S05 Episode 18: Learning to See (Pt. 2 of 2)

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Let us help you succeed. Here's al Go to beachbody dot com to claim your free membership and start feeling great. You're listening to Unexplained, Season five, episode eighteen, Learning to See Part two. Peter Herkos arrived at T. F. Green Airport in Providence, Rhode Island, on Wednesday, January twenty ninth, nineteen sixty four, just after eight pm, accompanied by Jim Crane, a wealthy speculator who'd offered to provide security for Peter

as a favor. Waiting for them at the airport was Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General John Bottomley and Detective Sergeant Leo Martin. With the authorities keen to avoid any unwanted press, Herkos and Crane were quickly whisked through arrivals and out into the bitterly cold night air toward a waiting vehicle. From there, they were taken to the Green Inn Motel in Lexington

and checked in under false names. This would be their base for the next week, where the police could utilize Peter in secret, with doctor Andrea poo Harrich also present throughout their time at the motel to supervise the proceedings. It was early the following morning when Detective Julian Soshnik from the Strangler Task Force arrived at Peter's room carrying

two large boxes and a stack of envelopes. Inside the boxes were a series of items that once belonged to the murdered women, and inside the envelopes over three hundred photographs of the various crime scenes. With Peter sitting opposite him, Soshnik removed each batch of photos from the envelopes one by one and placed them carefully faced down in piles on the coffee table, as per Peter's instructions. Then Peter leant forward and placed a finger on the back of

one of the piles. This is phony, he shouted, suddenly shooting up from the seat, pointing at Soshnik. Why are you playing tricks? Detective Soshnik shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, then got up and removed a photo from the pile. It was an image of an unrelated crime that he'd placed there as a test, as he tried to explain, he just wanted to see if Peter could be trusted. Grabbing the first photo from a pile without looking at it,

he held it up to the detective. This is a dead woman, her legs far apart like this, said Peter, theatrically throwing himself to the ground in a strange exaggerated pose. The startled, Soshnik looked on in amazement her coos had positioned himself identically to the body in the image. After finally calming down, Peter began picking his way through the photographs, describing details of each murder as they apparently came to him,

while Soshnik captured it all with the tape recorder. Sometimes Peter would sit naturally deep in concentration as he held the objects in his hands or studied another photograph. Other times, whenever he found it difficult to concentrate, or if he found the presence of the others in the room too distracting, he covered his eyes with washcloths and wrapped a towel

around his head to block out the light. It was a condition of the Assistant Attorney General that members of the task force keep an eye on Peter the entire time, even when he was sleeping, just in case any crucial evidence cropped up, but also to make sure he wasn't messing them around. It was a few nights in after another eighteen hours spent working with the items with little headway made that day that an exhausted Peter decided to

try something different. After preparing himself for bed, He opened one of the boxes of items and took out a blows and a nightgown that it belonged to one of the victims, then took them into bed with him and promptly went to sleep. It was sometime around two forty am that he began talking in his sleep, Hello, Enginero W two d K one, W two d K one. Sophia Mortar, Sophia Mortar. The others present looked about in confusion. An hour later it started again. I take the shoes off,

here is the body. I undress her. I go to the church. I do nothing wrong, the words tumbling from Peter's mouth in a strange, exaggerated, high pitched voice. Then Peter's usual voice returned. Killed that bastard, he shouted, as he went on to seemingly have a fight with someone in his sleep, who he later identified as the killer. Moments later, Peter announced that he was inside the man's residence in his dream, describing it as a junk pile in which oddly there was a spring bed with no

mattress on it. There was a diary there too, he said, there would reveal everything about the murderer's crimes. Then he mumbled something about how the women let the man in because he claimed to be selling shoes, and then he would grab them when they least expected it. It was just approaching three thirty am when Peter screamed, suddenly, get out of my mind, then shot up awake with a look of great torment on his face. Peter jumped quickly out of bed and lit a cigarette, appearing rattled by

the experience. After pacing the room for a few minutes, he took a final drag, then stubbed out the cigarette and went back to sleep. The following morning, Peter attempted to describe the man he'd seen in his dream. He is not too big, maybe five foot seven or eight, a high hairline with thin hair, a mark or spot on his left arm, and something wrong with his thumb. Heard an accent, not American French. I think he has something to do with a hospital. He is a homosexual

and a misogynist. He takes their blood and washes his hands in it. He has blue gray eyes and a sharp pointed nose, a big Adam's apple too. He has the energy of a twenty seven year old, but is more like fifty two. After he kills he offers the women to God. They are clean in his eyes because he doesn't touch them after he's killed them. He has strange habits, like washing his hands in the toilet and sleeping in his clothes. He practices extreme sexual things on himself.

