Some things are etched into your consciousness forever. And the afternoon of Feb. 25, 1967, is one of them.
It began innocently enough. There was snow on the ground, and my sister and I were shoveling it off our front walk. I seem to remember quite a few snowy days that winter.
We lived in a quiet neighborhood, full of single-family homes in a section on the Lynn-Saugus line called Lynnhurst. Therefore, to see patrol cars going up and down Bonavesta Street seemed highly unusual. But there they were. It didn’t seem ominous, though. Just weird.
All of a sudden, my mother opened the front door and said, tensely, “you kids get in here.”
Naturally, we asked why. When you’re 13 and 11, playing around in the snow is fun, even if you’re shoveling it.
“Never mind,” she said, still with way too much tension in her voice. “Just get in here.”
Mothers, I’m sure, were hustling their kids inside all over Lynn that day. Soon enough, we knew why. A day earlier, Albert DeSalvo, the “self-styled” Boston Strangler, as he’d been dubbed, had escaped from the Bridgewater State Hospital, where he’d been confined after being convicted of a series of sexual assaults.
DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler, the name given the person who’d terrorized and murdered a series of women in and around Boston, during that trial. But he never lived long enough to be tried for it, as he was murdered in jail only six years later.
Someone had tipped the authorities off that DeSalvo had made his way to Lynn, and that afternoon, around 2:30 (or thereabouts) he walked into Simons Uniforms on Western Avenue and was eventually captured. At the time, he was wearing a sailor’s suit. But Simons, as it was noted several times, sold police uniforms.
Why is this germain today? Because DeSalvo’s lawyer was Francis Lee Bailey, who died last week. The world-renowned F. Lee Bailey was a Waltham native, and had actually lived on Lynn Shore Drive for a few of his 88 years on this mortal coil.
Bailey didn’t make his name off DeSalvo, but he certainly enhanced it. He’d already represented both Sam Shepherd and George Edgerly in murder trials that ended up being part of the basis for the popular TV show “The Fugitive.” Subsequent to his involvement with DeSalvo, he represented Patty Hearst, who — despite being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army — was in trouble up to her neck when one of the bank robberies in which she participated resulted in the death of a guard.
Bailey negotiated a plea deal in which Hearst rolled over on the SLA people in exchange for not being put to death (capital punishment was in play at the time).
If Erle Stanley Gardner hadn’t invented Perry Mason well before Bailey ever arrived on the scene, he could have used America’s Barrister as a model. In the courtroom, Bailey was every bit as combative and bombastic as the fictional Mr. Mason. He got acquittals in cases where, much of the time, the verdict seemed beyond doubt at the outset.
And if he didn’t get outright acquittals, the end result was much more diluted. For example, even if Hearst’s “Stockholm Syndrome” defense didn’t work on a jury (much to Bailey’s chagrin), it worked with Jimmy Carter. Her seven-year sentence was commuted after 22 months and she was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton.
How could we get this far without talking about O.J.? That was F. Lee Bailey’s coup de grace. Some of the most damning testimony against Simpson in his double-murder trial in 1995, including discovery of “the bloody glove,” was given by Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman. But under a cross examination that would have made the aforementioned Perry Mason proud, Bailey grilled and grilled Fuhrman about his alleged use of the “N” word in conversations with his colleagues. Fuhrman denied it vehemently.
Then, of course, the Simpson defense team produced tapes of Fuhrman using the word.
As they say in tennis, game, set and match. The stunning sequence of events rendered immaterial any evidence provided by any L.A. detectives. Simpson was ultimately acquitted.
In later years, Bailey ran into difficulty. He was disbarred twice on fraud issues, and by the time he died last week, he was no longer the “world-renowned F. Lee Bailey.”
Bailey had his day, and it was glorious. He was one of those guys you’d classify as a “lovable rogue.” There were a million reasons to loathe him. But you just couldn’t.
Steve Krause can be reached at [email protected].
