The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (15 page)

Albert DeSalvo

In his short, deranged life, Albert DeSalvo acquired several nicknames. In his late twenties, he became known as the “Measuring Man,” a serial sex molester who went from door to door, posing as a scout for a modeling agency. If a woman fell for this line and invited him in, he would produce a tape measure and proceed to check out her assets—a ploy that allowed him to indulge his taste for crude sexual fondling.

A few years later, after serving a brief prison sentence, he progressed from molestation to rape, assaulting hundreds of women throughout New England during a two-year span in the early 1960s. During this period, he was known as the “Green Man,” so called because of the green work clothes he favored while committing his crimes.

It was his third nickname, however, that ensured him enduring infamy. In 1962, DeSalvo became known as the “Boston Strangler,” a smooth-talking sadist who savagely murdered thirteen women during an eighteen-month reign of terror.

Or, at least, that has been the official version for the last forty years. Recent developments have raised some questions about DeSalvo’s guilt.

The generally accepted story begins with DeSalvo’s insanely brutal
Upbringing
, when he acquired an early taste for
Sadism
.
One of his favorite childhood pastimes was placing a starving cat in an orange crate with a puppy and watching the cat scratch the dog’s eyes out. He got married while in the army and maintained a more or less normal facade as a husband and father, even while committing some of the most shocking crimes in American history. (Of course there were strains in the marriage. Among other things, DeSalvo was possessed of a demonic libido and demanded sex as often as six times a day.)

The earliest victims of the Boston Strangler were elderly women. Each had willingly let the killer into her apartment. Posing as a building repairman, the glib, smooth-talking sex slayer had no trouble gaining entrance. Besides raping and strangling the women, he enjoyed desecrating their corpses, sometimes by shoving bottles or broomsticks into their vaginas. After finishing with his victim, he would leave a grotesque signature, knotting his makeshift garrote (often a nylon stocking) into a big, ornamental bow beneath the dead woman’s chin.

Toward the end of 1962, the Strangler’s MO suddenly changed. He began preying on much younger women. And his murders became even more vicious—and bizarre. In one instance, he stabbed his victim nearly two dozen times. He left another corpse propped against the headboard of her bed, a pink bow tied around her neck, a broomstick handle jutting from her vagina, and a Happy New Year’s card resting against her left foot.

Eventually, DeSalvo was arrested not for the Boston Strangler murders but for one of the Green Man rapes. During a stint at a state mental hospital, however, he began boasting of his strangling career to a fellow inmate. Only then did authorities discover that they had unwittingly nabbed the infamous killer.

In the end, DeSalvo was never punished for the Boston Strangler crimes. Through a deal struck by his lawyer—F. Lee Bailey—DeSalvo was spared the chair and given a life sentence for the Green Man rapes instead. Not that Bailey’s efforts did DeSalvo much good in the end. He was stabbed to death by a fellow inmate in November 1973.

DeSalvo’s death, however, was not the end of the story. For years, questions about his guilt swirled around the case. Some skeptics believed that DeSalvo confessed for mercenary motives—i.e., because he believed he’d profit from book and movie rights. Others remained convinced there was more than one Strangler.

In 2001, forensic experts lent support to the doubters when DNA taken
from the exhumed corpse of the Strangler’s last victim did not provide a match with DeSalvo. The controversy over his involvement in the other ten cases, however, rages unabated. Whether science will ever be able to resolve the issue of his guilt remains to be seen.

“Me? I wouldn’t hurt no broads. I love broads.”

A
LBERT
“B
OSTON
S
TRANGLER
” D
E
S
ALVO

D
ISPOSAL

To get away with gruesome murder again and again, a serial killer has to possess a fairly high degree of fiendish cunning. Snaring a victim is the first challenge he has to meet. Once he has perpetrated his atrocities, he is faced with another, even more pressing problem—what to do with the remains. The solutions to this grisly dilemma range from the straightforward to the diabolically elaborate.

Some serial killers simply leave their victims where they lie, occasionally taking the time to wreak some grotesque indignity on the remains. For example, Albert
DeSalvo
, the “Boston Strangler,” liked to tie big ornamental bows around the throats of his female victims, as though he were leaving a gift-wrapped present for the police.

DeSalvo’s bizarre bow-tying practice made for an unmistakable “signature.” Understandably enough, many other homicidal maniacs prefer to leave no trace of their identities at all. For some sociopaths, the simplest approach to corpse disposal is the best. Ted
Bundy
, the “
Hillside Stranglers
,” and the Green River Killer, for example, simply dumped the bodies of their victims out in the open—in forests, along riverbanks, on the slopes bordering freeways. Others made perfunctory attempts at concealment, burying the bodies in shallow graves or shovelling dead leaves over the remains. John Wayne
Gacy
didn’t even bother to leave home. He simply stuck the dead
bodies of his young male victims under the crawl space of his house—at least until he ran out of room, at which point he began tossing them into a nearby river.