As for the bed with no mattress, sometimes he sleeps naked on it as a penance for his crimes. If he doesn't kill, he sleeps on the mattress, but if he kills, he takes it off. He takes the victims shoes and keeps them in a basement, and sometimes he tries to sell them. Then Peter stopped and took a moment to think, that is all I have, he said.

About the same time, Soschnik had the recording of Peter talking in his sleep from the night before sent to Bottomley's office to see if any one could decipher a meaning behind the term W two d K one or

find any relevance to the other words he'd spoken. Later that afternoon, he received a reply they hadn't been able to find anything matching W two d K one, but they did find a listing for a small ham radio station operating out of New Jersey using the call sign W two D k Incredibly, it belonged to the cousin of Sophie Clark, one of the victims whose murder they were investigating. The language Peter had been speaking at the time was determined to be Portuguese, with the phrase Sophia

mortar translating as Sophie dead. This had been confusing at first, until it was later discovered that Sophie Clark's father was Portuguese as well as the victims. Detective Soshnik also brought photos of potential suspects to Peter to see if he might have an opinion on them too. Peter discarded them more,

telling Soshnik that none of them were the killer. Then one afternoon, Peter was examining the crime scene photos once more when he looked up suddenly, as if struck by an epiphany, then demanded a map of Boston and an object belonging to one of the victims be brought to him. Soshnik hurriedly pulled out a comb from the box and handed it to him, along with a map of the city. Peter flipped it over, then quickly began tracing a line

with the comb on the back of the map. Here, he said, flipping the map back over here you find the killer. Peter was pointing at the Newton, Boston area, close to Boston College. Then another vision apparently came to him. I see him dressed like a priest. He said, he has a French accent, and he's a pervert. Then Peter bent his wrist in an offensive homophobic gesture, implying again that the man was gay. Then he dropped down into an armchair and announced he was done for the day.

The following morning, Detective Soschnik picked up her Cos and his chaperone, Jim Crane, from the Green Inn motel, and drove them into Boston to meet with Assistant day John Bottomley. Bottomley was keen to meet with the man himself to go over again what he claimed to know. While Peter and Jim sat waiting outside Bottomley's office, Detective Sergeant Leo Martin approached them with a letter and asked Peter what he thought of it. Peter grabbed it from him and

without opening it, held it tightly in his hands. By God, he said, this is from the murderer. The letter was addressed to the nurse director of the Boston College School of Nursing, the headquarters of which was located in almost the exact spot that Peter had pointed out on the map of Boston only the day before, where he claimed

the killer would be found. According to journalist normal Lee Browning, who wrote about Peter's life in her nineteen seventy one book The Psychic World of Peter Herkos, Peter never once looked at the letter. It read as follows, Dear Madam, I have a difficulty. Perhaps you'll smile when you read about it, but I'm coming to you because I think you can help me. I'm a Boston College grad, and when I look at the years I've been out of school,

I stroke my longish beard. I've tried selling off and on for quite some time, and I'm still in the selling field. My reason for writing now is to say I am a bachelor, and for some time I've wanted to meet a good Catholic nurse who might have graduated from nursing school about nineteen fifty. Even an undergrad about that time would be okay, one who is working near Boston.

