to New Haven was exhausting for both of us. After asking her to marry me, I began calling television stations in Boston in hopes of finding work. I soon learned of a producer opening at WBZ-4, Boston’s oldest TV news station. During my interview, I told the news director I was a student of the city’s rich history and that to understand Boston’s future, you had to understand its past. The news director, Peter Brown, apparently appreciated my approach and hired me. It was December 1996.

  Brown was a very demanding boss. With live TV, anything can go wrong, and much does. If a reporter does not make deadline or a live shot suddenly disappears because of a technical difficulty, the producer must find a way to get the show back on track.

  And not only did Peter Brown insist that his producers keep a clear head in the control booth, he also counted on us to generate good story ideas. Story ideas usually are discussed around a large conference table, with every producer in attendance. At first, I did not tell anyone about my connection to the biggest murder case in Boston history. Instead, I waited for the right moment. During a story meeting in the winter of 1997, Brown went around the room asking each producer to come up with three story ideas. Some suggestions were interesting, others had been done previously in other television markets. Finally, all eyes rested on me. I was the new guy, and I had better have something good. I took a deep breath and told my story. My aunt had been the last victim in the Boston Strangler case, and I wanted to prove that Albert DeSalvo was not the killer. The room fell quiet. “Will your family talk on camera?” Peter Brown asked finally. He knew a great story idea when he heard it. “Absolutely,” I told him.

  10 : The Living Victims

  When I got home that evening, I called my mother and explained my story i
dea. “You know, it’s funny,” she said. “I drove by Mary’s grave today. I never go there because I hate to think of her in that cold ground. But there I was, talking to her headstone. I had this strong feeling come over me. It was Mary urging me to find her killer. It’s time for everyone to know the truth.” My mother would be the first relative of a Boston Strangler victim ever to go public with doubts about the guilt of Albert DeSalvo.

  I wondered whether DeSalvo’s family also had questions about his guilt. I scoured the telephone directory, hoping to find a DeSalvo relative still living in New England. I came across the name Frank DeSalvo in Revere. When I called, Frank DeSalvo confirmed that he was Albert’s brother, but he also made it abundantly clear that he wanted nothing to do with a reinvestigation of the Boston Strangler case. “Why dig all that up again?” he asked. I explained there was a good chance we could prove that Albert was not the Boston Strangler, but he just replied, “Ah, who cares anymore?” At that point I realized there was no way to convince him to be interviewed for television.