Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (16 page)

Albert claims that he began to have steady sex at age eight with girls and women and that he prostituted himself to homosexuals:

Some of them was amazed at how I could come and then five minutes later come again. The queers loved that they would pay for it, too, which was all right with me since I needed the dough and there was some relief from the urge that was pushing me to sex all the time, but it really was Woman that I wanted—not any special one, just Woman with what a woman has, not just to come, but to have the breasts and body to play with, to bite and kiss, then to go into . . . didn’t even care so much what she looked like, how old she was . . . it was Woman and not a pretty woman, or any special woman, but Woman that I wanted, even then.
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Like 36 percent of the sex killers in the FBI study, DeSalvo tortured animals when he was a child. Like 81 percent of the surveyed killers, DeSalvo began to steal in early adolescence. At the age of twelve he was sentenced for burglary to ten months in the Lyman School for Boys, a reformatory in Boston. His IQ was tested at the time and recorded as 93—low average. DeSalvo said that in reformatory one “can learn about every form of sexual perversion.” Just as with serial killers Ed Kemper and Henry Lee Lucas and thousands of other young men, early incarceration of DeSalvo served to better educate him in criminal techniques and expose him to darker frontiers of aberrant sexuality.

Once he was released from Lyman, DeSalvo began to commit a flurry of burglaries, never getting caught. There was a distinct sexual character to his burglaries. DeSalvo said, “There was something exciting, thrilling, about going into somebody’s home . . . I think now, too, that it had something to do with going into the bedrooms where women had been sleeping, or were sleeping and there was times when I would get a rail [erection] on just standing there outside the bedroom door listening to some woman breathe . . . so you see what urge was all part of this and it was only a matter of time before I would feel strong and tough enough to go into the bedroom where the woman was there and make her let me do what I wanted with her.”
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Once again there is a weak historiography on Albert DeSalvo’s school years. Dr. Brussel describes DeSalvo as a “model pupil” who pleased his teachers by cheerfully running errands for them and getting them coffee and sandwiches. DeSalvo told him, “I bulled [bullshitted] my way through. I always tried to be tops, like in book sales or where you got recognition or a certificate for doing something. I was always number one. Teachers knew I wasn’t doing my schoolwork properly . . . I actually had no schooling. I was jealous; I was looking for recognition.”

Earl James, however, in his police manual on the apprehension of serial killers, wrote: “Albert DeSalvo began school when he was six years old. During his early school years, he suffered from some medical problems. He had tonsillitis and some other childhood diseases. Because of these illnesses, he missed a great deal of school. He failed second grade and was put into a special education class when he was in fifth grade.”
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In 1948, at age sixteen, DeSalvo graduated from junior high school. His teachers there have no memory of him. DeSalvo went to work on Cape Cod as a dishwasher in a motel. He spent most of his free time on a roof watching couples through windows. As with many serial killers, his first sexual aberration was ostensibly a minor one—voyeurism.

In September 1948, when he turned seventeen, DeSalvo enlisted in the army and was sent to Germany. In the military DeSalvo apparently did well. He was trained as a military policeman, achieved the rank of sergeant, and was made colonel’s orderly twenty-seven times. He also discovered that he had abilities as a boxer and became the U.S. Army middleweight champion of Europe twice.

DeSalvo also claimed that he had numerous affairs with officers’ wives and that he practiced bondage with some of them. DeSalvo said that he was sought out by women and offered money or jewelry for his “stud” services. He claims that while he was able to satiate his growing sexual appetite, he was seeking love in his life.

In 1953, now twenty-two years old, DeSalvo married a pretty German girl from Frankfurt named Irmgard. He was intensely in love with her, but she was not a good match for his sexual appetite. DeSalvo recalled that she was innocent and scared of sex because of her strict family upbringing. He said he needed to have sex five or six times a day, often immediately after just having sex. She did not like it, he said, and he used to constantly ask himself what was wrong with him.

In April 1954, DeSalvo returned to the United States with his bride. He was stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

In December 1954, at about 9:00
P
.
M
., DeSalvo knocked at the door of a house where there was a woman whose husband was working a night shift. DeSalvo told her that he was driving by her house and saw a prowler looking through the window. She allowed him into the house to look around but then became suspicious when DeSalvo began to ask when her husband would be coming home. She locked herself into another room. DeSalvo left the house and sat in his car parked in her driveway. The woman wrote down his license plate number.

Tracing the license plate, New Jersey State Police questioned DeSalvo several days later. DeSalvo told them that he was driving around looking for a place to rent when he saw a prowler at the woman’s house and had only wanted to help. There was nothing to charge DeSalvo with and no further action was taken.

On January 3, 1955, at about 2:00
P
.
M
., a young mother went out to do some quick food shopping and left her nine-year-old daughter and two younger brothers alone. When she returned, the daughter told her that a soldier had come by “for the rent.” Since the family owned the house, this struck the mother as strange. On further questioning, the girl said that the soldier had felt and touched her chest and genital areas.

When the New Jersey State Police were called, they immediately remembered the soldier they had questioned just a few days earlier. The little girl and her brothers identified him. DeSalvo was charged with carnal abuse of a child and released on a $1,000 bond. The case, however, never went to trial because the mother did not want her daughter to go through the trauma of testifying. All charges were subsequently dropped.

It was in this period, in 1955, that Irmgard gave birth to DeSalvo’s daughter, Judy. She was born with a deformity of the legs that required special braces locking her limbs into a froglike position. DeSalvo tenderly massaged the legs of his daughter and tried to give the braces a more cheerful character by tying pretty colored bows around them.

