Strangled - Brian McGrory [56]
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