I've even had the idea of doing an article on this class, interviewing as many as possible to learn their opinions and experiences in training and in the field since graduation, then offering the article to a nursing publication. Perhaps while interviewing, I might see a nurse who might like me as much as I'd like her, and if so, we could begin a friendship that might lead to the altar. Chances may be, however, the very few nurses of the year

nineteen fifty are eligible or might even consider me eligible. Okay, if there are such, maybe there is a better way to meet them than the way I have suggested here. I'd be glad to call at the office to see you about this if you wish at any rate, may I hear from you? If you'd like to, you could call doctor Richard H. Wright of Beacon Street, Brookline. He's known me for many years. With every best wish, I

am sincerely yours. The name of the man who wrote it has never been disclosed, though he is often referred to as Thomas P. O'Brien. The letter had arrived that morning, sent to the police by a concerned member of Boston College who was struck by the writer's peculiar request, with

Peter insisting it was written by the killer. John Bottomley called doctor Richard Wright whose name the pseudonymous Thomas O'Brien had given as a character reference to find out more Wright, who was surprised by the call, was also troubled by the letter, as he went on to explain the so called Thomas was a long standing patient in his fifties, similar to the age of the man that Peter apparently identified in his sleep, who had a history of severe

psychiatric illness. Things quickly escalated when, after looking back at their records, police discovered that a call had been made back in nineteen sixty two suggesting they look into Thomas as a possible person of interest in relation to the sexual assault and murder of Anna Slessers. Without wasting any more time, police soon procured an address for the man, who was found to be rooming at a boarding house not far from the Back Bay area of Boston where

Anna Slessers lived. At the first attempt, Detective Soshnik, joined by a Detective Tommy Davis and Officer Stephen Delaney, knocked on the man's door, only for him to open it and then promptly close it again, telling them he didn't want to be disturbed. Though it was only the briefest of encounters, Soshnik couldn't help but be struck by how similar the man looked to what Peter had described, from his thinning hair right down to his large, Adam's apple

and sharp pointed nose. Now convinced more than ever that he might be their man, the Strangler Task Force needed to figure out a way to find some evidence before making a formal arrest. Although they could take him in for questioning, it would require something tangible to keep him in custody. Such a move would be risky, since if he failed to give them anything, if he was indeed

the murderer, the man would soon be free to kill again. Thankfully, the state provided a loophole by granting the police the ability to have suspects committed to a psychiatric hospital for ten days provided a formal assessment who had been made of them. With the man removed from his apartment, the police would be free to search it for as long as they needed in order to find the evidence that

Peter was convinced would be waiting for them inside. The following day, the three men returned to Thomas's apartment with the warrant to search the premises and a doctor to carry out the psychiatric assessment. Peter was also invited, but told to wait in the car until the coast was clear. This time, things went a little differently. Once again, Soshnik knocked on the man's door, this time brandishing a warrant to search the property and bracing himself for the inevitable resistance.

Then the door opened. I'm so glad you came, said Thomas, suddenly, catching them all off guard. Then, without further ado, he pulled the door back wider and divided them all inside. The men stepped through into the tiny room no more than ten feet by eight as the shy, nervous Thomas tried to make room for them. The place was littered

with books and notepads and piles of junk. Just as Peter had seemingly foreseen, Soshnik couldn't keep his eyes off the wire bed with no mattress on top of it, but also the oddly deformed shape of the man's thumb, again just as Peter had described. As the doctor proceeded to make a psychiatric assessment of Thomas, he quickly volunteered that he'd once tried to have himself committed to an asylum, giving the doctor all he needed to have him detained.

Thomas was promptly removed and taken to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center for a minimum stay of ten days. With the man removed, Peter was invited up to the room. Meanwhile, detective Soshnik picked up one of the notebooks. It appeared to be a diary. Always run from temptation, it said in bold capital letters. Then he scanned another page. I get angry, So angry. It read women sitting in doctor's offices exposing their legs, wearing tight fitting dresses and highly

scented erotic perfumes. Then Peter appeared at the door. Within seconds, he was on his knees frantically searching through the piles of books. He put all the killings on paper. We will find it, he said to the permused detectives. Then, spotting something, he pulled out a book from a pile by the man's closet. Here it is, he cried triumphantly. Is there something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals? Better help will assess your needs

