Authors: Brian McGrory
“When DeSalvo confesses and starts reciting details from the crime scenes, everything he knew he learned from Vasco. DeSalvo’s famous for having this photographic memory. But it wasn’t really photographic. He didn’t have to see things to remember them. It was just a fabulous memory. And everything that Vasco told him about the crime scenes, DeSalvo committed to memory and recited for Callaghan’s lame-brained bureaucrats who were allowed to interview him.”
By now, retired Lieutenant Detective Bob Walters was on a roll, and the look on his face didn’t make him look so old and frail anymore, as if he was back on the job, running a crime scene, drawing out a witness, intimidating a suspect into confessing to some heinous crime.
I asked the obvious question, which, again, is something we sometimes do in my line of work. “If he didn’t kill these women, then why confess?”
Walters looked at me in silence for a long moment, his head still resting against two propped-up pillows, his weak chest and useless legs spread beneath his graying sheets.
“That’s what we spent a lot of time trying to figure out,” he said. “You’ve heard of professional confessors, right?”
I had, but wanted to hear his definition, so I said nothing.
He continued, “They’re people who get their rocks off confessing to crimes. Don’t ask me why. They like to be in the middle of things, but their own lives are too pathetic to ever put them there. Don’t know. It’s why we usually hold something back from you guys at the paper, some key fact that only a person at the crime scene would know about. In this case, we held something back that was pretty big.”
He paused and looked away for a moment, as if recollecting events that didn’t, to him anyway, seem all that long ago.
“DeSalvo didn’t really fit the bill as one of those,” he said. “He was a rapist, or maybe just a groper, so why bother confessing to murders? So we counted that out. Then we — we, like Boston PD — interviewed a bunch of other prisoners. Ends up, they said DeSalvo thought he was going to make a fortune for his family from a book and movie deal if he was the Boston Strangler. He knew that he’d be going away for a long time on the rape charges, so what was the difference if he was a murderer, too. Then he got this high-powered lawyer to take his case, H. Gordon Thomas. And Thomas convinced him that if he confessed to the stranglings, he could plead innocent by reason of insanity to the rapes. Thomas tried telling the jury that anyone who committed all those Boston Strangler murders must be crazy. The jury, though, saw right through it.
“Guilty, and sentenced to twenty-five years in Walpole. And trust me, you wouldn’t want to spend twenty-five minutes in Walpole.”
This from a guy who was confined to his own little prison, life without parole sprawled on a bed in a dreary room with a wife downstairs who drank herself into oblivion every day of the week. I don’t take credit for it, but this conversation seemed to be a furlough for him, a brief respite from his disease.
I asked, “Why do you think Vasco did it?”
He said, “I just do. You develop a sense of people in my business, probably the same as in your business — when people are lying, when they’re telling the truth, when they’re hiding, when they’re exposing. I asked him once, put it right to him: ‘Hey, Paul, DeSalvo’s gone. The case is off the books. But we had the wrong guy, didn’t we?’
“You know what he said?”
He didn’t wait for an answer here, in the way that people in charge aren’t really seeking answers when they ask questions. It’s just part of their show.
“Nothing. Not one fucking word. You know what he did? He smiled at me, this evil fucking smile, his eyes locking on my eyes, his teeth like a wolf’s, just sitting there smiling. I swear to God, I wanted to grab his throat and choke the guy and ask how it fucking felt as his eyes bulged out and his ears filled up with blood because his damned eardrums burst. But I didn’t, and that look has stayed with me ever since, the look of defeat in the biggest case of my career.”
He added softly, “That’s why I think Paul Vasco was the Boston Strangler.”
I nodded. What else could I do? What was I supposed to say? How do you tell a guy it’s going to be all right when it’s not, when his wife is downstairs probably passed out by now, when he’s never going to get out of bed, when the guy he thought was a killer forty years ago could very well have been killing again?
Finally I asked, “Given the advances in DNA, shouldn’t forensic scientists be able to prove or disprove whether DeSalvo was the Strangler?”
“Kid, so much of this science is more like science fiction to a sick old man like me.”
I said, “When DeSalvo was murdered, he was stabbed. There was obviously a knife involved, covered in DNA, his DNA. Where is it?”
