He laughed again, this time louder and more gutturally, and that caused him to descend into a coughing fit, which spurred him to stick the oxygen mask over his mouth for several long, deep breaths. As he breathed, his blank eyes stared straight ahead at nothing, a total acceptance of this as his human condition.
When he pulled the mask away, he said, “They wouldn’t, would they?”
“Why not?”
He looked at me like I was a bronze-plated idiot, and maybe I was. But sometimes these are the kinds of questions you have to ask in this grand business of information acquisition — questions that might seem obvious to everyone but the person asking them.
He asked, “Why would the brass want people thinking that the Strangler is killing again? That would be an admission that they didn’t get the right guy back then. That would mean that the grunts, people like me, were right, and that the higher-ups, they were wrong. Why would they want you to think that?”
As he spoke, he grew more animated, even agitated, moving his arms out from under the unwashed sheets. He fell into another coughing fit, then climbed his way out of it by sipping water from a badly smudged glass on the other side of his bed.
When he collected himself, I asked, “All these many years later, the brass is still sensitive about it?”
He shot me another one of those looks that made me feel like the stupid kid at the fifth-grade science fair. You know how they say there’s no such thing as a dumb question? In Bob Walters’s presence, I was the exception to that rule — a living, breathing asker of the dumbest questions he’d ever heard.
Still, he contained himself and said, “Think about who’s where. One of the lead detectives on the case is now the police commissioner, and from what I hear from the few friends I still have on the force, he wants to be mayor. The U.S. senator from your state was the attorney general heading the Strangler investigation. These are just two guys who have staked their whole fucking careers on that one case. And they’re not done yet. Think, kid, think.”
I was, but to no avail. I said, “Tell me about your role. You headed up the investigation, right?”
He swallowed hard. His eyes were transforming right before my eyes, sharpening. He laughed softly and said, “Yes and no. A lot of people headed up that investigation. After DeSalvo confessed, there were probably forty people who claimed to have led the case, every one a fucking tactical genius. I was just one of them.”
I said, “Save your false modesty for your lovely wife. Tell me your role.”
He looked at me — both surprised and amused.
“I headed homicide at the time, so yeah, it was my case. The whole fucking world was coming down on us. Boston had four newspapers at the time, every one of them going crazy with this thing. The Phantom Fiend, the Boston Strangler, another woman dead, read all about it. Women were locking themselves indoors. The mayor was having fits. The Strangler didn’t care about city and county boundaries, and the other police departments and prosecutors were being real pricks.
“And then you’ve got the state attorney general, the most ambitious prick in the world, taking over the case and putting some sham group together called the Boston Strangler Commission, trying to make it all go away in the best possible way so he could have a campaign issue when he ran for president. And my own fucking cohorts in homicide were sticking knives in each other’s backs to get in the next day’s paper. The thing was a pure fucking disaster from the day the first broad was found strangled in Back Bay.”
He paused and took another long sip of water. He pivoted his head along the pillow again, looked at me, and said, “So you want to know my role? That was my role. Bring order to total fucking chaos. I thought I had succeeded until the day I failed, and when I failed, I failed big.”
He shut his eyes and seemed to rest for a moment. I stood in silence on the side of his bed. When he looked at me again, I asked, my tone softer now, “What’s got you laid up?”
“I’m old, kid. I’m old. That’s my problem. You’ll be old someday too, and it sucks.”
Before I could respond, he added, “And I have diabetes, which prevents me from walking. I haven’t even tried taking a step in a year. I get out of here maybe once a month in a wheelchair, when I can get someone over to carry me down the stairs. The doctors want to amputate both my legs. I’m on borrowed time down there. And I’ve got emphysema, which is what’s causing this fucking coughing all the time. I guess I’m on borrowed time everywhere.
“And I’ve got a miserable drunk of a wife who doesn’t give one flying fuck whether I’m dead or alive. You know what, never mind that. She’d much prefer if I was dead so she wouldn’t have to deal with all my bullshit. Kid, I hope your wife is someone special, because like I said, growing old sucks.”
