The Boston Stranglers Read online

  An Acclaimed Account of a Notorious Murder Case

  “This book is, quite simply, remarkable journalism and remarkable writing.”

  —Robert B. Parker

  “Impressive ... raises disturbing questions about one of our nation’s most notorious crime sprees.”

  —Gail Zimmerman, Producer, 48 Hours

  “Taut with suspense ... crackles like a bestselling novel.”

  —Barry Reed, author of The Verdict

  “It’s been half a century, but no one who lived through it will ever forget it. The Boston Strangler stalked the streets, and a whole city, a whole region, lived in fear. Then they caught him and put him away. Or did they? That’s the question Susan Kelly asks in this meticulously researched, compulsively readable return to those bad old days in Boston. It’s terrific true crime and much, much more. It’s also first-rate history, and it has all the drama of fine fiction. It’s a classic of the genre.”

  —William Martin, New York Times bestselling author of Back Bay and The Lincoln Letter

  “In beginning her prodigious research for this volume, Kelly talked to local police officers, most of whom were convinced that DeSalvo was not the killer. She offers logical conjectures about some of the other suspects, proceeding on the assumption that several slayers were involved.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The narration is engrossing as Kelly lays out the gruesome particulars of each of the 13 murders alleged to be the Strangler’s.”

  —AudioFile (review of the audio edition)

  Also by Susan Kelly

  The Gemini Man

  The Summertime Soldiers

  Trail of the Dragon

  Until Proven Innocent

  And Soon I’ll Come to Kill You

  Out of the Darkness

  THE BOSTON STRANGLERS

  Susan Kelly

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Since it was members past and present of the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Police Department who put me onto this story, I owe them my first and greatest thanks for all their help, in particular, Superintendent Walter L. Boyle; retired Captain William R. Burke, Jr.; retired Detective Sergeant Fidele Centrella; the late Detective Louise Darling; Lieutenant Michael D. Giacoppo; former Detective M. Michael Giacoppo, now a private investigator; Detective Joseph McCarthy; retired Detective James Roscoe; and Crime Analyst Richard Sevieri. Several other officers contributed to this book; they have requested that their names not be used for reasons of privacy and personal safety, and I respect their wishes. They know who they are and I thank them.

  I am more than grateful to Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger and former Assistant At torney General Thomas Samoluk, who dug up and put at my disposal more than twenty-five cartons of material relating to the Strangler case—material that until now has never been made public. Without Mr. Harshbarger and Mr. Samoluk, I would not have a book.

  My deep thanks also to former United States Senator Edward Brooke; former Governor of Massachusetts Endicott Peabody; and former United States Attorney General Elliot Richardson.

  Richard and Rosalie DeSalvo, brother and sister-in-law of the late Albert DeSalvo, offered me not only their help but their kind hospitality while I was gathering information for this book.

  Francis C. Newton, Jr., Esq., and Thomas Troy, Esq., counsel for the late Albert DeSalvo, provided me with much important information about their famous and ill-starred client (and wasted a lot of billable hours doing it!). I can say the same of Dr. Ames Robey, whose mordant observations on the criminal justice system may merit a book in themselves.

  Former Boston Police Commissioner Edmund McNamara and former Boston Police Department Detective Sergeant James McDonald were kind enough to share with me their invaluable recollections.

  Former Lieutenant John Moran of the Salem (Massachusetts) Police Department, who knows more about the murder of Evelyn Corbin than anyone else alive—except for the perpetrator—helped immeasurably, not the least in giving me a guided tour of the murder site.

  Novelists and former crime reporters George V. Higgins and Andrew Coburn had riveting reminiscences of the major players in the Strangler drama—and recounted them in fascinating detail. Professor William Russo of Curry College provided valuable information about the making of the movie The Boston Strangler.

  Michael Brady, Ann Marie Barr, Franco Davoli, Bill Martin, Howard Hock, and Winston Alves of the Massachusetts State Record Office made my research there a pleasure.

  Middlesex County Courthouse Librarian Sandra Lindheimer went above and beyond the call of bibliographic duty in helping me track down trial manuscripts and appeals briefs. I received similar excellent help from Jeannette Ramos at the United States District Court in Boston.

  Jack Reilly, Joy Pratt, and novelist Lee Grove provided me with vivid memories of—and sharp observations about—the Harvard Square scene in the early 1960s.

  Gordon Parry, who would have been a great stand-up comic but probably made a better forensic investigator, was enormously helpful to me in re-creating some of the crime scenes.

  Reporters William Davis and Stephen Kurkjian of the Boston Globe were more than professionally courteous in helping me run down some suspects. Without John Cronin of the Boston Herald, this book would lack most of its wonderful illustrations.

  I thank Gerold Frank for his kindness in answering my questions.

  Diane Sullivan Dodd and Casey Sherman: thanks.

  This book grew out of an article of mine published in the April 1992 issue of Boston Magazine; for this, I thank former editor Michael Roberts, who knows a thing or two about a hot crime story himself.

