by Susan Kelly
McNeill also testified that in the Malden police station he’d overheard Albert say to his sister Irene and to Irmgard, “Please, let me be a man just this once.”
Albert had tried to evade the authorities on the morning of November 5, 1964.32 When McNeill asked him why he’d done so, Albert had replied that he knew he was in trouble and wanted to settle his affairs, principally the sale of his car and house. He told McNeill that he wanted Irmgard to have the profits.
The suspect did have three hundred dollars on his person when taken into custody, McNeill recollected for the court. Albert claimed it was the proceeds from the sale of his car. And, McNeill added, a lawyer showed up at the police station that evening with a paper for Albert to sign regarding the sale of his house. McNeill said that he had advised Albert to consult Jon Asgeirsson, the attorney now representing him, before putting his signature on anything.
McNeill’s final piece of direct testimony was to state that the defendant had remarked to him that the Malden police officer who’d arrested Albert had been an old man. “You know,” Albert had commented, “I could have taken that gun from him and shot him. But what the hell.”
On cross-examination, Sergeant McNeill revealed that Albert had asked McNeill to “help” him.
The defendant’s psychiatric case was first stated by Dr. James A. Brussel, associate commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Health. A former member of the Strangler Task Force’s Medical-Psychiatric Committee, Dr. Brussel was now, like Sandra Irizarry, Andrew Tuney, and Stephen Delaney, in the employ of F. Lee Bailey. Dr. Brussel told the court that he had examined Albert for a total of four to five hours on October 16, 1965, and January 9, 1967. During those sessions Brussel interviewed the defendant about his life. Brussel said that Albert had given him an autobiography replete with anecdotes of “abnormal behavior with family, friends, and animals.” Albert also, according to Brussel, had discussed his sexual activities with the wives of fellow officers while he was in the army and his exploits as the Measuring Man.
Brussel further told the court that Albert had admitted to him experiencing a “brain sensation” that would compel him to leave work and go looking for an apartment to break into and plunder.
Brussel went on to testify that in April 1964, as part of his duty to the Medical-Psychiatric Committee, he had profiled whomever the Strangler might be as a paranoid schizophrenic. During cross-examination he allowed that Albert in 1966 and 1967 did not quite fit this diagnosis, although Brussel did indeed find the defendant in 1966 suffering from a chronic undifferentiated type of schizophrenia with paranoid features. The doctor had also found that although Albert had been driven by an irresistible impulse to commit his Green Man crimes, he had been sufficiently compos mentis to take the precautions necessary to avoid detection by the police.
Brussel did not conduct a physical exam or any neurological testing of the defendant, nor did he inquire of the Bridgewater guards whether Albert had betrayed any symptoms of violence or disorder.
During redirect examination Brussel told the court that the defendant knew the difference between right and wrong under the dictates of law, religion, and morality, and that he was fully aware his actions were criminal. He was, however, Brussel reiterated, driven by an urge he could not control.
Brussel also said that Albert had never spoken to him of any ambition to make money by admitting to the stranglings. (Brussel may have been unique in this respect, since Albert broadcast the desire to profit from his crimes to virtually everyone else who came within earshot.) Nor did Brussel consider Albert a compulsive confessor.
Bailey’s next hired psychiatric gun, Dr. Robert Ross Mezer, testified that Albert, whom he had seen four times during March 1965, three times during April 1965, and seven times the following year, was a long-term sexual psychopath who as a child had tortured dogs and cats and had once strangled another boy until his eyes had rolled back in his head.
Mezer also told Judge Moynihan and the jury that Albert had confessed to him the murders of thirteen women and provided the doctor with a complete account of his nonhomicidal sexual assaults.
Mezer further stated that Albert had told him he labored under an uncontrollable urge that forced him to wander various neighborhoods in search of an apartment he could break or talk his way into in order to have sex with the female occupant.
One of Mezer’s most intriguing revelations was that Albert had told him he’d feigned the hallucinations he’d experienced in the house of correction—those of Irmgard furiously chastising him—for the purpose of being sent back to Bridgewater. Bailey, of course, had been maintaining all along that his client was desperate to get out of Bridgewater. And Albert himself was explicit about his hatred of the place.
