Search for the Strangler

by Casey Sherman

  Later that day, I received a telephone call from a producer at the CBS Early Show featuring Bryant Gumbel. She asked if I would appear on the program live, opposite F. Lee Bailey. It was a moment I had dreamed about, but I was nervous. Before I agreed to appear on the show, I called Elaine and Dan. I pointed out that they were more qualified to discuss the legal issues of the case. “Yes, but it will be more effective coming from you,” Elaine advised. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

  The interview was done via satellite from the WBZ newsroom. I arrived early that morning to prepare. I knew I would be facing one of the most celebrated and reviled lawyers of the twentieth century. There was a good chance I would be eaten alive. “Just stick to the facts,” I told myself over and over. “Despite what Bailey says, the facts of the case will speak for themselves.” Members of the WBZ production crew sat me down in the studio and handed me an earpiece. I could hear the Early Show producers giving Gumbel his cues in New York. Then I was asked to stare straight into the camera. I could not see Gumbel or, more important, F. Lee Bailey, who was talking via satellite from Palm Beach, Florida.

  The first question was to me. “What’s the point of all this? Why now?” Gumbel asked, a trace of annoyance in his voice.

  “Well, Bryant, my family doesn’t believe Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, and we’re here to find her killer,” I replied.

  Gumbel, who clearly had not done his homework, countered that all the investigators agreed they had gotten the right man.

  “Some of the investigators are saying that, and that’s because these people don’t care about truth, they don’t care about justice. What they care about is how they’ll be remembered when they’re gone, and they all want to be remembered as the men who caught the Boston Strangler, and that’s simply not true,” I replied, my jitters now gone.

  Gumbel then went to Bailey, who, when I was able to view the tape later on, looked as if he had just rolled out of bed for the interview. His face was bloated, his suit was rumpled, and he sat hunched over in his chair. “I think this is a lot of hogwash. The young man wasn’t even alive when this happened,” Bailey said. “Albert said he had intercourse with her, and that’s all he said.” I tried to correct him, but the legendary lawyer cut me off. Bailey might still have been shaking off the cobwebs, but he knew that this television segment could last only a short time. He was doing his best to filibuster his way through it. “There was no room for questioning when people like Andy Tuney and Ed Brooke were done. Albert was the Boston Strangler,” Bailey insisted.

  This time, Bailey was cut off, by Bryant Gumbel. “Mr. Sherman, what do you have to say to this?”

  “Albert DeSalvo said he had sex with my aunt; he said he ejaculated inside my aunt. This was disproved by the official autopsy report. Albert DeSalvo was completely wrong, and, Mr. Bailey, so are you!”

  For a few awkward moments, F. Lee Bailey was speechless. Gumbel called for a commercial, and I walked out into the newsroom to a standing ovation from my colleagues. I felt like David slaying Goliath, but I also knew we had a long way to go.

  19 : The Exhumation

  While the media were focused on our lawsuits, final plans were secretly being made for Mary’s exhumation. My mother did not want this to become a media event, and Jim Starrs assured us that it would be done quickly and quietly. Mom went to the Barnstable town hall and picked up the proper permits. Starrs had lengthy conversations with the caretaker of St. Francis Xavier Cemetery, who was intrigued by the idea. The owners of the nearby John Lawrence Funeral Home offered to donate their facilities for Mary’s new autopsy. Everyone involved in the project was sworn to secrecy. After denying several requests, we finally relented and allowed a camera crew from the CBS news program 48 Hours to film at the cemetery. The network news program, which was working on an hour-long special on the case, had pressed us hard about attending the exhumation. Having weighed the pros and cons, we decided that the media were vital to our success. Even my mother went along, though she wasn’t especially happy about it. Mom realized that the program was not going to air for several months, and she hoped the pain involved in approving the exhumation would not be as fresh then.

