When he got out of prison, after serving an 11-month term, DeSalvo’s wife, as her own form of punishment, denied him all sexual contact. So DeSalvo was forced to take on a new identity, this time that of the ‘Green Man’. The ‘Green Man’ got his name from the green trousers he liked to wear when talking his way or breaking into women’s houses; and he was both a more dangerous and a wider-ranging character. In other northeastern states as well as Massachusetts, he’d strip some of his victims at knifepoint and then kiss them all over; others he would tie up and rape. Many of them, he later claimed, hadn’t complained at all and had heartily joined in. He boasted of having ‘had’ six women in a single morning.
Alberto DeSalvo became known as the ‘Measuring Man’
In 1962, though, another and yet more sinister character appeared on the scene, one that was to terrorize Boston for eighteen months: The Boston Strangler. In June of that year, the naked body of a middle-aged woman was found in her apartment, clubbed, raped and strangled. Her legs had been spreadeagled and the cord from her housecoat had been wound round her neck, then tied beneath her chin in a bow. The necktie, the bow and the spreadeagling were all to become, as the months dragged on, horrifyingly familiar.
Two weeks later, the Strangler struck twice. Both victims were women in their sixties. Two more were murdered, a day apart, in August 1962, one 75, one 67. Then, in December, he struck once more – and from then on no woman in Boston felt safe, for she was only 21. Sophie Clark was strangled and raped, and her body, when it was found, carried all the marks of the Strangler.
The killings went on, with increasing violence, until January 1964. There was no particular pattern, apart from the spreadeagling, the bow, the ligature. The youngest victim was 19, the oldest 69. As the number of dead mounted up, panic increasingly gripped the city. Few – except for patrol cops – chose to walk the streets at night. When husbands had to leave the city, wives kept guns at their bedsides. The police were inundated with calls and condemned in the press. But Albert DeSalvo was never even interviewed.
Then, though, the killings stopped. After January 1964 the Strangler seemed to disappear – even though the ‘Green Man’ was still at work. For that autumn a young married student called the Cambridge police to say that she’d been tied up and sexually assaulted by an intruder. The description she gave tallied with that of the ‘Measuring Man’, and DeSalvo was arrested. Meanwhile police in Connecticut, who’d been investigating similar attacks during the summer of ’64 in their state, finally identified him as the ‘Green Man’. DeSalvo was held on $100,000 bail and sent to Bridgewater mental hospital for routine observation. He was later sent back there by a judge when declared
‘potentially suicidal and… schizophrenic.’
It was at Bridgewater that the controversy that still surrounds DeSalvo’s name began. For a prisoner called George Nassar, who’d been arrested for murder, was in the same ward as DeSalvo and realized, from his boasts, so he said, that he had to be the Boston Strangler. He told his lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, and Bailey himself spoke to DeSalvo and taped his confession – not only to the Strangler’s known murders, but also to two others.
In a complicated deal engineered by Bailey, DeSalvo in the end stood trial only for the ‘Green Man’ offences. He was sentenced to life imprisonment; and is said to have confessed in detail to the Boston Strangler’s crimes at a special meeting of doctors and law enforcement officers in 1965. Even so there remain some doubts. For the ‘Measuring Man’ and the ‘Green Man’ invariably chose younger women than the Boston Strangler. Witnesses who’d actually seen the Strangler failed to identify him. So could the Boston Strangler have really been George Nassar, who’d somehow fed DeSalvo details of the crimes in Bridgewater and then persuaded him to confess? Could there in fact have been several killers? We shall never know. For DeSalvo was stabbed to death in Walpole State Prison in 1975. The inmate who knifed him through the heart was never identified.
