A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger
alone. He recommended that they double-lock their doors, lock their windows, and refuse entrance to anyone who did not identify himself on their doorstep. (The flaw in that advice, he soon realized, was that women would immediately open the door to anyone who identified himself as a police officer.) He also encouraged people in Boston to report any suspicious behavior to the Strangler hotline.
Police departments in Boston and outlying towns were predictably deluged with calls. A young woman reported that her boyfriend had tried to strangle her during a dispute, but a quick police investigation determined that the man couldn’t have committed any of the murders. An older woman called a suburban police department to say that she was frightened and wanted a police officer sent over to keep her company; the police declined. One woman reported that her phone rang, and when she picked it up, a voice said, “This is the Strangler, you’re next.” A neighbor of Nina Nichols, who was killed in late June, reported having seen a white man sitting in a car and looking up at Nichols’s apartment for three Saturdays in a row before the murder. Nothing came of it. A woman was raped by an ex-marine she met in a bar who told her, while raping her, that he liked to choke older women. A Brockton housewife opened her front door, expecting a friend, and was greeted by an unknown man. She fell dead of fright before he could explain that he was an encyclopedia salesman.
Police investigators went through every diary, notebook, and scrap of paper in the apartments of the dead women for names and phone numbers. Each one then had to be tracked down and investigated. Detectives took latent fingerprints from the crime scenes and then compared them to other crime scenes to see if anyone came up twice. They worked their way through routine checks of some six thousand people who knew the deceased or lived near the deceased or had simply attracted someone’s attention near one of the crime scenes. Much was made of the fact that all the women were in some way associated with hospitals, until it was pointed out that health care and nursing were among the few professions easily accessible to women, and moreover, that elderly people of both sexes would be likely to have links to hospitals.
The FBI was brought in to give a seminar on sexual perversion, and investigators gradually put together a psychological profile of the kind of person who might be driven to kill and sodomize elderly women. Since most of the murders happened around dusk or on weekends, it was thought that the killer might have a nine-to-five job in the Boston area, and that he killed when he wasn’t working, or on his way home at the end of the day. His job, one psychiatrist hypothesized, was a menial one, possibly at a hospital. Since several of the murders took place in or near the Back Bay—known for its concentration of artists and bohemians—some suggested that the killer might be homosexual. Or he might be a man dressed as a woman—which would explain his ability to get women to open their doors to him. Or maybe he was just a woman, period. A local psychiatrist consulted by the police decided that the murders “were palpably the work of a homosexual. They could have been done by a woman homosexual—one who through frustration or emotional upheaval develops a hatred of her sex. If a male homosexual was the killer, he probably had a hatred of his mother or some other older woman who dominated his childhood, and he now gets his satisfaction from the defiling of older women’s bodies.”
It didn’t require a degree in psychology to theorize that a man who molested and killed older women might harbor a grudge against his mother. Such was the level of terror in Boston, however, that even an insight as vague and obvious as that one could still make it to the front page of the papers. It was right around that time—the fall of 1962—that my mother had her first experience with the workman named Al.
ELLEN JUNGER, Belmont, Massachusetts:
“It was quite early. I heard the bulkhead door slam, and I heard him go downstairs, I was still in my nightgown and bathrobe, and I hadn’t gotten dressed yet. I heard him come in, and two or three minutes later I heard him call me. So I opened the door to the cellar, and I saw him down there at the foot of the stairs and he was looking at me. And he was looking in a way that is almost indescribable. He had this intense look in his eyes, a strange kind of burning in his eyes, as if he was almost trying to hypnotize me. As if by sheer force of will he could draw me down into that basement.”
My mother knew almost nothing about Al at this point; it was only two or three days into the job, and they had never even been alone together. She stood at the top of the stairs looking into Al’s eyes and wondering what to do. What is it, Al? she finally said.
There’s something the matter with your washing machine, he told her.
My mother thought about that. Al had been in the house only a couple of minutes and the washing machine wasn’t even on. Why was he worrying about it? He was supposed to be outside building a studio, not in our basement worrying about the appliances. It didn’t make sense. Clearly he wanted to get her down into the basement, and clearly if she did that things could go very wrong. My mother told him that she was busy, and then she closed the basement door and shot the bolt.
A few moments later she heard the bulkhead door bang shut and the sound of Al’s car starting up. He drove off and did not come back for the rest of the day. My mother didn’t tell my father about the incident because she was afraid he would overreact and cause a scene, but she decided that when she saw Russ Blomerth the next morning, she would tell him she didn’t want Al working on the property anymore. The next morning my father left for work and this time the whole crew showed up for work—Mr. Wiggins, Russ Blomerth, and Al. My mother got ready to confront Blomerth, but when she saw Al, he was so friendly and cheerful—“Hi, Mrs. Junger, good morning, how are you?”—that she hesitated. Was she overreacting? Did she really want to get a man fired for the look in his eyes?
Al had a wife and two children to support, and in the end my mother didn’t say anything. She decided to wait a few days and see how things went. The weather was already cold when the crew poured the foundation, and the first thing Blomerth did was erect a wood frame over the work site and cover it with heavy plastic tarpaulins. That way they could keep the cement warm with diesel heaters so that it would cure properly. Al dropped by every day to fill the heaters with diesel, and once the foundation was finished, all three men showed up to start framing out the walls and roof. Blomerth and Wiggins were the expert builders, and Al was the laborer of the crew, the heavy lifter. “He wasn’t much taller than I am, but he was absolutely the strongest man I ever saw,” my mother remembers. “I mean, he wasn’t muscle bound, he was just strong. I don’t think he was wildly intelligent but he was clever. No, ‘clever’ isn’t the right word. He knew his way around.”
The work on the studio stopped over the holidays, though Al came out every day to fuel the heaters. One bitter night he stopped by as usual, but this time he brought his four-year-old son, Michael, and his eight-year-old daughter, Judy. Al finished with the heaters and then came in to introduce his children to my father, who was sick in bed with the flu. My father was born in Germany and had an accent, and Al said that if he spoke to Judy in German, she would understand because her mother was German as well. My father said a few words to her, and then Al wished him well and took his children back out of the house and drove away. My father still didn’t know about the incident in the cellar, and it occurred to him that Al’s last name, which was DeSalvo, meant “safe” in Italian, and that it was a fitting last name for someone who seemed so solid and dependable.
That was the only time that Al was ever in the house, although occasionally my mother would go out to the studio and have lunch with him when he was there on his own. Al never gave her the sort of look he had in the cellar that day—a “bold male look,” as my mother described it to my father years later—but there was still something about him that made my mother uneasy. She gave private art lessons at home, and every week a teenager named Marie came by in the afternoon to learn to draw. One afternoon Marie arrived before my mother, and she let herself in to the newly finished studio to wait. It was a warm day, and she was dressed in a madras shift, and Al must have noticed her through the plate-glass windows because the next thing she knew, he was standing next to her. You must be the model, he said.
Marie was sixteen years old and