Free The Boston Stranglers by Susan Kelly

loved her so much. She made me scared to make love to her. I felt unclean and less than a man in bed with her. She herself will tell you. She made me feel low and unlike a man. I stoped in the middle of trying to make love to her. I told her I could jerk off and get better thrill. Many many nights I layed in bed next to her. And bad as I wanted to make love. I was so hot. I didn’t dare ask her because I knew what her answer would be. I hated her so bad but I loved her so. I was burning up ... New Year Eve we went out and I felt different with her. She danced with me and put her hand in back of my head and put her fingers thru my hair and kissed me and held me close. And she said she was happy things are getting better. We had a nice XMASS. This is when I felt a big change in her to me. She started treating me better. That night we made real love together. It wasn’t till about the last two months before Nov. 64 that she made me feel like a man. She gave me love that I never dreamed she could give me ... I felt like a real man for the first time. She to me was always pure and could do no wrong. There wasn’t a thing in this world I wouldn’t try doing for her. No matter how bad she hurt me I could never stay mad at her and yet at times I hated her so bad I held it in. I felt all fluid and like I was going to burst. Not knowing what to do. That feeling would only come so often. Feeling less than a man. Being hurt so deep by her.

    Irmgard, of course, saw their relationship differently. She was fully aware and appreciative of Albert’s best qualities: his tenderness toward her and the children and his concern for their well-being, his desire to give them the best life possible. But his incessant sexual demands wore her down; he wanted, she claimed, to make love six times a day. Even if she had been similarly inclined, Irmgard had a household to run and two children to tend, one of whom was chronically ill and needed special care. How could she do all that and still meet Albert’s demands? There weren’t enough hours in the day.
    Albert and Irmgard: a doomed and tragic folie à deux.
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    If Albert’s most compelling physical feature was his delightful smile, his least attractive personality trait was his compulsion toward braggadocio. “He always had to be the biggest and the best,” says a Cambridge detective who came to know him well and who grew fond of him despite all the trouble Albert was to cause the CPD. “He was the kind of guy who, if you said to him, ‘Hey, I did twenty burglaries,’ he’d say, ‘That’s nothing, I did two hundred.’ ” James Ward, an orderly at Bridgewater while Albert was incarcerated there, says of Albert that “he loved to toot his own horn.” He even annoyed the other inmates with his incessant boasting.
    â€œA blowhard,” Edmund McNamara says.
    Albert had another notable personal characteristic. According to one of his attorneys, Francis C. Newton, Jr., “Albert was the type of guy who didn’t seem to be a leader, but more the type who was easily led.”
    Albert’s willingness to submit himself to a stronger personality, coupled with his irresistible urge toward self-aggrandizement, would seal his fate.
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    At approximately 9:15 on the morning of May 29, 1964, Geraldine Surette was asleep in the bedroom of her apartment in Wakefield, a town about ten miles north of Boston. She may have been awakened by some noise or movement. At any rate, when she opened her eyes, she found herself looking at a man, a total stranger, sitting on the bed. He pulled back the covers, lifted Mrs. Surette’s nightgown, and began fondling her body. He told her that he had just gotten out of the service and that he knew her husband.
    In the same room the Surettes’ baby slept in a crib. The man ceased fondling Mrs. Surette, rose, and walked over to where the child lay. He reached into the crib