  Jim Starrs and his team arrived on Cape Cod on Friday, October 13, 2000. Starrs wanted to open Mary’s grave the day before the exhumation to determine what condition her remains were in. Members of the group delicately dug up the area around the tombstone, making a conscious effort not to disturb the other caskets in the family plot, which contained the remains of my Grandmother Florry, my Grandfather Jack, and my Uncle David, who had died suddenly of a heart attack in 1995. When the team reached Mary’s casket, Starrs was disappointed to discover that the cover had caved in and the casket was filled with water. Starrs gave this information to Elaine Sharp, who broke the news to my mother later that evening back at Sharp’s hotel. Trembling, Mom told her a story that she had told me a few years before. “I remember sitting at my kitchen table and I heard a voice coming from the hall,” she said. “At first, I thought it was the television set, but then I remembered that the TV wasn’t on. The voice was very familiar to me. I went into the hall to see what the noise was, and I saw my sister. Mary was standing right in front of me. She was saying, ‘Find my killer, find my killer.’ Mary was wearing a white nightgown, and she was soaking wet. Her hair was wet, and her clothes were wet. I didn’t know why she was wet. It has bothered me for years. But now I know why.”

  I drove to Cape Cod the next morning. The fog of early dawn had lifted, replaced by brilliant sun and balmy temperatures. I got to the cemetery just before nine. Starrs and his team were already gathered. Starrs’s spirits were high, thanks to the arrival of his friend and colleague Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner in New York City. Baden had testified in the O. J. Simpson trial and had his own television program on forensic science on HBO. He was a mountain of a man with wild, curly hair and a thick mustache, but his physical appearance belied a caring nature. He told me in a soft voice that he sincerely hoped the work done on this day would lead to closure for my family. “Your mother is a very brave woman. She cares deeply for her sister and we will not let her down,” he said.

  Mom didn’t come to the cemetery for the exhumation. Instead, she wanted to spend the beautiful Indian summer day walking Sea Street Beach, thinking about her sister. Mary was not at the graveyard, Mom told herself, but alive at her favorite spot in the world, the beach. I attended the exhumation in Mom’s place. Since I had never known Mary, I thought I could observe the exhumation and keep my emotions in check. I was wrong. When I saw the scientists lifting the casket out of the ground, my eyes welled up with tears, and I could barely breathe. Once again I wondered about the wisdom of exhuming Mary’s body. Then Starrs walked up to me with a quizzical look. “We found another set of remains at the foot of your aunt’s grave. They are the remains of an infant,” he said. I had to look away. The casket Starrs had found, I knew, held the remains of my sister, Susan, born two years after me. She had been stillborn, and my mother had her laid to rest next to Mary, so that Mary could watch over her. I thanked God that Mom wasn’t there.

  Out of respect for my aunt’s memory and for their surroundings, Starrs’s team of scientists spoke in hushed tones throughout the unearthing of Mary’s body. Elaine Sharp took copious notes and pictures that she hoped would one day be presented to a jury. “She’ll lead us to her killer, I really believe that,” Elaine said, giving me a hug as we watched the scientists carefully place Mary’s remains into a waiting hearse.

  I followed the caravan of vehicles from the cemetery to the funeral parlor. It was like a funeral procession, but in reverse.

  I declined an invitation to observe the autopsy. Instead, I sat upstairs in the funeral parlor, awaiting word from Baden and Starrs. I wanted to remember Mary as she was in her high school yearbook picture, young and smiling.

  Now it was time for Michael Baden to go to work. The first thing the scientists noticed when th
ey placed the remains on the table was that Mary was still holding rosary beads. They spent the next several hours examining Mary’s remains for possible trace evidence of her killer. First, they ran an ultraviolet light over her body, hoping to find signs of seminal fluid. Baden and the crew also took swabs of Mary’s mouth and vaginal area. The work would continue into early evening. In all, the scientists extracted over sixty biological samples for later testing.

