The Boston Stranglers

by Susan Kelly

  When her body was found, it was facedown in a kneeling position in the bathtub. A housecoat covered the upper torso; the underpants were pulled down on the legs. Jane’s bra was on the bathroom floor.

  There were bloodstains on the kitchen floor, in the hall, and in the bathroom. The apartment did not appear to have been ransacked.

  The “Strangle Worksheet” reported accurately the date and manner of Jane’s death as well as the position in which the killer had left the corpse. It also reported that the victim was wearing a duster, a slip, and a girdle, and that her underpants were around her ankles.

  Albert’s confession to this murder was not specific in its details, and Bottomly had to work particularly hard to wrest answers from him that weren’t either evasive or contradictory.

  BOTTOMLY: Did you have regular, normal sex relations with her? Did you ejaculate before—?

  ALBERT: Uhhh—no—I don’t know about her. This is somethin’ different now, you see? This is gonna be a weird one. This is a weird one.

  BOTTOMLY: This one is a weird one?

  ALBERT: Yes, uh, because the urine made me disgusted—

  BOTTOMLY: Yuh?

  ALBERT: Right, uh.

  BOTTOMLY: Oh, yuh, when she—Did she get on you? Did she urinate on you?

  ALBERT: No.

  BOTTOMLY: Or had you gotten out from under her?

  ALBERT: Maybe it’s possible she did or did not, I don’t know.

  BOTTOMLY: Well anyhow she urinated?

  ALBERT: Yuh—and uh—I do not believe—its possible I did a movement on her, you know what I mean, it’s possible because afterward I put her in the tub, you see, but I’m trying to see if I can remember if I had intercourse with her—I do remember biting her bust, possibly other parts of her body, too, her stomach maybe, too.

  (The medical examiner’s report shows no indication that during the autopsy any teeth marks were found on the body.)

  ALBERT: Uh, what I’m trying to do is see if I had intercourse with her. It is possible.

  BOTTOMLY: It isn’t fresh in your mind right now?

  ALBERT: No, maybe at this moment it isn’t. But I—I just like I’m trying to remember as to what I even put on her, you know what I mean?

  BOTTOMLY: Right.

  ALBERT: I do know that I—I know I didn’t strip her naked.

  BOTTOMLY: What did you do—just push her dress up out of the way or something?

  ALBERT: Yuh—

  BOTTOMLY: And then you pulled off her bra?

  ALBERT: Yuh—This here thing she had on her, I think it was still on her becuz I ripped open her bra and ripped it off.

  BOTTOMLY: Yuh?

  ALBERT: Or pulled it up or somethin’—either I either pulled it up—

  BOTTOMLY: Or pulled it off?

  ALBERT: Or off, and I don’t know if she had the heavy-type girdle on or what, heavy-type bra thing, I’m not sure but she had that heavy-type—

  BOTTOMLY: She must have—well she was an older woman?

  ALBERT: Oh, yeah, she was around 55, 60. I think she had on one of those wider ones, ever see the wide ones? Well the wider type.

  BOTTOMLY: But anyhow you pulled it off?

  ALBERT: It went off, right?

  BOTTOMLY: Yuh.

  (The tape transcript is riddled with incidents like these in which Albert asks Bottomly to confirm a detail of a crime scene, and Bottomly does.)

  ALBERT: And, uh, I remember putting the nylon stockings—I don’t know if on her I used those white nylons. I’m not positive on her.

  BOTTOMLY: (Word distorted)

  ALBERT: White nylons, possibly.

  BOTTOMLY: Yuh?

  ALBERT: On her.

  BOTTOMLY: How many did you use, do you recall?

  ALBERT: Two, I think.

  BOTTOMLY: Uh-huh.

  ALBERT: And I think maybe, you know what I—

  BOTTOMLY: The sex part of this one isn’t too clear in your mind, huh, I mean it doesn’t seem to be as big a part as some of the others?

  ALBERT: No, that’s why I say this here part of the sex to my opinion was a way of revenge.

  BOTTOMLY: It’s an incidental thing, really? ALBERT: Yuh.

  BOTTOMLY: So why did you pick her up? Have you ever thought about that? Why did you put her in the tub?

  ALBERT: You know something, the tub was filled, so full.

  BOTTOMLY: Yuh? Do you think she was getting ready to take a bath?

