News of Reilly’s latest chess move infuriated Elaine Sharp. “Why do you have to rule out a dead guy in order to go after a living suspect?” she asked reporters. Sharp was referring to my previous statements to the press about a suspect in Mary’s murder, whom I did not name, living in northern New England. “Fine. They want Richard’s DNA, we’ll give it to them. In public!” she swore.
This set the stage for a public bloodletting. Elaine Sharp called in a physician friend of hers to take DeSalvo’s blood and saliva before the cameras on July 18, 2001. At first, I opposed the idea of a staged event, and Richard appeared embarrassed by it. “It doesn’t matter what the press writes,” Elaine promised. “People will see Richard giving his DNA, and that will put the ball back squarely in Reilly’s court.” Reporters from all the local television stations and newspapers came to cover the event. The cameras clicked away as Dr. Stephen Miller pricked Richard’s finger and ran a cotton swab along the roof of his mouth. I could sense the disdain coming from members of the media. We had worked very hard to get the public on our side, and I hoped we were doing the right thing. A stoic figure in short sleeves, Richard turned in the direction of the gang of reporters, but he could not see them. Blindness had robbed Richard of his eyesight, but it did not rob him of his pride. He looked uneasy and I could tell he hated every minute in the spotlight. “I honestly swear on a stack of Bibles that Al wasn’t the Boston Strangler,” he told reporters. “If I ever thought he even killed one, I wouldn’t be sitting here today.”
As our media event made clear, we were fully ready to swap evidence, but the attorney general wasn’t. Tom Reilly’s office released a statement that day saying, “It is critical that it [the investigation] be conducted impartially and that the integrity of the evidence be preserved.”
Most press reports treated the exercise fairly, but Reilly had his supporters, especially the Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory. McGrory had been given a major scoop when Reilly told him and only him that his office had reopened Mary’s murder case. This was payback time. In a column titled “Not the Way to Help Out,” McGrory wrote, “Enough already. That stunt pulled by Richard DeSalvo last week when he called a news conference and sought to barter his freshly drawn blood to the state Attorney General was at once shameless and shameful. . . . What Reilly seems to want is a by-the-books investigation, and so far, so good. What Sherman and DeSalvo seem to want is a circus, with hokey press conferences and televised exhumations.” What McGrory didn’t mention was that the state could afford to fight our lawsuit and bury us under a blizzard of paperwork. If we as families couldn’t get authorities to do their jobs, at least we could utilize our biggest strength, media coverage, to change public opinion.
But not everyone on our side agreed with this assessment. For the first time, my mother voiced her strong disapproval about the direction in which the case was heading. “Mary was a dignified girl,” she told me. “These public displays only make a mockery of her life—and her death. Show the world the real evidence, Case; you don’t have to resort to this.” It had been nearly a year since Mary’s exhumation, and we still had no idea about the results of the forensic work being conducted by Jim Starrs and his team. Sharp had flown down to Washington on several occasions to see if Starrs had found any trace of Mary’s killer on her remains, but the professor told her his team was still months away from releasing its findings. I worried that Starrs was merely putting off the bad news that the forensic investigation had been a colossal waste of time.
I began having doubts about Starrs’s work at the same time that Richard DeSalvo was making the painful decision to have his brother’s body exhumed. Richard held out hope that if Starrs had found evidence of Mary’s killer on her body, it would be possible to find evidence of Albert’s killer on his remains. The attack on Albert DeSalvo had been carried out at close quarters, so it was conceivable that the murderer’s blood, hair, or saliva had passed onto the victim’s skin.
In October 2001, a full year after Mary’s exhumation, Starrs’s team and members of the DeSalvo family gathered at Puritan Lawn Cemetery in Peabody to watch as Albert’s casket was hoisted out of the dirt. The team worked fast, and the exhumation took less than an hour. Starrs did not inspect the remains at the grave site; instead, DeSalvo’s casket was placed in the back of a hearse and driven to a laboratory in York, Pennsylvania.
Unlike Mary’s exhumation, this one was done under a veil of secrecy. Starrs feared that if Tom Reilly found out about it, he might claim that the professor was tampering with evidence and post state troopers at the Massachusetts border to arrest Starrs and his team.