I asked, “If not DeSalvo, then who’s the Strangler?”
“Nobody’s told you that already?”
“I haven’t really asked anyone until now. All respect intended, sir, you were the guy who knew the most back then, the detective that all the other cops looked up to. Speaking of which, Hank Sweeney says to say hello.”
He didn’t, but he probably should have. And far more important, I had a strong sense that dropping his name, showing that I already had easy access among favored members of the fraternity, would help my cause here at a level that I hadn’t yet explored.
Bob Walters brightened at the mention of Hank and said simply, “A good man. An excellent man. Broke barriers and broke cases. You can’t beat that combination.”
I said, “Who is it?”
He lay in silence for another long moment, his gaze moving from me to some faraway place I couldn’t see.
Finally, he said, “A guy who was never on my list until long after the stranglings stopped. A brilliant guy. Pure evil. Poor Boston if he’s back.”
“You’re not helping me,” I said.
He laughed again. Our rapport was growing easier, even as he seemed to be growing tired again.
He said, “DeSalvo was arrested on a rape charge, actually, a string of rape charges, and sent to the Bridgewater Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons while he awaited trial. He wasn’t a suspect in the stranglings, either. But one day, he just ups and confesses. He gave details of each of the murders that impressed the hell out of Stu Callaghan and a bunch of his people. Callaghan was so excited about the confession, about bagging the Strangler, that he never let any of the hands-on detectives interview him, because he knew we had doubts and he was afraid we’d ruin his moment and all the fawning press coverage that went with it. So he only allowed access to DeSalvo to a bunch of his pissant, know-nothing administrators who wanted nothing more than to close the books on the whole thing.”
He paused, then said, “Trust me, Albert DeSalvo couldn’t hit a dog, never mind kill a woman. He was not the Boston Strangler.”
I said, “But the killings stopped as soon as he was arrested.”
“You’re right. They did,” he said. “It ends up that DeSalvo’s cell-mate in Bridgewater is a guy named Paul Vasco. Ever hear of him?”
I shook my head.
“Vasco’s got an IQ of 158. I wasn’t kidding when I said he was a genius — an evil fucking genius. Diabolical. And cold-blooded. He had beaten a murder rap years before on a technicality. Robbed a gas station. Drove halfway out of the parking lot, flipped his car in reverse, went back inside, and shot the clerk in the head just for kicks. Then he left. This was in the ’burbs, and the damned cop forgot to read him his Miranda when he pulled him over later that night and found powder burns on his hand and blood on his shirt. So he walked.
“Anyway, Vasco’s arrested at just about the same time as DeSalvo. They spend months in Bridgewater together, walking this route up and down a corridor heading from the cell block to the rec room. Other prisoners I interviewed said that’s all they did, walk and talk, day and night, week after week, walking and talking.
“When DeSalvo confesses and starts reciting details from the crime scenes, everything
he knew he learned from Vasco. DeSalvo’s famous for having this photographic memory. But it wasn’t really photographic. He didn’t have to see things to remember them. It was just a fabulous memory. And everything that Vasco told him about the crime scenes, DeSalvo committed to memory and recited for Callaghan’s lame-brained bureaucrats who were allowed to interview him.”
By now, retired Lieutenant Detective Bob Walters was on a roll, and the look on his face didn’t make him look so old and frail anymore, as if he was back on the job, running a crime scene, drawing out a witness, intimidating a suspect into confessing to some heinous crime.
I asked the obvious question, which, again, is something we sometimes do in my line of work. “If he didn’t kill these women, then why confess?”
Walters looked at me in silence for a long moment, his head still resting against two propped-up pillows, his weak chest and useless legs spread beneath his graying sheets.
“That’s what we spent a lot of time trying to figure out,” he said. “You’ve heard of professional confessors, right?”
I had, but wanted to hear his definition, so I said nothing.