John Dillinger
There was something desperate, death-or-glory, about John Dillinger. For his big-time career as America’s most wanted criminal lasted, in fact, little more than a year. He came out of prison in May 1933 after a nine-year stretch, and by July the following year he was dead, gunned down outside a cinema in Chicago. In that short space of time he robbed untold numbers of banks, broke into police armouries, escaped from prison twice, and survived at least six different shoot-outs. If he hadn’t existed, J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation – which made its reputation out of his identification and death – would have had to invent him.
John Herbert Dillinger was born into a religious Indianapolis Quaker family in 1902, and moved with it to Mooresville, Indiana eighteen years later. In 1923, after an unhappy love-affair, he joined the navy. But he deserted soon after, married a local girl and then, in September 1924, was sent down for nine years for assault while attempting to rob a grocer. He seems to have come out of prison nine years later as a man with a mission. For within a month, he’d robbed an Illinois factory official and within two, he’d committed his first bank robbery. At this point he gathered a gang together, among them ‘Baby Face Nelson’ Gillis, and together they went on a spree, robbing banks all over the Midwestern states and killing anyone who stood in their way.
Dillinger became the FBI’s Public Enemy No1
There were occasional hiccups. In July 1933, Dillinger was arrested for his part in a Bluffton, Ohio bank heist. But three of the gang posed as prison officials and soon got him out – the spree went on. They moved from rural banks to the big city: they robbed the First National Bank in East Chicago, and escaped with $20,000, killing a policeman on the way. And though Dillinger was again arrested – this time in Tucson, Arizona for possession of stolen banknotes and guns – this did little to cramp his style: legend has it that he carved himself a wooden gun, held up officials with it and bluffed his way out the joint.
The only other thing he did wrong on this occasion was to steal a car from a sheriff and drive it across the state line. But this was enough to involve J. Edgar Hoover’s Feds, who then played him up to the newspapers as a deranged killer even as they tried to track him down. Dillinger, in fact, had a reputation as a courteous man, particularly to women and children. So he resented the publicity, and did his best to avoid it. He tried to disguise himself via facial surgery – and he even had his finger ends shaved off to avoid identification.
In April 1934, a tip-off led the government men – or G-men, as George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly seems to have been the first to call them – to a hide-out at a lodge in Little Bohemia, Wisconsin. The Feds, though, shot at the wrong car during a night-time raid, and Dillinger escaped, leaving a dead G-man behind him. Gradually, however, the net closed in. Rewards for information leading to Dillinger’s arrest were by now on offer from several states, and there’d even been a special appropriation voted by Congress to add to the pot.
Dillinger was gunned down outside a cinema in Chicago
Dillinger survived six shootouts before the one that finally killed him
In July 1934, then, a friend of Dillinger’s, a brothel-keeper called Anna Sage, came to claim it, and on the 22nd, by previous arrangement, she went with him to the Biograph Cinema in Chicago.
As they came out after the show, a halfhearted attempt was made to arrest him. He resisted and was shot; he died before reaching hospital. J. Edgar Hoover, who was on hand to grab the limelight cast by his Public Enemy Number One, later described Dillinger as,
‘a cheap, boastful, selfish, tight-fisted plug-ugly.’
It’s worth remembering that it was this same J. Edgar Hoover who announced that the Mafia – a much more difficult target than Dillinger – simply did not exist in America.
Albert Fish
Albert Fish was a harmless-looking old guy, but when he came to trial in White Plains, New York in 1935, the judge wouldn’t let any female spectators into the courtroom. After the grisly evidence had all been heard and he’d been conde
mned to death, one of the jurors said:
‘I thought he was insane, but I figured he should be electrocuted anyway.’
He first appeared in the light of day – and history – on June 23rd 1928, when he appeared at the New York house of a family called Budd in the guise of ‘Frank Howard,’ who claimed to have a large farm in Farmingdale, Long Island. Eighteen-year-old Edward Budd had placed an ad in a newspaper asking for farm work, and this was his potential future employer. After a friendly lunch, ‘Howard’ said he’d be back later to drive Edward out to the Island. But in the meantime why didn’t he take Edward’s nine-year-old sister Grace to a children’s party his sister was having?
