The Boston Strangler — Reflecting on Albert DeSalvo and Alleged Marathon Bomber, Jahar Tsarnaev

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

In 2013, Bostonians got conned regarding the Marathon story, but it wasn’t their first experience of this. It also happened in the 1960s. I was 15 in 1962. Going out at night had no particular fears associated with it. We’d walk to Wednesday night choir practice, or whatever, without our parents even saying “be careful.”

What was there to be careful of? In a Catholic parish you knew everyone and they certainly weren’t any killers. After the first Strangler episode we probably did not change our way of life, but by the sixth strangling, or so, we had learned to stay indoors.

Choir stopped having evening rehearsals. Really, community life declined. I guess that was one of the intended outcomes. Another was training us to believe that there really are weirdos who will do anything.

Let me briefly compare the Boston Strangler con job to the Marathon con job. I’ll show that the media had a field day, the court case was an Inside Job, that both men were killed in custody, and the accused’s ethnicity was a target for a separate purpose.

Media

The media dragged members of Tsarnaev’s family thorough the mud for months. Of course media had a lot of material to work with: and the venue was that of a great icon – the Marathon race, there were numerous amputees and subsequent hero stories. The story of the brothers’ growing up in Russia and getting radicalized could be speculated on endlessly as there were no investigators to counteract it.

As for “the Boston Strangler,” he was just a name, just a concept for a while. The media first dragged the concept through the mud.  All the police had to do was describe how each of the women’s bodies was found.  Some had nylon stockings wrapped around their neck, one had a broom handle in her vagina. The victims tended to be old, which was a new twist on “perving.”

After Albert got outed, the media could dig up unlimited stories about the failures of his family. For instance, he was caught stealing as a child and was sent to Reform School. Later, his wife became frigid “resulting from the birth of their deformed child.” Then there was the very hubba hubba story as to how Albert knocked on doors, told women he was looking for models and “measured” them for outfits.

Once Boston “learned” (wrongly) who had done so much harm, the script team had to fill months of newspaper accounts of how such a person could exist.

Court Case

There is a striking similarity between the court cases of Tsarnaev and DeSalvo. In Jahar’s 2015 trial, the defense team did all it could to see that exculpatory evidence did not see the light of day. They amazingly did not cross-examine witnesses whose tales were laughable.

Most importantly, the defender, Judy Clarke, told the jury that Jahar was guilty “It was him.” The public naturally thought her client had pleaded guilty, that’s what I thought myself. But no, he didn’t. And in her summing up she did not even ask the jury to return a verdict of innocence.

DeSalvo had a famous lawyer, F Lee Bailey, age 32, an ex-Marine who had been in newspapers and magazines for defending Sam Shepherd in a sensational trial. It would be hard to get the public to be sympathetic to DeSalvo, and thus the lawyer could dispense with all the standard protections of the accused’s rights without constitutionalists jumping up and down.

Not unlike Clarke, Bailey arranged for Albert to be presented as guilty (by the defense). He did this by cutting a deal with the prosecution: Albert would be tried for something other than the murder of those women, and at the trial it would be “mentioned” that he had confided to a fellow inmate (George Nasser) that he was the Strangler.

Setting the Stage

I wonder if the Marathon planners had someone else in mind to be the bomber, as it looks like they did rather little to plant seeds of the “badness” of Jahar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. No journalist has ever sounded congratulatory in describing Tamerlan’s athletic achievements, but neither have they been painting the boys as criminals or mental cases.

It seems obvious to me that Albert DeSalvo was chosen early on to be set up for some newsworthy crime. Just before he left the Army (he was in from 1948 to 1958), he was accused of molesting a nine-year-old girl. He vigorously denied it and “charges were eventually dropped.”

If they couldn’t be bothered to indict him, the chance is that the allegation was false.  But even so, media can wave the information in front of the public “He was once accused of child molesting.”

Valentines

Another crime he committed has, I think, a laughable feature. There had been a theft from a person’s home of silver dollars. When I was a kid you could still trade all your paper dollars for silver dollars at the bank. But people usually only did his for gifts, such as to give someone a silver dollar for a birthday.