He continued, “They’re people who get their rocks off confessing to crimes. Don’t ask me why. They like to be in the middle of things, but their own lives are too pathetic to ever put them there. Don’t know. It’s why we usually hold something back from you guys at the paper, some key fact that only a person at the crime scene would know about. In this case, we held something back that was pretty big.”
He paused and looked away for a moment, as if recollecting events that didn’t, to him anyway, seem all that long ago.
“DeSalvo didn’t really fit the bill as one of those,” he said. “He was a rapist, or maybe just a groper, so why bother confessing to murders? So we counted that out. Then we — we, like Boston PD — interviewed a bunch of other prisoners. Ends up, they said DeSalvo thought he was going to make a fortune for his family from a book and movie deal if he was the Boston Strangler. He knew that he’d be going away for a long time on the rape charges, so what was the difference if he was a murderer, too. Then he got this high-powered lawyer to take his case, H. Gordon Thomas. And Thomas convinced him that if he confessed to the stranglings, he could plead innocent by reason of insanity to the rapes. Thomas tried telling the jury that anyone who committed all those Boston Strangler murders must be crazy. The jury, though, saw right through it.
“Guilty, and sentenced to twenty-five years in Walpole. And trust me, you wouldn’t want to spend twenty-five minutes in Walpole.”
This from a guy who was confined to his own little prison, life without parole sprawled on a bed in a dreary room with a wife downstairs who drank herself into oblivion every day of the week. I don’t take credit for it, but this conversation seemed to be a furlough for him, a brief respite from his disease.
I asked, “Why do you think Vasco did it?”
He said, “I just do. You develop a sense of people in my business, probably the same as in your business — when people are lying, when they’re telling the truth, when they’re hiding, when they’re exposing. I asked him once, put it right to him: ‘Hey, Paul, DeSalvo’s gone. The case is off the books. But we had the wrong guy, didn’t we?’
“You know what he said?”
He didn’t wait for an answer here, in the way that people in charge aren’t really seeking answers when they ask questions. It’s just part of their show.
“Nothing. Not one fucking word. You know what he did? He smiled at me, this evil fucking smile, his eyes locking on my eyes, his teeth like a wolf’s, just sitting there smiling. I swear to God, I wanted to grab his throat and choke the guy and ask how it fucking felt as his eyes bulged out and his ears filled up with blood because his damned eardrums burst. But I didn’t, and that look has stayed with me ever since, the look of defeat in the biggest case of my career.”
He added softly, “That’s why I think Paul Vasco was the Boston Strangler.”
I nodded. What else could I do? What was I supposed to say? How do you tell a guy it’s going to be all right when it’s not, when his wife is downstairs probably passed out by now, when he’s never going to get out of bed, when the guy he thought was a killer forty years ago could very well have been killing again?
Finally I asked, “Given the advances in DNA, shouldn’t forensic scientists be able to prove or disprove whether DeSalvo was the Strangler?”
“Kid, so much of this science is more like science fiction to a sick old man like me.”
I said, “When DeSalvo was murdered, he was stabbed. There was obviously a knife involved, covered in DNA, his DNA. Where is it?”
He smiled again, a long, remembering smile, and rolled his head from me toward the wall on the other side of the room, that smile never fading from his mouth. After a few moments he said, “The murder was committed outside of my jurisdiction, in another municipality and a different county. The attorney general’s Strangler task force had already been disbanded. Hell, the attorney general had already gone on to bigger and better things — mainly the United States Senate. But I got one of the state police detectives to get me the knife.”
I was stunned. The knife could prove to be the Holy Grail in the Strangler case. According to Sweeney, if you found the knife and placed it in the right hands, you could determine that DeSalvo was not, as many people suspected, the Boston Strangler. This, in turn, could possibly mean that the new serial killer in Boston was, in fact, the old serial killer.
I blurted out, “You have the knife?”
As I asked this, I began picturing the burgundy-stained blade sitting in a Tupperware container in the bottom of a box in a corner of Walters’s cellar or garage. Hopefully his old lady hadn’t spilled vodka or gin all over the damned thing and destroyed the most important evidence in the annals of Boston crime.