At the Pennsylvania laboratory, the forensic team received quite a shock when they opened the casket. Albert DeSalvo’s heart, lungs, and kidneys were missing. Starrs already knew that the vital organs had been taken out during the 1973 autopsy, but he was startled to find that they had not been put back, as is standard procedure after an autopsy. The Sharps did not believe they had simply been misplaced. “It’s frightening to think that DeSalvo’s organs might be in a collector’s jar somewhere,” Dan said. We already knew that authorities had taken certain pieces of evidence as trophies in the case, but the idea that someone had stolen DeSalvo’s vital organs was not just disturbing but macabre. The news also did not bode well for Tom Reilly. He had staunchly defended the state’s refusal to share evidence with the families because he was concerned about chain of custody issues. Yet someone working on behalf of the state had stolen DeSalvo’s organs. Who could better be trusted with the evidence—the families who only wanted justice, or the state of Massachusetts?
21 : Truth or Consequences
W aking early on the morning of December 5, 2001, I tossed and turned while my wife tried unsuccessfully to cuddle me in her arms. My mind was solely on Mary’s murder and whether Albert DeSalvo had been her killer. It was a question I had wrestled with for ten years, my mother for much longer. In twenty-four hours, Jim Starrs and his forensic team would announce their findings to the world. I would be flying down to Washington with Elaine and Dan Sharp. My mother had decided to stay on Cape Cod. She wanted the opportunity to pray at Mary’s graveside when she heard the news.
Before leaving the house, I shared a quiet moment with Laura and our baby daughter. “You did the right thing, honey, no matter what the outcome is. Your mom will finally know,” my wife told me. I hugged her tightly. She had been my backbone. Walking out the door, I wondered, “Will I return home a hero or a fool?” When I met the Sharps for the ride to the airport, I suspected they were thinking the same thing. The Sharps had taken our case on faith and had worked long and hard to defend the view that DeSalvo was innocent. The evidence we had gathered pointed away from Albert DeSalvo, but our theories would be blown apart if DNA put him at the scene of the crime. My credibility as a journalist was at stake, too, but that was nothing compared to what my mother and Richard DeSalvo were going through. Mom’s relationship with her siblings, who wanted to keep the past dead and buried, had nearly been destroyed by her vow to find Mary’s killer. Richard had given up a quiet life to endure intense public scrutiny. Yet both had had the courage to see this investigation through to the end, whatever the end might be.
On the eve of the announcement, while driving back to our hotel from dinner, Dan told a story that calmed my growing anxiety. “A few years ago,” he began. “I took a case of a mentally retarded man who was severely beaten while living in state care. His name was Joey. He was in his fifties and had been in state facilities his whole life. He even had a retarded brother whom he hadn’t seen in years because the brother had simply vanished in the system. Can you believe the state of Massachusetts lost his brother?” Dan asked, still outraged. “Joey was beaten by another disabled person living at the same halfway house. This guy had abused other residents as well. There was little supervision at the house, so you can see how easily an attack like this could happen. I sued the state to make sure that Joey was taken care of for the rest of his life.
The state fought tooth and nail, but the jury sided with Joey. They awarded him millions. I didn’t care about the money; I just wanted someone held responsible so it wouldn’t happen again. Joey didn’t care about the money, either. He just wanted a new radio for his tiny bedroom. But when the jury decision came down, it was the most satisfying moment of my legal career. We had really done something good. I guess what I’m trying to say, Casey, is that I feel the same way about this case. We’ve really done some good.”
Dan’s story eased my mind, and that night, I slept soundly for the first time in days.
The scientific findings in the Mary Sullivan murder case were announced the next day, December 6, 2001, at the National Press Club in Washington. By the time we arrived, the room was filled to capacity with journalists from all over the world. Fortunately, Starrs had reserved three seats for us in the front row. Seated on the platform in front of a large blue and yellow George Washington University banner were Starrs, Baden, Dr. Bruce Goldberger from the University of Florida, and David Foran, head of the molecular biology lab at George Washington University. Standing up and walking behind the lectern, Starrs welcomed members of the media and then he recited the problems he and his team had faced in Boston. “Any relationship we might have had with Massachusetts authorities who are in possession of a number of items in this case, all of that cooperation that scientists would love to have in the open air of free discussion, we have been deprived of,” he told the reporters. “Massachusetts authorities have stonewalled us from the outset.