  The team members got together later that evening for dinner at Barbyann’s, a Hyannis steak house. Starrs, who was putting the team up in hotel rooms with money from his own pocket, said he’d also pay for dinner. My mother and I protested, but the professor wouldn’t hear of our paying. Starrs was once again wearing his tweed coat, but this time he was also carrying a wool sock that contained a can of Guinness—mother’s milk, according to Starrs. “What is the sock for?” I asked. He looked at me as if my question was absurd. “To keep it warm, of course,” he said.

  As the night progressed the drinks flowed, and Starrs and Michael Baden began discussing the idea of holding a news conference the next day. This was exactly what my mother and I didn’t want. Mom was already uncomfortable over the fact that television cameras had filmed the exhumation. Although the 48 Hours special would not air for months, our emotions were still raw at this time and we didn’t want to be forced to share that with an audience. Knowing we were upset, Sharp said, “The story will get out; it always does. Let Jim hold the news conference and get ahead of the story before the story gets ahead of us.”

  The next day, Starrs announced that we had exhumed Mary’s body, and reporters from Boston rushed to the Cape for the news conference. There Starrs and Baden discussed the purpose of the exhumation, and Sharp once again emphasized the need for cooperation from the government. I reminded reporters that this was by no means a fruitless exercise. “We are not chasing ghosts here. The real killers of these women are still out there,” I said.

  Later that afternoon, Mary was laid to rest once again. My mother’s new husband, Ken Dodd, had built Mary a new casket that my mother-in-law, Ann, lined with Irish linen. Instead of jetting out of town with their forensic evidence, Jim Starrs and his team attended the reburial, serving as pallbearers. Again, the sun shone brilliantly. A Catholic priest offered a prayer as Mary’s remains were returned to the ground. “It was beautiful. It was the way Mary’s first funeral should have been, quiet and dignified,” my mother said afterward. I had feared the weekend would be traumatic for her, but it had turned out quite the opposite. “It was like I had my sister back,” she said, “if only for a couple of days.”

  The exhumation made news around the world. The Times of London reported it, as did the Daily Scotsman, and I got interview requests from as far away as South Korea. I explained to the foreign journalists that my mother had been forced into the exhumation because authorities in Massachusetts said there was no physical evidence left in my aunt’s murder case. The exhumation was our best hope of finding out who the killer was.

  One morning soon after the exhumation, I groggily walked out to my driveway to fetch the newspapers. The weather had gotten cold again, and my golden retriever refused to go outside to do the chore herself. Back inside, I took my first sip of coffee. The first section of the Boston Globe did not hold my interest, so I turned to the Metro section, where a column by Brian McGrory caught my eye. According to McGrory, Attorney General Tom Reilly had recently turned up evidence of semen from Mary’s murder. I nearly spit out my coffee. McGrory, who had once called Reilly a “French poodle” for his less than vigilant approach to this case, was now praising him for digging through dusty basements in search of evidence. “What a load of bullshit!” I screamed. I knew that Reilly had been lying to us when he claimed such evidence did not exist. He had had it all along but hoped that the families would go away. And what timing! If the attorney general’s office had told us about the seminal evidence, we would never have gone through with the exhumation. To top it all off, Reilly had told McGrory that he was reopening the Mary Sullivan case, yet he had never even bothered to tell her family. My mother was being victimized once again.

  I forced myself to sit back and think about what was best for the case. Maybe his comments to McGrory were Reilly’s subtle way of extending the olive branch. Swallowing my pride, I phoned his office and was granted another meeting.

  This time, we were well represented by Elaine and Dan Sharp. “Leone thinks he’s still in the marines,” Dan said as we rode the elevator to the eighteenth floor. “He has a procedure for everything. Getting him to think creatively on this could be impossible.”

  Leone did not offer his hand to me as we entered the small conference room; he merely guided us toward the empty chairs. Next to Leone sat a young woman who did not introduce herself. We all assumed she was Leone’s aide.

  “We’re here to make a deal,” Dan announced. “You seem to have something we want, and we seem to have something you want.”

  Elaine broke in. “We will suspend our lawsuit today if we can have an assurance that any forensic testing done in this case will be done aboveboard and not under a veil of secrecy.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Leone asked.

