The judge, ultimately sympathetic to DeSalvo’s role as a bread-earner, reduced the sentence he received to 18 months. With good behavior, DeSalvo was released in April of 1962, 2 months before the first victim of the Strangler, Anna Slesers, was found.Albert DeSalvo was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on September 3, 1931. His parents, Frank and Charlotte had five other children. His father was a violently abusive man who regularly beat his wife and children. As a boy, he was delinquent, arrested more than once on assault and battery charges. Throughout his adolescence, he went through periods of very good behavior and then lapses into petty criminality.
His mother Charlotte remarried and did her best to keep her son out of trouble. Their relationship, aside from the disappointments she suffered when he got into trouble, was a reasonably good one.
He was in the Army from 1948 through 1956 and was stationed for awhile in Germany. There he met his wife, Irmgard Beck, an attractive woman from a respectable family. At one time, he was promoted to Specialist E-5, but later was demoted to private for failing to obey an order. He received an honorable discharge.
In 1955, he was arrested for fondling a young girl, but the charge was dropped. That year, his first child was born. Judy had a physical handicap in the form of congenital pelvic disease. This problem had a large impact on DeSalvo’s homelife.
 Edmund McNamara |
His wife was terrified that she would have another child with a physical handicap and did everything she could do avoid sex. DeSalvo on the other hand had an abnormally voracious sexual appetite, requiring sex many times a day. Between 1956 and 1960, he had several arrests for breaking and entering. Each time, he received a suspended sentence. In 1960, his son Michael was born without any physical handicaps. |
In spite of his brushes with the law, Albert seemed to stay employed. After he worked as a press operator at American Biltrite Rubber, he worked in a shipyard and subsequently as a construction maintenance worker. Most people who knew Albert DeSalvo liked him. His boss characterized him as a good, decent, family man and a good worker. He was a very devoted family man and treated his wife with love and tenderness.
Aside from being a thief, he had another serious character weakness: he was a confirmed braggart. He always had to top the other guy, no matter what the situation was. Police Commissioner Edmund McNamara summarized the problem: "DeSalvo’s a blowhard."
Early in November of 1964, almost three years after he had been released from jail, DeSalvo was arrested again. This time the charges were more serious than breaking and entering and measuring prospective models.
On October 27, a newly married woman lay in bed dozing just after her husband left for work. Suddenly, there was a man in her room who put a knife to her throat. "Not a sound or I’ll kill you," he told her.
He stuffed her underwear in her mouth and tied her in a spread eagle position to the bedposts with her clothes. He kissed her and fondled her, and then he asked her how to get out of the apartment. "You be quiet for ten minutes." Finally he apologized and fled.
She got a very good look at his face. The police sketch reminded the detectives of the Measuring Man.
They brought DeSalvo to the station where she was able to observe him through a one-way mirror. There was no doubt about it. He was the man. DeSalvo was released on bail. Routinely, his photo went over the police teletype network and soon calls came in from Connecticut where they were seeking a sexual assailant they called the Green Man, because he wore green work pants.
Police arrested him at home and arranged for the victims to identify him. He was mortified that his wife would see him in handcuffs. His wife was not surprised. Albert was obsessed with sex. No one woman would ever be enough for him. In fact, the Green Man had assaulted four women in one day in different towns in Connecticut. His wife told him to be completely truthful and not to hold anything back.
He admitted to breaking into four hundred apartments and a couple of rapes. He had assaulted some 300 women in a four-state area. Given DeSalvo’s tendency to aggrandize, it was difficult to tell if the number was really that high. Many of the instances had gone unreported and in those that were, the women were reticent to describe what all he did to them.
"If you knew the whole story you wouldn’t believe it," he told one of the cops. "It’ll all come out. You’ll find out."
DeSalvo was sent to Bridgewater State Hospital for observation. While the police did not believe that DeSalvo could be the Strangler, they wanted the psychiatrist there to examine him.
Shortly after DeSalvo arrived at Bridgewater, a dangerous man named George Nassar also became an inmate. He had been charged with a vicious execution-style murder of a gas station attendant. Nassar was no ordinary thug. His IQ approached genius level and his ability to manipulate people was highly developed. While in prison for an earlier murder, he had been studying Russian and other subjects. He was put in the same ward with DeSalvo and became his confidant.
In early March of 1965, DeSalvo’s wife Irmgard got a call at her sister’s house in Denver from a man named F. Lee Bailey who said he was Albert’s attorney. He told her to assume a different name, leave the area with her children and go into hiding at once to avoid the deluge of publicity that was going to descend upon her if she didn’t do what he said. "Something big is going to blow up about Albert – it will be on the front pages of every newspaper in 24 hours. I’m flying out to see you tomorrow so I can help you myself."
The next day she was told that Albert had confessed to being the Strangler. She hung up on the man in disbelief. She couldn’t understand why he would confess to such a lie. There was no way that she could believe that he was capable of such brutality. It had to be another of Albert’s attempts to make himself seem important. Some newspaper must be offering him money. That had to be the reason.
What had brought all of this about? Well, Albert was starting to think about money: money specifically to support his family while he was in jail. He had a pretty good idea that with the charges against him that he could end up spending the rest of his life in jail. Somehow he had to take care of Irmgard and his two children. The idea of selling a story and collecting reward money began to take shape in his mind.
Some months earlier before Albert was sent to Bridgewater, his lawyer Jon Asgiersson went to see Albert who asked him,
"What would you do if someone gave you the biggest story
of the century?"
"Do you mean the Boston Strangler?"
Albert said yes.
"Are you mixed up in all of them, Albert? Did you do some
of them?"
"All of them," Albert admitted. He thought the story
might bring some money for his family.
 Robert Mezer, F. Lee Bailey and John Donovan |
Asgiersson wasn’t quite sure what to do with this information and seriously considered the possibility that Albert was insane. He began a quiet inquiry. |
Meantime, Albert went to Bridgewater and struck up his friendship with George Nassar. Regardless of whose idea it was, the two discussed the reward money for information leading to the conviction of the Strangler. Nassar and DeSalvo mistakenly assumed that $10,000 would be paid for each victim of the Strangler or a total of $110,000 for the eleven official victims. If Nassar turned him in and DeSalvo confessed, they could work out a deal to split the money.
DeSalvo, who expected to spend the rest of his life in an institution, did not intend to get himself executed. But then, no one had been executed in the state for seventeen years.
There was a good chance that he could convince the shrinks that he was insane and could spend the rest of his life in a mental hospital instead of a prison. Not too bad, considering the alternatives, especially when he didn’t have to worry about money for his family..
F. Lee Bailey, who had already distinguished himself in the Dr. Sam Sheppard case, was George Nassar’s lawyer. Bailey heard about DeSalvo from Nassar and went to visit Albert with a Dictaphone on March 6. Not only did Albert confess to the murders of the eleven "official" victims, but he admitted to killing two other women, Mary Brown in Lawrence and another elderly woman who died of a heart attack before he could strangle her.
F. Lee Bailey in The Defense Never Rests says he felt very comfortable being around DeSalvo:
That was one of the pieces that fell into place in the puzzle of the Boston Strangler. It helped explain why he had been able to evade detection despite more than two and a half years of investigation. DeSalvo was Dr. Jekyll; the police had been looking for Mr. Hyde.
One of the things that struck me about DeSalvo at our first meeting was his courteous, even gentle manner. I stared at him, seriously considering the possibility that he might be the Strangler, and I felt something that verged on awe. As for DeSalvo, his gaze dropped from time to time in what appeared to be embarrassment.
…DeSalvo was thirty-three at the time, about five-nine with broad shoulders and an extremely muscular build. His brown hair was combed back in an exaggerated pompadour. His nose was very large, and his easy smile was emphasized by even white teeth.
When Bailey questioned him on what DeSalvo wanted of him, DeSalvo was quite forthright: "I know I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life locked up somewhere. I just hope it’s a hospital, and not a hole like this. But if I could tell my story to somebody who could write it, maybe I could make some money for my family."
