by Colin Wilson
Possibly because he encountered a certain scepticism – he had a reputation as a boaster – DeSalvo began hinting that he had done far more serious things than raping a few women. Only one of his ward-mates took him seriously: a murderer called George Nassar. At first, Nassar also thought DeSalvo was merely boasting – particularly when he confided that he was the Boston Strangler. What finally convinced him was DeSalvo’s detailed knowledge of the crimes. ‘He knows more about them stranglings than the cops.’
Nassar knew there was a large reward for the Boston Strangler, and he spoke to his attorney, F.Lee Bailey, who had achieved fame when he obtained freedom for Dr Sam Sheppard, accused of murdering his wife. Bailey was also sceptical – there are endless fake confessions to almost every widely publicised murder – but when he went to see DeSalvo on 4 March 1965, he soon realised that this sounded authentic. DeSalvo was not a man of high intelligence – although bright and articulate – and it seemed unlikely that he could have read and memorised newspaper accounts of the murders. He even mentioned a murder that no-one knew about – an old lady of eighty or so who had died of a heart attack as he grabbed her. In fact, DeSalvo’s account enabled the police to identify her as eighty-five-year-old Mary Mullens who had been found dead in her Boston apartment two weeks after the murder of Anna Slesers, the first Strangler victim. DeSalvo’s descriptions of other murder scenes made it clear that he knew details that had never been published. Most important of all, he knew exactly what the Strangler had done to various victims. This information had been deliberately suppressed, giving rise to all kind of wild rumours of torture and perversion. DeSalvo knew, for example, precisely what position Mary Sullivan – the last victim – had been left in, and that she had a broom handle inserted into her vagina; and he was able to describe in precise detail the rooms of most of the victims.
There were some odd complications. Several witnesses who had seen a man entering apartment buildings where stranglings had taken place failed to identify DeSalvo as the man. And two women who had seen the Strangler – including Gertrude Gruen, the German girl who had fought him off – not only failed to identify DeSalvo, but identified George Nassar as the strangler. Yet DeSalvo’s incredibly detailed knowledge of the crimes finally convinced most of those involved with the case that he alone was the Boston Strangler.
In the long run, all this proved irrelevant. Albert DeSalvo stood trial for the Green Man rapes, and in 1967 was sentenced to permanent detention in the Walpole State Prison, where he could receive psychiatric treatment. On 26 November 1973 DeSalvo was found dead in his cell, stabbed through the heart. No motive was ever established, and whoever was responsible was never caught.
In January 1964, while the Boston Strangler was still at large, the assistant attorney general of Massachusetts, John S. Bottomly, decided to set up a committee of psychiatrists to attempt to establish some kind of ‘psychological profile’ of the killer. One of the psychiatrists who served on that committee was Dr James A.Brussel, the man who had been so successful in describing New York’s ‘Mad Bomber’ (see here). When he attended his first meeting, Brussel discovered that there was a sharp division of opinion within the committee. One group believed that there were two stranglers, one of whom killed old women, and the other young girls; the other group thought there was only one strangler.
It was at his second meeting of the committee – in April 1965 – that Brussel was hit by a sudden ‘hunch’ as he listened to a psychiatrist pointing out that in some cases, semen was found in the vagina, while in others, it was found on the breasts, thighs, or even on the carpet. When it came to his turn to speak, Brussel outlined the theory that had suddenly come to him ‘in a flash’.
‘I think we’re dealing with one man. The apparent differences in M.O., I believe, result from changes that have been going on in this man. Over the two-year period during which he has been committing these murders, he had gone through a series of upheavals . . .’
The first five victims, said Brussel, were elderly women, and there was no semen in the vaginas. They had been manipulated in other ways – ‘a type of sexual molestation that might be expected of a small boy, not a man’. A boy gets over his sexual obsession with his mother, and transfers his interest to girls of his own age. ‘The Strangler . . . achieved this transfer – achieved emotional puberty – in a matter of months.’ Now he wanted to achieve orgasm inside younger women. And with the final victim, Mary Sullivan, the semen was in her mouth and over her breasts; a broom had been inserted in the vagina. The Strangler was making a gesture of triumph and of defiance: ‘I throw my sex in your face.’
