Free Search for the Strangler by Casey Sherman

Storm,
a best-selling book about doomed Gloucester fishermen.
    Albert DeSalvo’s family would soon face a storm of its own, however. On the morning of October 27, 1964, the wife of a Boston
     University professor was startled awake by a strange man standing in her bedroom. In a soothing voice, the dark figure whispered,
     “You know me.” Then, walking toward the bed, he told her he was a police officer and wanted to ask her a few questions. The
     frightened woman, leaping out of bed, noticed something shiny in the intruder’s hand. It was a knife. Ordering her not to
     look at him, the intruder tied her hands, blindfolded her, and forced a gag into her mouth. Continuing to whisper, he said,
     “I won’t hurt you.” Then he lifted the woman’s nightgown and began fondling her breasts, all the while asking for her forgiveness.
     The victim was certain she was about to be raped, but the intruder apologized once again and left the room as quietly as he
     had come.
    At Cambridge Police headquarters, the shaken victim gave investigators a detailed description of her attacker. The suspect
     had slick black hair, a hooked nose, and a medium build. He was wearing some kind of work uniform consisting of a dark green
     shirt and green pants. Investigators were familiar with the suspect the victim had described. An alert had gone out to all
     law enforcement agencies in New England to be on the lookout for a sexual predator known as the Green Man, who was wanted
     in Connecticut for several sex assaults and break-ins. A Cambridge detective took one look at the police sketch and knew he
     had seen this man before. The detective didn’t know him as the Green Man, though. He knew him as the Measuring Man.
    In early November 1964, ten months after the murder of Mary Sullivan, Albert DeSalvo was positively identified by the Cambridge
     victim and placed under arrest. During his lengthy confession, DeSalvo admitted breaking into four hundred apartments in the
     greater Boston area and sexually assaulting three hundred women in Connecticut and Rhode Island. During one trip to Connecticut,
     DeSalvo claimed, he had assaulted four women in one day.
    There is no question that Albert DeSalvo was a sexual predator, but the sheer volume of his claimed exploits should have raised
     eyebrows. If DeSalvo had committed three hundred sex assaults in Southern New England over a two-year period, one would think
     he had no time for anything else, including his job and his family. Yet DeSalvo’s employer, Russell Blomerth, would later
     tell the police that DeSalvo was both hardworking and reliable. In any case, DeSalvo was booked on rape charges and shipped
     to Bridgewater State Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.
    Although he was a veteran of reform school and jail, nothing prepared DeSalvo for what he saw at Bridgewater. Called “the
     chicken coop” because of its unsanitary conditions, Bridgewater was a sprawling asylum for the insane and sexually dangerous.
     Built in the 1800s, the institution housed many of the region’s forgotten souls. The forensic psychiatrist Ames Robey recalls
     a story he heard when he first started work at Bridgewater. “Lives were expendable at Bridgewater,” he says. “The place was
     a real pit. Guards told me that back in the 1940s to amuse themselves they’d put a patient in a cell in his underwear. Then
     they’d open the windows and place bets on just how long it would take the patient to die from the cold.”
    Even in the 1960s, many cells at Bridgewater lacked toilets or beds. Inmates had to wrap dirty wool blankets around themselves
     and try to find a soft place on the cold concrete floor. Bridgewater, in short, resembled a medieval dungeon more than a hospital.
     Dr. Robey was the first to interview DeSalvo when DeSalvo arrived at Bridgewater. “I asked him how many women he had assaulted,”
     Robey recalls. “Albert first said six hundred. Then, a bit later, it was up to a