The Strangler

44

Ricky had been lingering at the back of the gallery when it struck him, when the connection came clear. He slid along the wall to the edge of the front row, where the newspapermen cocked their heads and scratched in their notebooks, and the only two women in the audience clutched their purses in their laps. Ricky tried to catch a glimpse of DeSalvo in quarter profile at the defense table watching his lawyer deliver his closing argument to a jury of men. Albert DeSalvo had not shrunk from attention during his eight-day trial. He had not testified, of course-the con he was running would not have survived a competent cross-so he’d had to make the most of his entrances and exits, and in between he had emoted sympathetically from his chair. But even in this straitened role, DeSalvo had managed to project his likable grandiosity. He was satisfied with the work they were all doing together in that room. He was here to settle accounts, a stand-up guy, not the sort to deny the obvious, not a bad guy at all really. Ricky watched DeSalvo watch his lawyer. (The lawyer Leland Bloom was a famous closer and he was just beginning to find his voice now, the bombastic high gear that could elate a jury as it did Bloom himself: “If this is not a case of not guilty by reason of insanity, then there is no such thing. Let’s just wipe it off the books because the words themselves will be rendered meaningless. Let’s tear it up…”) Ricky studied DeSalvo’s features, the melted-wax nose and the brilliantined pompadour and five-o’clock shadow, and he thought: Oswald. The similarity was not physical. In the few photographs that recurred in the newspapers, especially the grainy old snapshot of Oswald with his rifle propped on his hip-the image already had become iconic, the trope by which we knew Oswald, knew everything we needed to know about him; we assumed that rifle on his hip was the famous 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano carbine he’d brought to the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository-Oswald seemed a wispier, more delicate type than DeSalvo. What was it, then? Ricky studied him.

DeSalvo turned, perhaps detecting the heat of Ricky’s stare or simply noticing that a man had moved forward out of the crowd. There had been death threats, even one against the defense lawyer that had shut down the trial for an afternoon. DeSalvo’s face tightened with a moment’s concern, then relaxed again, satisfied that Ricky was no threat, just another civilian drawn to the spectacle of History Being Made. He gave Ricky a little nod, then turned back to listen to his lawyer pronounce him the one true Boston Strangler.

“Hey, slim, you gonna stand there all day?”

Ricky glanced back. “Sorry.”

The courtroom was jammed. The Middlesex Superior Courthouse was a steep redbrick mausoleum. The courtrooms were not big enough for a crowd this large. Albert DeSalvo’s trial had consumed the city. Reporters arrived early to secure the best positions. Extra court officers were detailed to the courtroom, and Cambridge cops stood guard in the hallways and outside on the sidewalks. Alvan Byron came and went from the gallery, Wamsley too. Mayor Collins was said to receive briefings every afternoon. The glamorous B-list singer Connie Francis, who was appearing at Blinstrub’s in town, showed up one day to watch. But the focus was on DeSalvo and his rogue-elephant lawyer and the resolution of the Strangler drama, the other story from that horrible, stultifying year of 1963 that still needed wrapping up.

Except this trial did not feel like a wrapping-up. DeSalvo was not even being tried for the stranglings. His entire marathon confession to thirteen killings could not be used against him; it had been given under a grant of immunity. And there was not a scrap of evidence linking DeSalvo to any of the stranglings. In fact, whether Albert DeSalvo was actually the Strangler was still a matter of debate among cops and prosecutors. The problem was DeSalvo himself. He kept insisting he was.

So DeSalvo was on trial for the so-called Green Man attacks, four cases in which an intruder had broken into women’s apartments and assaulted them. (The cases were named for a “Green Man” because, for weeks before the Boston attacks, the police teletype had been reporting a vaguely similar series of incidents in Connecticut in which the suspect had worn a green shirt and pants, presumably some sort of work uniform.) But the Green Man attacks were not stranglings. They were not even murders. In one case, there had been a garden-variety rape-the attacker had forced a woman to fellate him-but the rest were aborted, inconclusive attacks in which the Green Man had tied women up and groped them, only to abandon the attack in remorse or skittishness. (“Don’t tell my mother,” he told his last victim as he ran off.) The charges were a lumpy mess of lawyerspeak: B-and-E with intent to commit a felony, unnatural and lascivious acts, ABDW. This was not the operatic, macabre horror of the Strangler murders. It was the sort of low-rent trial that usually goes unreported, the kind that assistant D.A.’s bide their time with while waiting for Something Big.

