It
was a hot steamy night in June, 1962 when police were called to a run down
apartment building in the centre of Boston.
In the bedroom, they found the body of a young woman. Partially clothed, with
her limbs arranged in an obscene posture, the woman had been strangled with one
of her own stockings.
Although, on that sticky, humid night, the
killing seemed only to be a random sex murder, the discovery was the beginning
of a reign of terror that was to grip the city and capture the morbid imagination
of the nation for more than 18 months. For the murder was the first carried out
by one of the most notorious mass murderers of the century … Boston Strangler.
For a year-and-a-half, police sought in vain
to unmask the fiend who left his trademark on 11 of the 13 bodies: a single
stocking tied tightly around the neck of his victim. Of the two other victims,
one was stabbed to death, and another died of a heart attack, allegedly in the
arms of the Strangler.
The man behind the mass murders was former US
Army boxing champion. Albert de Salvo. In a twist as bizarre as the killings
themselves, De Salvo was never tried for the Strangler murders, but for an
assorted series of robberies and sex attacks on women whom he did not kill.
Although some still express doubt that De
Salvo was the Boston Strangler, the thick-set handyman. Who always wore his
black hair slicked back and had an obsession for dressing in neat, freshly
laundered white shirts, did make a confession to the killings. Facts which only came to light after he was
sentenced to life imprisonment seemed to confirm that De Salvo indeed the Boston Strangler.
Albert DeSalvo had been in trouble with the
law since his childhood, mostly for breaking into homes – a skill that was to
be put to terrifying use when he began his killing spree. As a young man he
served with the US Army’s occupation force in Germany, where he married a local
girl, Irmgard. But after having two children, the couple was divorced. He
became the Army’s middleweight boxing champion, but left the service on his
return to America
and became a handyman.
DeSalvo had a sexual drive that some doctors
described as “uncontrollable”. Back in his army days, according to one
psychiatrist who gave evidence at his trial, his wife constantly complained
about his sexual demands. ‘She refused him sex’, said Dr James Brussel,
‘because he made excessive demands on her. She did not want to submit to his
type of kissing which was extensive as far as the body was concerned.’
He added that during his off-duty hours in
the army, DeSalvo would engage in wild orgies with the wives of officers who
were absent.
‘DeSalvo was without doubt, the victim of one
of the most crushing sexual drives that psychiatric science has ever
encountered’, said his lawyer, the famous defense attorney, F. Lee bailey. ‘He
was without doubt schizophrenic.’
The wave of killings began in 1962 and,
despite the setting up of a special Strangler Squad by law enforcements
officers, they continued unabated until 1964. In each case, the women who fell
victims to the strangler were killed in their own homes. DeSalvo gained access
to their apartments by posing a delivery man or by claiming he had been sent by
the superintendent of the building to check a leaking water pipe.
Many of the strangler’s victims were
sexually molested, which was in keeping with DeSalvo’s insatiable sex drive.
They were nearly all undressed, and their bodies arranged in obscene poses.
As the murders continued unabated, so the
fear and panic among the citizens of Boston
increased. Few took to the streets by themselves at night. Husbands going away
on business left their wives loaded guns on their bedsides. Police patrols
reached an unprecedented level. But despite the rising deaths toll, and the
almost daily arrest and released of possible suspects, Albert DeSalvo, then 32
was never interviewed by the police. He should have been a prime target for
investigation …having only just been released from prison after serving six
months for sex offences. He had posed as an agent for atop modeling agency and
persuaded young woman to allow him to take their measurements. But it was just
an excuse to molest them, and he was arrested for what became known as the
Measuring Man’ attacks.
Then in 1964 he was arrested for the ‘Green
Man’ attacks. He was nicknamed the ‘Green Man’ because of his love for green
trousers, which he always wore when he broke into the homes of single women. He
would strip his victims at knife point and them all over, before making his
escape. A description given by one of his victims, however, was matched by a
detective, as being an exact description of the ‘measuring man’ and De Salvo
was brought in.
After his arrest, he was taken to the
Bridgewater Mental Institute in Massachusetts,
where the terrible truth was to come out.
At his trial for the ‘Green Man’ offences,
psychiatrist Robert Mezer stunned the court when he revealed that DeSalvo had
admitted to him in hospital that he was the strangler. He said that during an interview
at Bridgewater,
DeSalvo had confessed he strangled 13 women. He went into details about some of
them, telling me some of the inmate acts he had committed.
But by Massachusetts’ law no doctor who takes
information from the suspect in a case can give it as evidence in a courtroom,
so the full story never came out at DeSalvo’s trial. However, there is a little
doubt in the minds of most experts that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler.
Probably the most telling revelations came from his defense lawyer, F Lee
Bailey, in his book, The Defense Never Rest. He explained that DeSalvo had made
another confession this time to doctors and law enforcement officers, in a
dramatic meeting in July 1965. But because of special deal between the police
and the defense, the evidence was never used.
I wanted DeSalvo studied by experts, and
the authorities wanted to be able to end their investigation. In both cases,
DeSalvo’s identification as the Boston Strangler had to be irrefutably
established. That was only possible if the police interviewed him and matched
his memory against the myriad of details of the 13 murders.
After striking the bargain that the
conversations with DeSalvo would not be used in court, the meeting took place
at the Bridgewater Mental Institute. It was supposed to take only 15 minutes.
Instead it took more damning evidence that DeSalvo was the Strangler was to
emerge. He revealed the information about the victims that only the real
murderer could possibly have known. He said there was a note book under the bed
of the victim number eight, brunette Beverly Samans. He was able to draw floor
plans of the apartments of his victims, and could give clear descriptions of
the furnishings and decoration.
These other details added up to more than 50
hours of tapes made at subsequent interviews with DeSalvo and more than 2000
pages of transcript. All details were checked and all were correct.
But the dramatic details that could have
convicted DeSalvo as the Boston Strangler were never fully revealed until after
his trial for the other offences. And the only man who could know with
certainty whether he had killed 13 women, Albert DeSalvo, is now silenced for
ever. In 1973 six years after he was sent to Walpole State Prison, in Massachusetts, DeSalvo
was stabbed to death by three other inmates, in a row over drugs.