  ALBERT: Same way with Nich—uh, Anna, Anna Slesers.

  BOTTOMLY: Yuh?

  ALBERT: She was getting ready to take a bath, right? All she had on was the blue robe, stripped naked underneath, right.

  BOTTOMLY: Right.

  ALBERT: There was nothing about her that would interest any man. You follow me? And that’s why I’m trying to figure this one out here, too. BOTTOMLY: That’s why you think sex didn’t have too much to do with it?

  ALBERT: Yes, I’m very sincere about this here. I don’t feel sex had somethin’ to do with this here. As the green man, yes I—I feel sex had something but this is a different thing but still I’m trying to keep on one subject now.

  BOTTOMLY: Right.

  ALBERT: I can’t understand why I didn’t put Anna Slesers [sic] in the tub when she was taking a bath and why did I put Mrs. Sullivan in the tub and she was taking a bath. Just like why did I leave a broom and a bottle?

  BOTTOMLY: Yuh?

  ALBERT: Everything was done differently.

  BOTTOMLY: Yuh.

  ALBERT: You see, but it was done and, uh, the tub—much different—

  BOTTOMLY: Well, was this, is this in the morning then? Or is it the end of the day?

  ALBERT: No, this to me would be around the middle of the day, around two o’clock—

  BOTTOMLY: About two o’clock.

  ALBERT: Uh, this time element there I don’t know.

  BOTTOMLY: Uh-huh. Well is it after lunch? Can you place your lunch that day?

  ALBERT: No. I don’t know the exact time of day.

  BOTTOMLY: What day was it, do you remember? ALBERT: No I don’t. You see—

  BOTTOMLY: Where were you working then, do you remember?

  ALBERT: On Jane Sullivan, it was in, uh, let me see—Jane Sullivan. If I knew what year it was, I can tell you where it was and then maybe I can place where I was working, but uh—

  BOTTOMLY: I’ll give you the year—it was 1962.

  Albert had a great deal of difficulty recalling the murder of Evelyn Corbin, whom he kept calling “Ellen Corbett” or “Evelyn Corbett” despite Bottomly’s constant corrections. He also did not know when the crime had been committed.

  “Is there any chance of me knowing what year it was?” he asked Bottomly. “You tell me,” Bottomly replied, and Albert chuckled.

  BOTTOMLY: You hate to talk about Corbin?

  ALBERT: Corbett, Corbett the name is.

  BOTTOMLY: Corbett? C-O-R-B-I-N.

  ALBERT: Uh, Corbin, uh—

  BOTTOMLY: You don’t like to talk about her?

  ALBERT: Well, uh, there was no intercourse with her.

  BOTTOMLY: Yuh? What did you do with her?

  ALBERT: Well she did it for me.

  BOTTOMIY: Yuh? What’d she do? (Pause) What’d she do? Come on.

  ALBERT: They—use a professional name for it. Also—

  BOTTOMLY: What’s the professional name for it?

  ALBERT: Also the pillow was involved on her.

  BOTTOMLY: Oh.

  Reluctantly, almost coyly, Albert admitted that he’d gotten Evelyn to perform oral sex on him. She couldn’t have regular intercourse, he said, because of a medical problem.

  Bottomly then tried to pin him down on when the murder had occurred. Albert said he thought it was either in the wintertime or the summertime.

  Evelyn had been slain on September 8, 1963.

  Albert was correct when he told Bottomly that the victim had died on a Sunday, that she had been getting ready to go to church, that she was going to have Sunda
y dinner with a man friend, and that another woman in the building had a key to her apartment.

  All these facts had been widely publicized.

  Albert thought the weather had been “nice” that day; in fact, it had been foggy in Salem the morning Evelyn died.

  Albert must have been sweating bullets throughout this interrogation. At one point he said to Bottomly, “I can’t get no breaks.” Said Bottomly, “You’re getting plenty of breaks.”

  When Bottomly asked Albert how old he thought Evelyn had been, Albert replied, “She looked, uh, to be about fifty-two or fifty-three and she had, uh, brownish hair like. She was, uh—”

  Press accounts of the murder had in fact variously given Evelyn’s age as fifty, fifty-one, and fifty-three. But everyone who knew her agreed that her appearance was startlingly youthful; she was often mistaken for a woman in her thirties.