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better HLP dot com. Forward slash Unexplained joined the over one million people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional. Better Help wants you to start living a happier life today. The book Peter picked out was a textbook on yoga, filled with diagrams to illustrate the various positions. The first half of the book displayed images of male figures, while the second half showed female figures, a significant number of which had been

deliberately blotted out with ink. Peter counted them and found precisely eleven figures had been marked in that way, eleven for each of the eleven victims, he said. Meanwhile, Officer Delaney was examining the contents of a draw when he found half a dozen ties and scarfs knotted tightly together. In another set of drawers, they found a notebook brimming with sketches of what looked like apartment buildings and their interiors. In one sketch, a bath tub had been drawn with

an X marked on top of it. Soshnik thought for a moment of sixty seven year old Jane Sullivan, one of the eleven victims whose murders they were investigating. She had been found dead in her bath. Another drawing depicted a bedroom with an X marked on the bed at the base of the headboard, just like where the body of nineteen year old Mary Sullivan had been found. Soshnick

was dumbfounded. Mostly the diaries displayed the inner thoughts of a deeply unhappy and unsettled man who had likely struggled all his life with sexuality, and who was doing, as he wrote, all that is humanly possible to master human nature. A section in one diary under the heading remarks made to Me by others listed numerous insults such as, you're a menace, You're no good, You're a goddamn liar, you're

a disgrace to Boston College, you're a womanish man. I'd rather see you dead drunk in the streets than see you as you are. When are you going to get married? Eh? So you like that boy? As for the rest of it, the similarity of his body and facial characteristics to what Peter had described the misogyny, ink blots and strange apartment diagrams were certainly more than a little hair raising under the circumstances. All in all, it was arguably a smoking

gun at least, but it wasn't the bullet. With the pseudonymous Thomas P. O'Brien undergoing his assessment at the mental health center, police took the opportunity to question him over the next few days. The man was told he didn't have to answer the questions if he didn't want to, and was also offered a lawyer. However, since he didn't believe he had anything to hide, he declined the offer.

Over three separate sessions, Detective Soshnik, assistant Da Bottomley, and Peter, under the guise of being a doctor of psychiatry, each took it in turns to ask the questions. The man was sat huddled over on the edge of his bed, looking anxious and scared. When they entered his room. A hospital psychiatrist was also present to supervise. Soshnik asked first why he'd written the letter to the nurse director of

the Boston College. Thomas replied that it was a desperate ploy, the last of many, to try and meet a Catholic woman. When pressed on his relationship with doctor Wright, he explained that the doctor had once treated him for a persistent ear problem that he was suffering from, in contradiction to what right himself had said. The man also confirmed that he'd once spent time with French Trappist monks and had once been a shoe seller, as Peter had suggested, at

which point Peter saw his opportunity. You lose a button once in a lady's apartment, he said, when he went inside to sell shoes. Thomas looked confused. No, he insisted, he never sold door to door and he'd never been inside an apartment under those circumstances. Peter then pressed him on why he'd recently been sacked from a job at a shoe store after only working for half the day. It was because they excited you, wasn't it, he said

the female customers. You couldn't control yourself, That's why they fired you. But Thomas denied the accusation and insisted that he just wasn't cut out for the job. Then he changed the subject and began talking about how he'd become convinced that the police were following him. Why they asked,

but Thomas wasn't sure. Maybe, as he explained, it was because he once thought about approaching a woman in the street to introduce himself, but just as he got close to her, he turned away, realizing it might be strange for her. Perhaps a police officer had seen him do this, he said. Also, a man had once sat next to him on a bench and asked him forcefully if he was gay. He thought the man might have been a

police officer trying to catch him out. Puzzled by this meandering answer, Soshnik turned the conversation to the yoga book and the peculiar sketches of apartments they'd found in his note books. You don't have to worry any more. We know everything. We've searched your room, said Soshnik. Thomas looked up, confused the sketches, replied Soshnik, the ink blots, but Thomas insisted they were nothing, just a legacy from the time

he spent studying to be a commercial artist. The sketches, he said, was something he liked to do from time to time, part of a game he used to play with his brother, where they challenged each other to draw places they'd lived in from memory. And as for the ink blots, that was just something he diared out of habit. He always covered the female form whenever he saw it. Soshnik and Bottomly glanced at each other. Unconvinced by his explanation.

Thinking it was time to move things up a notch, Soshnik reached inside an envelope, then pulled out a photograph and held it in front of Thomas. It was an image of the body of Mary Sullivan. Thomas turned away in disgust. Don't be afraid, don't you remember, asked Soshnik. The more Thomas squirmed, refusing to look at it, the more Soshnik pressed him, demanding to know what Thomas knew about the woman in the picture. Thomas began to shake.