So there was Albert in a shop, buying his wife and child some candy for Valentine’s Day. He paid in silver dollars and these dollars happened to have red paint on them. (Or so we are told.) Well, don’t you know, the person whose house was burgled of silver dollars had reported that there was tell-tale marking in them – red paint!

And don’t you know, a cop — who had been standing at the counter when Albert bought the Valentine’s candy – just happened to see the incriminating red paint. (Like cops all know the details of all theft reports?) So he was done for.

How he came to do the measuring of the door-knocked models I do not know. Some people do have sexual addictions. But how could he be so lucky as to choose houses where no kids were home from school, or no husbands home from work. (I suspect DeSalvo never did this nonsense at all.)

Anyway, was every sexually deprived woman so eager for the touch of the measuring man that she would put up with it? Or so keen to become a model that she allowed the incursion on her modesty? (We were modest in those pre-sexual-liberation days.)

As this sort of thing was now on Albert’s record, it as easy to accept that he was a woman-killer.  Note: that’s a complete non-sequitur, but who was going to analyse it? We probably had some talking-head psychologists on radio (not much TV in 1962) to make the connection between “sex” and “murder.  Bostonians — myself included – fell for it.

Killed in Jail

Another similarity between the “Marathon bomber” and the “Boston Strangler” is our acceptance of their murder in custody. Both men were killed and no one protested.  I have yet to hear anyone – except those who know the Marathon business was fake – protest that an apprehended man was killed. We all saw naked Tamerlan looking healthy, getting into an FBI car. The next thing you know he is dead.

No one in their right minds in Boston would have protested the stabbing to death of Albert DeSalvo, when he was in a maximum security section of Walpole Prison. After all, when a man has gone around killing 13 ladies, some of them elderly, you just don’t have warm heart for him, do you? Ditto the bomber.

If you are interested in what happened to Albert, please see a booklet by Alan Rogers who is a professor of History at Boston College. He notes of the Strangling rampage:

“In 1962 Anna Slesers, the first victim of Strangler, is found by her son who works at Lincoln Labs. Homicide detectives Sherry and Donovan inspect. Two weeks later, Nina Nichols, sister-in-law of the president of the Boston Bar Association, is strangled. Also in 1962, CBS does an expose on police corruption. Thus the Commissioner is replaced. Ex-FBI man Ed McNamara gets the job.”

Who-hoo bigtime.

Ethnics Take the Rap

I cannot recall who tipped me off as to a possible connection between blaming an Italian as the Strangler, and the fact that the West End of Boston, a part filled with Italian immigrants, was scheduled to be demolished.  The new Government Center area replaced it in the 1960s.

I can’t vouch for their being a connection.  But there surely is a connection between blaming Muslims for terrorist acts (done actually by the FBI) and calling for the destruction of countries in the Middle East.  Who will stand up for a Bin Laden? Who would even stand up for Afghanistan in October 2001 as we began to bomb that country on the thin excuse that Bin Laden, a Saudi man, was hiding there?

See? We don’t use the old noodle when we should.

As for the Tsarneavs, their Dad Anzor is from Chechnya. That nation used to be in the Soviet Union and is now in the Russian Federation. The people are known for standing up for themselves, like the Catalans and the Welsh.

Don’t ask me why but Russia is eager to persecute the Chechens. I can only guess that the US government went along with a Russian request to aid in the persecution of any Chechen should the opportunity arise. It arose on April 15, 2013.

The fact that Jahar and brother are also Muslims has not been played up too much, except for the confession note on the boat wall. (That confession is on a par with the red-painted silver dollars, is it not?)

What To Do?

I think the case of the Strangler needs an airing. Please don’t believe the garbage turned out last year by the FBI. The body of Mary Casey was exhumed, allegedly in response to Casey Sherman’s plea that the death of Mary, his aunt, be looked into.

She was the last of the 13 women killed. Casey Sherman wrote A Rose for Mary in 2014, which set the scene for the recent re-conviction of Albert (by media , that is). I guess the authorities had been starting to worry that the truth might come out.

Don’t you believe the FBI’s garbage. And may your understanding of the fraudulent case against Jahar serve to shine some light on the matter of the unfair treatment to which we have been subjecting the DeSalvo family for the last 50 years.

Mary W Maxwell is the author of Fraud Upon the Court, a free download at www. MaxwellForSenate.com