by Susan Kelly
There was a Halloween moment when the casket was brought into the biology laboratory. The doorway was too narrow to accommodate the steel box horizontally; it had to be upended and tilted slightly sideways. “Oh, God,” someone said, echoing everyone’s fear. “I hope it doesn’t pop open.” It didn’t. The casket was settled in the lab. Everyone grouped around and stared at it for a moment.
Leaving the building, we followed a Hansel and Gretel trail of fluid that had dripped from the casket—a combination of ground water, formaldehyde, and other substances no one particularly wished to identify closely. The stench made me gag; I yanked the turtleneck of my dress up over my nose to filter out the smell.
We piled back into our cars and went to a restaurant. Some of the other members of the forensic team joined us: Major Timothy Palmbach, a crime scene specialist from the Connecticut State Police; Professor Michael Warren, Deputy Director of the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory at the University of Florida; and James (Jack) Frost, Deputy Chief Medical Examiner for the State of West Virginia. Just after the first round of drinks had arrived, a pleasant man named Scott Koscevic, the sales manager of Yorktowne Caskets, appeared. In his van he had a Ziegler container (a sealed metal case) in which what would be left of DeSalvo after the autopsy would be placed and sealed in the casket for reburial. The company had been kind enough to donate the container. A moment before the salad course was served, Kevin Watts, Leo Barry, and Koscevic went to the parking lot to transfer the container to the hearse. Another Halloween moment.
The autopsy began at eight on Saturday morning, October 27. I was present for most of it.
Richard DeSalvo, convinced from the start that his brother was not the Boston Strangler, had taken great pains to insure that Albert’s body was preserved against the day when an exhumation might prove necessary— as it had twenty-eight years later. The embalmed corpse had been placed in a twelve-gauge steel casket and then into a plastic-lined concrete vault. Despite these precautions, the body had deteriorated in the course of nearly three decades. The face was unrecognizable as such, except for the thrust of Albert’s protuberant nose; it was a mask of some crusty black substance shortly afterward identified as the husks of maggots. Along with ground water, beetles had entered the casket and done their work. Ironically, the suit in which DeSalvo had been buried was in nearly perfect condition.
Starrs had assembled an all-star team to perform the autopsy and tests on materials extracted from the corpse. In addition to Frost, Levisky, Warren, Palmbach, and Traci Starrs were forensic specialists Michele Hamburger, Sherry Brown, and Barbara Hanbury; pathologists Michael Baden and Patricia Aronica-Pollak; odontologist John McDowell; geophysicist George Stephens; radiographers Michael and Susan Calhoun (brother and sister-in-law of videographer Mitchell Calhoun); toxicologist Bruce Goldberger; microscopist Walter F. Rowe; radiologist G. Brogden; entomologist Neal Haskell; researcher Matthew Mantel; and attorney Linda Kenney as well as Sean Brebbia, Starrs’s legal assistant.
After pausing for a brief two P.M. lunch break—catered from a local McDonald’s by Elaine Sharp, who removed her scrubs long enough to make the food run—the autopsy continued until six that evening. It was an exquisitely choreographed ballet of necrosis: Frost and Aronica-Pollak performing the actual autopsy, the others receiving and readying the materials removed from the corpse for further testing.
The day’s work ended at six P.M. At that moment the energy and purpose that had buoyed each member of the forensic team seemed to escape like air from a leaky balloon. I stood next to one of the team members as she slumped back against a counter and stripped off her surgical mask. “I want a shower,” she said. “Then a restaurant. And a bar, and a bar, and a bar . . .”
It was a sentiment echoed by everyone else on the team.
We went to an Italian restaurant and consumed large quantities of food and wine. Afterward, most team members returned to their motels and collapsed into bed. A few went to a pre-Halloween celebration in York. One of them danced with a fellow costumed as the Frankenstein monster. It seemed, under the circumstances, quite appropriate.
