Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (17 page)

DeSalvo’s first murder was highly proficient. He wore gloves and left no fingerprints behind. He parked his car a distance away from where he committed the murder. He quickly disposed of his bloodied clothing and he engaged a stranger who could later testify to an alibi if he had been caught that day. His training as a military policeman was paying off.

Two weeks later, on June 28, 1962, DeSalvo knocked on the door of eighty-five-year-old Mary Mullen. He told her he had been sent to do some work on her apartment. She inevitably let him in. It should be noted that all the victims of the Boston Strangler lived in economical low-rise apartments, which were almost always in need of some sort of repair. Whenever DeSalvo called to say he had been sent to do repair work or repainting, it always made perfect sense to the tenants.

When Mary Mullen turned her back on DeSalvo, he wrapped his arm around her throat. She apparently died instantly, perhaps of heart failure. DeSalvo laid her out on the couch and left. When her body was discovered, authorities declared her death as being of natural causes. It was only after DeSalvo confessed that the authorities realized Mary Mullen was a victim of the Boston Strangler.

On June 30, a Saturday, DeSalvo told his wife he had to go out on a job early in the morning. He drove around aimlessly until he arrived at an apartment building on Newhall Street in Lynn, where he had been before in his Measuring Man days. He randomly knocked at an apartment door on the second floor. Helen Blake, age sixty-five, answered the door still wearing her pajamas. Using his usual approach, DeSalvo told her he needed to check her windows for leaks. Just before he entered, DeSalvo picked up some milk bottles left by the door and handed them to Blake. He handled them carefully so as not to leave any fingerprints.

In the bedroom as they inspected the windows, DeSalvo grabbed Blake from behind and choked her. She fainted quickly. Holding her with one hand, he carefully took her glasses off and set them down. He laid her down on the bed, took off her pajamas, and raped her with a foreign object. He tied a nylon stocking and her bra tightly around her neck and strangled her. He then looped the garments into a bow, which he tied under her chin. This bow would become a signature of the Boston Strangler. Asked why he tied the bow, DeSalvo simply replied, “I don’t know.” Some analysts speculated that the bow was somehow connected to the bows he tied around the orthopedic braces of his crippled daughter, but the connection is tenuous.

DeSalvo killed his fourth victim later that same day. He drove into Boston, randomly chose an apartment, and began pressing buzzer buttons that had women’s names on the address plates. Nina Nichols, age sixty-eight, was talking to her sister on the phone when DeSalvo buzzed. Her sister heard the buzzer, and Nina told her that she would call her right back. She never called back.

Nina Nichols was found posed on the floor, her legs spread wide apart, facing the entryway. Her pink housecoat and slip were pushed up to her waist and two stockings were tied around her throat in a bow under her chin. She had been raped with a wine bottle; seminal fluid was found on her thighs.

The apartment appeared to have been burglarized, with things strewn about and drawers pulled out. The desk drawer was pulled out and placed on the floor as if the killer carefully examined all the contents: stationery, stamps, pens, paper clips. Nothing, however, was found to be missing. Asked what he was looking for, DeSalvo again replied, “I don’t know . . . I didn’t have in my mind the idea of taking anything.”

When DeSalvo was confessing to Nina’s murder, he said that she had scratched him when he was strangling her and that the police must have found his skin under her fingernails. This revealed the extent to which DeSalvo was familiar with police investigative techniques.

At this point the police became aware that there was a multiple killer on the loose who had murdered three women (a fourth victim was thought to have died of natural causes.)

On August 19, 1962, DeSalvo murdered seventy-five-year-old Ida Irga. She was found on her back on the living room floor wearing a light nightdress that had been torn open, exposing her body. Her legs were spread wide apart and her feet were propped up on individual chairs. A pillow was placed beneath her buttocks and she was pointed in the direction of the door, so the sight of her exposed genitals would greet whoever would enter the apartment. A white pillowcase was tightly knotted around her throat. The posing of the victim had now become complex, but when DeSalvo was questioned about it, he could only say, “I just did it.”

