Return of the Strangler

For Boston and a wide swath of eastern New England, it was like the return of a nightmare. From the North Shore to the South Shore, Worcester to Charlestown, doors slammed shut, and women scurried furtively along cold, windswept streets. Husbands hurried home to be with their wives, and there was a run on locks--though, as authorities dourly admitted, the man they were after could open just about any lock in existence. Albert DeSalvo, 35, the self-confessed "Boston Strangler" and sexual felon, had escaped.

In the biggest manhunt in New England history, bloodhounds bayed through the woods around the Bridgewater State Hospital, 25 miles south of Boston, where he had been held; police, on foot, in cars and a helicopter, searched the area for DeSalvo and the two other inmates--a wife slayer and a robber--who had fled with him. The trio had used a key they made in prison to unlock their cell doors. DeSalvo's brothers were arrested and charged with being accessories after the fact; within recent months DeSalvo had transferred $2,600 in veterans' and Social Security payments to them.

The hospital had not been designed as a prison, and the locks had not been changed since it was built sometime after 1890. Said Hospital Superintendent Charles Gaughan: "We're holding murderers here in a hen coop." Sentenced in January to life plus ten years for armed robbery and sex crimes resulting from assaults on four women, DeSalvo, a former handyman, was never legally identified as the Strangler, but the minute details of his confession--which, by prior agreement with his attorney, could not be used as evidence--left little doubt that he was indeed the man who had murdered and, in several cases, savagely mutilated 13 women in 18 months between 1962 and 1964 (TIME, Jan. 27). He bragged in fact that he had raped from 1,000 to 2,000 women during a bizarre career of sexual perversion that started when he was a child. Defense Attorney F. Lee Bailey, who tried unsuccessfully to establish that his client was insane, claimed that DeSalvo was a "completely uncontrollable vegetable" and "could disintegrate at any point."

The runaways did not get far. DeSalvo's two companions drunkenly telephoned their surrender from a bar in a Boston suburb. And after 33 hours of freedom, the self-styled Strangler was captured, wearing a sailor's uniform, in a clothing store in Lynn, 40 miles from the hospital. There was no struggle, and DeSalvo, who had pleaded in vain for psychiatric help, said plaintively: "Maybe now they'll believe it's a mental condition."

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