by Susan Kelly
The breakout, which Albert, Erickson, and Harrison had apparently been planning for several days at least, was childishly simple to accomplish. One of them had obtained a key to unlock their cells. The three then walked down a third-floor corridor to where an elevator was being installed. They removed the plywood covering the shaft, climbed down the scaffolding inside it, and stepped out onto the hospital grounds. They scaled a twenty-foot inner wall, a second thirty-foot outer one, and dropped down to freedom on the other side, landing in a bed of new-fallen snow.
Albert was supposedly armed with a gun, Erickson and Harrison with a half a pair of scissors each.
At 2:20 A.M., the stolen car in which they were driving ran out of fuel, so they coasted into a gas station on Route 28 in North Easton. Albert tried to charge three dollars’ worth of gas. The teenage attendant wouldn’t let him, so they asked the young man to call them a taxi. Instead, he called the police—not because he was aware that he had three escaped felons on his hands, but to report a vehicle breakdown. Albert, Erickson, and Harrison had disappeared into a nearby woods by the time a cruiser appeared.
Either Albert and the others somehow retrieved their car and got it going or stole another one. Police and press reports are confused and conflicting about this particular part of the escape. What is definite is that the trio managed to reach Everett, where Albert’s brother Joseph lived, before running out of gas again. Albert called Joe; Harrison and Erickson made phone calls of their own.
A few minutes later Joseph picked up the three and drove them to Richard DeSalvo’s house in Chelsea. Richard gave Albert money and fresh clothing. All five then drove to Sullivan Square in Charlestown, where Harrison and Erickson wanted to be dropped. Albert gave them ten dollars apiece.
By this time, the escape had been discovered and reported. Hundreds of state troopers and municipal police joined in the manhunt for the fugitives. Armed guards were posted around the homes of the witnesses, judge, and prosecutor in Albert’s trial.
Joseph and Albert took Richard to work in Chelsea. From there, Joseph drove Albert to Lynn, where they parted company in front of a drugstore on Western Avenue. 35
Albert, thinking that he had been spotted, broke into an apartment to hide for a few minutes. When it seemed safe, he left the apartment and broke into the cellar of a house on Western Avenue. He put together a makeshift bed and turned on his transistor radio to listen to the news of his escape.
By 10:23 P.M., Harrison and Erickson, who had spent their first and only day of freedom drinking—and in Harrison’s case, ingesting drugs—at the Melody Lounge in Waltham, were back in custody. They had surrendered voluntarily to the authorities, who bought the pair hamburgers to blot up some of the alcohol they’d consumed before returning them to Bridgewater.
Albert went for a walk around the Lynn General Electric plant until 2:00 A.M. Cold and hungry, he went back to his cellar refuge. There he broke into a locked bin and discovered two sea bags, one of which held a navy uniform. Albert dressed in that, leaving his discarded clothing—and an automatic pistol wrapped in a white T-shirt—on a bench.
Around 2:30 in the afternoon, he walked into the Simon Uniform Store on Western Avenue and asked to use their phone to call his lawyer. He feared the authorities were closing in on him, and he didn’t want to be shot by an overzealous cop.
Five minutes later he was arrested by a Lynn patrol officer and taken to the police station and then to court. The judge ordered him to MCI-Walpole immediately. He arrived there at 7:15 P.M.
To quote from the police report: “DeSalvo entered the Walpole State Prison and was thoroughly searched by Supervisor John J. Mahoney and Senior Officer Edward J. Cronin. After DeSalvo was stripped naked and searched, he was placed in his cell for his long-term sentence.”
Albert had gone from bad to worse.
He had also been reunited with George Nassar.
At the news of Albert’s escape, the press went wild. The Record promptly offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for his capture. It furnished a list of protection do’s and don‘ts alongside an article entitled WOMEN BEWARE! HE’S A SMOOTHIE. It warned that the female population was in grave danger not only from Albert but from Erickson and Harrison.
