Strangled - Brian McGrory [70]
The line all around us had receded to a few stragglers, and the hum of activity had lessened to a vague sense of quiet. The gate agent announced over the PA system, “Final call for Flight 423 to Boston. This will be the final boarding call. All ticketed and confirmed passengers, please get on board now.”
A deadline, so I asked, “Are you planning a wedding at the same time?”
Tactful, even if it wasn’t.
Without missing a beat, she replied, “That’s what’s so overwhelming about it. I’m doing it on my own. I’m using a friend’s sperm. He signed away all rights; I freed him of all obligations.”
It’s always something with this woman, always another surprise around every terrific curve. My mood lightened, though I tried to hide it. I asked, “Why?”
The gate agent approached us and asked, “Are you guys on this flight?” You guys — everyone assuming we were a couple. I looked around the waiting lounge and saw only one man in the distance reading a newspaper.
I said, “I am. Do I have ten seconds?”
“How about five.”
Elizabeth said, “Because I was writing about other people’s lives and not living my own. Because time was passing me by. Because it’s something I’ve always wanted, and I don’t have the luxury anymore to sit back and wait.”
I looked at her and she looked at me and the gate agent looked at both of us.
“Congratulations,” I said. “I’m really thrilled for you, and don’t take this the wrong way, but proud of you as well, even if I no longer have the right.”
I kissed her on the cheek, turned around, and walked toward the jetway.
Me and Elizabeth Riggs — we were always parting ways.
20
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