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Armed with his Dictaphone, Bailey went to visit DeSalvo a second
time on March 6, 1965. Albert mentioned that Detective DiNatale from
the Attorney General’s Strangler Bureau had taken a sudden
interest in him and had come to take his palm print the day before.
Bailey had to work fast if he was going to be able to protect his
client.
Bailey says of that interview: "…I became certain that the
man sitting in that dimly lit room with me was the Boston Strangler…Anyone
experienced in interrogation learns to recognize the difference
between a man speaking from life and a man telling a story that he
either has made up or has gotten from another person. DeSalvo gave
me every indication that he was speaking from life. He wasn’t
trying to recall words; he was recalling scenes he had actually
experienced. He could bring back the most inconsequential details…the
color of a rug, the content of a photograph, the condition of a
piece of furniture…Then, as if he were watching a videotape
replay, he would describe what had happened, usually as
unemotionally as if he were describing a trip to the
supermarket."
DeSalvo described his attack on seventy-five year-old Ida Irga in
August of 1962:
I said I wanted to do some work in the apartment and she didn’t
trust me because of the things that were going on and she had a
suspicion of letting, allowing anybody into the apartment without
knowing definitely who they were. And I talked to her very briefly
and told her not to worry, I’d just as soon come back tomorrow
rather than – in other words, if you don’t trust me, I’ll
come back tomorrow, then. And I started to walk downstairs and she
said, ‘Well, come on in.’ and we went into the bedroom where I
was supposed to look at a leak there at the window and when she
turned, and I put my arms around her back…
[Bailey asks him where the bedroom was relative to the front door
and how he got to the bedroom]
I think it went through a…a parlor as you walked in, and a
dining room and a bedroom. Oh, before the bedroom was a kitchen,
and the bedroom was way back. The bed was white. It wasn’t made,
either…She was in the midst, probably, of making the bed up. And
there was an old dresser there and I opened the drawers up and
there was nothing in them, nothing at all. They were empty. And,
uh, when I did get her by the neck and strangler her…
[Bailey asks if he grabbed her from behind]
Yes. Manually. I noted blood coming out of her ear – very
dark…the right ear. I remember that, and then I think there was
the dining room set in there, a very dark one, and there was brown
chairs around it, and I recall putting her legs up on her two
chairs in a wide position – one leg in each chair …
Bailey asked him why he would choose such an old woman to attack.
DeSalvo told him that "attractiveness had nothing to do with
it." She was a woman. That was enough.
DeSalvo then described the attack on Sophie Clark, the
twenty-two-year-old student who was killed in December of 1962:
She was wearing a very light, flimsy housecoat, and she was
very tall, well built, about 36-22-37. Very beautiful…
[Her apartment]…had a yellowish door, a faded yellow door…And
she didn’t want to let me in, period. Because her roommates
weren’t in there at the time…and I told her I would set her up
in modeling and photography work, and I would give her anywhere
from twenty dollars to thirty-five dollars an hour for this type
of modeling.
…there was a place where there would be …what do you call a
flat bed, where you put a – something over it, but you take it
off, you can use it to sit on, like a couch? It had fancy little
pillows on it, colorful ones, purple ones. It looked like a purple
or black cover.
There were so many details that he remembered that could be
checked with the police. Bailey called Lieutenant Donovan and his
colleague Lieutenant Sherry to his office and they listened to the
Dictaphone, which Bailey played at different speeds to disguise
Albert’s voice.
The detectives listened very closely when DeSalvo described the
attack on Sophie Clark:
First DeSalvo said that when he attempted intercourse with
Sophie he discovered she was menstruating. He described the napkin
he removed from between her legs, and the chair he had thrown it
behind. Second, he said that as he was going through Sophie’s
bureau looking for a stocking to knot about her neck, he knocked a
pack of cigarettes to the floor. He named the brand and described
the place on the floor where he left them. At this, Sherry grabbed
the briefcase and pulled out a photo showing a bureau and a pack
of cigarettes just as Albert had described them. On the back of
the photo there was an inscription "Homicide – Clark,
Sophie –December 5, 1962. (The Defense Never Rests)
Commissioner McNamara and Dr. Ames Robey, the psychiatrist at
Bridgewater, were called into the consultation. After talking with
DeSalvo, Bailey got him to agree to cooperate with the police and
take a lie detector test. They really couldn’t go too far without
getting John Bottomly, the head of Edward Brooke’s Strangler
Bureau, involved.
Subsequently, there was a lot of unpleasant legal wrangling while
Bailey tried to protect his client from execution and Attorney
General Brooke wanted to keep control of the investigation. The
stakes were now higher in so much that Brooke was going to run for
senator with the incumbent retiring. Resolution of the Strangler
case would be a nice boost to his campaign.
The issue of intensive questioning of DeSalvo on all of the
murders and checking out every detail of his confession was
critical. Finally, on September 29, 1965, the interrogation was
completed. More than fifty hours of tapes and 2,000 pages of
transcription resulted. While each detail of the confession was
checked out, Bottomly, Brooke and Bailey tried to work out the rules
for whatever would happen next.
The original doubts about whether DeSalvo really was the
Strangler were quickly dissipating:
Details piled upon details as DeSalvo recalled the career of
the Strangler, murder by murder. He knew there was a notebook
under the bed of victim number eight, Beverly Samans; he knew that
Christmas bells were attached to Patricia Bissette’s door. He
drew accurate floor plans of the victims’ apartments. He said he’d
taken a raincoat from Anna Slesers’s apartment to wear over his
T-shirt because he had taken off his bloodstained shirt and
jacket. Detectives found that Mrs. Slesers had bought two
identical coats and had given one to a relative. They showed the
duplicate to DeSalvo, along with fourteen other raincoats tailored
in different styles. DeSalvo picked the right one.
He described an abortive attack on a Danish girl in her Boston
apartment. He had talked his way into the place, and had his arm
around her neck when he suddenly looked in a large wall mirror.
Seeing himself about to kill, he was horrified. He relaxed the
pressure and started crying. He was sorry, he said, he begged her
not to call the police. If his mother found out, [he lied] she
could cut off his allowance, and he wouldn’t be able to finish
college. The young woman never reported the incident. With nothing
to go on other than DeSalvo’s memory, DiNatale found her. Not
surprisingly, she remembered the incident vividly.
Eventually, the Strangler Bureau came to the same conclusion that
F. Lee Bailey had – Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. Now,
there was a much larger issue to contend with: how to justly serve
the rights of the confessed Strangler and the demands of the people
for justice.
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