Grace never returned. The address that the party was supposed to have been given at was non-existent – and so was the Long Island farm. All the police had to go on was the writing on a telegram-form that had been sent to Paul from mid-town New York. There were no other clues.
Then, though, six and a half years later, the Budd family received a letter in the same handwriting, saying that he, ‘Frank Howard’, had murdered Grace and had,
‘feasted on her flesh for nine days… I learned to like the taste of human flesh many years ago during a famine in China,’
‘Howard’ went on.
‘I can’t exactly describe the taste. It is something like veal, then again it resembles chicken, only it is tastier than either. The best flesh, that which is most tender, is to be had from children. Little girls have more flavour than little boys.’
This time the police were able to trace the letter through the envelope that ‘Howard’ had used; in December they arrested the culprit, sixty-four-year-old Albert Fish, in a New York rooming-house. He quickly confessed, saying that he’d originally intended Paul as his victim but had changed his mind as soon as he’d seen Grace. He led police to what remained of her body, buried in woods in Westchester County.
Fish, a house-painter with six children, turned out to have a long record of arrests for, among other things, writing obscene mail. But in prison he confessed to a string of other crimes, among them the murders of six children, whose flesh, he said, he ate in stews. In all, he is believed to have attacked over a hundred young people and to have committed at least fifteen murders.
Albert Fish looked like a harmless old man
He was tried for the killing of Grace Budd in March 1935 and, though his defence pleaded insanity, he was found guilty. He was executed at Sing Sing prison on January 16th 1936, after helping his executioner position the electrodes on his chair.
John Wayne Gacy
Why John Wayne Gacy, the so-called Killer Clown, was never suspected of involvement in the disappearance of a succession of young men in the Chicago area in the 1970s, remains a mystery. The baby-faced, twice-married – although homosexual – had, after all, been earlier sentenced to ten years in an Iowa facility on charges including kidnap and attempted sodomy. On probation in Chicago after his early release, he’d been accused of picking up a teenager and trying to force him to have sex, and of attempting the same thing, at gunpoint, with an older man at his house. His name had even appeared on police files four times between 1972 and 1978 in connection with missing-persons cases.
To cap it all, a full eight months before his final arrest in December 1979, a twenty-seven-year-old Chicagoan called Jeffrey Rignall told police that, after accepting a ride from an overweight man driving a black Oldsmobile, he’d been attacked with a rag soaked in chloroform, and then driven to a house, where he’d been re-chloroformed, whipped and repeatedly raped, before being dumped, unconscious, in Lincoln Park hours later. When the police said his evidence was too little to go on, Rignall spent days after leaving hospital sitting in a hired car at motorway entrances. Finally he spotted the Oldsmobile, followed it and wrote down the number. It belonged to thirty-seven-year-old John Wayne Gacy.
At this point the police did issue a warrant, but they failed to act on it. It was three months before they arrested Gacy – and then only on a misdemeanour. He was set free to go on killing.
The reason the police were so lax was probably because Gacy, on the face of it, was prosperous, active in his community and well-connected. He had a construction business with a large number of employees, an expensive house – and was something of a local celebrity. Dressed up as Pogo the Clown, he was a regular entertainer at street parades and children’s parties. He was also active in Democratic Party politics. He gave donations to the Party, organized fêtes for it and on one occasion co-ordinated a Party event for 20,000 people of Polish descent, at which he was photographed with First Lady Rosalyn Carter.
The truth was, though, that it was all front. Gacy used his construction company as, in effect, a recruiting-agency, a way of getting close to his victims. He gave jobs to young men and boys from the surrounding Chicago suburbs, and he picked up others at the local Greyhound station, luring them to his house with the promise of work. He was also a regular cruiser in Chicago’s gay district, preying on yet other young men whose disappearance would not be much noticed. They, too, would end up among the whips, handcuffs and guns at Gacy’s house.