  I appreciate the kindness of Jack Barry, Dan Doherty, John Donovan, Bill O’Donnell, Kathleen Rogers, Andrew Tuney, James Ward, and Roger Woodworth in sharing with me their memories of the Strangler investigation and its principals.

  Thanks to Officers Richard Aumais and David St. Jean of the Andover (Massachusetts) Police Department for their help.

  Jeff Klein of Pip Printing in Cambridge did a great job reproducing old photographs.

  The following people, who figure prominently in this book, are deceased:

  John Bottomly

  Donald Conn

  Phillip DiNatale

  George McGrath

  Cornelius Moynihan

  P. J. Piscitelli

  Robert Sheinfeld

  Edward Sherry

  The following people either declined to be interviewed or did not respond to requests for interviews:

  Charles Burnim

  John Collins

  George Nassar

  Juris Slesers

  I also interviewed F. Lee Bailey, Esq., and Jon Asgeirsson, Esq., two other of Albert DeSalvo’s attorneys. They stopped speaking to me after a while; nonetheless, I appreciate their initial input.

  And thanks to those of you who requested anonymity: Your reasons for doing so make a great deal of sense.

  Table of Contents

  An Acclaimed Account of a Notorious Murder Case

  Also by Susan Kelly

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Preface

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  1 - A Time of Terror

  2 - Police Under Fire

  3 - The State Takes Over

  4 - Psychiatrists and Psychics

  PART TWO

  5 - The Measuring Man

  6 - The Green Man

  7 - A Murder in the Suburbs

  8 - Enter George Nassar . . . And F. Lee Bailey


  9 - The Cuckoo’s Nest

  10 - Bailey Takes Action

  11 - Wheeling and Dealing

  12 - The Green Man Goes to Trial

  PART THREE

  13 - A Great Escape, a Musical Interlude, and More Wheeling and Dealing

  14 - Hooray for Hollywood

  15 - From Jet Plane Lawyer to Helicopter Lawyer

  16 - The Burnim and Bailey Circus, I

  17 - The Burnim and Bailey Circus, II

  18 - Endgame

  PART FOUR

  19 - Grave Doubts

  20 - Origins of a Hoax

  21 - The Confessions of Albert DeSalvo, I

  22 - The Confessions of Albert DeSalvo, II

  23 - The Confessions of Albert DeSalvo, III

  24 - The Confessions of Albert DeSalvo, IV

  PART FIVE

  25 - The Murders of Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Margaret Davis, and Jane Sullivan

  26 - The Murder of Sophie Clark

  27 - The Murder of Patricia Bissette, I

  28 - The Murder of Patricia Bissette, II

  29 - The Murder of Patricia Bissette, III

  30 - The Murder of Beverly Samans, I

  31 - The Murder of Beverly Samans, II

  32 - The Murders of Evelyn Corbin and Joann Graff

  33 - The Murder of Mary Sullivan

  PART SIX

  34 - Final Thoughts

  35 - Last Moments

  Epilogue

  Update

  Update: 2013

  Bibliography

  Sources

  Copyright Page

  Notes

  Preface

  November 8, 1981, was one of those lead-gray days when the sky seems very close to the earth. I was visiting the Cambridge, Massachusetts, Police Department to do research for what would become my first published novel, The Gemini Man, a story about a serial killer.

  I was sitting in the reception area outside the chief’s office, waiting to speak to a lieutenant, a homicide specialist working out of the Criminal Investigation Division. Side by side on a bench diagonally across the room from me were two cops, both white-haired, both in their late fifties or early sixties, both in plain clothes. They introduced themselves as “the two Billies”1 and asked me who I was. I gave my name and added that I was doing research on crime and police work. I did not have the nerve to identify myself as a writer: At that point, my only publications were three brief scholarly articles on medieval literature.

  The two Billies had been detectives for the past thirty years, the first said. If I wanted some good stories, I should ask them.

  “We been around the block a few times,” the second said.

  I smiled and said I’d look forward to hearing about that. Then I added, “At the moment, I’m trying to find information about serial killers.”

  The two Billies looked at each other.

  “Like Ted Bundy,” I said.

  “How about the Boston Strangler?” the first Billy said.

  “Him, too,” I replied.

  The two glanced at each other again. Their faces wore the slightest of grins.

  “We can tell you a lot about that,” the second Billy said.

  Something was going on here. I studied the two men. “I’d love to hear it,” I said.

  The first Billy gazed at me, still with that odd little smile. “Lemme ask you a question.”

  “Sure.”

  “Who do you think the Boston Strangler was?”

  It seemed like a strange question. Sort of like asking who was buried in Grant’s Tomb.

  “Albert DeSalvo,” I said.

  Everybody knew that. All the newspapers had proclaimed DeSalvo the Strangler. A best-selling book by a famous writer had said so. Ditto a major movie. History’s only more notorious serial killer was Jack the Ripper.