Perhaps because of the sex crime charge or perhaps because of the birth of a crippled child, Irmgard withdrew from DeSalvo further. Referring to his murdering as having “stolen” life, DeSalvo wrote to his wife years later while in prison:

You will admit that if you treated me differently like you told me all those years we lost, the love I had been searching for, that we first had when we were married. Yes, Irm, I stole them. But why. What happened when Judy was born and we found out she may never walk. How you cried, Al please no more babies. Irm from that day you changed. All your love went to Judy. You were frigid and cold to me, and you can’t deny this. That’s why we were always fighting about sex because you were afraid to have a baby. Because you thought it would be born abnormal.

In 1956, Albert DeSalvo received an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army. It is unclear whether he left the army as his own choice, or whether the charges in New Jersey had something to do with it. He returned to live in Chelsea with his wife and daughter and was arrested there in 1958 for a minor burglary.

In 1959, a son, Michael, was born. DeSalvo worked in a shipyard as a laborer to support his family. DeSalvo recalls attempting to lead a conventional life, being a provider for his family, but always being overpowered by his compulsions in the end. He said he was trying to “bring out the best” in himself, yet the “sickness” was always with him, forcing him to go out and “do things I knew was wrong.”

In 1960, DeSalvo began committing a series of almost comical sex offenses in the Boston district of Cambridge. Posing as a talent scout for a modeling agency, DeSalvo asked women for permission to measure them. While wrapping a measuring tape around their bust and hips, he would touch and fondle them. Many women did not even notice DeSalvo’s touch; complaints started to be filed with the police from angry women only when they realized that no photographer was coming to shoot their pictures. DeSalvo became known as the Measuring Man.

In March 1961, police observed DeSalvo breaking into a house in Cambridge and arrested him. DeSalvo confessed that before he was caught he had tried to break into an apartment where he had previously “measured” two women. He said he wanted to break into their apartment and wait for them to come home. Asked why, DeSalvo said nothing further.

DeSalvo was charged with lewdness, assault and battery, attempted breaking and entering, confining and putting in fear, and engaging in an unnatural and lascivious act. He was convicted of only assault and battery and attempted breaking and entering. He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison, and his term was reduced to eleven months for good behavior.

After he had committed the murders, DeSalvo commented on his Measuring Man activities:

Mostly, I got a big kick out of those girls around Harvard. I’m not good-looking, I’m not educated, but I was able to put something over on high class people. I know that they look down on people who come from my background. They think they are better than me. They was all college kids and I never had anything in my life but I outsmarted them. I was supposed to feel that they was better than me because they was college people . . . when I told them they could be models that was like saying the same thing: you are better than me, you are better than anybody, you can be a model . . . Anybody with any sense could’ve found out. They never asked me for proof.

They was times when I was doing that Measuring Man thing that I hated them girls for being so stupid and I wanted to do something to them . . . something that would make them think, even for a little while . . . that would let them know that I was as good as they was, maybe better and smarter.
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DeSalvo had been given a psychiatric examination at Bridgewater mental hospital, and it was recommended that he be put into a psychiatric unit instead of prison. It might have worked in this case, because it appears that DeSalvo was aware of his compulsions and sincerely wanted to be free of them.

When DeSalvo was in jail he told the psychiatrist of his slavish love for Irmgard: “I can hardly wait to get out so I can be with her and treat her the way a wife should be treated even if it means washing her feet.” But when he got home, Irmgard rejected him totally. She said that he was “dirty and sickening” and called him an animal.

Two months after his release from prison, Albert DeSalvo left his house on June 14, 1962, telling his wife he was going fishing. Instead he ended up wandering into a low-rise apartment complex with scaffolding outside. He knocked on doors at random until Anna Slesers, a fifty-five-year-old woman of Latvian descent, came to her door. She appeared younger than her age and had brown, bobbed hair. She was trained in Latvia as an agronomist but in America she worked as a seamstress. DeSalvo told Slesers he was from a work crew and that some repairs were going to be done in her apartment. She let him in.

Slesers was later found lying on her back on a runner near the door to the bathroom. She was wearing a blue robe, which was spread open, exposing her nude body. Her legs were spread wide apart, her left leg bent at the knee. She had been struck on the head and there was a quantity of blood underneath her head. She was strangled with the cord of her robe, which was strangely tied around her neck with a bow under her chin. Although she appeared to have been raped, no seminal fluids were found in her vagina or at the scene.

Her wastebasket was missing and its contents were strewn on the floor. Drawers had been pulled open and some of their contents thrown on the floor. The police assumed that the murderer entered the premises to commit a burglary, and was discovered by the victim, who was then struck, raped, and killed by the burglar.

DeSalvo said that after killing Slesers, he went into the bathroom to wash up. He remembers that he was wearing gloves. He ransacked the apartment and took $20 he found on a cabinet. He later would say that was the only time he ever stole something from his victims—other than their lives.

He removed his bloodied jacket and shirt and, after dumping the contents of the wastebasket, put his garments in it. He turned off the record player, put on a raincoat he found hanging by the door, and walked out carrying the waste basket.

He walked by a police car on patrol, got into his car, and drove away. He stopped a man on the street and told him he was having an affair with a woman and that her husband had caught him and he had to run away without his shirt; would the man mind accompanying him to a store so that he could buy a shirt in case there were any problems with him walking in without a shirt? The man agreed.

Afterward, DeSalvo went to the ocean, tore the bloodied garments into strips, and dumped them in the surf. He then went home to have supper with his wife and kids.

DeSalvo described a tranquil, trancelike state after he killed:

It was all the same thing, always the same feeling. You was there. These things were going on. And the feeling after I got out of that apartment was as if it never happened. I got out and downstairs, and you could of said you saw me upstairs, and as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t me. I can’t explain it to you any other way. It’s just so unreal . . . I was there. It was done. And yet if you talked with me an hour later, or half an hour later, it didn’t mean nothing. It just didn’t mean nothing.
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