He was caught in the end more by accident than design – simply because a mother came to pick up her son one night from his job at a Des Plaines pharmacy. The teenager said he had to go off for a few moments to see a man about a high-paying summer job. He never returned. When the police later visited the pharmacy they noticed it had recently been renovated – and the pharmacist told them that the renovation company’s boss was probably the man who had offered the kid a job: a man called Gacy…
Gacy, the Killer Clown
When the police called at Gacy’s house to question him about the teenager’s disappearance, they opened a trapdoor leading to a crawl space below the house and found the remains of seven bodies. Another twenty-one were subsequently found, either dug into quicklime or buried in the area around the house. Gacy quickly confessed to their murders, and to the murder of another five young men, whose bodies he’d simply dumped into the river because he’d run out of space. He’d sodomised and tortured them all. One eerie detail of Gacy’s modus operandi emerged in the coming months. He’d offer to show his victims what he called ‘the handcuff trick,’ promising that if they put on a pair of handcuffs they’d be able to get out of them within a few seconds. Of course they couldn’t. Then he’d say:
‘The way to get out of the handcuffs is to have the key. That’s the real trick…’
Gacy was married twice and was a well known figure in his community
He was given life imprisonment in 1980.
Carmine Galante
Carmine Galante’s Mafia nickname was ‘Lillo’ – for the little cigars he constantly smoked. He was short, fat, bald – and immensely violent. When he came out of federal prison in 1978 he had two ambitions: to make money – by taking over the immensely lucrative New York heroin trade; and to become the ultimate man of respect: the Boss of All Bosses.
Galante grew up in East Harlem, New York, the son of Sicilian immigrants. He was to remain at heart a Sicilian, out of tune with the pliable Italian-Americans who gradually took over the Mafia – and were willing to keep a low profile for the sake of business. He was a man of vendettas; he lived by the gun and the code of honour; and as such he became in the early days a trusted member of the Bonanno family.
In 1957, he travelled as consigliere to his boss Joe Bonanno to the Palermo summit of Sicilian and American Mafia leaders, organized by ‘Lucky’ Luciano. He then organized the American end of the so-called ‘Montreal Connection,’ by which perhaps 60 per cent of all America’s heroin illegally crossed the border from Canada. But when the ‘Connection’ was rolled up by the FBI and its Canadian counterpart, and he himself was imprisoned, all he could do was watch, powerless, from behind bars as boss ‘Joe Bananas’ became increasingly eccentric and his family was forced to yield power to others. Once out, he wanted revenge.
Carmine Galante, the cigar smoking king of violence
Equally quickly, though, they and their boss became a ‘business problem’ to the New York Commission, especially to one member, Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, who, in the absence of any real leadership in the Bonanno family, had taken over many of its interests. No one, though, wanted a bullying throwback, a ‘Moustache Pete’ from the past, to rock the boat. So the Commission ordered Galante’s assassination – and the job was handed, as per custom, to a member of his own family, underboss Salvatore Catalano.
On July 13th 1979, as Galante was enjoying an after-dinner cigar with two friends on the patio of Joe and Mary’s Italian Restaurant in Brooklyn, three men wearing ski-masks and shotguns walked in through the back door. Galante was dead so fast, his cigar was still in his mouth as he hit the patio floor. The traditional .45 bullet was then fired into his left eye; his guests were finished off by his own trusted bodyguards – who then calmly walked out with his killers.
That same day, at a meeting in prison, Phil Rastelli was reconfirmed as head of the Bonanno family, and Mafia bosses met in a social club in New York’s Little Italy to celebrate. But Galante later came back to haunt them. For as the result of wiretaps installed during the investigation into the so-called ‘Pizza Connection,’ Salvatore Catalano and the members of the New York Commission were eventually charged with his murder.
100 Most Infamous Criminals Page 10