Serial Killer Investigations Read Free Page B

his mother’s previous marriage. On that matter, Brussel’s ‘guess’ had been remarkably accurate.
    A search of the house revealed nothing, but in the garage police found a workshop with a lathe, and a length of the same kind of pipe used to construct the bombs. Rechecking the house, they found in a bedroom a typewriter that would later be identified through forensic examination as the one used to write the letters. An hour later, at the police station, Metesky confessed that he was, indeed, the Mad Bomber, and that the initials ‘F.P’ stood for ‘fair play’. A photograph of him taken immediately after his arrest showed that, as Brussel had predicted, he wore a doublebreasted suit.
    Rsychiatrists at Bellevue found Metesky to be insane and incapable of standing trial; he was committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Beacon, New York, where he spent the remainder of his life.
    The next major investigation involving ‘psychological profiling’ was rather less successful, and brought a certain amount of discredit to the new science.
    Between June 1962 and January 1964, 13 women were strangled and raped in the Boston area; the press referred to the unknown assailant of 11 of them as the ‘Boston Strangler’. But on 4 January 1964, the killings suddenly stopped. The Strangler’s last presumed victim was 19-year-old Mary Sullivan; he bit her all over her body, masturbated on her face, and left her with a broom handle rammed inside her vagina.
    A rash of rapes continued in the Boston area, but this rapist seemed to be a polite and gentle sort of person; he always apologised before he left, and if the woman seemed too distressed, even omitted the rape.
    The descriptions of this ‘gentle rapist’, known as the ‘Green Man’ because he wore green pants, reminded the police of an offender who had been jailed for two years in 1960. He had been dubbed the ‘Measuring Man’ because he talked his way into apartments by posing as an executive from a modelling agency, and persuaded young women to allow him to take their measurements. Occasionally he ventured a few indecent caresses. A few of the women allowed him to make love to them as a bribe—although the promised modelling jobs, of course, never materialised.
    The Measuring Man was arrested, and proved to be a husky young ex-soldier named Albert DeSalvo; he was sentenced for ‘lewd and lascivious behaviour’, as well as for attempted breaking and entry.
    DeSalvo was identified by the Green Man’s rape victims after his arrest in November 1964, and in February 1965 was sent to the Bridgewater State Hospital for observation; there he was diagnosed schizophrenic and deemed incompetent to stand trial. Soon after his permanent committal to Bridgewater, DeSalvo confessed to a fellow inmate, George Nassar, that he was the Boston Strangler, and Nassar informed his lawyer, who happened to be the controversial F. Lee Bailey, well-known for his involvement in the Dr Sam Sheppard murder case. In taped interviews with Bailey, DeSalvo confessed in detail to the 13 murders in Boston. The police were at first inclined to be sceptical, but soon became convinced by DeSalvo’s detailed knowledge of the crimes. As a result, DeSalvo was sentenced to life imprisonment; he had served only six years when he was found stabbed to death in his cell by a fellow prisoner who was never identified.
    In January 1964, while the Boston Strangler was still at large, the assistant attorney general of Massachusetts, John S. Bottomly, decided to set up a committee of psychiatrists to attempt to establish some kind of ‘psychological profile’ of the killer. One of the psychiatrists who served on that committee was Dr James A. Brussel, the man who had been so successful in describing the Mad Bomber. When he attended his first meeting, Brussel discovered that there was a sharp division of opinion within the committee. One group believed that there were two stranglers, one of