The Confession
After the late-night news anchor brought the television audience up to date on the progress of John Glenn's Friendship 7 flight, the newscaster made a startling announcement: "In the local news, the police have made an arrest in the Essex Green strangler case."
Lisa Stroud turned to her husband, who was already reaching for the telephone on the night table on his side of the bed.
"This is attorney Burt Stroud," he introduced himself to the police officer who answered the phone. "I'd like to know if the man you've arrested in connection with the strangler case has legal representation."
As Stroud anxiously waited for a reply, he kept his eyes on the televised image of the man police suspected to be the serial killer who had terrorized Essex Green for the past two years.
"Yes, I'm still here," he said when the officer came back on the line.
Lisa watched a smile spread across her husband's face, and she knew the news was good. Burt hung up the telephone receiver, jumped out of bed and started to dress.
"This could be the break I've been waiting for," he declared as he quickly buttoned his shirt.
"What if the police have arrested the wrong man?" Lisa asked. "There have been several other suspects in this case, and they've all been released."
"I got a feeling about this one," Burt replied with the air of a man who held the winning ticket to the Irish Sweepstakes in his hand. "This is the guy who did it, and I'm going to represent him."
"And if he can't afford a lawyer?"
"I'll do it pro bono."
"What?" Lisa cried. "We're barely making ends meet now. You can't afford to take on any charity cases."
"Don't you get it? This is the biggest case to hit New England since Lizzie Borden swung her axe. It will make me the most famous defense attorney in the state. I can then get more lucrative cases and stop chasing ambulances."
Lisa would have argued further, but her husband had already grabbed his briefcase and was headed toward the door.
* * *
Antonio Fusco looked up in confusion when an Essex Green police officer opened the door of the interrogation room and informed the lead detective, "An attorney by the name of Burt Stroud is outside. He claims he's representing Mr. Fusco, and he demands to confer with his client before you question him any further."
"Show him in," the detective instructed with a weary sigh.
When Stroud entered the room, the detective stood up. It was time for a cup of coffee.
"You can have fifteen minutes alone with him."
"I ain't got any money," Fusco said before the lawyer had a chance to sit down.
"That's okay," Stroud replied, removing a blank contract from his briefcase. "That's one good thing about the American justice system. Everyone—rich or poor—has the right to a defense and a lawyer. Just sign here and we've got a deal."
Once the contract was signed, Stroud and Fusco quickly went over the circumstances surrounding the arrest.
"I don't really need a lawyer, though," Fusco concluded. "I'm innocent. I didn't kill nobody."
"It doesn't matter. The police ...."
Stroud was interrupted when the detective returned and the interrogation continued.
* * *
Austin Rivers had once been one of the finest detectives at the Essex Green Police Department. Then his wife left him, and he developed a drinking problem. After several DUIs, he was suspended from the force. Subsequently, Austin became a private investigator. His clientele consisted mainly of the city's defense attorneys, including Burt Stroud. Two weeks earlier Stroud had contacted Rivers and asked for his help on the strangler case. They met for lunch at the King George Tavern in nearby Bordentown to discuss the investigator's findings.
"What have you got for me?" the lawyer asked after the hostess seated them.
"I don't believe the commonwealth has much of a case against your client," the investigator said with a smile. "In fact, I'd be willing to bet the district attorney doesn't even charge Antonio Fusco with the murders."
"Why do you say that? The police caught the guy red-handed, ready to strangle another victim. I would think they'd have an open-and-shut case."
"Our man is no angel; I'll give you that. He's got a record as long as my arm. He's been arrested for breaking and entering and petty theft, but he's never exhibited the violent, sexual tendencies that the strangler has shown. Just look at the reports on the victims. Those thirteen women were raped and strangled with items of their own clothing. Then the killer posed their bodies as though he were putting them on display."
"And—who knows?—Fusco might have killed that young woman if the police hadn't broken into the apartment when the neighbor reported a possible burglary."
"He doesn't fit the M.O. First of all, the strangler never robbed his victims. All their belongings and valuables were left untouched. Second, the strangler's victims were all elderly women. The woman Fusco was caught with was young and attractive. He admits he went to the apartment to rob it. Unfortunately, the woman came home. He was attracted to her, one thing led to another and he attacked her. The most the prosecutor has got on him is a B&E and attempted rape."
"What about physical evidence to tie him to the killings?"
"There were no fingerprints or footprints at any of the crime scenes. No blood. In short, nothing to link your client to the killings."
Stroud frowned. He had thought the police had good reason for arresting Antonio Fusco. Now he realized that they hadn't.
"What's the matter, Burt?" the private eye wondered. "You don't look too happy. I thought this would be good news. How often does a lawyer get a client who is clearly innocent?"
Stroud shrugged, and the corners of his mouth turned down in a frown.
"I was looking forward to the challenge of a murder case."
* * *
"The press had no business announcing that the Essex Green P.D. believed your client was the strangler," Detective Milt Wexler told Burt Stroud in confidence. "We arrested him for robbery and attempted rape, and while we had him at the station, we decided to question him about the murders. The next thing you know, some overzealous reporter announces that he was our prime suspect, and from there the story snowballed."
"Where does the case stand now?" Stroud asked.
"We haven't got any physical evidence against Fusco, no witnesses—nothing. The D.A. will probably charge him with one count of B&E and attempted rape, but not with murder."
"Be honest with me," Stroud said. "Is there any possibility at all he could be the strangler?"
Wexler seriously considered the question for several moments.
"It's possible but not very probable. He's a bad egg, no doubt about it, and he doesn't have an alibi for any of the murders, but the D.A. won't go to trial without evidence. You know that."
* * *
When her husband came home in a sullen mood, Lisa was concerned.
"What's wrong?" she asked. "Is this case more than you can handle?"
Burt shook his head and uttered a sound of disgust.
"Can't you have your client plead insanity? Surely, no man in his right mind would strangle thirteen innocent old ladies, all complete strangers to him."
"I agree with you," Burt admitted. "And you don't know the worst of it. He sexually molested and posed his victims in obscene positions after he strangled them. He then tied bows around their necks and drew smiles on their faces with dark lipstick. This guy is a real kook!"
"I don't see how you can defend him then."
The words were out before she realized she'd said them.
"I'm sorry," she apologized. "I know all about everyone's constitutional right to a trial and an attorney, but I just don't understand why you have to be the one to defend a monster like that. If I were a lawyer, I'd be a prosecutor and put animals like him away where they couldn't hurt anyone."
"Prosecutors work for the government, and as such, their jobs are political. Besides, most defense attorneys make a lot more money. Before you say it," he cautioned her, "I know we're not doing so well financially right now, but all that will change soon. I promise."
Stroud looked at his wife. She seemed to grow more beautiful every day. He had known and loved her since she was eighteen, and now that she was one year short of her thirtieth birthday, he loved her even more.
"Why don't we forget about the rights and wrongs of our criminal justice system for one evening?" he suggested. "Let's not talk about murder or the law. Let's just go out for a nice dinner and maybe a walk along the beach like we used to do when we were in college, in those days when we didn't have the money for a night out on the town."
"Have you seen our checkbook lately?" Lisa laughingly asked. "We're not much better off now than we were then."
She put her arms around her husband and kissed him. Despite her jokes, she didn't really care if their financial situation was not what they'd both hoped it would be. She was as much to blame as he was. What did she do with her four years of college? She became a kindergarten teacher, hardly a job with a high income. But it was what she wanted to do, and that was what mattered most to her.
Despite his good intentions, Stroud couldn't help thinking about the strangler as he and his wife shared a romantic though inexpensive dinner at a local Italian restaurant. The strangler case was to have been his stepping stone, his way of getting off the farm team and into the majors. Now it was turning out to be a dead end—worse yet, it was a pro bono dead end that would further strain his financial resources.
* * *
The following day, Stroud met with his client.
"You gotta get me off," Fusco pleaded. "I'm not the man they're looking for. Honest to God! I didn't hurt anyone."
"You attacked that young girl; you were about to rape her when the police burst into the apartment," his attorney pointed out.
"All right," the suspect reluctantly admitted. "I may have raped a few women, but I didn't kill any of them."
Stroud sighed and pushed his client's rap sheet across the table.
"You've got quite a record here, going all the way back to when you were eleven and as recent as December 1961—just three months ago—and now this arrest. Do you honestly think anyone is going to buy that you're innocent?"
"I swear it! I'm not the strangler."
"You've got a record, you have no alibi for any of the murders and you were caught in the middle of an attempted rape. No one is going to believe a word you say."
Fusco put his head in his hands and wept. Stroud watched him and fought with his conscience.
The man is no killer, he thought sympathetically.
But he was a confessed rapist, he reasoned, and rape was a violent crime. It would only be a matter of time, Stroud believed, before his client crossed the line.
"You've got to get me off," Fusco sobbed. "I didn't do it."
"It seems you have only two choices. One, you take your chances with a trial, in which case you could get the death penalty or, two, you confess and go to jail for life."
"Confess? But I didn't do it," Fusco screamed and proceeded to bang his head against the cell wall. "I didn't kill anyone, and you tell me I might get the chair."
"That's a distinct possibility. That's why, as your attorney, I advise you to confess and take the prison term."
"Confess to thirteen murders I didn't commit? Are you nuts?"
"Then take your chances with the jury," Stroud declared as he picked up his copy of Fusco's police record and placed it in his briefcase.
"I will."
"Just remember one thing," the lawyer said as he rose to leave. "This city has been terrorized by these murders. There are going to be women on that jury who have lived behind locked doors for the past two years and men with mothers, wives and sisters that they want to protect."
Naturally, Antonio Fusco chose the safest course open to him. Despite his innocence, he confessed and pleaded guilty to thirteen counts of first-degree murder. As his lawyer had promised, he was given a sentence of life in prison rather than death.
"So this case wasn't the boon to your career that you'd hoped it would be?" Lisa asked over a dinner of frozen pizza and Coca-Cola. "Cheer up; you gave it your best shot. Believe it or not, I'm proud of you. You could have advised your client to go to court and gotten your name in the headlines, but you put his welfare before your own interests."
Burt smiled at his wife. He didn't have the heart to destroy her idyllic notion and admit that he had put his own interests before those of his client. She would never know that Fusco's confession had been the answer to his prayers.
"It won't be a total loss," he admitted to her. "I'm meeting with a publisher about writing a book."
"A book? On what?"
"The strangler."
* * *
Eighteen months later The Essex Green Strangler topped the bestseller list, and a Hollywood producer paid the now-famous defense attorney a substantial amount of money for the movie rights to his book.
Austin Rivers, however, had long suspected that Antonio Fusco was not the notorious strangler, despite his confession. When he met with Burt Stroud regarding another case, he couldn't help questioning the lawyer about the confession.
"I just don't understand why he pleaded guilty. The D.A. didn't have enough on him to get an indictment much less a conviction."
Stroud shrugged indifferently.
"Who knows? Maybe he had a guilty conscience."
Rivers continued to press the matter.
"I read his confession. He offered no details about the murders, at least none that weren't in the newspapers."
"What are you suggesting?" Stroud asked.
"I'm not suggesting anything, but I do find it odd that there have been two more murders while Fusco has been incarcerated in a maximum security prison."
"They're the work of a copycat. That's what the police said."
"Maybe," Rivers replied without conviction.
Stroud tactfully changed the subject.
* * *
Soon after the movie version of The Essex Green Strangler was released, Burt and Lisa Stroud moved out of their Cape Cod house in Essex Green and into a townhouse on Beacon Hill. Burt no longer had difficulty getting clients, and those he accepted were more often than not wealthy ones, the cream of Boston society.
Then one morning, three years after moving to the city, Stroud kissed his wife goodbye and went to work. He stopped at his secretary's desk, picked up his messages and walked into his office where he was startled to see a man sitting in the room. It wasn't like his secretary to forget to inform him that he had a visitor.
"Can I help you?" Stroud asked as he walked around the desk toward his own chair.
When he sat down, Stroud saw the man's face for the first time. It was Antonio Fusco.
"What the devil are you doing here?"
Fusco smiled at him and vanished. Stroud jumped up from his desk and ran out into the hall, calling for his secretary.
"Beryl!" he cried.
"What is it, Mr. Stroud?" the startled young woman asked.
"That man in my office ...."
"What man is that? I haven't seen anyone else in the building since I unlocked the door this morning."
"Never mind."
Stroud picked up his phone and called Milt Wexler in Essex Green.
"What's Antonio Fusco doing out of jail?" he demanded to know when the detective answered. "He's supposed to be serving a life sentence."
"Didn't you hear the news?" the detective asked. "Fusco was found murdered this morning. One of his cellmates stabbed him to death."
"But I just saw him. He was here in my office."
"I don't know who you saw, but it sure as hell wasn't Fusco. Not unless it was his ghost," the detective added with a laugh.
Stroud didn't find that idea the least bit amusing.
"I'm going home," Stroud announced to Beryl after he gathered his briefcase and topcoat. "Cancel all my appointments."
Once outside, he headed for his brownstone. When he walked up the steps, his eyes were drawn to a movement in the front window. Again, Burt thought he saw the smiling face of Antonio Fusco.
"You're not real," he said under his breath.
Despite his brave words, the frightened attorney ran inside his house. As he had expected, no one was in the living room.
"This is a hell of a time for my conscience to kick in," he mumbled as he crossed the hall to the dining room.
He opened the bottom of the China cabinet, took out a bottle of Scotch and poured himself a large drink. What was he going to tell his wife when she asked what he was doing home so early? Burt finished his drink in two gulps and then headed upstairs.
"Lisa," he called. "I thought we'd spend the day together, do some shopping, go out to lunch and maybe catch an early movie."
There was no reply.
"Lisa, are you awake yet?"
He opened the door to the master bedroom and was confronted with a horrific, yet disturbingly familiar scene. His wife was lying on the bed with a pair of pantyhose tied around her neck in a large bow. Her body was posed in an obscene position, and her killer had drawn a grotesque smile on her beautiful face with a tube of red lipstick.
"Lisa! Oh, God! No! Lisa!"
Burt cradled his beloved wife's body in his arms, crying hysterically and trying to keep unbidden memories at bay. Then he saw, across the room, the spirit of Antonio Fusco. This time, however, the confessed killer was not smiling at him. Rather, he, too, was weeping.
* * *
Austin Rivers, former Essex Green detective and once Burt Stroud's private investigator, sat in a Boston police station, speaking to the investigator in charge of the Lisa Stroud murder.
"I thought it odd," he said, "that Antonio Fusco confessed to the Essex Green murders when the police had no evidence against him. At first, I thought Stroud had only taken the case to further his own career and that he talked Fusco into confessing so that he could write a book and make a good buck as well as a name for himself. I was further convinced of this when I learned there had been two stranglings after Fusco was imprisoned."
"When did you first suspect that Stroud's motives went even deeper?"
"When I read his book. You see, I already knew that Fusco was innocent. Yet Stroud's book had facts, details and descriptions of the crimes that only the killer could have known. Now, if Stroud didn't get that information from his client, where did it come from? So I did a little snooping into Burt's background. That's when I came to the conclusion that he was the Essex Green strangler himself."
* * *
When the authorities learned that Bert Stroud had murdered his wife and fifteen other women, they committed the unscrupulous, emotionally disturbed lawyer to the state hospital for the criminally insane. Although he lived to a ripe old age, Stroud never again ventured outside the hospital walls. He was not alone in his confinement, however. Sharing his sentence was the ghost of Antonio Fusco, a constant companion Stroud created in his own diseased mind to punish himself for killing his wife.
Salem confessed to me that he ate the last of the Godiva chocolates.