Within a day or two, DeSalvo killed his sixth victim, sixty-seven-year-old Jane Sullivan. The precise date of her murder is unclear, as her body was not discovered until August 30, some ten days after the murder. She was found in the bathtub in a kneeling position. Her face was beneath about six inches of water and her bare buttocks were exposed. Her cotton housecoat had been pulled up over her shoulder and her girdle was pushed above her waist. Her underwear was down around her ankles. She was strangled with her own nylon stockings. The victim had been killed in another room and then taken to the bathroom and posed.

Such posing is a sign that the FBI describes as a
disorganized
-personality serial killer. (See Chapters 3 and 9.) Often the posing of the victim has some obscure meaning known only to the perpetrator. DeSalvo’s random targeting of apartment buildings also is a mark of a disorganized offender, as is his frequent use of weapons found at the crime scene—articles of clothing. At the same time, however, DeSalvo carried gloves with him, took meticulous care never to leave any fingerprints, and talked his way into the victims’ apartments, all characteristics of the
organized
personality. DeSalvo was that rare creature defined as a
mixed-
personality killer—both predictable and unpredictable at the same time—a homicide investigator’s worst nightmare. It made DeSalvo a unique case in forensic history, and DeSalvo was now about to go a step further.

After committing six homicides in a period of two months, DeSalvo suddenly stopped killing for four months. Then on December 5, 1962, he murdered Sophie Clark, a victim who defied the odds—she was black and twenty years old. It is rare for a sexual murderer to cross racial lines—usually whites kill whites, blacks kill blacks, and so forth. Even more rare was that having established a consistent pattern by murdering six elderly women, DeSalvo suddenly murdered a twenty-year-old. It caused havoc in the investigation, as detectives became divided on the issue whether there was one killer or two different stranglers. (Today this question is still being pondered about DeSalvo.)

December 5 was DeSalvo’s wedding anniversary, and that might have triggered his killing again. DeSalvo gained entry into Sophie Clark’s apartment using the usual repairman routine. He said, “I gave her fast talk, I told her I’d set her up in modeling. I’d give her twenty to thirty dollars an hour.” He then asked her to turn around so he could get a better look at her figure. As she turned her back to him, he grabbed her around the throat with his arm.

Clark was found on the living room rug. Three of her nylon stockings were tightly tied around her neck, as was also her white slip and a belt. A gag was stuffed into her mouth. She was on her back, her bathrobe open, and she was naked except for a pair of black stockings, a garter, and loafer shoes. Her legs were spread wide open and her bra had been ripped from her during the attack. A sanitary napkin was tossed under a chair nearby. Her glasses were broken. Seminal fluid was found in her vagina.

After DeSalvo killed her, he remained behind in the apartment leafing through her magazines and record collection. Then, without taking anything, he quietly slipped out. Sophie Clark’s apartment was two blocks away from Anna Slesers’s, his first victim.

On December 31, 1962, DeSalvo killed his seventh victim—twenty-three-year-old Patricia Bissette. Again, DeSalvo defied the odds: The victim was found in her bedroom lying face up on her bed, her legs together, and covered by a bedspread snugly drawn up to her chin—diametrically opposite to the grotesque and humiliating posing that had been committed previously. A victim who is found covered this way often reflects a sense of guilt or remorse in the killer. Later DeSalvo said, “She was so different, I didn’t want to see her like that, naked and . . . She talked to me like a man, she treated me like a man.”

DeSalvo had knocked on her door, pretending to be somebody who lived upstairs looking for one of her roommates. He had already gotten the names from the mailbox below. Bissette invited him in to wait and made some coffee. DeSalvo said that she was nice to him, treating him “like a man” and that he talked himself out of hurting her. He tried to find an excuse to leave her apartment and offered to go out and get some donuts, but Bissette said it was not necessary. DeSalvo said that at that moment he knew that he did not want it to happen but it would.

Despite his fuzzy warm sentiments for Bissette, he raped her and strangled her with her stockings, leaving them tied in what by then the police were calling the “Strangler’s Bow.”