At eleven on Sunday morning, the forensic team held a press conference on a lawn outside the York College Music, Arts, and Communications Center. James Starrs, wearing a white medical coat and a George Washington University baseball cap, took center stage. He promised the assembled reporters “blockbuster” results from the Albert DeSalvo autopsy and “many rewards” for the DeSalvo family.
Back in Massachusetts, Attorney General Thomas Reilly, asked to comment on the weekend events, termed the autopsy “a macabre stunt.” George Burke, the retired Norfolk County (Massachusetts) District Attorney who had twice prosecuted Carmen Gagliardi, Robert M. Wilson, and Richard L. Devlin for DeSalvo’s 1973 prison murder, told the Boston Globe that there was no mystery about Albert’s homicide. Both trials ended in hung juries and mistrials. According to Burke, authorities decided not to pursue the matter further because Gagliardi, Devlin, and Wilson were already serving long prison sentences. Gagliardi would in fact die of a heroin overdose shortly after the second trial.
And why had DeSalvo been murdered? Again according to Burke, to prevent him from muscling in on the drug trade flourishing in Walpole State Prison.
On Monday, October 29, 2001, Albert DeSalvo’s remains were reinterred at the Puritan Lawn Cemetery in Peabody, Massachusetts. Elaine Sharp bought flowers for the service and located a minister to perform it—the Reverend Patricia Long of the United Church of Christ in Marblehead.
Like the day of the exhumation, the day of the reburial was a beautiful one, warm and sunny with a panoply of autumn foliage spread out against a lapis sky. Present were Richard and Rosalie DeSalvo; Timothy DeSalvo, his wife Cheryl, and their children; Richard and Rosalie’s other son, daughter, and son-in-law; James Starrs; British journalist Noel Young; Mitchell Calhoun; Gaetan Cotton; Elaine Sharp; Dan Sharp; Michael DeSalvo, the only son of Albert DeSalvo; and me.
The service was brief, dignified, and very moving. Reverend Long read two psalms, a prayer of her own composition for the repose of the soul of Albert DeSalvo, and asked the mourners to join her in the Lord’s Prayer.
Timothy and Cheryl’s four children each carried a single rose. At the end of the service, they approached the casket and set the flowers atop. Elaine Sharp followed with the bouquets she had purchased earlier that morning. The casket was lowered into the ground. Cemetery attendants began immediately to fill the hole with earth.
“Daddy,” piped one of Timothy’s sons, “what did Albert DeSalvo do?”
Timothy looked at the boy for a moment and then rested a hand on his head.
“Someday,” he said. “When you’re older.”
On December 6, 2001, James Starrs held a press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce the final results of the tests that had been conducted on the materials taken from the remains of Mary Sullivan and Albert DeSalvo. Accompanying Starrs were George Washington University Professor David Foran, who, with his post-graduate team of assistants, had done the DNA profiling; Michael Baden, who had compared the Sullivan autopsy report with DeSalvo’s confession to the murder; and University of Florida Professor Bruce Goldberger, who had performed toxicological studies.
Goldberger’s findings indicated that no drugs or alcohol were present in Mary Sullivan’s system when she died. Baden outlined the discrepancies in DeSalvo’s confession. Foran’s test results showed the presence of two different DNA samples—one taken from Mary Sullivan’s pubic area, the other from the underwear put on the body at the funeral home. Neither sample matched the DNA of Albert DeSalvo.
Since 1928, the Times Square ticker has kept New Yorkers informed of all major news—the end of World War II, the death of John F. Kennedy, the moon landing, etc. On December 7, 2001, the 369-foot moving sign carried a message that surely startled many viewers. It read ALBERT DESALVO NOT THE BOSTON STRANGLER.
The old showman would have loved seeing his name in lights.
Update: 2013
June 14, 2012, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of Anna Slesers. Her death was the first in a series of homicides that would come to be attributed in the press, and in popular imagination, to the “Boston Strangler.”
Since this book was last updated in 2002, after the exhumation of Albert DeSalvo in October 2001 to be autopsied again and for DNA testing, a number of events important to the case have occurred. Not one of these events remotely suggests that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. In fact, most of them strongly indicate that he was innocent of the crimes for which he was charged and convicted only in the court of public opinion.
First, though, I have to note the passing of some of the principal actors in the Strangler drama, which has played out over five decades and still continues to run.
Ames Robey, the forensic psychiatrist who first met Albert DeSalvo when the latter was held at Bridgewater State Hospital after his November 1964 arrest, died on September 23, 2004. Dr. Robey, who was one of the last people—if not the last person—to speak with DeSalvo before DeSalvo’s death, maintained to the end of his own life that the Malden, Massachusetts, handyman who had gained worldwide notoriety by confessing to the stranglings never committed a single murder. The doctor always recalled that DeSalvo, who had called Robey from prison, sounded terribly frightened about something. There was good reason, given that he was stabbed to death several hours later.
Jon A. Asgeirsson, who became DeSalvo’s lawyer in November 1964, died on December 9, 2009. To my knowledge, Asgeirsson declined to speak publicly about the Strangler case after I interviewed him in December 1991. Whatever his private thoughts were about his client’s guilt or innocence, he took them to his grave. He and his most famous client are buried in the same cemetery—though not in proximity.
Daniel Sharp, who with his wife and law partner, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, spent a substantial part of the last ten years of his life trying to establish in the courts the facts of the Boston Strangler case, died on February 13, 2010. Elaine Sharp continues to work on behalf of the DeSalvo family.
The Honorable Francis C. Newton Jr., DeSalvo’s last lawyer, died on February 6, 2012. After a thirty-year career in the United States Army, the Massachusetts Army National Guard, and the U.S. Army Reserve, he retired as a colonel. In 2011, he retired from the legal field as an administrative law judge in the Social Security Administration. Judge Newton was always firm in stating his belief that Albert DeSalvo was innocent of committing any murders.
On July 25, 2012, I spoke with former FBI agent Mark Safarik. After twenty-three years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Safarik retired in 2007 as a senior member of the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU). He was also a supervisory special agent at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) at the FBI Academy. At present, he is a partner with Robert Ressler in Forensic Behavioral Services, a consulting firm in Virginia.
In the course of his career, Safarik has researched the rape-murders of over five hundred elderly women. He has published several scholarly papers on the subject in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, the Journal of Forensic Nursing, Homicide Studies: An Interdisciplinary & International Journal, and elsewhere.
The first four women to be murdered in the summer of 1962, whose deaths came to be attributed to a putative Boston Strangler, ranged in age from fifty-five to seventy-five. Safarik has established a profile of the kind of man who sexually assaults and kills older women.
“Despite age, race, and culture, the offenders who sexually assault and murder older women—the mean age of these offenders is twenty-seven,” Safarik said. “After the age of thirty, they really drop off sharply. The most violent offenders are fifteen to twenty-four years of age. They likely have a substance abuse problem. Most of their previous crimes are misdemeanor crimes—burglary, drug possession, larceny, public disturbance, and prowling. They generally live close to the crime scene, so that they can stay in their neighborhoods, their comfort zones. Eighty-one percent of them come to the crime scene on foot, and they leave on foot.”
Safarik continued: “Ninety-three percent are unskilled. Seventy percent are unemployed. Seventy percent were never married. They don’t have wives and girlfriends. They rarely engage in postmortem activity with the victim that would be described as ritual in nature, posing her, adding clothing items to her. These offenders generally leave the woman in whatever position they last interacted with them, usually when they finish interacting with them sexually. Socially, they’re not competent. Sexually, they’re not competent, with investigators finding semen at the crime scene less than fifty percent of the time. They often live with a mother or grandmother, and they resent that loss of control that comes from being dependent on an older woman for shelter, food, and money.”
Did Albert DeSalvo match this profile? According to Safarik, “DeSalvo does not fit the template. If he was the Boston Strangler, he would be an extreme outlier for this type of offender.”
Indeed, he would be. DeSalvo was married, had children, had no substance abuse problems, was generally employed or seeking work, and lived with his family miles from any of the crime scenes. And, by 1962, he had aged well out of the cohort most responsible for the rapes and murders of elderly women.
Safarik pointed out another fact that undermines the belief that the Boston stranglings were serial killings committed by the same person. “White offenders offend almost exclusively against white females. They don’t cross the racial barrier. Black females who are killed are—again, almost exclusively—killed by black men.”
Sophie Clark, the sixth strangling victim, was a student. She was very young, she was beautiful, and she was of African ancestry. The possibility that she was murdered by the man or men responsible for the stranglings of the four older white women who preceded her in death is virtually nonexistent.
George Nassar, who first met Albert DeSalvo while the two were held at Bridgewater State Hospital, and remained a strong and influential presence in DeSalvo’s life thereafter, continues to serve his sentence on the first-degree murder charge of which he was convicted in 1967. His appeals for a new trial have been turned down by the courts.
As I noted in the first update to this book, F. Lee Bailey was disbarred in Florida in 2001. In June 2002, the Supreme Court of the United States issued the following opinion: F. Lee Bailey, having been suspended from the practice of law in this Court by order of March 18, 2002; and a rule having been issued and served upon him requiring him to show cause why he should not be disbarred; and the time to file a response having expired; It is ordered that F. Lee Bailey is disbarred from the practice of law in this Court. (IN THE MATTER OF DISBARMENT OF F. LEE BAILEY, D-2291, SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, 536 U.S. 936, 122 S. Ct. 2650; 153 L. Ed. 2d 827; 2002 U.S. LEXIS 4674. Judges: Rehnquist, Stevens, O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer.)
On December 3, 2001, a petition for reciprocal discipline regarding Bailey was filed in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts for Suffolk County. One justice of the Massachusetts SJC judged that Bailey be disbarred in Massachusetts. On April 11, 2003, the SJC affirmed this judgment, pointing out: [T]he fact that Bailey had committed such grave misconduct despite his vast experience as a seasoned litigator only serves to heighten the seriousness of his offenses.
Among the instances of what the Florida court termed Bailey’s “egregious and cumulative misconduct” were the following: offering false testimony, violating a client’s confidences, violating two federal court orders, engaging in ex parte communications, and trust account violations. The latter entailed the commingling and misappropriation of funds. The Florida court also concluded that such offenses, in “the absence of any mitigating factors,” necessitated disbarment. Said the Massachusetts court: “We agree.” (IN THE MATTER OF F. LEE BAILEY, SJG-08764, SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS, 439 Mass. 134; 786 N.E.2d 337; 2003 Mass. LEXIS 268.)
Bailey requested of the United States Dist
rict Court for the District of Massachusetts an evidentiary hearing on this matter. On November 5, 2005, his request was denied, and he was disbarred. On June 9, 2006, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed this judgment: The court held that, even assuming that the attorney could prove that the stock was not transferred to him in trust, such proof would not adequately undermine the states’ rationale for disbarment. because the disbarment. hinged on a finding that the attorney appropriated the funds without prior court approval. (IN RE: F. LEE BAILEY, Appellant. No. 05-2779, UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FRIST CIRCUIT, 450 F.3d 71; 2006 U.S. App. LEXIS 14189.)
In February 2009, Bailey was invited to speak on the topic of ethics and the law at Wellesley College. At present, he lives in Maine, where he and his girlfriend, Debbie Elliott, a former cosmetologist, operate a consulting firm. Bailey & Elliott Consulting offers a variety of services, including expert advice on financial matters.
Edward Brooke, attorney general of Massachusetts during the Boston Strangler case, and later United States senator from Massachusetts, lives in Virginia with Anne, his second wife. A breast cancer survivor, he has advocated for awareness of the disease in men.
On June 20, 2000, the Edward W. Brooke Courthouse in Boston, a Massachusetts trial court, was dedicated. A Boston charter school was founded in his name in 2002. In 2004, Brooke was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. In 2006, the Massachusetts Republican Party instituted the Edward Brooke Award for distinguished service. Its first recipient was Andrew Card, the former White House chief of staff for the forty-third president. In 2009, Brooke received the Congressional Gold Medal.
