UBC: Frank, The Boston Strangler

The Boston Strangler by Gerold Frank

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The last sentence of this book is a lie:

But no matter what direction is taken by the law and those who act in its behalf--determined to protect the rights of society, yet equally determined to protect the rights of the individual--the story of the Boston Stranglings has ended.

Even when he wrote it in 1966, Frank must have known it was a lie. There were too many loose ends, too many contradictions. It wasn't until 2013 that forensic evidence was able to conclusively prove Albert DeSalvo killed any of the thirteen women whose murders he confessed to. Fifty years, and the "story of the Boston Stranglings" arguably still isn't over.

The essential problem with Albert DeSalvo and what I'm going to call the Single Strangler Theory is that the 13 murders are all over the map. Young women, old women, one African-American woman. One woman brutally stabbed. One woman beaten to death. The victimology doesn't match, the M.O. doesn't match. It actually makes more sense, logically, to say that there were several people (some of them must have been men, because of seminal fluid left at the crime scenes, but not all of them), all imitating the signature of the first killer. Except then you have to explain away DeSalvo's knowledge of details only the killer could know for all thirteen murders.

Frank doesn't help. He reports everything, but he doesn't provide any kind of critical rubric. He obviously believes that DeSalvo was the Single Strangler, hence that last lying sentence, but he doesn't ever come out and provide a theory or an explanation--which also means that it's impossible to tell where his reporting may or may not be biased by his own beliefs.

And it's a pity, because there is a Single Strangler Theory that you can use to make at least some sense of Albert DeSalvo, and it's right there in the data Frank dumps on the reader. DeSalvo as a criminal was all over the map. He was grotesquely oversexed to the point of satyriasis. (He blamed his wife (while passive-aggressively insisting he didn't blame her) for withholding sex, which (obviously!) caused him to go out and strangle old ladies.). But his rap sheet, leaving the murders aside entirely, included child molestation, breaking and entering, petty theft, scams (he was known as the Measuring Man because he'd use a line about a modeling career to get Boston and Cambridge-area coeds to let him "take measurements"), rape. He didn't have an M.O. And not unlike Gary Ridgway, who killed white women, black women, and Native American women indiscriminately because his only criterion was that the woman would get in the car with him, DeSalvo murdered completely at random. His only criterion was that the woman was home alone, and she let him in.

DeSalvo doesn't fit the FBI's profile of a serial killer. You can't go down the line of boxes and tick them off. He was an utterly disorganized killer, who eluded capture for two years because (1) pure dumb luck and (2) he was known to the police as a chronic offender, but not the kind of cruel, violent person they thought they were looking for. So, no, his crimes don't make sense in the way that other serial killers' do, where you can see a pattern, a tiny psychodrama the killer acts out every time. But their very lack of sense makes sense in the context of DeSalvo's life and verified criminal career. And I think it's important to be open to the possibility that the FBI's profile might not fit all serial killers. (In kind of the same way that Aristotle's theory of tragedy really only fits Oedipus Rex.) Yes, psychopaths share certain traits, and yes, many serial killers are psychopaths. But then look at Gary Ridgway and the way that two psychopathic serial killers, both of whom, by their nature, had to assume that all serial killers were like them, were completely wrong about him.

This is a pretty good book, if you allow for the fact that it was written in 1966 and is very much a child of its times: the casual misogyny that makes it perfectly okay to refer to two professional journalists in their their thirties as "the girls"; the equally casual, stunningly bigoted homophobia that assumes all "sexual deviates" (gays, lesbians, sadists, masochists, pedophiles, etc.) are equally capable of all sex-related crimes. Frank is a good writer; his prose is engaging and clear. But that blatant lie right at the end makes me unwilling to trust him to be telling the truth--even though I think Albert DeSalvo really might be the Boston Strangler.





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