By contrast, there are some serial killers who go to great lengths to obliterate every trace of their victims, often by immersing the bodies in acid, covering them with
Quicklime
, or incinerating them in
Ovens
.

Then there are those serial killers whose disposal methods can best be described as wildly (if not insanely) unorthodox. Joe Ball, for example, got rid of his murdered mistresses by feeding their flesh to his pet
Alligators
, while the monstrous Fritz
Haarmann
chopped up his victims and sold their flesh to his neighbors, passing it off as black-market beef.

The longer a serial killer remains on the loose, of course, the more proficient he tends to become. With corpse disposal, as with most human skills, practice makes perfect. Special agents of the
FBI
’s Behavioral Science Unit describe one serial killer who was thrown into a state of almost panicky confusion when faced with the ravaged remains of his first victim. By the time he committed his second homicide, he had already worked out a sophisticated disposal method, taking four painstaking hours to dismember the body in his bathroom before bagging up the parts and depositing them in supermarket Dumpsters.

Of course, there are some serial killers who prefer not to dispose of their victims at all. Both Dennis
Nilsen
and his American counterpart, Jeffrey
Dahmer
, were so desperate for companionship that they went to great, highly deranged lengths to keep the corpses close by. Of course, since both men occupied cramped apartments, even they had to face up to the fetid reality after a while and get rid of their rotting house guests. Nilsen’s solution was sublime in its simplicity, if not entirely practical—he chopped up the bodies and flushed the chunks down the toilet, a method that eventually led to his arrest when the plumbing in his apartment building became clogged with gobs of decomposing human flesh.

D
OCTORS

From Dr. Jekyll to Dr. Lecter, the fiendish physician has long been a staple of horror fantasy. Unfortunately, this nightmarish figure is not just a figment of the pop imagination. The annals of crime contain notable examples of psychopathic
M.D.’s who stand the Hippocratic Oath on its head by using their skills to do harm.

“I got a dead body on my hands. People saw me come in here. How am I going to pack this one out? Am I gonna put it in a double bag or a sheet and carry it out of here? I figured the smaller the better. I chopped the body up, stuffed some in the refrigerator, dumped the guts in a vacant lot, throwing pieces here and there, whatever came out of the bag first. I was scared.”

Anonymous serial killer,
describing his first experience with body disposal

Given his dexterity at dissection, there has always been speculation that
Jack the Ripper
—the first and most famous of modern serial killers—was someone with surgical training. “Ripperologists” have come up with several candidates: a Russian doctor and homicidal maniac named Michael Ostrog, who ended up in a mental asylum; another Russian, Dr. Alexander Pedachenko, described as a “criminal lunatic” exiled to London by the tsar’s secret police; and an English surgeon named Stanley who allegedly confessed to the Whitechapel murders on his deathbed.

Jack’s contemporary, H. H.
Holmes
, was America’s original M.D.—i.e., Medical Deviate. After receiving his degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Holmes made his way to Chicago, where he constructed his notorious “Murder Castle,” complete with a basement dissection lab. Though Holmes worked as a pharmacist, not a physician, he was able to put his surgical training to profitable use by selling the stripped and mounted skeletons of his victims to local anatomy schools.

At roughly the same time, a British psychopath named Thomas Neill Cream—who received his medical degree from Montreal’s McGill University and did postgraduate work at the prestigious Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons at Edinburgh—was busily dispatching victims on both sides of the Atlantic. After killing several women through botched, illegal
abortions, Dr. Cream—who was residing in Chicago at the time—poisoned his mistress’s husband by lacing the man’s epilepsy medicine with strychnine. Released after a ten-year stint in Joliet, he sailed for England, where he embarked on a career as a serial killer of prostitutes—poisoning five London streetwalkers before he was caught, tried, and hanged in 1892. Dr. Cream is regarded as another Ripper candidate, since he is reputed to have cried, “I am Jack the—”just as he plunged through the trapdoor of the gallows.

Herman Mudgett, aka Dr. H. H. Holmes; from
True Crime Trading Cards Series Two: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers;
art by Jon Bright

(Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)

Fifty years later and across the English Channel, residents of the Rue Le Sueur in Paris were assaulted by an overpowering stench issuing from a neighborhood building. When firemen broke in, they were horrified to discover a stack of dismembered bodies decomposing in the basement. The building, it turned out, belonged to Dr. Marcel
Petiot
, who claimed that the corpses were those of Nazi collaborators killed by the Resistance. It wasn’t until the war ended that the appalling truth emerged: the victims were actually wealthy French Jews, desperate to flee Nazi-occupied France. Posing as a Resistance member who would smuggle them to freedom—for a fee—Petiot arranged to have the unsuspecting victims arrive at his house with all their valuables. Then he would administer an “immunization shot”—actually a lethal injection of strychnine—lock them in a chamber (where, through a peephole, he could watch them die in agony), appropriate their
belongings, and dispose of their remains in his furnace. Unrepentant to the end, Dr. Petiot went to the guillotine with a smile in 1946.