The public reaction was predictable. “I’m scared out of my mind,” a Beacon Hill secretary told Jonathan Klarfeld of the Globe. Klarfeld also reported that a resident of the town of Bridgewater was keeping a shotgun by her side as she did her housework. A local sportswriter, a twelve-year-old at the time, today recalls that his mother made him stay indoors for two whole days. Nor were any of his friends permitted to play outside while Albert was on the loose.
In Harvard Square, however, where sangfroid reigned supreme, women shrugged off the danger. The same was true in the affluent suburbs, just as it had been during the Strangler scare of 1962—64. According to one Andover woman, Albert’s escape was “sort of a distant joke, really. We knew he wouldn’t be coming here.”
If Albert’s destination wasn’t Andover, what was it? Media speculation abounded. Ames Robey thought he might try to lose himself in the population of a big city, wrote the Globe’s Sara Davidson. Mexico might be his goal, another source felt. And Samuel Allen thought Albert might head for Germany, where Irmgard, Judy, and Michael were now living near Bremen. Allen supposedly characterized Albert’s putative need to see his wife and children as a “keen, twisted desire.”
Erickson and Harrison later told authorities they’d overheard him discuss with Richard and Joseph the possibility of taking a plane somewhere, of “flying out.”
While all this was going on, F. Lee Bailey was in Charleston, South Carolina, defending Air Force Captain Jack Simon in court-martial proceedings. Simon had been charged with molesting four children at the base swimming pool. On the evening of February 24, the captain was acquitted. BAILEY DOES IT—AGAIN! the Record crowed the following day.
Bailey’s first step on learning of Albert’s escape was to offer a reward of his own—ten thousand dollars for the safe return of his client to custody. He feared that the five-thousand-dollar booty put up by the Record might encourage some trigger-happy citizen or cop to shoot Albert on sight. He also angrily denounced the Commonwealth for “double-crossing” his client by reneging on its promise to get him good psychiatric help.
Bailey added that he wasn’t surprised Albert had fled Bridgewater, because he had been extremely depressed and despairing after his conviction, resentful that the Commonwealth had so ill repaid his cooperation with it. (Albert would later claim that he had escaped in order to dramatize the hellish conditions at Bridgewater.) Bailey also said that he didn’t think the self-admitted Strangler posed much danger to the public at present, since his urge to kill had been sated years ago with the murder of Mary Sullivan.
The fact that DeSalvo, Erickson, and Harrison had been able to slip so easily out of Bridgewater was a major concern and a major embarrassment to the authorities. “I’m shocked and very upset,” said Governor John Volpe, who ordered Public Safety Commissioner Leo Laughlin to look into the matter.36 State Representatives Robert Cawley and George Sacco would ask a legislative committee to investigate. “It could only happen in Massachusetts,” the Globe editorialized acidly, going on to remark that while most states in the union had mass murderers, only the Commonwealth seemed incapable of keeping its mass murderers under lock and key.
The saga of Albert Henry DeSalvo, already bizarre, sordid, and tragic, took on a dimension that was downright ludicrous the following month. Having transferred the literary and theatrical rights to his life story to Gerold Frank, Albert had now gone into the music business. On March 15, C-C-M Productions of Cambridge announced the release of a recording based on a poem Albert had written while in Bridgewater.
It was entitled “Strangler in the Night.”
All the profits from the record would go to the Foundation to Study the Cause and Treatment of Sexual Disorders—established by C-C-M.
C-C-M Executive V
ice President Samuel A. Cammarata told the press that “this recording tells, in part, [Albert’s] feelings during the period he was undergoing psychiatric tests at Bridgewater State Hospital... DeSalvo would not receive a penny from the sale.” CC-M legal counsel Joseph Balliro said that the foundation expected to realize ten thousand dollars from sales.
“Strangler in the Night” did not make the Top Forty, although it did become a very minor kitsch classic.
On March 20, Bernard Schultz, manager of the main Lynn post office, reported to the police that he had a package addressed to Mr. A. DeSalvo of 785 Western Avenue. The package was a bundle of books from the Doubleday Book Club. Some anonymous practical joker had made a note of Albert’s hideout address as published in the press and used it to enroll him in the club.
It was the kind of stunt Albert himself might have pulled.
While Albert was busy fashioning a new career as the Frank Sinatra of Walpole State Prison, Donald Conn was settling into his new position as assistant attorney general of the Commonwealth, to which he had been appointed very shortly after the Green Man trial. He was hired by Elliot Richardson, who had succeeded Edward Brooke as attorney general.
Richardson and Conn, along with Herbert Travers, head of the Criminal Division, were taking a serious look at the possibility of trying Albert for the stranglings.
And the Boston Bar Association was taking a serious look at F. Lee Bailey’s role as Albert’s defense attorney.
Nineteen-sixty-seven saw a number of setbacks for F. Lee Bailey. One was the April trial of Carl Coppolino in Florida. It ended that same month with Coppolino being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of his wife Carmela. And in August, George Nassar would be reconvicted of the murder of Irwin Hilton. This time, the jury recommended that Nassar be sentenced to life imprisonment rather than execution. Judge Donald Macauley followed its recommendation.
There were other difficulties for Bailey. In The Defense Never Rests, he writes that his tribulations with the Boston Bar Association began in June, after he applied to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts for a certificate of good standing in order to represent Coppolino at his Florida appeal.37 Bailey expected the application to be routinely approved. He was instead informed that it would be held up because the Bar Association had some “matters of concern” regarding Bailey that they wanted to discuss with him first.
These “matters of concern,” according to Bailey, were “a report that [he] intended to play [him] self in a movie about the Sam Sheppard case,” “a contract [he] had signed with David Susskind’s Talent Associates for an ABC-TV series that fall,” “ [his] appearance on CBS radio in Boston to discuss [an aspect of the Plymouth mail robbery case] with a local interviewer named Paul Benzaquin [one of George Nassar’s supporters],” ”[his] appearances on the Joey Bishop and Johnny Carson TV shows after Carl Coppolino’s conviction, during which [he] attacked the verdict,” and ”the fact that [he] had contracted to write [The Defense Never Rests], and engaged a literary agent [Sterling Lord].“38
Bailey asked another lawyer to assist him in addressing the questions the Bar Association’s grievance committee had raised about his conduct. That lawyer was Joseph Balliro, counsel for the Cambridge corporation producing “Strangler in the Night.”
Bailey and Balliro met with the grievance committee, and, Bailey writes, it accepted his explanation of “the matters of concern.” He received his certificate of good standing.
But documents on file in the Massachusetts State Record Office clearly suggest that the Boston Bar Association had in mind issues somewhat weightier than book contracts and guest shots on late-night talk shows.
On March 15, Hiller Zobel, then an attorney with the firm of Bingham, Dana and Gould and now a superior court justice, had the following letter hand-delivered to Attorney General Elliot Richardson:
The Boston Bar Association has appointed me special counsel to investigate certain aspects of the professional conduct of a member of the Bar of the Commonwealth. I write to you now at the suggestion of Theodore Chase, Esq., Chairman of the Committee.
Our investigation has just disclosed information of the most disturbing and sensitive nature, pertaining directly to a series of matters now before the courts. The occasion is, in my opinion, urgent, and I request an opportunity to lay the issue before you personally as soon as possible. I stand ready to cancel any other professional appointment in order to serve your convenience.
At the bottom of the page is this handwritten note: “I talked with Zobel on 3/15/67. He is particularly interested in the actions of Sandra Irizarry and Lt. Tuney [former Strangler Bureau members], who went to work for Bailey. HFT [Herbert F. Travers, Jr.].”
On April 24, Zobel requested access to the attorney general’s files on the strangling murders, in particular a long memo dated February 2, 1967, and written to Travers, head of the Criminal Division of the attorney general’s office, by Tuney, Irizarry, and Phillip DiNatale. This document furnished a history of the Task Force and an account of how Gerold Frank had been permitted access to the volumes of material it had gathered on the homicides. It also mentioned that the Task Force personnel had objected vehemently to Frank’s constant presence in the Bureau offices while he was doing the research for the book that would become The Boston Strangler, which they felt inhibited their discussions on how to proceed with their investigations of the murders. In late April of 1964 Bottomly had, however, ordered them to cooperate fully with Frank and permit him to read and make notes on even the most top secret police files.