“The question we set out to answer today was, Did Albert DeSalvo rape and murder Mary Sullivan?” Starrs continued. A picture of Mary’s smiling face was projected onto a large screen behind him. He spoke briefly about the difficult task of exhuming Mary’s body and the fact that even her death certificate had contained a basic factual error. “The death certificate had her buried at Oak Neck Cemetery in Hyannis, when we know she was buried at St. Francis Xavier Cemetery in Centerville, Massachusetts,” he pointed out. After providing a brief background of Mary’s murder, Starrs surrendered the microphone to Dr. Michael Baden, who had conducted the new autopsy.
Baden, a bear of a man, eased his way to the lectern. “The first question medical examiners ask is, How will the body look?” he said. “The remains were in fair condition, some in excellent condition. The body showed deterioration of the extremities, but the chest, abdomen, and pelvis were in excellent condition.” Baden then began to dissect DeSalvo’s confession as expertly as he would a human body. “DeSalvo said he entered Mary Sullivan’s apartment at 4:00 P.M. and left when it was dark. But when the medical examiner arrived at the scene, he noticed that rigor mortis was complete.” Baden pointed out that it takes several hours for the body to become fully rigid. “The time of death would have to have been many hours before 4:00 P.M.,” he noted. Baden also had discovered that the medical examiner’s inspection of Mary’s stomach found only brown fluid, which smelled like coffee. Mary had yet to eat anything that day. It was inconceivable that Mary could go a full day without at least a snack of some kind. “So again, Sullivan was killed around ten o’clock in the morning, not four or four-thirty,” Baden surmised.
Now the picture of Mary’s smiling face was replaced on the overhead screen by an X ray of her skull. “Albert DeSalvo said he beat her unconscious and bit her over her body,” Baden said, but there was no indication of blunt trauma to Mary’s skull or bite marks on her skin.
The projectionist advanced slides from the skull X ray to a picture of Mary’s hyoid bone. Baden said, “The hyoid bone is a horseshoe-shaped bone right above the Adam’s apple. It’s the bone that the tongue is fixed to. It’s the target organ for manual strangulation. Albert DeSalvo claimed that he manually strangled Sullivan with his thumbs against her Adam’s apple.” Baden noted that the hyoid bone is likely to fracture under the pressure of manual strangulation. “But as you can see,” he pointed out, “Sullivan’s hyoid bone shows absolutely no sign of trauma.” I glanced over at Elaine, who was now smiling. As comfortable in a laboratory as in a courtroom, she had been the first person to raise the issue of the hyoid bone with Starrs and Baden. I then turned to watch the flurry of activity behind me. Reporters were scribbling on notepads, summarizing Baden’s presentation. What it boiled down to was that Albert DeSalvo had lied when he confessed to the murder of Mary Sullivan.
The next presenter was Dr. Bruce Goldberger, the team’s toxicology expert. Starrs wanted the world to know that he had all the bases covered. Goldberger’s tests detected neither drugs nor alcohol in Mary’s body.
The fourth speaker was the team’s DNA expert, David Foran. Jim Starrs, who clearly knew how to put on a show, had saved the best for last. The slender Foran fidgeted at the podium. “This has been a huge amount of work,” he observed. “This was completely uncharted territory. We had to pick out evidence we thought would be most productive.” First, Foran and his DNA team had looked at Mary’s fingernails, he said. “If she fought off her attacker, she could have scratched him. But the only DNA found under Sullivan’s fingernails was her own,” he added. As Foran continued, my hopes for a clear conclusion began to fade. Foran had also examined Mary’s underwear, which had been put on her right before the funeral. “We were looking for any possible leakage [from the vagina],” he explained. Foran indicated that under ultraviolet light, he had discovered fluorescents in the panties, an indication of the presence of biological fluids. The DNA sequence found on the panties did not match Mary Sullivan or Albert DeSalvo, but it could have come from the medical examiner or even the mortician. Foran also had discovered something in Mary’s pubic hair. “The substance was clear and crusted,” he said. “It was not brittle.” In short, it had the characteristics of semen. I sat up in my chair. Mary’s murder had been a sex crime, and this was the killer’s DNA, plain and simple. Did DeSalvo do it? David Foran was about to tell the world. “These genetic sequences did not match Mary Sullivan,” he said. “They did not match anyone on the forensic team, and most important, the DNA is not from Albert DeSalvo.”