This man, said Brussel, was a physically powerful individual, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, the time the paranoid reaction reaches its peak. He hazarded a guess that the Strangler’s nationality was Italian or Spanish, since garrotting is a method used by bandits in both countries.
Brussel’s final ‘guesses’ were startlingly to the point. He believed that the Strangler had stopped killing because he had worked it out of his system. He had, in effect, grown up. And he would finally be caught because he would be unable to resist talking about his crimes and his new-found maturity.
The rest of the committee was polite but sceptical. But one year later, Brussel was proved correct when DeSalvo began admitting to George Nassar that he was the Boston Strangler.
In 1966, Brussel went to Boston to interview DeSalvo. He had been half-expecting a misshapen monster, and was surprised to be greeted by a good-looking, polite young man with a magnificent head of dark hair. (Brussel had even foretold that the Strangler would have well-tended hair, since he was obsessed by the impression he made on women.) Brussel found him charming, and soon realised how DeSalvo had talked his way into so many apartments; he seemed a thoroughly nice young man. Then what had turned him into a murderer? As usual, it proved to be the family and childhood background. DeSalvo’s father was the worst kind of brute. He beat his wife and children mercilessly – on one occasion he broke his wife’s fingers one by one. He beat one son with a hosepipe so badly – for knocking over a box of fruit – that the boy was not allowed on the beach all summer because he was covered in black and yellow bruises. He often brought a prostitute home and had sex with her in front of the children. Their mother was also less than satisfactory. She was indifferent and self-preoccupied, and had no time for the children. As a child Albert had been a ‘loner’, his only real friend a dog that lived in a junkyard. He developed sadistic compulsions at an early age. He and a playmate called Billy used to place a dog and cat in two compartments of an orange crate and starve them for days, then pull out the partition, and watch as the cat scratched out the dog’s eyes. But, like so many psychopaths (Albert Fish and Gary Heidnik, for example) he could display considerable charm and make himself liked.
The real key to DeSalvo was sex. From an early age he was insatiable, ‘walking around with a rail on most of the time, ready to take on any broad or fag come along, or to watch some broad and masturbate . . . thinking about sex a lot, more than anything, and needing it so much all the time. If only somebody could’ve seen it then and told me it was not normal, even sick . . .’ DeSalvo is here exaggerating; a large proportion of healthy young males go around in much the same state. DeSalvo’s environment offered a great deal of sexual stimulus. He participated in sex games with his brothers and sisters when he was five or six years old. At the age of eight he performed oral sex on a girl at school, and was soon persuading girls to do the same for him. Albert DeSalvo was turned into a sexual psychopath by the same kind of ‘hothouse environment’ that had nurtured Albert Fish. Combined with the lack of moral restraint that resulted from his family background, his tremendous sex urge soon led him to rape – his own estimation was that he had raped or assaulted almost two thousand women. During the course of the Green Man attacks, he raped four women in a single day, and even then tried to pick up a fifth. This was something that Brussel had failed to recognise. The Strangler had n
ot been ‘searching for his potency’ – he had always been potent. During his teens, a woman neighbour had asked him if it was true that he had a permanent erection, and when he modestly admitted it, invited him into her apartment. ‘She went down on her knees and blowed me and I come almost right off and she said: “Oh, now you went and come and what am I going to have to get screwed with?”, and I said: “Don’t worry, I’ll have a hard on again in a few minutes”.’ When he left her, she was exhausted, but he was still unsatisfied. It was not potency DeSalvo was searching for, but emotional stability.
Yet Brussel was undoubtedly correct about the main thing: that DeSalvo’s murders were part of an attempt to grow up. The murders of elderly women were acts of revenge against the mother who had rejected him; but the murder of the young black girl Sophie Clark signalled a change. When he knocked on her door DeSalvo had no idea that she would be so young – he was looking for elderly women, like his mother. Her white dress and black stockings excited him. He talked his way into her apartment by claiming to be a workman sent to carry out repairs – the method he invariably used – then, when she turned her back, hooked his arm round her neck and squeezed until she was unconscious. After that he raped her, then strangled her. The experience taught him that he preferred young girls to older women, and caused the change in his method.