“I had the knife,” he replied. He paused and added, “I gave it away.”
“You gave it away?” I mean, what the hell, did the old guy sell the Strangler knife on eBay, for chrissakes? Was that how he was living in this house?
“I gave it to the family of one of the victims.”
“You gave it to the family of one of the victims.”
He said, smiling again, “Is there an echo in here?” It was his first token attempt at humor, and for that reason and perhaps that reason alone, I obliged with a laugh.
But quickly I asked, “Why?”
“It gave them closure. That’s a fancy word that all the victim advocates use for helping them get over the fact that the human race sucks. That knife wasn’t doing me a damned bit of good.”
It would now, but I let that obvious fact remain unstated. Instead I asked, “Which family?”
“It was —” And before he could get the words out, he started to cough, that deep, penetrating cough. He reached for his glass again, but the water was gone. The cough was getting harder and longer. He pulled his mask desperately to his face.
At that exact moment, a woman behind me said, “Who the hell are you?” She wasn’t yelling, but each word was as firm as a rod of steel.
I whirled around to see an overweight fiftysomething darkskinned woman in those green medical scrubs that were fashionable to wear many years ago, though I suppose they don’t go out of fashion if you’re in the business of making people well. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the business of making people unwell, or even dead, but that’s a concern for another time.
I gave her the whole Jack Flynn thing. She was uniquely, and might I add bizarrely, unimpressed.
“He can’t be bothered by no reporter.” She said “reporter” as if she was spitting on an already littered sidewalk. I could have pointed out that, in fact, by talking to that reporter, Bob Walters was probably happier than he had been in months or years. I could have said that I, like her, was in the business of saving lives, and Bob Walters was helping me do it.
Instead I said, “We were just wrapping up. If you could excuse us for a moment.”<
br />
Walters was still coughing, though not quite as loud or hard as he had been, and he continued to hold the mask over his face. The health worker walked around me to the oxygen tank, turned a knob, and more oxygen came out into the mask with a large swooshing sound. Walters closed his eyes in relief.
She said to me, “He’s done. Get the hell out.”
Maybe she was right, maybe he was done, but the problem was, he had left one key fact dangling at the end of an unfinished sentence. I turned back toward Walters and said, “Sir, the name of the victim’s family?” He pulled the mask off his face and let forth with a phlegm-covered rapid-fire coughing fit. The health worker shot me a look that would kill a weaker man and shrieked, “Get the hell out. Now!”
I looked at Walters, but his eyes were deadened again, staring straight ahead. His body was convulsing in coughs that he was trying unsuccessfully to contain. “I’ll drop by later, Lieutenant,” I said.
He didn’t say anything or do anything in response. He didn’t even look at me. As I walked out the door, I dropped my business card on his soiled side table. He seemed to be in an ongoing struggle for his life.
Downstairs, Mrs. Bob Walters still sat at the kitchen table, staring now at an empty bottle of vodka. I didn’t say anything. Really, I couldn’t say anything. As I walked out the back door, she never even looked up.
17
I had twenty-eight voice mails on my cell phone when I dialed in from the rental car, and immediately assumed that twenty of them were from Peter Martin. Ends up I was wrong. Twenty-one of them were from Martin. By the fifteenth one, he was reduced to pleading: “Call me.” Voice mail sixteen: “Call me now.” Voice mail seventeen: “Fricking call me now.” Voice mail eighteen: “Fucking call me or you’re fired.”
Voice mails nineteen and after continue in that same general tone and theme.
I got five messages from other media outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, wanting to interview me about my correspondence from the Phantom Fiend. There was a message from Boston Police Detective Mac Foley, sounding anything but happy with my reportage in that morning’s paper. The one remaining voice mail came from Vinny Mongillo, providing me a list of his favorite Vegas restaurants and offering — or was it threatening — to fly out and join me for what he described as “a little dinner and an evening of gaming.” Such is the adventurous life of an intrepid reporter on the road.
Strangled Page 13
