Strangled - Brian McGrory [55]
He didn’t, but he probably should have. And far more important, I had a strong sense that dropping his name, showing that I already had easy access among favored members of the fraternity, would help my cause here at a level that I hadn’t yet explored.
Bob Walters brightened at the mention of Hank and said simply, “A good man. An excellent man. Broke barriers and broke cases. You can’t beat that combination.”
I said, “Who is it?”
He lay in silence for another long moment, his gaze moving from me to some faraway place I couldn’t see.
Finally, he said, “A guy who was never on my list until long after the stranglings stopped. A brilliant guy. Pure evil. Poor Boston if he’s back.”
“You’re not helping me,” I said.
He laughed again. Our rapport was growing easier, even as he seemed to be growing tired again.
He said, “DeSalvo was arrested on a rape charge, actually, a string of rape charges, and sent to the Bridgewater Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons while he awaited trial. He wasn’t a suspect in the stranglings, either. But one day, he just ups and confesses. He gave details of each of the murders that impressed the hell out of Stu Callaghan and a bunch of his people. Callaghan was so excited about the confession, about bagging the Strangler, that he never let any of the hands-on detectives interview him, because he knew we had doubts and he was afraid we’d ruin his moment and all the fawning press coverage that went with it. So he only allowed access to DeSalvo to a bunch of his pissant, know-nothing administrators who wanted nothing more than to close the books on the whole thing.”
He paused, then said, “Trust me, Albert DeSalvo couldn’t hit a dog, never mind kill a woman. He was not the Boston Strangler.”
I said, “But the killings stopped as soon as he was arrested.”
“You’re right. They did,” he said. “It ends up that DeSalvo’s cell-mate in Bridgewater is a guy named Paul Vasco. Ever hear of him?”
I shook my head.
“Vasco’s got an IQ of 158. I wasn’t kidding when I said he was a genius — an evil fucking genius. Diabolical. And cold-blooded. He had beaten a murder rap years before on a technicality. Robbed a gas station. Drove halfway out of the parking lot, flipped his car in reverse, went back inside, and shot the clerk in the head just for kicks. Then he left. This was in the ’burbs, and the damned cop forgot to read him his Miranda when he pulled him over later that night and found powder burns on his hand and blood on his shirt. So he walked.
“Anyway, Vasco’s arrested at just about the same time as DeSalvo. They spend months in Bridgewater together, walking this route up and down a corridor heading from the cell block to the rec room. Other prisoners I interviewed said that’s all they did, walk and talk, day and night, week after week, walking and talking.
“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,