He smiled again, a long, remembering smile, and rolled his head from me toward the wall on the other side of the room, that smile never fading from his mouth. After a few moments he said, “The murder was committed outside of my jurisdiction, in another municipality and a different county. The attorney general’s Strangler task force had already been disbanded. Hell, the attorney general had already gone on to bigger and better things — mainly the United States Senate. But I got one of the state police detectives to get me the knife.”
I was stunned. The knife could prove to be the Holy Grail in the Strangler case. According to Sweeney, if you found the knife and placed it in the right hands, you could determine that DeSalvo was not, as many people suspected, the Boston Strangler. This, in turn, could possibly mean that the new serial killer in Boston was, in fact, the old serial killer.
I blurted out, “You have the knife?”
As I asked this, I began picturing the burgundy-stained blade sitting in a Tupperware container in the bottom of a box in a corner of Walters’s cellar or garage. Hopefully his old lady hadn’t spilled vodka or gin all over the damned thing and destroyed the most important evidence in the annals of Boston crime.
“I had the knife,” he replied. He paused and added, “I gave it away.”
“You gave it away?” I mean, what the hell, did the old guy sell the Strangler knife on eBay, for chrissakes? Was that how he was living in this house?
“I gave it to the family of one of the victims.”
“You gave it to the family of one of the victims.”
He said, smiling again, “Is there an echo in here?” It was his first token attempt at humor, and for that reason and perhaps that reason alone, I obliged with a laugh.
But quickly I asked, “Why?”
“It gave them closure. That’s a fancy word that all the victim advocates use for helping them get over the fact that the human race sucks. That knife wasn’t doing me a damned bit of good.”
It would now, but I let that obvious fact remain unstated. Instead I asked, “Which family?”
“It was —” And before he could get the words out, he started to cough, that deep, penetrating cough. He reached for his glass again, but the water was gone. The cough was getting harder and longer. He pulled his mask desperately to his face.
At that exact moment, a woman behind me said, “Who the hell are you?” She wasn’t yelling, but each word was as firm as a rod of steel.
I whirled around to see an overweight fiftysomething darkskinned woman in those green medical scrubs that were fashionable to wear many years ago, though I suppose they don’t go out of fashion if you’re in the business of making people well. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the business of making people unwell, or even dead, but that’s a concern for another time.
I gave her the whole Jack Flynn thing. She was uniquely, and might I add bizarrely, unimpressed.
“He can’t be bothered by no reporter.” She said “reporter” as if she was spitting on an already littered sidewalk. I could have pointed out that, in fact, by talking to that reporter, Bob Walters was probably happier than he had been in months or years. I could have said that I, like her, was in the business of saving lives, and Bob Walters was helping me do it.
Instead I said, “We were just wrapping up. If you could excuse us for a moment.”
Walters was still coughing, though not quite as loud or hard as he had been, and he continued to hold the mask over his face. The health worker walked around me to the oxygen tank, turned a knob, and more oxygen came out into the mask with a large swooshing sound. Walters closed his eyes in relief.
She said to me, “He’s done. Get the hell out.”
Maybe she was right, maybe he was done, but the problem was, he had left one key fact dangling at the end of an unfinished sentence. I turned back toward Walters and said, “Sir, the name of the victim’s family?” He pulled the mask off his face and let forth with a phlegm-covered rapid-fire coughing fit. The health worker shot me a look that would kill a weaker man and shrieked, “Get the hell out. Now!”
I looked at Walters, but his eyes were deadened again, staring straight ahead. His body was convulsing in coughs that he was trying unsuccessfully to contain. “I’ll drop by later, Lieutenant,” I said.
He didn’t say anything or do anything in response. He didn’t even look at me. As I walked out the door, I dropped my business card on his soiled side table. He seemed to be in an ongoing struggle for his life.
Downstairs, Mrs. Bob Walters still sat at the kitchen table, staring now at an empty bottle of vodka. I didn’t say anything. Really, I couldn’t say anything. As I walked out the back door, she never even looked up.
I
had twenty-eight voice mails on my cell phone when I dialed in from the rental car, and immediately assumed that twenty of them were from Peter Martin. Ends up I was wrong. Twenty-one of them were from Martin. By the fifteenth one, he was reduced to pleading: “Call me.” Voice mail sixteen: “Call me now.” Voice mail seventeen: “Fricking call me now.” Voice mail eighteen: “Fucking call me or you’re fired.”
Voice mails nineteen and after continue in that same general tone and theme.
I got five messages from other media outlets, including
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post,
wanting to interview me about my correspondence from the Phantom Fiend. There was a message from Boston Police Detective Mac Foley, sounding anything but happy with my reportage in that morning’s paper. The one remaining voice mail came from Vinny Mongillo, providing me a list of his favorite Vegas restaurants and offering — or was it threatening — to fly out and join me for what he described as “a little dinner and an evening of gaming.” Such is the adventurous life of an intrepid reporter on the road.
None of the messages, perceptive minds might note, were from anyone identifying themselves as the Phantom Fiend. For that matter, I was also lacking a voice mail from one Maggie Kane, who almost became Maggie Kane Flynn, though not really.
I was about thirty minutes from the Strip, not including traffic, so it wasn’t worth my while to go back to the hotel. Instead, I pulled off the road into the parking lot of a lush golf club named Dunes East, even though there wasn’t a dune within a hundred miles of the place, and called Martin back. He, of course, picked up the phone on the first ring and promptly explained that the city of Boston was unraveling at the seams.
Police, he said, held a press conference at Schroeder Plaza to say they were unconvinced that a serial killer was on the loose, and publicly complained that the
Record
had published its story before any of the correspondence could be — their word here — “authenticated.” I’m not really sure how you authenticate a note from an anonymous person, and I don’t think they knew either. But you can bet that the blow-dried reporters on the six o’clock newscasts wouldn’t be probing this particular point as they repeated the complaints verbatim. Also, you can bet that Jill Dawson and Lauren Hutchens wouldn’t have had any doubt about the existence of a serial killer, if they were still around to have doubt, which is once again the point.
Those aforementioned television reporters were chronicling a massive run on pepper spray and mace by women, as well as a surge in demand for area locksmiths, according to Martin. One particularly creative reporter even did a stand-up from the Animal Rescue League’s dog shelter, where she reported a sudden spike in dog adoptions by the city’s female population.
There weren’t any other new developments on the story, Martin said — no more calls to the Barry Bor Show that morning, no blog postings, no new deaths — at least none we knew about yet. Maybe the Phantom was all mine again. We can only hope, right?
Martin told me that Edgar Sullivan wanted to speak to me, but was in a meeting for the next twenty minutes and would call back. I briefed Martin about my Walters meeting and promised to be on an eastbound plane by nightfall.
I then called back a few of the print reporters who had left me messages earlier in the day. To each of them I explained off the record about the various notes but said I was forbidden from talking for attribution, which in a way was true; I had forbidden myself. The TV people I didn’t bother with, knowing full well they wouldn’t have bothered with me.
And I hung up. I checked the dashboard clock and it read 10:50 a.m. I figured it would be safe to return to the Walters’s house at about noon — safe meaning that the Abu Ghraib guard who doubled as his home health care worker would be gone by then. At least I hoped she would be.
I listened to more voice mails on my work machine, but again, nothing from the Phantom Fiend or my phantom fiancée, though I wonder if that title expires with an unrealized wedding day, or whether, like retired ambassadors, we carry the moniker for life. I kind of doubt that, but the thought made me realize I was getting punchy.
Sitting in the front seat of my rental car, I had nothing to do but wait, and as I did just that, temptation finally overwhelmed me, sending me in the direction of the immaculate driving range where half a dozen or so guys were hitting golf balls. I grabbed a five-iron out of a bag of extremely expensive demo clubs, approached a pile of golf balls stacked into a pyramid, and began to hit.
My first shot of the new golf season faded hard to the right, but it didn’t feel bad. The second was a little fat, the third a bit thin. The fourth shot clicked effortlessly off the clubface, long and straight, as did the next, and the one after that.
The morning sun was high in the sky, warm without being overwhelming. The air was clean and crisp, the sky an ocean blue, dare I say the color of my eyes. I was starting to feel pretty damned good.
I traded in the five-iron for a pitching wedge and lobbed balls at a flag about a hundred yards away, one after another falling just to the right or the left — not bad for a New Englander swinging for the first time at the end of a brutal winter. I thought of so many of my more memorable rounds — my father teaching me the game on the tenth fairway of the Number Two course at Ponkapoag outside of Boston; the day at Congressional Country Club in Maryland with the president of the United States when shots rang out and we both ended up bloodied in the sandtrap on the sixteenth hole; the late Sunday afternoon shoot-out on the hallowed links of Pebble Beach with my best friend, Harry Putnam, as we celebrated his impending nuptials.
My father was dead. The president was retired. Harry was married now to a woman that neither one of us particularly liked, but he said he was sticking it through for the sake of his young son and daughter. The world, I thought, is an ever-changing place, but too rarely for the better. It also seems to be a diminishing place; the people you love most tend to leave you too soon.
So much for my rising mood.
A young man came sauntering toward me in a pair of golf cleats and a shirt with an insignia that said “Dunes East.”
“Sir, are you playing with us today?” he asked, politely more than accusatorily. I apologetically explained that I was out from Boston on business, was returning a few phone calls from the road, and was just hitting a few shots before I got back to work.
“Ah, Boston,” he said. Usually this line preceded what used to be a crack about the Red Sox, but was now more along the lines of congratulations. Instead, though, he continued, “That’s crazy with that new serial killer you’ve got, huh? Have you read about it?”
Try written about it, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Before I could reply, one of the guys hitting balls a dozen or so yards away looked up and said, “I saw that on CNN this morning. That’s really scary, no? This new killer is like the old killer from back in the seventies.”
It was actually the sixties, but again, I wasn’t of any mind to correct him. Instead, I asked the young assistant pro, “What’s the latest?”
“You know, cops saying they’re not sure whether the whole thing is a prank. Two women dead. The newspaper there getting anonymous letters when someone is killed. Pretty damned spooky, if you ask me.”
I hadn’t, but still found his take interesting. There are some stories, very rare stories, that transcend gender and geography, class and race, and serve to bring people together in conversation and speculation, sometimes in hope, other times, like now, in fear. This was one of those stories, and I was in the absolute middle of it.
As we talked, my phone vibrated in my back pocket, and I could see on the caller ID that it was coming from the
Record
. I quickly excused myself and walked back to the car. It was Martin. He said he had Edgar Sullivan and Monica Gonsalves, the paper’s technology guru, on a conference call. They both said hello. I barely knew how to use call waiting, and made a mental note to get a session in telephone operations when I got back east.
Edgar said, “Jack, we’ve been monitoring your incoming mail for obvious reasons. I hope you don’t mind. First off, I want to be on record as saying I think it’s fine that you’re the New England chapter vice president of the Martha Stewart Fan Club.”
That Edgar, such a card. This, for whatever reason, made Monica laugh uproariously. It’s probably reasonable to note here that since Monica works in IT, almost anything could make her laugh uproariously.
Edgar continued, “You received a disc in this morning’s mail, an unlabeled DVD in an unmarked envelope with a Boston postmark. I opened it. There was no note included. I didn’t feel right invading your privacy by viewing the DVD, but I did take the liberty of having Monica upload the contents into the computer system. She, in turn, is going to e-mail it to you, and you can view it and determine whether it’s got anything to do with this Phantom Fiend business. It probably doesn’t, but I don’t want to leave anything to chance right now.”
Edgar is how old? Sixty-five? Seventy? Older? And here I am, somewhere in the middle of my life, and I lost him at
DVD
. I said, “That’s great, but I’m not near my hotel at the moment to view it.”
Monica chimed in. “Jack, Monica here.” She said this even though she was the only woman on the call, as if I was an absolute idiot. I guess maybe when you work in IT, you grow accustomed to the idea that everyone around you is an idiot. “Do you have your laptop with you?”
“I do.”
“You can receive your e-mail right from your laptop.”
I went into a long explanation of how I couldn’t, because I wasn’t wired into anything. She went into a longer explanation on how I didn’t have to be because of something called an air card that she had installed in my machine a year ago when she had it in for maintenance. I explained that she was wrong. She asked me to press a couple of buttons and proved that she was right. All in all, this is why I don’t make my living writing manuals for IBM, though that would probably pay more and prove less hazardous, at least compared to my professional life at the moment.
We hung up so I could deal with the DVD. I called up the e-mail with the video clip, expecting it to be another piece of schlock from an independent film producer desperately looking for a few moments of free publicity that would allow his arty movie to take off in the direction of
The Blair Witch Project
.
As the video was downloading, my phone rang again.
“Hey, Fair Hair, I hope you’re about to tell me you won a million dollars at the craps table, spent the night having wild sex with a pair of thousand-dollar-an-hour escorts, and are about to quit journalism to pursue your dream of being a hydroponics farmer.”
It was my mother.
Just kidding. It was Mongillo.
I said, “You’re using spy satellite photography to monitor my every move, aren’t you?”
With the halfhearted attempts at humor out of the way, he asked me how I was doing. I, in turn, told him about my meeting with Bob Walters and his information about Paul Vasco.
I said, “I don’t even know if he’s still alive, but my gut says he’s the key.”
Mongillo replied, “Best that I know, Vasco is alive and well.”
As he was talking, the video began playing on my laptop screen, a very methodical tour of the inside of a reasonably nice apartment. The camera proceeded slowly around the living room, pausing at an ornate marble fireplace, scanning the coffee table, which held some magazines and an unlit candle, glancing past a chunky contemporary couch in what a designer might describe as an aloof shade of gray. The tape looked to be nothing more than a particularly aggressive Realtor trying to sell an upscale condominium.
I said to Mongillo, “Oh yeah? Walters was adamant about it. We need to track Vasco down and double-team him. I’m going to be back east sometime later tonight, not in time to do us any good for tomorrow’s paper. It would be great if we could see him by tomorrow.”
As I said this, the camera proceeded from the living room to the small kitchen, the angle drifting over the appliances to a stainless-steel kitchen door that had a photograph of a tanned thirtysomething man in a blue blazer and open collared white shirt with his arm around a smiling woman in a yellow sundress.
Mongillo said, “Your wish is my command. Can you invite a murderer to lunch, or is that unseemly?”
Whoever was carrying the camera was now walking it down a narrow hallway that seemed to connect the front of the apartment to the back, the picture growing darker without any ambient light. I could make out a collection of old maps on the hallway walls, and at the end of the hall was a giant vintage poster, an advertisement for a trans-Atlantic voyage on board the
Queen Elizabeth II
. Very stylish. Maybe I’d buy the place. I wonder if I could get it furnished.
I said to Martin, “Why don’t you just find out where he is, for starters. We’ll figure out tomorrow’s lunch plan later.”
He hung up. The camera took a left into a rear bedroom of what Realtors call a floor-thru apartment. For whatever reason, I became instantly drawn in by the image, my spine feeling a slight chill. I wasn’t entirely sure why until I took a harder, more focused look. Unlike the front room and kitchen, the bedroom was in a state of disarray, as if it had been ransacked. Items had been knocked off a bureau and could be seen scattered on the carpeted floor — loose change, a makeup kit, a jewelry chest. A closet door was ajar. Clothes were flung here and there. A desk chair had been flipped on its side. If this was a real estate promotion, I’d want a new Realtor.
That’s when the camera casually but abruptly focused on the rumpled bed, and clear as day, which is when this shot was taken, I could see the woman who had been shown in the photograph on the refrigerator door.
She was sprawled on top of a white comforter, dead, her eyes wide open, her tight purple tank top lifted above her bare breasts. She was completely disrobed from the waist down. She had her head propped up on a pair of pillows. Her bare legs were parted wide, one of them bent awkwardly under her at the knee. She had what looked to be a pair of nylons wrapped around her neck in a ligature, tightened into a knot, and then tied into a looping bow just beneath her chin. I could see blood in her right ear, and drops and smears of blood on the sheets. Her face looked unsettlingly serene, as if death came as a relief from what she had gone through in the moments before it.