Soshnik pulled out another photo and then another, imploring Thomas to look, but each time he refused, repeating only that he didn't know anything about any of them. With little else to go on, Assistant Attorney General Bottomley drew the interview to a close. The next morning, with Peter's work finished, Detective Soshnik drove him back to the airport as Peter reiterated his absolute conviction that they had the man they

were looking for. The following day, the story broke in the press that the Strangler Task Force had been consulting with a self proclaim psychic. The story was a huge embarrassment for the police, with particular scorn reserved for Attorney General Edward Brooke, who was publicly rebuked for sanctioning Peter's involvement.

A few days later, Peter was arrested by the FBI for impersonating an FBI officer on a very flimsy charge that some saw as an effort to embarrass him and Edward Brooke, who was due to begin a campaign to run for reelection. After ten days, the man known as Thomas p O'Brien was kept in for another thirty five days, after which he was given the opportunity to leave the

Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Instead, he voluntarily committed himself to the institution and his thought to have remained there ever since. No further sexual assaults or murders related to the apparent individual, by then commonly referred to as the Boston strangler a

thought to have occurred after this point in time. It was just over a year later, on March sixth, nineteen sixty five, the thirty one year old defense attorney Francis Lee Bailey arrived at Bridgewater State Hospital in southeastern Massachusetts to answer an unusual request. The hospital was a psychiatric facility housing convicted criminals judged by the state to be criminally insane, as well as all those whose state judged

sanity had yet to be evaluated. Bailey was already making a name for himself after getting involved in the case of physician Sam Shephard, who in nineteen fifty four was

found guilty of murdering his wife, Marilyn Reese. The case, which garnered huge media attention at the time, provided the inspiration for the TV show and later the film the fugitive in nineteen sixty three, after taking Shepherd on as a client, Bailey filed the writ that took his appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, resulting in the retrial that eventually overturned his conviction. That morning, in March nineteen sixty five, however, Bailey was on a decidedly different mission.

Another of his clients, George Nassa, who was currently under assessment of Bridgewater Hospital, had suggested he come and interview a fellow patient of his who he believed had something big to tell the world. Despite Nassa being a suspected paranoid schizophrenic who had recently been arrested for murder, Bailey

couldn't help but be intrigued by the request. After arriving at the hospital and being led through the various security checkpoints, Bailey was eventually shown into a dimly lit room where he was greeted by a thirty three year old man measuring about five foot nine in height, with broad muscular shoulders and a thick head of dark brown hair combed back in a slick pompadour style. The man introduced himself as Albert de Salvo, who, according to himself was also

the Boston strangler. Over the next hour or so, De Salvo proceeded to outline to Bailey in minute detail all the murders and sexual assaults he'd committed, as unemotionally, as Bailey later put it, as if he were describing a

trip to the supermarket. At the time, De Salvo, who lived in Malden, six miles north of Boston with his wife and two children, was awaiting trial after confessing to raping several women, as well as committing something in the region of three hundred other sexual assaults and around four hundred home breakings. Dsalvo had a long history of committing

sexual offenses. In nineteen sixty one, he was arrested for masquerading as a model agency rep who door stepped women, telling them he'd come to measure them up for future photo shoots. When some of them believed him, he proceeded to take their measurements and sexually assault them in the process.

After spending only twelve months in prison for the crime, being released two months before the first apparent Boston Strangler murder, Dussalvo was arrested again in November nineteen sixty four, ten months after the last for his suspected involvement in the sexual assault of another woman who'd been left tied to her bed after being molested by a man who'd broken into her apartment. After being arrested, Dassalvo was picked out

in a line up by the woman. A few days later, a number of other women had been similarly attacked in Connecticut identified Dsalvo as their attacker to a short time after that, Dasalvo confessed to the countless other crimes in his confession to Francis Bailey, Dsalvo is said to have listed numerous details about the crime scenes that were yet to be made public. In spite of this, however, no physical evidence connecting him to the apparent Boston Strangler crimes

was ever established. As a result, in nineteen sixty seven, with f Lee Bailey, as he would come to be known, representing him, Dasalvo was only put on trial for the earlier offenses he was already accused of. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, and although DA Edward Brooks and Boston police were keen to draw a line under the Strangler case, many remained unconvinced by the conviction.

