Dr. Robey, precocious, pipe-smoking, scholarly, who at the age of thirty-five had been appointed to this important post only a year before, agreed. He and his associates would consider it part of their responsibility to the people of the Commonwealth. However, every safeguard would be taken to protect the civil rights of patients. (Dr. Robey was particularly interested in this, for one of his specialties was the legal aspects of psychiatry.) That meant if David Parker told Dr. Robey that he was indeed a murderer, this confession could not be used as legal evidence against him, particularly in the absence of a lawyer to advise Parker what to answer and what not to answer. Nor would Dr. Robey testify in court as to what he had learned during his examinations. He would deliberately make no detailed notes on his interviews to avoid any chance that these would be later used to deprive the patient of his rights.
What Dr. Robey, in effect, promised Bottomly was this:
If the persons you wish us to question are sufficiently lucid, or if by medication we can improve them so they can be lucid, we shall question them. If we elicit suspicious material, we shall forward it to you informally to guide you in your further investigations. If we find nothing suspicious, we shall report that as well. If, in our opinion, the suspect could not be capable of the stranglings, we shall say so. Our purpose is to help you find the guilty and eliminate the innocent.
Before Bottomly turned his attention to Peter Hurkos again, he sent Dr. Robey a long memo on the eleven stranglings, listing clues that might guide him and his associates in their interrogations. New facts were being elicited every day as both Lieutenant Donovan’s Homicide Division and Bottomly’s investigators pushed more deeply into each strangling. Dr. Robey would be kept up to the minute.
9
It was 4 A.M. Sunday, February 2, when Julian Soshnick, asleep in the room adjoining Peter Hurkos’ in the Battle Green Motel in Lexington, suddenly awakened. Jim Crane was bending over him, flicking his ear. “He’s started to talk,” Crane whispered. “I’ve turned on the recorder—”
Soshnick tiptoed into the next room. Peter lay asleep, snoring gently. On his pillow, six inches from his face, rested the microphone leading to the tape recorder. Three detectives sat in the room, illuminated only by the cold moonlight filtering through a half-drawn window blind. Crane put his finger to his lips; the men waited.
Peter spoke. “Sophia morte … Sophia morte!” It was a deep, strained voice, then came five or six swift words in a foreign tongue. The voice did not sound like Peter’s, nor had it any trace of his familiar Dutch accent. Then, the gentle snore again. No question of it, Peter was sound asleep. It was no act. He spoke once more. “Hallo, hallo!” A pause. “Engineero, engineero …” He began counting, “Una, dua, treya, Radio Internationale, W-two-D-K-one, W-two-D-K-one, hallo, hallo—” So would a radio ham announcer call out the letters of his station. Then again, slowly, sadly, the deep sepulchral voice, “Sophia mortica … Sophia mortica, Sophia—a-a …”
Soshnick tiptoed about making a quick whispered check. No one recognized the language. Soshnick himself knew a smattering of French, German, Latin, and Hebrew, and a little Spanish; it vaguely resembled Spanish, but whatever the tongue, the words obviously meant “Sophia dead” or “Sophia is dying” or “Sophia killed.”
Sophia. Sophia. Although Soshnick was not too familiar with the individual stranglings, he had read up on the cases since being assigned to Peter. Sophia must refer to Sophie—Sophie Clark, the Negro girl murdered on December 5, 1962, more than a year ago. Again, the gentle snores, interrupted by several short sentences in the same unfamiliar language.
“W-two-D-K-one, W-two-D-K-one, Radio Internationale, Radio Internationale,” came Peter’s words, intoned with almost metronomic precision. Suddenly his voice changed. It became high and feminine, almost whispery, a Boston voice speaking English with no trace of foreign accent: “I take the shoes off! Here is the body! I take the shoes off! I undress her! Oh, I go to church, I go to church. I do nothing wrong. I know what is right. I told you I do right.” Almost petulantly, “I do right: I wash my hands in toilet.”
Then, silence. His snores rose and fell. A detective gently picked up the microphone and whispered into it, for the record: “It is now four-fourteen A.M., February second, 1964. Peter Hurkos is sound asleep. He is talking in his sleep.”
