Free Search for the Strangler by Casey Sherman Page A

thousand.”
    Robey says he quickly realized his new patient had a vivid imagination. “He wanted to be important,” Robey recalls. “If you
     said you broke into five homes, he’d say he broke into fifty.” DeSalvo was a liar, Robey knew, but he also had an undeniable
     charm. “You had a tendency to like him,” the psychiatrist says, “and the thought of him becoming violent just wasn’t there.”
     After meeting with DeSalvo once a day for the thirty-five-day court-ordered observation period, Robey concluded that DeSalvo
     had a sociopathic personality but was competent to stand trial in the Green Man case.
    In December 1964, DeSalvo was sent to the East Cambridge jail to await trial. Once there, his cocksureness disappeared, and
     he began acting like some of the mentally ill patients he’d seen at Bridgewater, telling his jailers he heard voices and also
     that he thought of killing himself. After one month in the jail, he was returned to Bridgewater.
    In February 1965, DeSalvo would get his first hearing in front of a judge on the Green Man charges. Robey, the only witness
     testifying on his behalf, said DeSalvo’s condition had grown worse and he was no longer competent to stand trial. DeSalvo
     then took the stand and told the judge he was competent to stand trial, but he needed better psychiatric care than Bridgewater
     could provide. DeSalvo maintained he was treated like an animal and that doctors at the hospital were not interested in helping
     him gain control over his powerful sexual urges. The judge was not swayed, and DeSalvo was sent back to Bridgewater.
    Robey, who continued to treat DeSalvo, found himself awed by the man’s memory. “He had a photographic memory,” Robey says.
     “I’d bring him into a room full of doctors, and he’d tell us the exact seats we sat in two weeks before.” Robey also noticed
     that DeSalvo had struck up a friendship with George Nassar, another inmate.
    Nassar had been sent to Bridgewater for observation after his arrest for the cold-blooded murder of a gas station attendant
     in Andover, an upscale Boston suburb near Lawrence, where another Boston Strangler victim, Joann Graff, was killed. On September
     29, 1964, the attendant had been checking gas pumps when a man in a tan trench coat came up behind him and plunged a knife
     into his back. Irving Hilton, the victim, begged for his life, but to no avail. The attacker pulled a .22 automatic from his
     trench coat and shot Hilton six times. At that moment, Rita Boute pulled into the service station with her fourteen-year-old
     daughter. When Boute heard the gunfire, she and her daughter ducked beneath the steering column. The killer, who had seen
     the car pull in, calmly walked up and stared at the terrified pair. He tried to open the car door, but, finding it locked,
     he instead tried to fire a shot through the windshield. Fortunately, no bullets were left in the gun. The man in the tan trench
     coat got into his car and sped away.
    Rita Boute gave a near-perfect description of the killer. She said he had wavy, brown hair, rigid cheekbones, and black, soulless
     eyes. A police artist drew a picture that bore a striking resemblance to George Nassar, a Lawrence native who had been released
     from prison in 1962 after serving time for murder.
    Nassar had been arrested at age fifteen for fatally shooting a grocery store owner during a holdup and sentenced to thirty
     years to life. While in prison the young man showed a keen aptitude for learning and convinced local ministers that he had
     changed his ways. The ministers petitioned for Nassar’s release and he was freed after serving almost fourteen years. When
     they compared Nassar’s mug shot to the police sketch, investigators were sure he was the one who had murdered the gas station
     attendant. They traced Nassar to an address in Boston’s South End, only a few blocks from several Boston Strangler crime scenes.
     When they searched Nassar’s apartment