In a later interview about the incident, George Nassa, who had first alerted Francis Bailey to Albert DeSalvo, made a startling revelation. Though he claimed he was certain that DeSalvo was the strangler, according to Nassa, his confession was actually part of a bigger plan to get reward money for information leading to the strangler's arrest. He and DeSalvo assumed wrongly that they would receive ten thousand dollars for each victim in return for the confession, which Nasso would claim

and then secretly split with DeSalvo. DeSalvo apparently agreed to the deal because he knew he was already facing life in prison and wanted to make some money to send back to his family. Some have also claimed that DeSalvo's earlier confession to have committed hundreds of offenses was also suspect. Suggested that DeSalvo was often prone to boasting and fantasized

about being notorious. The fact that no physical evidence or eyewitnesses, of which there were said to be many, linked him to any of the crime scenes was also hugely controversial. And then there were the cigarettes. As author Susan Kelly pointed out in her book The Boston Stranglers, The Public Conviction of Albert de Salvo and The True Story of Eleven Shocking Murders. Three fresh Salem's cigarette butts were found in an ashtray next to the bed that Mary Sullivan's

body was discovered in. Neither Mary nor her roommates was said to have smoked this brand, While a Salem cigarette butt was also found floating in the toilet of Apartment four S at three one five Huntington Avenue, where Sophie Clark's body was found. Albert de Salvo didn't smoke. Sam also believed that George Nassa, a man considered highly intelligent

and manipulative, may actually have been the strangler himself. In February nineteen sixty seven, Albert DeSalvo escaped from Bridgewater State Hospital in an apparent protest at conditions there, before eventually turning himself in. As a result, he was transferred to the Massachusetts maximum security prison known at the time as Walpole, where not long after, he recanted his confession to being

the Boston Strangler. Six years later, in nineteen seventy three, while at Walpole, Dsalvo was stabbed to death in an altercation with a fellow inmate. In the years since Dasalvo's confession to fth Lee Bailey, two other victims were did to the list of those thought to be murdered by the so called strangler, taking the total number of suspected victims to thirteen. The first was eighty five year old Mary Mullen, who was found dead in her apartment in

June nineteen sixty two from a suspected heart attack. Albert DeSalvo claimed in his confession that she had actually died after he broke into her apartment and tried to grab her. The next was twenty five year old Beverly Salmons, who was found stabbed to death at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May nineteen sixty three. With the victim seemingly so unrelated, differing significantly by age and appearance, many have also questioned

whether they were all murdered by the same individual. Peter Hurkos certainly remained convinced that the man he had identified as the killer had been responsible for at least some of the crimes. Her Coos would continue to offer his services to police, and was invited to consult on many other cases. Including the nineteen sixty nine murders committed by members of the Manson family. He died of a heart attack in nineteen eighty eight at the age of seventy seven.

In two thousand, incredibly, so convinced were they that Albert de Salvo's confession was not the full picture, both de Salvo's relatives and those of Mary Sullivan, thought to be the last of the strangler's victims, joined together in requesting that de Salvo and Sullivan's bodies be exhumed for DNA testing.

Attorney A. Lane Whitfield Sharp, who represented both families in the case, also found a series of inconsistencies between DeSalvo's apparent confession and the facts of Sullivan's sexual assault and murder. After years of trying, in twenty twelve, Mary Sullivan's remains were exhumed, from which the DNA taken from the seaman of an unknown male was successfully extracted. The same DNA was also found on the blanket she'd been lying on

at the time of her death. Without probable cause, however, d Salvo's body could not be exhumed, so Boston police hatched a plan. After tailing a nephew of Albert de Salvo's They managed to confiscate a bottle he had drunk out of and had its sent for testing. His DNA was found to be a match for the DNA found on Mary Sullivan, suggesting that at the very least he

was related to her killer. Now in possession of the evidence they needed, in twenty thirteen, Boston Police crime Lab dug up what remained of DeSalvo's body and extracted teeth and a section of bone from his left arm. After examining his DNA, investigators found it to be a significant match for that found on Mary Sullivan. Odds that the DNA had come from anyone else was said to be one in two hundred and twenty billion. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now

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