Yet from the beginning, DeSalvo suffered from the same problem as so many sex killers: self-division. A month before he killed Anna Slesers – the first victim – DeSalvo talked his way into the apartment of an attractive Swedish girl, claiming that he had been sent to repair the ceiling. ‘She was laughing and she was very nice. An attractive, kind woman.’ In the bathroom she turned her back on him, and DeSalvo hooked his powerful forearm round her neck. As he began to squeeze, he saw her face in the bathroom mirror, ‘the look of awful fear and pain.’ ‘And I see myself, the look on my own face . . . and I can’t do it. I take my arm away.’ The girl asked him what he was going to do, and he admitted that he was going to rape her and possibly kill her. ‘I tell you now that I was ashamed – I began to cry.’ He fell on his knees in front of her and said: ‘Oh God, what was I doing? I am a good Catholic man with a wife and children. I don’t know what to do . . . Please call the police.’ The girl told him to go home. ‘She was a kind person and she was trying to be good to me. But how much better it would have been if she had called the police right then and there.’ The episode is an interesting confirmation of a theory advanced by Brussel to his fellow committee members: that the Strangler only attacked women who turned their backs on him, because it seemed a form of ‘rejection’.
After killing Sophie Clark, he came very close to sparing his next victim, Patricia Bissette. ‘She was very nice to me, she treated me like a man – I thought of doing it to her and I talked myself out of it.’ She offered him coffee, and when he offered to go out and get some doughnuts, told him she had food there. ‘Then it was as good as over. I didn’t want it to happen but then I knew that it would.’ After he had throttled her into unconsciousness and was raping her, ‘I want to say that all the time I was doing this, I was thinking about how nice she had been to me and it was making me feel bad. She had treated me right, and I was doing this thing to her . . .’
At other times, Mr Hyde took over – as in his next murder, that of Mary Brown in Lawrence. This murder was not, at the time, recognised as one of the Strangler’s crimes, because its ferocity seemed untypical. DeSalvo described how he had knocked on the door and explained to the grey-haired lady who answered that he had come to paint the kitchen. She let him in without question. In his pocket, DeSalvo had a piece of brass pipe that he had found in the hallway. ‘As she walked to the kitchen, her back was to me. I hit her right on the back of the head with the pipe . . . this was terrible, and I don’t like talking about it. She went down and I ripped her things open, showing her busts . . . she was unconscious and bleeding . . . I don’t know why but then I hit her again on the head with the pipe. I kept on hitting and hitting her with the pipe . . . this is like out of this world . . . this is unbelievable . . . oh, it was terrible . . . because her head felt like it was all gone . . . terrible . . . then I took this fork and stuck it into her right bust.’ As in so many other cases, DeSalvo was unable to say why he did it. (Similarly, he had been unable to explain why he rifled the apartments after committing the murders: he was not looking for anything specific and apparently took nothing.) What he failed to recognise was that, like so many other serial killers, he had been taken over – literally possessed – by a sadistic compulsion, the sheer joy of destruction. Yet even as he did it, he continued to feel ‘This is terrible.’
DeSalvo never suceeded in overcoming his feeling of guilt. He intimidated the tenth victim, twenty-three-year-old Beverly Sams, with a knife; she made him promise not to rape her, because she was afraid of pregnancy. When he had her lying on the bed, DeSalvo decided to gag her. ‘Then I thought that I wouldn’t want a broad like that, with her stupid ideas to see me, so I tied a blindfold over her eyes.’ When she recovered consciousness and discovered that he was raping her, she called him an animal. This enraged him enough to make him stab her. When he could kill like this – giving rein to his resentment – he experienced no guilt.