Peter began again, but now his voice dropped in pitch. It had almost a brogue, the heavy, matter-of-fact growl of a detective. “Yeah, you was right.” Then, with a sigh, “No, I’m not mad at you. You wash your hands in toilet. I’m not mad.” Soothingly, reassuringly: “Sure you go to heaven! Sure.” He talked as if comforting a frightened child. Then, in a voice unexpectedly sly, cunning, almost like a man playing a children’s game with children, “I find you through the toilets. I find you …”
A long silence. No one moved. Peter, the no-nonsense detective again: “You call this holy water? You’re nuts! For the monks, eh? You are nuts!” Minutes passed. “And the monks don’t like you? I don’t blame them. Bring it to the monks, the toilet water? You make the cross in the toilet water?” Disgusted: “I tell you, you are nuts!”
The snores resumed, and he did not speak again.
After breakfast, Soshnick telephoned Bill Manning in Bottomly’s office and reported what happened. Would Manning look through the Sophie Clark casebook and see if he could find anything bearing on this? Would he also check the call letters W2DK1? Julian was sending the tape into the office. Would they get a man from Berlitz to tell them what language Peter spoke—if it was a recognizable language—and translate what he said?
Later that day Manning reported back. “Julian, I won’t comment on what I’m telling you. I am just telling it to you so you will know. Peter spoke Portuguese but the sentences were too fragmentary to make any sense except for the words ‘Sophia dead.’ Sophie Clark was a Negro, as you know, but we’ve learned that she was only half-Negro. Her father was Portuguese. There are no call letters W-two-D-K-one listed in any international registry we can find, but there is a small ham radio station in New Jersey with the call letters W-two-D-K. We made a little check on it. That’s owned—” he paused, almost as if fighting to control his voice “—that’s owned by a man who turns out to be Sophie Clark’s cousin.”
Soshnick looked at the receiver and hung up. If all that meant anything, it meant they must really give serious consideration to Peter’s suspect. Now it was even more important not only to pick up the shoe salesman and question him, but to allow Peter to question him too—perhaps even break him down.
Early next morning Soshnick was at O’Brien’s door. He was accompanied by a physician and Detective Davis and Officer Stephen Delaney—the latter recently appointed to Bottomly’s task force. Because publicity would certainly attend picking up O’Brien, Peter was told to remain in his motel in Lexington, and out of sight.
O’Brien was not home. Soshnick had no doubt what to do. He telephoned Peter in Lexington. “He’s not in his room,” he said. “Where’s he gone, Peter?”
“He go to church,” Peter answered promptly. “He a religious nut. I see him walk into church now.” He described the church, the kind of steeple, the neighborhood. “That can only be Our Lady of Victories,” said Detective Davis. “It’s about ten blocks from here.”
Leaving Delaney on the scene in case O’Brien returned, they drove to the church. Services were ending: they made a careful search, but their man was not there. Again Julian telephoned Peter. “God damn, you just miss him,” said Peter, in Lexington. “Go back—you find him in room.”
When they arrived Delaney reported that O’Brien had walked in a few minutes before. “Did he say where he’d been?” Soshnick asked. Delaney nodded. “At church—Our Lady of Victories,” he said. “I told him you were looking for him, and he said, ‘I guess I’m in trouble now.’”
A moment later in response to their knock O’Brien opened the door. Soshnick formally introduced himself. “I’m from the Attorney General’s office, these
gentlemen are police officers, and this gentleman is a doctor. May we come in?”
“Yes, of course,” said O’Brien. Then, in his high-pitched voice, “I’m so glad you came, finally.”
Soshnick’s mind flashed back to the notorious lipstick murders in Chicago in the 1940’s, the scrawled message on the walls of a victim’s apartment, “For heavens sake catch me before I kill more, I cannot control myself.” When he realized that the single cot in the room had no mattress—only bedsprings—he felt a complete sense of unreality.
Was this the Strangler before them?
They saw a small, emaciated man who could not have weighed more than 130 pounds, about five feet seven—exactly the height Peter had marked off in his room in Lexington; he was in his mid-fifties, effeminate in manner, standing almost apologetically to one side, nervously rubbing his hands together. His nose was thin and sharp—“spitzy”—as Peter had said. On his left arm was a scar—as Peter had said. The thumb of his right hand was deformed—as Peter had said. