There was very little rhyme and virtually no reason to the killings to which Albert DeSalvo confessed some forty years before. The victims were all women, they were all single, and they were all strangled. The similarities stopped there.
Sometimes the killer strangled two women in a single week. Other times, he went a month or more without killing anyone. Usually he killed within the borders of Boston, but he also traveled as far as Lowell and Lawrence to commit murder.
His first half-dozen women were into their middle or later years, some of them pretty divorcées, others spinsters. Later, his victims grew younger in age. One black woman was killed, though it was never clear whether she was part of the spree.
Sometimes the killer left big looping bows around their necks, usually tied from the victim’s own hosiery. Other times he didn’t. Occasionally he left them in ghoulish positions — sitting in a chair facing the door, for example, or propped up in bed just so, once in a bathtub. Other times they were left haphazardly where they died.
He left semen on various victims’ crotches, mouths, and chests. Some were vaginally raped, others not. One woman seemed to have been the subject of the killer’s necrophilic fantasies. Other women showed no sign of sexual assault.
He left a note — a card, actually — propped up against the foot of his final victim, but he hadn’t left anything like that with any of the victims before. He never had any contact with the news media, never reached out to the police, never intentionally left clues at any of the scenes.
When Albert DeSalvo confessed from the dank environs of the Bridgewater Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons, he poured out his soul, providing intimate details of each and every crime scene, as if he had so reveled in every murder that the sights, sounds, and smells would never leave his mind. Either that or, as Bob Walters seemed to believe, he committed someone else’s impressions to memory.
This is what I learned from my reading on the evening flight from San Francisco to Boston, which was also spent knocking back a couple of Sam Adams with a stewardess — ah yes, flight attendant — who invited me to join her for a drink at her, ahem, hotel bar. That wouldn’t happen, despite my best intentions, for a reason that can be summed up in two words: Edgar Sullivan.
You see, Edgar was there to greet me at the gate at Logan International Airport, along with a member of the Massport security team. It was nearing midnight. I think Edgar was up about five hours past his bedtime, though he didn’t seem to mind. He never seems to mind anything. The two guys silently hustled me down an escalator, past baggage claim, and through a set of double doors that I never knew existed. I thought they were leading me into some vault where frequent-flier miles are kept, but no, we were on the ground floor of a concrete garage.
Edgar had an SUV waiting, the kind of vehicle that celebrities are always getting into the moment they leave the courthouse where they face various securities or molestation charges. We climbed into the back. The driver I didn’t recognize. Edgar simply said, “Over to the Record,” and we were gone. To me he said, “Welcome home. Peter and I agreed that this was the best way to assure that you would get safely back into town without being followed. Toby here” — the driver, a balding and rather burly man, turned around briefly and waved — “is a former linebacker for the Chicago Bears. He’ll accompany you wherever you need to go for the time being.”
Truth is, I didn’t mind. Every once in a while, I still shivered from that night earlier in the week spent flailing in the cold, murky waters of the Charles. And I don’t think I’ll ever get the sound of the gunshot out of my head that killed that innocent guy in the Public Garden two days before, then the woman screaming that he was dying, her voice rising in the early spring air before fading into the wind.
By the time I walked into the Record, it was nearing midnight. Didn’t matter. Peter Martin arrived at my desk about a minute after I did, though rather than being a bundle of jangled nerves, he was in that zone of calm that he gets into when the world around him gets particularly frenzied.
“Welcome back,” he said. He said this in the same mechanically calm tone that one of the Stepford Wives might use to welcome her husband home from work.
“Thank you. Are you okay?”
“Fine, yes. Just fine. We need to go over some things.”
He pulled up a chair next to my desk.
He said, “Okay, the cops went to Commonwealth Avenue. Kimberly May indeed lived there. Second floor.”
Already, I’m thinking to myself, life in the past tense. This wasn’t going to be good, not for Kimberly May, not for the women who would inevitably cross my desk after her.
He continued, “No answer at the door, so they knocked it down. Mongillo was downstairs and could hear the whole thing. They found Kimberly exactly as she was shown on the video sent to you, dead for what they think was at least a full day, maybe two.”
I asked, “We’re going with it for morning, right?” That was newspaper speak for the next day’s paper.
Martin replied, “Full bore. Leading with the murder. Second graph is the fact that Record reporter Jack Flynn was sent a videotape of the apartment and the body by the person who apparently committed the murder. Flynn, in turn, contacted police. Police rushed to the address supplied by the Record and discovered the body. Record saves the day, though we don’t use those exact words.”
I said, “Not for Kimberly May.”
He nodded. “Point taken,” he said.
He added, “Then the issue became, do we post the video online?”
“What the fuck?”
Martin said, “It’s a tough market out there. We have a video of a murder scene given to us by a murderer. We shade out the actual corpse. Why not get it out there? It has a hell of a lot of value.”
I said, “Value to who? What kind of value are you talking about? Allowing people to be voyeuristic? To see a dead woman’s apartment, the place where she was killed? Like I said, Peter, what the fuck?”
Martin said, “Yeah, that’s why we didn’t do it. But bet the farm the Traveler would if this video was sent to them, and that’s my fear. You know, the Phantom is upping the ante here, from driver’s licenses to real visuals like this video. He may want this thing in the public realm. By us not putting it there, he may shop it around somewhere else.”
That kind of talk reminded me of my conversation with the guy on the phone who claimed to be the Phantom the morning before, my pleading with a murderer to avoid talk radio like the Barry Bor Show, to not post his stranglings on a blog, just to deal with me and the Record. I’d burn in hell for that, but at least I’d have the story first. Hopefully.
Martin added, “Your reaction was my reaction, but it might not be the right reaction. You and I might be too old-fashioned in the age of FOX News and the Internet. And this may not be the last of it.”
We both sat there in the middle of the newsroom, quietly now. In the distance, the copy desk was in the throes of another deadline, with pasty-faced copy editors nearly delirious in the discovery of a misplaced semicolon or a wrong middle initial.
Martin said, “There’s word of a press conference tomorrow morning at police headquarters. Nine o’clock. I think you’ll want to be there. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day.”
At that point, neither one of us had any idea just how big the day would be.