The reporters let out a collective gasp. A wave of emotion came crashing over me. We were right. Albert DeSalvo had not killed Mary. Through our hard work history was being rewritten. Now David Foran took his seat, and Jim Starrs returned to the podium. “The family of Mary Sullivan, Casey Sherman and Diane Dodd, and their determination to seek the truth over many years have been vindicated,” he said. “We have found evidence, and it does not and cannot be associated with Albert DeSalvo.”
Starrs then called me to the podium. I said, “I started to look at this case ten years ago because of what my mother said to me, which was, ‘I don’t believe Albert DeSalvo killed Mary, and I believe her killer . . . is still out there.’” I had to stop. My voice was breaking. I took off my glasses and wiped my eyes. “We were just looking for one thing,” I continued, “which was the answer to the question Did he do it? Now we have the answer, and what we’ve heard today brings my mother a certain closure in this case. It also gives the DeSalvo family closure to this case. Because if Albert DeSalvo didn’t kill my aunt, which he confessed to, then he probably didn’t kill any of those women.” DNA evidence had proved that DeSalvo had not murdered my aunt, and I believed that his grossly inaccurate confessions to the ten other murders proved he had not been the Boston Strangler after all. “The real killers are still out there, and we need to bring them to justice,” I concluded.
As I stepped off the podium, reporters quickly swarmed around me. But before I could talk to them, I had to talk to someone else. Elaine Sharp hugged me and handed me her cell phone, saying, “Call your mom.” Reaching her at home, I found out she had already heard the news. David Foran had called her right before the press conference. As we spoke, she began to cry. “You did it, Case!” she said. “It’s all because of you. Thank you so much.” I had waited ten years to hear those words. “No, you did it Mom,” I replied. I looked in the direction of Elaine, Dan, and Jim Starrs. “We all
did it!”
22 : The Final Showdown
S o what are you going to do now?” Jim Mellon asked as we both watched a seagull fly overhead with what looked to be a small fish in its mouth. It was a beautiful sight, even though many New Englanders feel that seagulls are merely rodents with wings.
I said, “I think the world now knows that DeSalvo wasn’t the Boston Strangler. The only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Tom Reilly.” A strong wind was blowing off the ocean. I zipped up my coat and blew warm breath over my frozen hands. “I never set out to exonerate Albert DeSalvo. I’m glad it happened for his family because they’ve certainly been through enough. But my goal is to find Mary’s killer, and I’m not going to stop until I do.”
Mellon smiled. “You’ll nail the bastard,” he said. “I’d be a fool to bet against you.”
I did not tell Mellon that my man in New Hampshire had finally succeeded in getting Preston Moss’s DNA. One evening, Moss had left his baseball cap at the bar, and the man had taken the cap back into the storage room and with a pair of tweezers pulled out several strands of Moss’s hair, placed them in a paper bag, and shipped the bag to David Foran’s lab for testing. The tests showed that Moss’s hair partially matched DNA evidence found on Mary’s body. The evidence was promising, but it still did not scientifically prove he was the killer. The mitochondrial DNA test performed on the evidence could exclude Moss as the killer but could not incriminate him. The DNA test showed the odds are one in five that Moss murdered Mary. “We still have a long way to go,” Elaine Sharp told me. “The hair sample was a good start, but we need Moss’s blood to really prove he did it. If only the attorney general’s office could force him to submit to a blood test,” Sharp sighed. “That could answer the question once and for all.” We both believed, however, that Tom Reilly was not interested in pursuing this case. We would have to do it on our own.
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