Albert Henry DeSalvo Trial: 1967

At a pretrial competency hearing on January 10, 1967, DeSalvo declared that he was not seeking his freedom and would "go anywhere necessary to receive proper treatment." Asked by the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Donald L. Conn, why he had retained F. Lee Bailey, DeSalvo answered:

To defend me, to bring out the truth, rather than let me be buried somewhere where they'd never get at the truth.… I'd like, myself, to know what happened … to bring out what's inside of me that I couldn't understand.

At the end of the day-long hearing. Judge Cornelius J. Moynihan found DeSalvo competent and announced that his trial would commence the next day.

It began with testimony from four women, all of whom had been attacked by DeSalvo in their homes. Two spoke of awakening to find DeSalvo, an experienced burglar, in their bedroom. One said he had pretended to be a detective before tying her up and committing the offense. As he was leaving, she said, "he asked me to forgive him and not to tell his mother."

Dr. James A. Brussel, associate commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, recounted DeSalvo's grim upbringing. His father had beaten the children repeatedly and often forced his wife to have sexual relations in front of them. The experience left DeSalvo morbidly preoccupied with sex, and with his own wife unable or unwilling to satisfy his voracious appetite, he looked elsewhere. Molestation led to rape, and ultimately to murder.

Prosecutor Conn, who had argued unsuccessfully to have all mention of murder excluded from this case, disputed Dr. Brussel's diagnosis of DeSalvo as a man reacting to an "irresistible drive." What did that mean? After much thought, Brussel replied, "He thought he was God in his own self-created world."

Conn wasn't so sure. He produced another Bridgewater inmate, Stanley Setterland, who said that DeSalvo had bragged of a cunning strategy: he would make a lot of money from his confession, then hire a good lawyer. The lawyer would have him placed in a hospital for a brain operation, after which he would be declared sane and freed.

Conn pushed Setterland hard, determined to expose DeSalvo as a schemer, perfectly aware of his actions. "What did he [tell you he did] after the killings?"

"He wiped everything… so he wouldn't leave fingerprints."

When Dr. Ames Robey, medical director of Bridgewater, took the stand, Bailey grilled him about several contradictory diagnoses of DeSalvo. First, Robey had declared DeSalvo sane, then changed his mind, then reverted to his original opinion.

"Why did you change the diagnosis?" asked Bailey.

"I felt I had been taken in."

"Are you saying Albert conned you?"

"I'm afraid so," the doctor conceded.

Robey also admitted that his latest change of heart had been inspired in part by Setterland's own performance on the stand. Bailey looked askance and produced Bridgewater records showing that Robey had once diagnosed Setterland as a patient capable of "a considerable degree of lying on an enormous amount of issues."

"When did you decide Setterland was a man of truth?" he asked with sarcasm.

Flustered, Dr. Robey said that Setterland was "looking a great deal better" after his recent discharge from Bridgewater, and that his testimony given just days previously confirmed Robey's current belief that DeSalvo was manipulative and an "attention grabber," a patient with an "extensive need to prove what a big man he was."