Travers passed Zobel’s request for a copy of this memo on to Richardson, who replied:
What is Zobel’s interest in this material? I ask partly because it would seem to me better, somehow, if instead of opening our files—or any part of them—to him we simply answered any relevant questions he may ask (where there is no reason why we shouldn’t), referring, where necessary, to our own files for purposes of refreshing recollections, etc. What do you think?
The reason Richardson was loath to surrender the Strangler files to an outsider was simply that while the Bar was investigating Bailey, Donald Conn was investigating the possibility of prosecuting Albert for at least some of the stranglings.
To this end, sometime around May 8, a new subdepartment was created in the Office of the Attorney General. It was called the Trial Section of the Criminal Division; in reality, it was simply the old Strangler Bureau under a new name. It would be headed by Conn and staffed by Detective Lieutenant John Butler and Corporal Paul O’Brien of the Massachusetts State Police and Phillip DiNatale, the lone holdover from the original Task Force.
The new bureau was formed just after Richardson and Conn met with Bailey—a meeting at which Bailey said that he’d be willing to have DeSalvo questioned about his role in the Strangler murders provided certain conditions were met. These were that Albert be examined by two qualified psychiatrists about his competence to make a voluntary confession; that he be given a lie detector test; and that the investigation and prosecution of any case against him be controlled by the attorney general’s office.
Richardson and Conn agreed.
Conn, as chief of the new Strangler Bureau, had the chore of gaining the consent of the district attorneys of Middlesex, Essex, and Suffolk counties to Bailey’s demand that the prosecution of any case against Albert be overseen by Richardson. Almost immediately he ran into some serious obstacles. Conn and Richardson met on May 11 with Conn’s former boss, Middlesex County District Attorney John Droney, to discuss the possibility of proceeding against Albert in the Beverly Samans murder. They explained to Droney the conditions Bailey had laid down as a part of the deal. Droney was not, to say the least, enthusiastic. As Conn would later write, “Mr. Droney was not receptive to the idea of homicide prosecutions and the control of the Attorney General’s Office in a consolidated prosecution.” Droney also felt that such a move might disrupt Albert’s pending appeal of his Green Man conviction. And Droney also object
ed on the grounds that “Mr. Bailey’s motives were purely financial and that $110,000.00 of reward money [for the Strangler murders] 39 was still uncollected” and that “Mr. Bailey’s motives, if not financial, were purely for publicity and that [the] Attorney General’s and the District Attorneys’ Offices of the respective counties involved could be greatly criticized for becoming a party for an attorney ‘throwing his client to the wolves.’ ”
When, on May 17, Conn and Richardson met with Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett Byrne to confer with him about indicting Albert, they got a similar response. Any murder cases that had taken place in his jurisdiction, Byrne said, he and not the attorney general would prosecute. Byrne also conveyed, to use Conn’s own words, “a distrust for Bailey.”
The next day, Conn got together with Essex County District Attorney John Burke. Again Conn proposed what he’d proposed to Droney and Byrne. And again, he got the same answer. Burke was no more taken with the idea of a consolidated prosecution of DeSalvo under Richardson’s aegis than had been Droney and Byrne.
Like Droney, Burke claimed not to want to do anything that might boomerang on Albert’s Green Man appeal. He also suggested that DeSalvo’s attorney was motivated by a desire for money and publicity. And he concluded by stating that Albert wasn’t the Strangler anyway, although he did have a good idea who was.
Burke’s favored suspect was George Nassar.
That same day, Conn met with Hiller Zobel, who was still attempting to wrest from the attorney general’s office the documentation he needed to pursue his investigation of Bailey. Conn wrote an account of this meeting two weeks later:
