Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  The first victim of the killer they came to call the Boston Strangler was fifty-five-year-old divorcee, Anna Slesers, murdered on 14 June 1962. Found by her son, she was naked and had been hit on the head with a blunt instrument before being strangled with the belt of her housecoat. Her legs had been left spread grotesquely wide apart and she had been sexually assaulted with an unknown object. Her apartment had been ransacked, the contents of her handbag scattered across the floor, but her jewellery and gold watch had not been taken, leading investigators to grimly conclude that robbery was not the motive.

  With this first killing, the killer established his method and his signature – the trademark left behind to perversely stamp his identity on the act, a feature of many serial killings. He would gain entry posing as a workman. His victims were exclusively women. They were sexually assaulted and strangled, using items of their own clothing – stockings, undergarments or belts – or a pillow and these were then tied in an elaborate bow around the dead woman’s neck. Variations included biting, bludgeoning or stabbing.

  Sixteen days after he had killed for the first time, he struck again, his victim a sixty-eight-year-old woman, Nina Nicholls who was on the phone when the doorbell rang. She hung up, telling the friend to whom she had been speaking that she would call back. She never did, however, and her worried friend called the building’s janitor and asked him to check that she was alright. She was found in the same position as his first victim. He had used a wine bottle to sexually assault her and two nylon stockings were tied around her neck in a neat bow. Although they found semen on her thighs, there was none inside her vagina. Once again, he had left valuables behind.

  Three hours later that same night, he killed again.

  Nina Nicholls had been attacked at around five that evening. At around eight, he was in the Boston suburb of Lynn, strangling another divorcee, sixty-five-year-old Helen Blake. Her body was only discovered a couple of days later when friends became worried that they had not heard from her. A brassiere was tied around her neck in a bow and she had been sexually assaulted with an object. He seemed more interested in her valuables this time as he had stolen a couple of diamond rings from her fingers and had tried to break into a metal strongbox.

  The city of Boston was in shock and women were warned not to open their doors to strangers; it was evident from the lack of signs of forced entry that the killer had been allowed to enter the apartments of his victims. All police leave was cancelled and every detective in Boston was put onto the Strangler case. They brought in forensic psychiatrists who created a profile of the killer, describing him as a man aged between eighteen and forty who was suffering from delusions of persecution and who felt antipathy towards his mother, as the victims had so far all been older women. They tried to find a match in their files and some men were brought in for questioning, but none of them seemed to be the Strangler. It all seemed irrelevant when seventy-five-year-old Ida Irga was found strangled on 21 August. He had strangled her with his bare hands, using a pillow case to tie in a bow around her throat. Her legs had been spread apart on two chairs, exposing her private parts.

  For three months nothing happened, but on 5 December he struck again, destroying the profile of the mother-hater by killing a younger woman, twenty-one-year-old Sophie Clark who was the only African-American woman he murdered. She had been raped – the first instance where rape could definitely be established – and a semen stain on a carpet nearby indicated that he had also masturbated over her body.

  One of Sophie Clark’s neighbours had earlier that day opened her door to a man claiming to have been sent to do some repairs in her apartment. When he started to make comments about her figure, she became afraid and, thinking fast, told him that her husband was asleep in the bedroom. He fled, saying it was the wrong apartment. It was a lucky escape but she was able to provide investigators with their first description of the assailant. He was twenty-five to thirty years old, of average height, with honey-coloured hair.

  He continued to smash the psychological profile by next attacking two young women, one of whom fought him off. When twenty-three-year-old Patricia Bisquette failed to turn up for work on the last day of January 1962, her boss became concerned. Her apartment was checked and she was found dead in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. She wore the customary bow around her neck.

  A fortnight later a German girl, Gertrude Gruen showed enormous pluck by biting the Strangler’s hand when he threw his arm around her neck in her apartment. She began to scream and he fled.

  Mary Brown died on 9 March in Lawrence, an industrial town twenty-five miles north of Boston. Her skull having been smashed with a piece of lead piping, this murder was not initially attributed to the Strangler, or the ‘Phantom’ as the press were calling him at the time. He had exposed her breasts and a fork he’d viciously stuck into one had been left there.

  His next victim also showed a deviation from his customary method. Twenty-three-year-old Beverley Sams had been stabbed repeatedly. Everything else was as usual, however.

  He took a break through the summer of 1963, but on 8 September, fifty-eight-year-old Evelyn Corbin was found with semen in her mouth as well as in her vagina.

  On 23 November, Joanne Graff was murdered and on 4 January 1964, nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan was found seated on her bed with a broom handle horrifically inserted in her vagina. There was semen in her mouth. The Strangler had a sense of humour; at her feet was a greetings card wishing investigators a happy new year.

  It was his last murder.

  Albert DeSalvo was arrested after he had entered the apartment of a young woman on 27 October 1964, pretending to be a detective. He tied her to her bed, sexually assaulted her and then left, saying ‘I’m sorry’ over his shoulder as he walked out the door. Her description of him was recognised by detectives and led to his arrest. Then, when his photograph was released, scores of women came forward to identify him as the man who had attacked them.

  He was identified as the Green Man who, following the end of the Boston Strangler murders, terrorised women in a wide area that extended to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island. He was a rapist who dressed entirely in green, like some kind of super-antihero and he was prolific, on one occasion raping four women in one day, gaining entrance to their apartments and threatening them with a knife, although he was never physically violent.

  The identification of DeSalvo came from another identity that he had been given several years previously – the Measuring Man who had been the perpetrator of a series of bizarre attacks in the early 1960s. He would knock on an apartment door and when it was opened by an attractive young woman, he would introduce himself as an employee of a modelling agency on the lookout for prospective models. He would tell the young woman she could earn $40 an hour, reassuring her that it was all above board and would involve no nudity. All he needed to do, he said, was take her measurements. He would take out a tape measure and take down her vital statistics. If she had not thrown him out by then, he would tell her that someone from the agency would call if she was suitable. He would then leave.

  DeSalvo, born in 1931, had endured a troubled upbringing, often suffering beatings by his abusive father. By the time he was a teenager he had already embarked on a criminal career but to get away from his increasing troubles, enlisted in the US Army. He was posted to Germany where he met his future wife, Imgard. The couple returned to the United States when he received an honourable discharge in 1956.

  He was viewed by others as a hardworking, devoted family man but he was still getting into trouble, usually for breaking and entering. Nonetheless, he still managed to hold down a job. At home, however, there were also problems. Imgard had given birth to a daughter with disabilities and she was fearful of becoming pregnant again in case another child might be similarly afflicted. DeSalvo, however, had a voracious sexual appetite, requiring sex sometimes five or six times a day. When Imgard refused to comply with this exhausting regime, he called her
frigid and became increasingly sexually frustrated.

  In 1961, he was sentenced to eighteen months in jail when he was arrested for the Measuring Man attacks, admitting to assaulting three hundred women and breaking into an astonishing four hundred apartments. The Boston Strangler murders began just two months after his release from prison.

  In 1964, when he was first held on the Green Man rapes, DeSalvo was incarcerated in Bridgewater State Hospital. One day, he suddenly confessed to another inmate, George Nassar, that he was the Boston Strangler. It sounded tue, because he demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the murders. However, as has been pointed out, DeSalvo possessed a photographic memory and much of the information could have been gleaned from the detailed accounts of the killings that had appeared in newspapers and magazines. It was even suggested that, knowing he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, he confessed so that his wife and disabled daughter might make some money from movie deals and book rights.

  An astonishing piece of plea-bargaining ensued by which it was agreed that DeSalvo should only stand trial for the Green Man rapes. Thus, he was convicted only of rape and robbery and in 1967 was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, which was what the authorities wanted.

  In February 1967, DeSalvo and two other inmates escaped from Bridgewater State Hospital and a massive manhunt was launched. He left a note on his bunk addressed to the superintendent of the hospital, claiming that he escaped in order to focus attention on conditions at the hospital. He was on the run for only a day and was recaptured at Lynn, Massachusetts. Following the escape, he was transferred to Walpole maximum security prison. Six years later, he was found stabbed to death in the prison’s infirmary. His killer or killers have never been identified, but some speculate that he was dispatched to prevent him from revealing the identity of the real Boston Strangler.

  The files on the Boston Strangler killings remain open.

  Charles Manson

  Charles Milles Maddox was born in 1934 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to sixteen-year-old unmarried teenage prostitute, Kathleen Maddox. His name was changed to Manson when Kathleen was briefly married to a labourer, William Manson, but Kathleen filed a paternity suit against a Colonel Scott who is said to have been a worker on a nearby dam project. He may have been the father of one of the twentieth century’s most evil killers.

  Manson’s childhood was unrelentingly harsh and at one time his mother, reputedly an alcoholic, is said to have tried to sell her son to a childless waitress for a pitcher of beer. Kathleen went to prison in 1939 for robbing a petrol station, leaving Manson in the care of her parents in West Virginia and following her release she lived with him in a series of cheap motel rooms. Tragically, Manson recalls her embrace of him on the day she was released from prison as his sole happy childhood memory.

  Unable to look after her increasingly unmanagable son, Kathleen succeeded in getting him sent to the Gibault School for Boys at Terre Haute, Indiana. Needless to say, he hated its discipline and endless rules and made no fewer than eighteen attempts to escape. On one occasion when he made it back to his mother, she rejected him and he made his way to Indianapolis where he robbed a store to get some cash to pay for lodgings. He embarked upon a string of robberies and break-ins but was eventually arrested trying to steal a bicycle from a store. He escaped from the juvenile centre he was sent to after just one day. Following his recapture, a Catholic priest made an effort to get Manson onto the straight and narrow, pleading for him to be given a chance at the famous Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska. Manson was there for only four days before he escaped with another boy with whom he carried out a couple of armed robberies. They were soon recaptured.

  Incredibly, Charles Manson was only thirteen years old at this point.

  Indiana School for Boys, his next stop, was a proper reform school, but it boasted a harsh and brutal regime – strict discipline, mistreatment by staff and sexual abuse. He escaped in 1951 with two other boys but, after another string of petrol station heists, was back behind bars again. This time, however, having driven a stolen car across a state line, he was sent to a federal institution, the National Training School for Boys in Washington DC. Assessed by a caseworker, he was found to be illiterate and was described as ‘aggressively antisocial’.

  He committed his first crime of real violence following his transfer to a minimum security detention centre in October 1951. Just a month before his parole hearing, he held a razor to another inmate’s throat while sodomising him. He wound up at the high security Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio, where at last he seems to have come to his senses. For the next two years, he stayed out of trouble, for once in his life doing as he was told. It paid off when he was paroled in 1954. He was twenty years old and had no idea what life was like in the world outside the institutions in which he had so far spent half his life.

  In January 1955, he married a waitress, Rosalie Willis, but although he claimed later to have at last found some kind of happiness with her, it was only a matter of time before he was in trouble again. He was arrested for driving a stolen car from Ohio to Los Angeles, once again a federal offence. He was lucky this time, getting off with only five years’ probation but when he failed to appear to face a similar charge soon after, he was arrested and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in San Pedro in California. In prison he missed the birth of his child, Charles Manson Jr, but Rosalie had soon given up on Charlie and by 1957 she was living with another man and divorcing him.

  Paroled in September 1958, he was earning his living as a pimp, but the next year he was given probation and a suspended ten-year sentence for attempting to cash forged US Treasury cheques. Failing to keep that probation, he went to the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island in Washington State for ten years. It was a horrific period for Manson. A man of small stature, he was raped on numerous occasions by other inmates, many of whom were black, a fact that contributed greatly to the racist views that would later colour his perverted philosophy.

  He was finally released in 1967 into the new world of flower power and free love in San Francisco, capital of hippiedom. Manson, with his hypnotic stare and talk that seemed to be deep and meaningful, but was in reality shallow and meaningless, set himself up as a guru of sorts, surrounding himself with a coterie of easily-manipulated flower children, mainly middle class girls who had ‘dropped out’. There were young malleable men, too, but the girls were Charlie’s and they were all in love with him. Girls like twenty-one-year-old Patricia Krenwinkel who had been expensively educated and worked in a good job in insurance in Los Angeles. After meeting Charlie on a beach, she gave it all up. Or Leslie Van Houten, a nineteen-year-old acid freak. Or twenty-two-year-old Linda Kasabian who left her husband and two children for him. Susan Atkins was a twenty-one-year-old topless dancer who was into devil worship. She became Manson’s right-hand woman, filling his head with Satanic nonsense, persuading him that he was the devil, a dangerous thing to tell a man like Charles Manson.

  They all had one thing in common – LSD – and Charlie used it to control them.

  Manson had learned to play guitar in prison and, fuelled by the success of his favourite band, the Beatles, in America, harboured his own dreams of becoming a pop star. His break seemed to arrive when a couple of the girls hitchhiking one day were picked up by Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and went back to his place. Soon after, the entire Family, as the group was now calling itself, had moved into Wilson’s mansion and was costing him a fortune. To Manson’s delight, however, Wilson paid for studio time for him to record some of the songs he had written and he provided introductions to producers and music industry people. The Beach Boys even recorded a Manson song, Cease to Exist, changing the words to the less dramatic Cease to Resist and renaming it Never Learn Not to Love. Nothing came of it all, however, and when Wilson had tired of them, he threw then out. They moved to a couple of ranches in the desert where Manson began to develop his crazed philosophy. He prophesied a racial war that would be called Helter Sk
elter, after a track on the Beatles’ recently released White Album. Manson and the Family would seek shelter in a bottomless pit in Death Valley and when it was all over, the Family, by this time enlarged to 144,000 members, would emerge to rule the world.

  In the meantime, they killed their first victim, Gary Hinman, a musician. Manson wanted him to hear some of his songs, but also learned that Hinman had recently inherited a large sum of money. Susan Atkins and Bobby Beausoleil were sent to steal the money, but ended up holding Hinman hostage for two days. When they could not find the money, they stabbed him to death. Atkins dipped her finger in the dead man’s blood and scrawled ‘political piggie’ on the wall. A short while later, Beausoleil was arrested after a fingerprint was discovered at the murder scene. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but, loyal to the end, implicated neither Manson nor Atkins.

  Manson moved his attention to successful music producer Terry Melcher, son of the movie star, Doris Day. When Melcher refused to have anything to do with the weird little hippie guru, Manson was furious. He decided on revenge with an act that would also show the blacks how it was done.

  On 8 August, he ordered Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins and Linda Kasabian to go to Cielo Drive and ‘totally destroy everyone in it as gruesome as you can.’ What he did not know was that Melcher had by this time moved out and the house was now being rented by film director, Roman Polanski and his pregnant actress wife, Sharon Tate.

  When they arrived at the secluded house, they cut the phone lines and climbed over the wall into the grounds. Seeing a car’s headlights approaching, the girls ducked into some bushes. Watson pulled out a gun, approached the car and shot dead its driver, eighteen-year-old Stephen Parent, who had been visiting William Garretson, a caretaker living in the nearby guesthouse on the property. Watson turned back to the house and cut a hole in a screen at an open window. He instructed Kasabian to go to the gate to look out for anyone coming while he, Atkins and Krenwinkel climbed in through the window.