  The two laughed.

  “Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler like my dog was the Boston Strangler,” the second Billy said.

  I stared at him. Then I said, “Tell me.”

  “You first, Billy,” the second said.

  I went on to write The Gemini Man (in which I made a passing reference to the two Billies’ story) and five more crime novels. The research for those books required frequent contact with law enforcement officials. Every once in a while, in conversation with one or another of these people, I’d mention what I’d been told that November day in 1981. To my initial surprise and then increasing fascination, almost all the cops, lawyers, and prosecutors concurred with the two Billies. Some had different theories about who the Boston Strangler—or Stranglers—might have been. But they all agreed on one point: Albert DeSalvo, a construction worker with a long record of convictions for breaking and entering, armed robbery, and sex offenses, was not the killer of the eleven women who died terrible deaths between June 1962 and January 1964.

  If DeSalvo wasn’t, who was?

  I decided to try to find out.

  In the autumn of 1964, thirty-three-year-old Malden, Massachusetts, resident Albert Henry DeSalvo, loving husband and devoted father of two, was arrested and charged with numerous counts of armed robbery unnatural acts, and rape, offenses that had been committed in various suburban communities in the greater Boston area. In the summer of 1965, after several months’ incarceration in a state facility for the criminally insane and sexually dangerous, DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler. He claimed, moreover, responsibility not just for eleven of the killings the press ascribed to what it liked to call “the Phantom Fiend,” but for two others. His descriptions of these thirteen murders were graphic. So much so that it took DeSalvo two months to recite all the details.

  The only problem was—a great many of those details were wildly inaccurate. And DeSalvo was ignorant of facts the killer would have known.

  DeSalvo’s confession was a phony from beginning to end. The individual who conducted the interrogation and tape-recorded it, one of the top law enforcement officials of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was quite aware of that. Still, he permitted the confession to stand unchallenged. A few years later, this individual would profit handsomely from the sale to the movies of the rights to DeSalvo’s story and the part he himself played in it.

  Albert DeSalvo was never charged with, much less tried or convicted for, being the Boston Strangler. He couldn’t be. Not one shred of physical evidence connected him to any of the murders. Nor could any eyewitness place him at or even near any of the crime scenes.

  No police officer from any of the towns and cities in which the stranglings occurred was ever permitted to question DeSalvo.

  Why did the Office of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—or at least one of its top representatives—accept DeSalvo’s confession, knowing full well that it was phony? Simply because this was the quickest and easiest way to close the books on eleven gruesome murders.

  Of course, there was also the money. The individual from the attorney general’s office was not the only person whose bank account would be fattened by DeSalvo’s confession.

  Albert DeSalvo went to trial in January 1967 on the rape, armed robbery, and unnatural acts charges lodged against him in the fall of 1964. At the trial his attorney, F. Lee Bailey, identified his client as the Boston Strangler. Bailey’s strategy—one he had used successfully at an earlier court proceeding to determine DeSalvo’s competence—was based on the belief that if DeSalvo was branded the killer of thirteen women in an open forum, a jury would have to find him not guilty by reason of insanity of the armed robbery and sexual assault charges. Bailey further reasoned that DeSalvo would be committed by the judge to a mental institution rather than a state prison, since he was clearly a very sick man in desperate need of treatment.

  Bailey’s strategy failed the second time around. The jury found DeSalvo guilty of armed robbery and sexual assault. The judge, apparently convinced by Bailey that DeSalvo was an appalling menace to society, sentenced him to life in prison. Afterward Bailey bitterl
y declared that Massachusetts had just burned another witch.

  DeSalvo was stabbed to death in prison in 1973. His murder—just like those of the eleven strangling2 victims—is officially considered unsolved.

  Two questions remain. The first, of course, is—why did Albert DeSalvo confess to a string of murders he never committed?

  He had four reasons, all of which must have seemed to him quite valid. First, his attorney, in whom he reposed complete faith, was erroneously convinced that the 1964 rape and armed robbery charges would put DeSalvo in prison for life. (According to other legal authorities, it was very unlikely Albert would have received such a stiff sentence.) Second, DeSalvo was told that the sale of his life story and confession would make him a great deal of money, which could be given to his beloved wife and children for their support. Third, his attorney convinced him that he would be confined to a posh mental hospital—Johns Hopkins, Albert claimed—if he identified himself as the Strangler. Fourth, in branding himself a serial killer, Albert would become world-famous, something he dearly wanted to be.

  He achieved this last goal, but surely not in the manner he’d intended.

  If the previous question has four answers, the final question has two parts. The first: If Albert DeSalvo wasn’t the Boston Strangler, who was? The second: Why, then, wasn’t the real Strangler—or Stranglers—ever arrested and prosecuted?

  I am convinced that there was not one Boston Stranger, but rather a bare minimum of six and much more likely eight or nine. The Boston Stranglings were not eleven serial killings—at least six of them were one-on-one murders committed for motives as individual as were the killers.