  “Professor Jim Starrs has sent you a letter,” Elaine advised. Before Leone could say he hadn’t received it, Elaine slid a copy of it under his palm. “Professor Starrs is offering any and all information he and his team discover in their forensic reinvestigation of Mary Sullivan’s murder. Now in response, Diane and Casey would like Starrs to be involved in any DNA testing done in your state labs,” Elaine said.

  Leone sat back in his seat, staring at the four of us. “Now, Elaine, this is a homicide investigation, and we do not solicit any outside help. It could jeopardize the case.”

  Now it was Dan’s turn. “We’re not asking that Starrs do the actual testing. We’re asking that he be allowed to observe. You know, the guy’s done this type of work before. He may actually be able to help you. He’d even sign a confidentiality agreement so as to not tell the families what you’ve found.”

  “Any DNA testing done in the Mary Sullivan case will be done by state investigators. And if we need the information Starrs and his team come up with, we’ll get it,” Leone warned.

  The legal sparring continued for several more minutes. Finally, my mother had had enough. “We come up here again and again, and you still tell us no. The best people in the world are working on Mary’s murder, and you say that you don’t need their help,” she said, her voice cracking.

  Leone told her involving outsiders in a state investigation simply wasn’t the way things were done.

  I reached out for my mother’s hand, but my eyes were focused on Leone’s. “So that’s it, then,” I stated. “We’ll continue with our private and successful investigation, and you can continue to do whatever it is that you do here.”

  “Looks like we’ll see you in court, Gerry,” Dan added with a smile as we all got up to leave.

  Then my mother turned to the woman who had been sitting quietly next to Leone for the entire meeting. “I’m sorry, miss, but who are you?” Mom asked.

  “I’m your victim’s advocate. I work as your liaison with the attorney general’s office. I’m working for you,” the woman replied.

  “Then what the hell are you doing sitting next to him?” Mom asked, pointing toward Leone. Before the woman could answer, we were out in the hallway, walking toward the elevator.

  * * *

  “All rise!” the bailiff ordered as Chief U.S. District Judge William G. Young entered the courtroom on February 21, 2001. My mother and I watched from a crowded gallery. Behind us, Dan Sharp stood alone at one table, while five lawyers representing the state of Massachusetts and the Boston Police Department stood at the other. Judge Young was hearing our motion to block the state from conducting further DNA tests on evidence found at Mary’s crime scene. The Sharps had recently discovered that the attorney general was in possession of six semen samples ta
ken from Mary’s body. Her killer, it turned out, had ejaculated on her chest, not inside her vagina, the way DeSalvo had claimed. The samples, which had been placed on slides in 1964, were reportedly hidden away in a vault at the state medical examiner’s office. The morning of the court hearing, Tom Reilly had told reporters that DNA testing in the Sullivan case had been “nonproductive” up to this point. “We are continuing our efforts to analyze that evidence to see if it can be probed. Whether or not it will be, I can’t answer that,” Reilly told the Boston Herald.

  Our worst fears had been realized. Tom Reilly was burning the evidence—literally. In the process of DNA testing, scientists must burn the material to obtain a genetic sequence. As a result, once a DNA sample is tested, it can never be tested again. We were not worried that Reilly’s DNA testing would place Albert DeSalvo at the scene of the crime but that the test results would come back conveniently “inconclusive.”

  “The defendants are in the process of destroying evidence even as we speak,” Dan warned the judge. Judge Young then called Tom Reilly’s legal representative, Judith Kalman, to the floor. “It’s been thirty-six years,” Judge Young began. “Why can’t you share the evidence you have? What could it hurt?”

  Kalman told Young that Mary Sullivan’s murder was an open and active case and that any sharing of the evidence would jeopardize a future prosecution. But how “open and active” was the state’s case? What Judge Young did not know was that the attorney general’s office had yet to question any key witnesses in the case. I knew my mother and I had not been consulted, and Jim Mellon was still sitting in his seaside home, waiting for a phone call.