3
Three months followed without a strangling.
But Boston was like a city created by a mad playwright for the Theater of the Absurd.
A long-haired man known as Psycho Charlie was arrested in the act of prying dimes out of a parking meter. Several women immediately claimed he was the man who had been running down the halls of their apartment houses slipping obscene notes under their doors. In the rear of a movie house an usher seized a dapper, moustached twenty-six-year-old youth. He indignantly identified himself as a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, but at precinct headquarters his name went on the record with the notation: “The above man apparently suffers from a form of sexual deviation; he has a climax from seeing the open toes of women in theaters or beaches; he carries a pen flashlight so he can see them in darkened theaters.” Police answered an alarm on Columbia Road, not far from Jane Sullivan’s building. A woman had seen a smiling, nattily dressed man coming toward her. Only after he passed did she realize that peeping out of his breast pocket was not the white edge of a handkerchief but unmistakably the tip of a nylon stocking.
Elderly women were awakened at two and three in the morning by the ringing of their telephone. “Darling,” a husky voice whispered, “can I come over now?” In Brockton a housewife, awaiting a friend, opened her door to a knock: a strange man stood there. She fell dead of a heart attack. The stranger was selling encyclopedias.
Working women hurried home before dusk—the time the Strangler usually struck—and slammed their doors locked, only to discover hours later that in their panic they had left the keys on the outside of the door. Some found themselves in agonies of indecision the moment they arrived in their apartments. To lock the door at once might mean locking themselves in with the Strangler, waiting in a closet to pounce on them: yet they didn’t dare leave the door unlocked while they looked about to see if anyone was hiding …
The “Mad Strangler” and “Phantom Strangler” and “Sunset Killer” took over the newspapers. From London came special dispatches comparing Boston’s Strangler with Jack the Ripper. There were parallels but differences, too. Though seventy-five years had passed since Jack the Ripper killed seven women in the slums of London, his file still remained open at Scotland Yard. He had never been caught. He did not strangle his victims; he cut their throats, then dismembered them with the skill of a surgeon. He chose only prostitutes—as if carrying out an awful moral judgment of his own—and after each murder sent Scotland Yard taunting letters signed “Jack the Ripper.” (Some were fiendish beyond belief: in one he enclosed a human kidney, and wrote, “I ate the other one: it was delicious! Yours in Hell, Jack the Ripper.”)
Even as the newspaper reported these parallels, attempts were made to reach out to the Strangler. The Boston Advertiser, remembering the success of a public appeal to the “Mad Bomber” who had terrorized New York in the 1940’s and 1950’s, printed a front page APPEAL TO THE STRANGLER.
“Don’t kill again,” it began. “Come to us for help … You are a sick man. You know it …” It paid tribute to him as “a clever man smart enough to have avoided detection by the shrewdest detectives in the community,” and went on, “This appeal is to you the man you were before this terrible urge overwhelmed you. YOU don’t want to kill again, but you know you will unless you give yourself up.”
No reply came.
Two days after Labor Day Dr. Richard Ford, Chairman of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University, called together state and Boston law enforcement officials, medical examiners, and psychiatrists to “exchange ideas.” Some way must be devised to meet this siege by a maniac. Boston, with its great universities, its law and medical schools, its hospitals, clinics, and diagnostic centers, its NASA installations, surely possessed as formidable a concentration of human intelligence as anywhere else in the world. It was ironic that this community which called itself the Athens of America, which prided itself upon its rationality, should find itself—as it did now—at the mercy of a supreme irrationality.
“Since robbery is not the motive, we are dealing with a demented man,” Dr. Ford said flatly. As chief Suffolk County Medical Examiner, he was familiar with the autopsies of the victims. Beyond his initial statement he would not go. It might be one man, it might be many. “There is nothing to tie these crimes together, no single proof,” he said. “The more such things happen, the more are likely to happen because—and you can quote me—because the world is full of screwballs and there are so many around we just couldn’t begin to round them all up.” He and his associates were looking for “a common denominator,” perhaps to be found “in how and when these women met their deaths, or in something about the places in which they lived, or in something relating to their mode of living. All we know is that we are looking for one or more insane persons.”
If one eliminated Margaret Davis, was there a common denominator? Music? Association with a hospital? Helen Blake and Jane Sullivan were nurses. Nina Nichols was a physiotherapist. Anna Slesers and Ida Irga had both recently been outpatients. Had the killer met his victims at a concert or in a hospital, ingratiated himself and so prepared the way for his fatal visit? Was he even now to be found seated quietly in a concert audience, or working in a hospital as an attendant, an orderly, or even a physician?
The ransacking of apartments might also be a common denominator. What was the killer searching for? He searched carefully, and obviously he wore gloves, for no fingerprints had ever been found. Why had he gone through his victims’ possessions, pulled out drawers, emptied pocketbooks, even thumbed through appointment books and personal letters? Was it to learn all he could about the woman he had killed? If—as many theorized—he attacked these elderly women because each in his deranged mind represented his mother whom he hated yet loved, he might be searching for a clue—an object, a talisman, something—to link her with himself, to identify her as his mother. Or it might be fetishism. He could be a man so terrified of women that he was driven to hunt for a handkerchief, an article of feminine apparel that would give him the essence of femininity without its menace.
And why did he leave his victims in obscene positions, as if deliberately to debase and degrade them, why the grotesque “decoration” about their necks, the streamers, the bows, the knots? And what about the mysteriously incomplete “sexual assault” or “sexual molestation”? Was the killing incidental to the assault, or theassault incidental to the killing? Most rape-murder cases were easily reconstructed. An attractive young woman, a discarded suitor or workman who saw her, or a burglar who came upon her by accident, or a rapist who followed her—then murder in a moment of panic to silence her or prevent her from identifying him. None of these patterns appeared likely here, although all were within the realm of possibility.
Psychiatrists tried to analyze the strangler. Dr. Philip Solomon, Psychiatrist in Chief at Boston City Hospital, suggested that he might be a Dr. Jekyll–Mr. Hyde personality—a man who worked at a menial job, perhaps in a hospital; a man who might seem quiet and well-adjusted when actually he was a “psychotic sex pervert suffering from the most malignant form of schizophrenia,” a disease in which the victim lives in a world of fantasy which he thinks is real. If not caught such a man would kill again. His obsession would give him no peace. But the forces driving him would sooner or later cause him to make a slip so he could be caught.
Dr. Robert W. Hyde, Assistant State Commissioner of Mental Health, agreed that the Strangler might look like any other person on the streets of Boston. Neither his manner nor his habits would call attention to him. He probably had a routine nine-to-five job. That would explain why many stranglings occurred just before dusk—he probably committed them on the way home from work. No absence from his job during the day, no absence from his home during the night, to give fellow employees or neighbors reason to suspect him. That would also explain his “phantom” quality—he was invisible because he melted into the sea of faces in which everyone lived and moved without c
ausing a second glance.
At the Homicide Division on the second floor of police headquarters, concealed behind a screen in a small room, rested a perforated wooden board. A length of rope had been brought through each hole and a knot tied in it. If the board were turned about, one saw that name tags had been attached to each knot: Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, Jane Sullivan.
Each was a replica of the knot found in the ligatures about the women’s necks. But whether housecoat cord, nylon stocking, or pillowcase, the knot was the same: a granny knot, a square knot with a double half hitch. Lieutenant Sherry, sick at heart, stared at them. He had not seen the body of Anna Slesers because the crime took place on his day off; nor that of Helen Blake, because it occurred in Lynn, outside his jurisdiction. When he saw Nina Nichols’ body, he had shaken his head; the lack of pattern in the drunken Margaret Davis killing had first planted the idea that it might be one man; when he saw the body of Ida Irga he had thought, What a terrible death for an old woman; at the sight of Jane Sullivan, stripped of all human dignity, he had turned away.
He stared at the knots, wondering whether this type of knot was peculiar to any one occupation, whether it pointed to a sailor, a surgeon, a warehouse packer, a stock clerk, a grocery clerk, a newspaper wrapper, a shoe salesman. And he checked these ideas against the suspects, with no definite results.
New suspects were rounded up daily; some were men whose names had been sent in by anonymous informants, others were part of a pathetic cache of souls brought in by the police net—loiterers, Peeping Toms, housebreakers who stole only women’s undergarments, alcoholics who turned themselves in fearing they might have strangled women during their blackouts.
In an adjoining room on the second floor three men spent their days examining thousands of handwritten records turned in daily over the past two years by Boston’s six thousand cabdrivers, checking for pickups and drops made at the five addresses, then eliminating all but the five victims, seeking to determine to what destinations they went, from what addresses they returned, whom they knew unknown to their friends and relatives.
At the Massachusetts Bureau of Identification, at 1010 Commonwealth Avenue, headed by Robert Roth, compilators worked on lists of bank and stockbrokers’ statements, names on checkstubs, medical, dental, and legal bills, laundry and dry-cleaning marks, department store bills, clothing labels, exterminators, mailmen, delivery truck drivers, building up a file of establishments to check, names of clerks, tellers, salesmen, and other employees to interrogate.
Each day plainclothesmen rode the buses and subways used by the five women at the hour they used them, watching the people who got on and off, studying the faces of passengers, trying to read answers from the very buildings passing by, searching, searching, searching …
Wednesday, December 5, 1962, was a wet and nasty day. On Tuesday night it had snowed. Wednesday it rained, and the rain transformed the dirty snow into mud-colored slush, making walking difficult. At 12:30 P.M. Sophie Clark, an attractive Negro student of twenty, left the Carnegie Institute of Medical Technology for her apartment, which she shared with two other girls, Audri Adams and Gloria Todd, both hospital technicians. The apartment was on the fourth floor of 315 Huntington Avenue, a crowded, commercial street in the Back Bay area. Two blocks away was Gainsborough Street, where Anna Slesers had lived.
Sophie, a popular but reserved girl, was to have waited at school until two o’clock for a class photograph. No one knew why she left earlier.
What is known is that a few minutes before 2:30 P.M. she was in her apartment writing a letter to her fiancé in Englewood, New Jersey, her home town. He was to visit her the following weekend. She wrote:
My Dearest Chuck:
May this letter find the man I love well. How is that cold of yours? I feel fine, especially after you called me last night—you’re the kind of medicine I need—you can make a person feel well without putting forth any effort. What would you like to have next weekend? Naturally I thought of chicken, but perhaps you’re tired of that. Do you have any suggestions? That’s the least I can do for you, darling, and I want you to have a good meal while you’re here …
Today is a nasty day. I do hope the weather is better next week for our sakes. Audri just called from work. It’s going on 2:30 now. I’ll start my homework when I finish this letter, then I’ll shift over to the kitchen and cook supper. We’re going to have liver tonight cooked in onions and gravy along with mashed potatoes and a vegetable, I guess. Maybe this weekend I’ll get around to making some pizza … Darling, I hope you don’t take this long to write again. You know how I get when I don’t hear from you. I …
Here the letter stopped.
At 5:30 P.M. when Audri came home, she found Sophie lying dead on the living room rug. She had been strangled with three nylon stockings—her stockings—twisted together so tightly about her neck that they were almost lost in her flesh. They were knotted under her chin. Her killer had twisted her white slip and a white elastic belt about her neck, too. A gag had been stuffed into her mouth. She lay nude on her back, in the middle of the room, her blue bathrobe flung open in front. Her legs, in black stockings neatly held up by a garter belt, were extended and spread wide apart. She still wore her black loafers; her bra had been torn off with great violence, her glasses broken; both lay near her. She had been sexually assaulted. There was evidence of a struggle. The bureau drawers had been searched, their contents left in disorder. The killer had even gone through her collection of classical records in a corner of the living room.
To enter the apartment that afternoon Audri had to unlock the double lock on the door. After the Strangler first appeared in Boston, Sophie had insisted on a second lock. She never opened the door, even to friends, until she was certain who they were. She was so cautious that if she still doubted a voice, she would ask, “What kind of car do you drive?” Yet there were no signs of forcible entry. Sophie herself must have opened the door to her murderer.
There were some differences between this crime and the earlier stranglings. Sophie was twenty; the other victims had been elderly women. She was a Negro, and she did not live alone. But most of the elements of the crime were only too familiar. There was one new fact: when the chemical analysis came back from the police laboratory, it bore the notation: “Seminal stains found on rug next to body.” The Strangler had not left such a calling card before.
There were other puzzling aspects of the crime. That morning, at coffee with a classmate in the school cafeteria, Sophie had said, “I’m so afraid of the Strangler.” The remark stuck in the friend’s mind. After all, three months had passed since a strangling, and in any event the Strangler chose only elderly women. Why should Sophie have said this? And on this day?
Meanwhile, police questioned neighbors, among them Mrs. Marcella Lulka, twenty-nine, who lived in Apartment 2B on the second floor of the building adjoining Sophie’s, which shared her entrance lobby. Mrs. Lulka told them that about 2:20 that afternoon, she had answered a knock on her door. A man stood there, about twenty-five or thirty, of average height, with honey-colored hair, in a dark waist-length jacket and dark green slacks. “My name’s Thompson,” he said. “The super sent me to see about painting your apartment.”
Mrs. Lulka said uncertainly, “We’re not due for a painting,” but the man walked by her, looked about the living room, walked into the bathroom—he seemed to know how the apartment was laid out—and returned to her. “We’ll have to fix that bathroom ceiling,” he said. Then, unexpectedly, “You know, you have a beautiful figure. Have you ever thought of modeling? With your form—”
Thinking quickly, Mrs. Lulka put her finger warningly to her lips.
Mr. Thompson grew angry. “What’s that for?” he asked roughly.
She whispered, lying, “My husband is sleeping in the bedroom.”
The man completely changed character. “Maybe I have the wrong apartment—perhaps it’s the one down the hall.” He left hurriedly, almost colli
ding with her five-year-old son who was running in the door.
Was it the Strangler?
While police pondered the question, their investigation of the Clark case continued along other lines as well. They studied the victim’s personal life, as they had done in the earlier cases.
Sophie Clark, very much in love, rarely dated anyone in Boston. She was a girl of regular habits. School until 1 P.M., then back to the apartment where she drew the shades, turned on the lights, exchanged her laboratory gown for a housecoat, and studied. About four o’clock she would begin to prepare supper for herself and her two roommates. Audri had called her that afternoon; and at 4:40, Gloria, too, telephoned her, to ask if a letter she expected had arrived and the telephone had not been answered.
The cold wintry twilight fell. At that hour—the Strangler’s hour—fifty handpicked men, members of Commissioner McNamara’s newly created, specially trained Tactical Patrol Force, were spread out through the Back Bay, combing the very streets through which the killer must have made his way to and from Sophie’s apartment.
Early next morning her two roommates moved away, telling no one their destination. Amid Sophie’s possessions handled by her murderer—left flung open on the floor—was a photo album with a snapshot of a pajama party clearly showing Gloria and Audri, standing arm in arm with Sophie. That terrified them, and that was not the only thing. Suppose it had not really been Sophie who had been marked for death, but one of them? It had been Sophie’s fate to return early, and thus she was in the apartment when the sun began to go down that wintry day, and twilight came, and out of the growing darkness, the Strangler … They dared not spend another day—or dusk—at 315 Huntington Avenue.
Mrs. Margaret Callahan, keeping close watch on her neighbor, Dr. Lawrence Shaw, could hardly contain herself. For the past two weeks he had been in one of his “states.” One afternoon, visiting her—through it all, Mrs. Callahan had maintained neighborly relations—his attention had been caught by a print of a young Negro girl on her wall. Dr. Shaw had been absolutely fascinated by it; he sat staring almost as if in a trance. Once or twice Mrs. Callahan spoke to him. He did not hear her. After he left she telephoned a friend who taught high school psychology. “Something’s going to happen,” Mrs. Callahan predicted, “You watch, Mary—there’s going to be a murder of a Negro girl.”
The Boston Strangler Page 5