  Albert said that Evelyn had been wearing only a “negligee” and a housecoat. In fact she had been clad in a short robe, a nightgown, and white socks. Her killer had left her supine on her bed, two stockings tied around her neck and a third around her left ankle. She lay with her right hand and forearm tucked beneath her. To Salem Police Inspector John Moran, one of the first investigators on the scene, it looked as if someone had tied her feet together and then cut the bond.

  Albert had told Bottomly that he’d tied Evelyn’s hands behind her back. Bottomly kept pushing him on this detail.

  BOTTOMLY: You say you tied her on the bed. You mean hand and foot?

  ALBERT: No. Just her hands.

  BOTTOMLY: What did you do about her feet? Anything?

  ALBERT: It, it’s possible that I did.

  All he would admit to was binding the victim’s hands. There was no indication at the scene that that had been done; at any rate, the stocking Albert said he’d used to do so was missing and he didn’t say he’d taken it with him.

  Albert told Bottomly that after Evelyn had finished fellating him, he’d ejaculated into a tissue. Bottomly asked him if he thought the victim had caught any of his semen in her mouth. He wasn’t sure.

  That she had was confirmed by the autopsy. The really interesting detail here is that Albert was clearly aware that crumpled semen-stained tissues, as well as lipstick-stained underpants, were found on the bedroom floor. His knowledge of this would seem to indicate that he had a firsthand knowledge of the crime.

  But it could just as easily have been gleaned from the close-up photos of the scene—which Bottomly had shown Albert for identification purposes prior to the confession.

  Albert was on somewhat surer footing with the Sophie Clark murder, perhaps because unlike that of Evelyn Corbin, this case had been diagrammed on the “Strangle Worksheet” as well as highly publicized elsewhere.

  Albert recounted what had happened after he knocked on Sophie’s apartment door.

  ALBERT: The door swung open to my left.

  BOTTOMLY: All right.

  ALBERT: And she presented herself to me. BOTTOMLY: What did she look like?

  ALBERT: A Negro girl, light complexion, black hair—

  BOTTOMLY: Long, short—?

  ALBERT: No, she had very long hair, beautiful, her eyes were—dark br—I don’t know, dark brown—she looked like a Hawaiian girl—her eyes were—BOTTOMLY: Outstanding eyes?

  ALBERT: Yes, it was a very beautiful girl—I’d almost say the—that her eyes were brown—but that her features were so—so—so tall—she wuz a very tall girl.

  BOTTOMLY: As tall as you are?

  ALBERT: About five ten—she could be as tall as me or more—she wuz at least 140, 150 pounds. She wuz built solid—

  BOTTOMLY: No fat.

  Sophie’s height and weight had been given on the “Strangle Worksheet,” as had her coloring.

  ALBERT: Oh, no, she wuz really—really built beautiful—she had on a—when she opened the door she had a uh—a white type—white type uh—throw on there, right? And she had a half slip, a bra—her—she musta been going somewhere—or she wuz dressed when she came in becuz—she had black high heels on I remember—ah—it wuz very appealing the way she wuz dressed.

  BOTTOMLY: Mm-mm.

  ALBERT: She also had on black stockings—with a garter belt—

  BOTTOMLY: Uh-huh.

  ALBERT: Uh—very attractive.

  BOTTOMLY: What color was her outer garment, what did you call it, a negligee, Al?

  ALBERT: It wuz—ah—like two or t’ree together, what do you call those there ah—

  BOTTOMLY: You mean different linings?

  ALBERT: Yeah, that’s it, yeah—

  BOTTOMLY: What colors do you remember? Was it a filmy kind of thing?

  ALBERT: Yeah, yeah. It wuz—ah—she wuz tall.

  BOTTOMLY: But you couldn’t see through it—

  ALBERT: N—no, no I couldn’t see through it.

  BOTTOMLY: Kind of sexy-looking, with all of this?

  ALBERT: Yes—yes, very appealing. But ah—on that there—

  BOTTOMLY: You remember any colors? If you don’t all right.

  ALBERT: I really don’t.

  BOTTOMLY: Okay.

  ALBERT: To me, right? It looked—white.

  BOTTOMLY: Uh huh.

  ALBERT: It looked white to me, but—

  BOTTOMLY: Were there other colors, too?

  ALBERT: Possible—but I remember—I remember the half slip.

  BOTTOMLY: She was wearing a half slip?

  Albert’s Frederick’s of Hollywood fantasy was only partially accurate. Sophie’s hair wasn’t very long at all—it was done in a medium-length bouffant flip, the style Jacqueline Kennedy as First Lady had made so popular. That Sophie had been wearing a blue floral housecoat (not white, as Albert had said), a bra, a garter belt, a half-slip, black stockings, and black shoes was noted on the “Strangle Worksheet,” and tallies with the description of her attire given in the autopsy report. Albert seems to have taken this description and embellished it, turning the plain baggy robe (or so it appears in the crime scene photo) into a diaphanous negligee and the flat, corrugated-sole tie shoes on Sophie’s feet into sexy spikes.

  The power the image of Sophie as seductress had over Albert is clear from the fact that he described her thus even after Bottomly had shown him the police photos of the crime scene, which are graphic close-ups of Sophie sprawled on her back, legs apart, the half-slip she had been wearing wrapped around her neck.

  It also explains how he knew she had been menstruating, and was wearing a sanitary napkin and the harness to hold it in place. Albert said he had ripped the pad from Sophie and thrown it behind a chair.

  Albert also told Bottomly that he had used his Measuring Man con on Sophie, telling her that with her superb figure and statuesque bearing (although not in those words), she would make a perfect model. He said that he’d grabbed her around the neck with his right arm and that she’d lost consciousness almost immediately.

  BOTTOMLY: Were you surprised she went out so fast? Did you expect a struggle?

  ALBERT: I didn’t expect anything.

  There was some debate about when the crime had been committed. “Now, this is a work day, Al, this isn’t like your usual routine, y’know that?” Bottomly said. “I’ll tell ya, December fifth.”

  ALBERT: December 5th.

  BOTTOMLY:—was a Wednesday.

  ALBERT: December the fifth.

  BOTTOMLY: Did you work at all that day?

  ALBERT: Ah—December fifth—anniversary—ah—lemme see, lemme find out where I wuz workin’ first—December the fifth, I wuz workin’—I wuz workin’ for Munroe Shipyard up until September of sixty-two—’n September of sixty-two until September of sixty-three I worked for Russell Blumett [Blomerth]—now on December the fifth—right? It wuz on a Wednesday, right?

  BOTTOMLY: Right.

  ALBERT: Ah—now—this is very important, now, remember this—ah—Russell Blumett—had taken a job—a contract—for work in Belmont—he worked all winter long on that contract in Belmont buildin
g a studio for a couple over there?

  BOTTOMLY: Right.

  ALBERT: And this has a lot to do with me taking it—like ah there’d be nuthin’ doin’ that day, right?

  BOTTOMLY: Uh huh.

  ALBERT: Or this week, and I’d take—I’d say, okay, I’ll take it off, I gut work to do myself—and I’d take the day off, y’see? Now on December the fifth—wuz a work day, right?

  BOTTOMLY: Right.

  ALBERT: I think that I might have been—working on—on my—yes—ah—I musta taken a day off—that could easy be checked—

  BOTTOMLY: Did you go to work at all?

  ALBERT: No, I—probably checked in—

  Albert had in fact worked three hours that day, although just when was not clear. The weather had been quite stormy; Albert didn’t recall this fact. The anniversary he spoke of on December 5th was that of his and Irmgard’s wedding.

  Albert recounted for Bottomly how he’d wandered around Sophie’s building seeking an appropriate target. (The layout of 315 Huntington Avenue, with its distinctive divided staircase, had been minutely described in the Record American series by Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole.)

  BOTTOMLY: You knocked on the door—you were looking for a woman.

  ALBERT: Yah.

  BOTTOMLY: And a man answered, so you brushed him off as fast as you could. Right?

  ALBERT: Yeah—but I did talk to him for a minute.

  BOTTOMLY: Is that before you—first you said that you went—

  ALBERT: Before.

  BOTTOMLY: Yuh. You first went up the right hand side [of the staircase]—right?

  ALBERT: Right in—right inside.

  BOTTOMLY: The first door you knocked on—there was—

  ALBERT: He hadda be on the right side, too.

  BOTTOMLY: All right then—was he the first one you knocked? Or the second?

  ALBERT: The second.

  BOTTOMLY: Who was the first?