The last victim, Mary Sullivan, tried to reason with him, to talk him out of rape. Her words struck home. ‘I recall thinking at the time, yes, she is right, I don’t have to do these things any more now . . . I heard what this girl is saying and it stayed with me.’ At the time he was angry, and hit her several times. As he tied her up and prepared to rape her, he realised ‘I would never be able to do it again’. After raping her, he strangled her manually, while she struggled to get up. ‘This is what I don’t like to talk about. This is killing me even to talk about.’ After death, her face looked ‘surprised and even disappointed with the way I had treated her’. Then DeSalvo propped her up against the head of the bed, straddled her chest, and masturbated so that the sperm would strike her face. ‘She is sitting there with the stuff on her nose and mouth and chin. I am not in control of myself. I know that something awful has been done, that the whole world of human beings are shocked and will be even more shocked.’ He went into the kitchen and fetched a broom, then inserted it into her vagina, ‘not so far as to hurt her . . . you say it is funny that I worry about hurting her when she is already dead, but that is the truth . . . I do not want to hurt her’. And, after leaving the apartment; ‘as far as I was concerned it wasn’t me. I can’t explain it to you any other way.’ When Brussel later pressed him to explain why Mary Sullivan was his final victim, he admitted that she had reminded him of his daughter. Dr Jekyll was back in control.
That he would now remain in control was demonstrated in a sensational manner. In February 1967, a month after being sentenced to life imprisonment, DeSalvo and two more inmates escaped from the Bridgewater mental institution. The city of Boston was plunged into panic. Interviewed by the press, Brussel was unconcerned. He pointed out that DeSalvo had left a note behind, apologising for taking unauthorised leave, and explaining that he was only doing so to draw attention to the fact that he was receiving no psychiatric treatment. He promised that he would harm nobody. Brussel stated that he was sure DeSalvo would honour his promise. In fact, DeSalvo gave himself up after only thirty-six hours. His protest failed in its purpose – he was transferred to the virtually escape-proof Walpole Prison, but still failed to receive any psychiatric treatment.
At least Brussel had proved his point. The Boston Strangler had raped and murdered his way to a kind of maturity.
Six
Folie à Deux
SOON AFTER MIDNIGHT on Sunday 2 November 1980 a young couple emerged from a restaurant in Sacramento, California, and walked towards their car. They had spent the evening at a Founder’s Day dance in the restaurant, and were wearing formal evening dress. On their way through the car park, they were accosted by a pretty blonde girl whose swollen stomach suggested an advanced stage of pregnancy. As t
hey stopped politely to find out what she wanted, the girl pointed an automatic pistol at them, and ordered them to climb into the back seat of an Oldsmobile. The front passenger seat was occupied by a big man with a sullen expression.
At that moment, a student who happened to know the young couple – and who was in the mood for a practical joke – decided to climb into the driver’s seat of the Oldsmobile, as if about to drive away. His position prevented him from seeing the gun in the hand of the sullen-faced man, but a glance at the face of his friends told him something was wrong. A moment later, he was startled when the pretty blonde screamed: ‘What the fuck are you doing in my car?’ and slapped his face. As he watched her drive away with a squeal of tyres, Andy Beal had the presence of mind to concentrate on the numberplate of the speeding car, and to write it down on a piece of paper. Then he hurried to the nearest telephone and rang the police. When the registration number was fed into the motor vehicle computer it revealed that the car was registered to twenty-four-year-old Charlene Williams, with an address in Sacramento.
The abducted couple were twenty-two-year-old Craig Miller and Beth Sowers, twenty-one, and when, the next morning, the police went to call on Charlene Williams at the home of her parents, Chuck and Mercedes, they were still missing. The attractive girl who opened the door to the policemen acknowledged that she was the owner of the Oldsmobile, but denied any knowledge of the kidnapping. She explained that she had been drunk the night before, and that her memory was hazy. But she insisted that she had spent the evening alone. It was after they had left Charlene Williams that the officers learned that Craig Miller had been found in adjoining Eldorado County; he was lying face down, with three bullets in the back of his head. By the time the police returned to Charlene’s residence, the Oldsmobile had gone, and so had Charlene. As the police looked into her background, they soon had reason to believe that she had been accompanied by her thirty-four-year-old ‘husband’ Gerald Armand Gallego, who had a lengthy record which included three years in jail for armed robbery.