So why was Albert DeSalvo copping to the stranglings in an unrelated, small-time case? According to Leland Bloom, the reason was simple: DeSalvo actually was the Boston Strangler and therefore must be insane; so by proving he was the Strangler, DeSalvo would prove himself not guilty by reason of insanity in the Green Man cases or, by extension, in any criminal case. Besides, Bloom calculated, his client was looking at life in prison anyway for the Green Man cases, so what was there to lose? It was such a daffy legal strategy, no one would have taken it seriously but for one fact: this was Lee Bloom, the Perry Mason of Boston, the Learjet lawyer who had won acquittals in places more glamorous than his run-down hometown. He was the swashbuckling native son who was too big for Boston but had stayed here anyway. So nobody mentioned the fact that there was no way in hell the Green Man was going to do life without parole on these chickenshit charges. Twenty, twenty-five years max, parole in ten-even that would be a stretch. More important, if DeSalvo actually succeeded in convincing a jury he was the Boston Strangler, they were never going to acquit him whether he was insane or not. What juror would want to go home to explain to his wife or daughter that he had released the Strangler on a technicality? It was legal hara-kiri. Of course there were lots of theories to explain DeSalvo’s ardor to confess to the stranglings. He wanted money, it was said, both the reward offered by the governor and the profits from book and movie deals. He was a pathological liar; he had confessed not just to the thirteen known stranglings but to a couple more besides, and according to Bloom the orgy of self-incrimination had not stopped there-DeSalvo claimed to have committed two thousand rapes and attacks over a period of eight or nine years. To the cops and lawyers and shrinks who knew DeSalvo it was even simpler: Albert DeSalvo wanted to be someone. He wanted to be famous.

But these were inconvenient facts. Alvan Byron had his eye on the governor’s office, and Leland Bloom would forever be the lawyer who represented the Boston Strangler. And the city could sleep at night, finally. It did not matter that the end would be inconclusive. That, too, suited the city’s mood. Jack Ruby had already ensured an inconclusive end to the JFK murder; here was the local analogue, the smaller, cruder bookend to the national drama. It was as if the men and women of Boston had had enough. They were glad to have the Strangler ordeal behind them. They agreed on a resolution. They wrote their own ending. It was even tacitly assumed that Bloom, by allowing his client to admit to the stranglings, was doing a civic service. He was manipulating the process to the right outcome. Besides, even the Perry Mason of Boston could not exonerate a man who would not stop confessing. DeSalvo was the Strangler-so be it.

Ricky did not buy it. He retreated to the back of the courtroom more convinced than ever that Albert DeSalvo was no more the Strangler than Oswald was a lone crank with a rifle. It was an old story that always worked: History caroms off the unpredictable acts of misfits like DeSalvo and Oswald. We liked to believe it because it was simple, it made the mysterious and incomprehensible seem suddenly very small and manageable. All that worry and all along it had only been an isolated crackpot. Ricky knew better. The night Amy was murdered, after all, Albert DeSalvo had been locked up tight at Bridgewater. What if Michael had been right? What if there was not one strangler but several, not one monster but monsters all around? And what if the city was right, too-that there are some facts just too frightening to live with? You could not worry about stranglers forever.

To no one’s surprise, the jury did not stay out long. Three hours and forty-five minutes. They came back at five-fifteen, a home-for-dinner verdict. Guilty on all counts. The judge immediately sentenced DeSalvo to life in prison for the simple reason, he explained from the bench, that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, de facto if not de jure. The next morning’s Observer screamed “DESALVO IS THE STRANGLER,” and so it was true, DeSalvo became the Strangler, and the next morning it seemed truer, and the next and the next until no one remembered to question it anymore.