DeSalvo had this to say about Bissette’s murder:

I don’t know if I done this for a sex act or for hatred or for what reason. I think I did this not as a sex act but out of hate for her—not her in particular, but for a woman. I don’t think that a sex act is anything to do. It is what everybody does, from the top to the bottom of the world, but that is not what I mean. It is one thing to do it when a woman wants you to do it and another when she don’t, you understand me? If women do not want you to do what is right and natural then it is dirty if they don’t. You are really an animal if you do it just the same, is what I mean, you see? But all I can say is that when I saw her body the sex act came in. I did not enjoy the sexual relations with this woman. I was thinking too much about that she would not have wanted me to do it. There was no thrill at all.
⁸⁰

For once, DeSalvo had come up with some valuable insight into his motives. Rape and other sex crimes are rarely committed out of a desperate lack of sex. Bundy was an attractive man with many girlfriends, and DeSalvo was able to seduce countless women, yet both used extreme violence in compelling the victims into sexual acts. In such cases, the sexual act is merely a component of the aggressive impulse. Sex and rape are used as a weapon to batter the victim, and not for the purpose of sexual gratification. Many cannot understand why an individual would rape a seventy-five-year-old woman because they cannot imagine such a woman as sexually attractive. In fact, however, sexual attractiveness or desire has nothing to do with it—it is a purely aggressive and hateful act against a victim. (Likewise in prison, male-on-male rape has less to do with homosexual desire than with aggressive dominance. Very few prison rapists are homosexuals.)
⁸¹

On February 18, 1963, DeSalvo gained entry into the apartment of a twenty-nine-year-old woman. She was sick with the flu and at first didn’t want to let him in. He told her that he was from the construction crew working on the roof and that he needed to shut her water off. Indeed, there was a crew working on the roof and the woman finally let him enter. When he grabbed her, however, she bit his finger down to the bone and began desperately screaming. DeSalvo ran away. But the victim could not come forth with a useful description.

By now the police were in a frenzy and were meticulously checking every sex offender released from prisons and mental hospitals in the last two years. Unfortunately, DeSalvo had been convicted of assault and battery and breaking and entering, and therefore his name did not appear on the list of sex offenders.

On March 9, 1963, DeSalvo killed his ninth victim, sixty-nine-year-old Mary Brown. On his way into her building, he picked up a piece of brass pipe. Once he gained entry into her apartment, he struck her with the pipe. He then ripped her dress open, exposing her breasts. He picked up a sheet, threw it over her head, and then battered her skull with the pipe. Afterward he picked up a fork and thrust it into her breast.

On May 5, 1963, he killed twenty-three-year-old Beverly Samans. She was found lying on her back on a convertible sofa bed. She was nude except for a lace blouse draped around her shoulders, and her legs were spread apart. Her wrists were tied behind her and she was gagged. A nylon stocking and two handkerchiefs were knotted around her neck. Again, DeSalvo surprised the police with his versatility—Beverly Samans was stabbed more than twenty times.

Beverly Samans, who was partially deaf, was a month away from getting her master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling. In her typewriter was her thesis, titled
Factors Pertaining to the Etiology of Male Homosexuality.
For some reason, perhaps because of the bite he had received from his previous victim, DeSalvo did not grab Samans by the throat from behind. Instead he drew his knife and confronted her face-to-face.

Samans tried to put her counseling education in practice to save her life: She attempted to negotiate with DeSalvo, agreeing to let him “play around with her” but no intercourse. When DeSalvo began to rape her anyway, she complained to him that he had exceeded their agreed-upon limit. DeSalvo became enraged because, he said, she began to remind him of his wife, with whom making love was “like asking a dead dog to move.” DeSalvo said Samans made him feel unclean and unwanted. Making matters worse, because Samans was partially deaf but DeSalvo did not know it, she could not hear all of his instructions. He became enraged when no matter “how hard he tried to please her” his victim complained and struggled. Enraged, he stabbed her twenty-two times.

On September 8, 1963, DeSalvo killed his eleventh victim, fifty-eight-year-old Evelyn Corbin. He arrived at her door after trying several other apartments and failing to find a suitable victim. DeSalvo told her that the superintendent had sent him to check for leaks in the windows. At first she wouldn’t let him in. Often in such cases, DeSalvo used a clever twist of psychology: “Well, if you don’t want the work done, I’ll go. It’s your apartment.”