The first witness called to the stand by the Commonwealth was Stanley Setterlund, a Bridgewater inmate who had, according to his own testimony, become one of Albert’s confidants. Setterlund told the court that Albert had admitted to him being the strangler of eleven women (as opposed to the thirteen he allegedly told Mezer he’d killed) and that his knowledge was worth a great deal of money—ten thousand dollars per victim. Setterlund further stated that Albert had told him that he had cased the residences of his female victims and then entered them with the intent of committing robbery and rape. If the women screamed or fought, he strangled them. He cleaned up after himself, leaving no physical evidence behind, and would purposely refrain from taking all the money and valuables from the apartment so that police would believe the victim had been murdered by a sex maniac and not by a robber.
Setterlund testified that Albert had told him that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life rotting in prison, that he wanted to be sent to a mental hospital and be cured of his condition—and that Life magazine had offered him ninety thousand dollars for his life story, the Saturday Evening Post forty thousand.
Setterlund also told the court that he had first met Albert in the company of George Nassar, and that his—Setterlund‘s—own attorney had once been F. Lee Bailey.
John A. Keriakos, deputy master of the Billerica House of Correction, testified that Albert’s behavior during his 1961 incarceration there had been perfectly normal; Adam Kozlowski, a senior officer at the Middlesex County House of Correction, deemed the defendant a model prisoner. Thereafter the Commonwealth called to the stand several of Albert’s previous employers, all of whom told essentially the same story: that the defendant was a hard worker, courteous, congenial, and entirely normal in his speech, behavior, and dress. He had put in an eight-and-a-half-hour day for the Highland Contracting Company on June 8, 1964, the day of the assault on Virginia Thorner, and an eight-hour day for the same company on October 27, 1964, the day of the assault on Suzanne Macht.
A Malden man, Harold Orent, testified that he had known Albert from April of 1963 to November of 1964 and never noticed anything out of the ordinary about his actions or demeanor. Albert had in fact been in the Orent home on over a hundred occasions to do remodeling work. Anna Orent, Harold Orent’s wife, said that she and her children had been alone in the house with Albert on a number of occasions and that his behavior had always been impeccable.
The Commonwealth’s final witnesses were three psychiatrists: The state called back Samual Allen and called in Ames Robey and Samuel Tartakoff, both of whom had figured in Albert’s various competency hearings in the spring of 1965 and the spring and early summer of 1966.
Ames Robey was the first to take the stand. He testified that Albert had told him also of faking his hallucinations, something Albert had admitted anyway at his February 1965 hearing. Robey further described the defendant as a con artist and a manipulator who could clearly distinguish between right and wrong. His present diagnosis of Albert was that the man suffered from a sociopathic personality disorder with schizoid features. Robey concluded that Albert had not been driven by an irresistible impulse to commit his Green Man offenses.
As far as Robey was concerned, the only uncontrollable
urge Albert suffered from was the desire to be branded the Strangler.
Doctors Allen and Tartakoff substantially agreed with Robey that Albert knew right from wrong and that no inner demon had goaded him into his actions. Tartakoff added that he had taken no history from Albert of any “brain sensations” or “little fires” (as Tartakoff called them) occurring in the defendant’s head, as defense witness Brussel claimed he had. Albert’s sociopathy was treatable, but the prognosis for him was not good.
Before he left the stand, Tartakoff mentioned that Albert had once described himself to the psychiatrist as having a fast mouth and the ability to talk his way into anything.
The jury heard no further testimony.
The press coverage of the trial was, as might be expected, phenomenal. Although Albert himself was under heavy guard—clearly the authorities feared not just an escape attempt but that someone might try to kill him—it was his attorney whose life appeared to be in danger. In a typeface only slightly smaller than that generally used for a declaration of war, the Record American ran this headline on Thursday, January 12: BAILEY’S LIFE THREATENED. The paper went on to report that additional court officers and fifteen cops were “rushed” to the trial because two gunmen were believed to be on their way from Boston to assassinate not only Bailey but his “attractive blonde wife” Wicki.
The threat had apparently been phoned in to the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office. When word of it was passed to Assistant District Attorney Conn, Judge Moynihan declared a recess. Wicki Bailey was hustled from the courtroom and, according to the Record, Bailey, Conn, and Moynihan adjourned for “a mysterious, hour-long, lobby conference.” Bailey emerged from it looking grim. When reporters asked him what the problem was, he replied, “I can’t tell you.” As to the whereabouts of the abruptly vanished Wicki, Bailey would only say, “I’ve got her locked up.”
Happily, no assassins appeared at the Middlesex County Courthouse that day, nor for the duration of the trial. The Record reported that the threat had not been in retaliation for his defense of the Strangler (Bailey says it was), although how this could be established with any precision is unclear since no trace of the gunmen who could provide the explanation for their motive was ever found. Wicki was released from purdah and the trial resumed.
On Friday, January 13, the Record bore another banner headline: DESALVO IS THE STRANGLER, with the subheading “Bailey Bares 13 Murders in 18 Months as Acts of an Insane Man.” Framing the headlines were close-up mug-style shots of Albert arriving at Superior Court, looking grim in the full-face shot and somewhat bemused in the profile. According to the Boston Herald, Bailey had in court that day described his client as “a completely uncontrollable vegetable,” in need, the Herald writer dryly suggested, of a suitable bin.
Also in its Friday the thirteenth issue the Record announced that it would begin running excerpts from Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler. And directly underneath that announcement, on page four, ran a notice that the Advertises, the Sunday edition of the Record, would run in its Pictorial Living Coloroto Magazine an article by resident gossipist Harold Banks called “At Home With the F. Lee Baileys”—a piece promised to be “as bright and informal as the Baileys really are. The cover shows the family relaxing before a blazing fireplace.”
A small article at the bottom of the same page informed anyone who might be interested that the death toll of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam that week had dropped to sixty-seven.
For the fashion-conscious reader, the Record also thoughtfully provided a commentary on Wicki’s courtroom couture.33
Ames Robey edged Bailey and Albert from the Record headline sweepstakes on January 17: MD SHAKES STRANGLER STORY. On January 18, it was John Bottomly’s turn to be tabloid man of the hour: CALL STRANGLER PROBER TO TELL CONFESSIONS. The former assistant attorney general didn’t rate the all-caps treatment Bailey, Albert, and Robey had.
(Not only was Bottomly relegated to the lower case, he never even mounted the stand. Judge Moynihan tartly refused to allow his testimony, on the grounds that Albert wasn’t being tried for the Strangler murders, which in any case they’d already heard far too much about from Dr. Mezer. Bottomly’s exclusion was a defeat for Bailey.)
Given its magnitude, Albert’s trial was a short one. On January 19, the Record informed its readers that JURY HOLDS STRANGLER’S FATE. Not the Green Man’s fate. The Strangler’s fate.
The jury had not, incidentally, been sequestered, nor had it been prohibited from reading press accounts of the trial. That was also true of the prosecution and defense witnesses.
On the morning of January 18, Bailey and Conn made their closing arguments. Bailey asked the jury to find his client not guilty by reason of insanity: “It is up to you to determine whether he is sick. I suggest that he is, based on the testimony of witnesses. I did not cross-examine some witnesses for reasons of decency. Their own stories about Albert indicate that he did not act like a normal human being. He was then, as he is now, very sick.”
Bailey then went on to ask the jury to heed the testimony of doctors Brussel, Mezer, and Tartakoff, but to disregard that of Robey. The lawyer then accused Robey of changing his diagnosis of Albert to suit the circumstances. “You can expect at least consistent testimony and proof,” Bailey declaimed. “If, as Shakespeare said, ‘let’s kill off the lawyers,’ I say, well, let’s kill off the psychiatrists, too.”
Donald Conn, who had snickered audibly—and quite deliberately—at Bailey throughout his summation, had his turn at bat: “This is a man [DeSalvo] who wants you to believe he is a vegetable, overwrought and overwhelmed by irresistible impulses,” the assistant district attorney charged. “Don’t be dissuaded [sic] by his cuteness and cunning. You’re going to have to live with your conscience when you get out of here just as I am with mine. Are you going to sit there and let this man get in a hospital and get out in a few years? Stamp his conduct for what it is—vicious, wrong, cruel, criminal conduct. Don’t allow him to fake, feign, and con you right out of your shoes like he conned a couple of doctors.”
Judge Moynihan instructed the jurors that there were three possible verdicts in this case: guilty, not guilty, and not guilty by reason of insanity.
The jury went out at 12:37 P.M. on January 18.
Three hours and forty-five minutes later, the foreman sent word that a verdict had been reached. The jurors filed back into the courtroom.
“All rise,” the bailiff ordered. Those present shuffled to their feet. Albert, wearing a neat dark suit, white shirt, and tie, stood quietly awaiting his fate.
“How do you find the defendant?” Judge Moynihan asked.
The answer was unhesitating: guilty on all counts.
Judge Moynihan pronounced sentence: imprisonment for life. It was a statutorially imposed sentence, he explained, that would not ordinarily have been handed down but for the very clear indication that Albert was the Strangler.
Bailey’s strategy had backfired; his insistence on identifying Albert as the murderer of thirteen women had resulted in exactly what attorney and client had striven to avoid. The jury of twelve men, all of whom had mothers if not also daughters, wives, sisters, granddaughters, and nieces, were not about to run the risk that this “twisted, driven vegetable” ever again be permitted to walk the streets. Nor was Cornelius Moynihan.
Nonetheless, Bailey today has no regrets about how he handled Albert’s defense, maintaining still that he saved his client from the electric chair.
Francis C. Newton, Jr., smiles slightly at this claim: “If Bailey hadn’t done what he’d done, Albert would be alive and free today.”
PART THREE
13
A Great Escape, a Musical Interlude, and More Wheeling and Dealing
The same day he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars,34 Albert was committed to the custody of the superintendent of Bridgewater State Hospital. That night he was back at the institution he so despised to await shipment to the state’s toughest
maximum security prison, MCI-Walpole.
Bailey moved immediately for a stay of execution of the sentence to Walpole, which Moynihan granted. On January 20, Asgeirsson and Bailey filed on behalf of their client a motion for a new trial, claiming errors of law regarding the standard of criminal responsibility applied to Albert. One week later, the attorneys amended that motion with further grounds: The guilty verdict in the case was against the weight of the evidence.
Moynihan denied the request for a new trial on February 1. On February 21, Bailey and Asgeirsson filed a claim of appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
At 11:00 A.M. on the same day, Herbert DeSimone, the attorney general of Rhode Island, had a meeting with Massachusetts State Police Detective Lieutenant Joseph Simons, Detective Phillip DiNatale of the Boston Police Department and the Strangler Bureau, Charles Burnim, a lawyer from Bailey’s office, and Ira Schreber, a lawyer who would serve as DeSalvo’s Rhode Island counsel. The meeting was held to discuss the assault and robbery of a Central Falls, Rhode Island, woman that had taken place on July 3, 1964. Albert had allegedly volunteered the information that he’d committed this crime. But another man, Roland Petit, had been charged with and convicted of the offense and was now serving time for it. The victim had apparently identified Petit as her assailant.
This, like all the other out-of-state charges against Albert, would eventually be put on a permanent hold.
On Friday, February 24, at 12:20 A.M., Albert and two of his fellow inmates, George Harrison and Frederick Erickson, escaped from Bridgewater.
That the three had vanished from their adjoining cells in the I Wing went unnoticed until 6:15 on Friday morning. One hour earlier, and again a half-hour after that, a guard had looked into each cell through a peephole and seen what he would swear were human forms in each bed. In fact, those forms were blankets plumped and twisted to resemble sleeping bodies.
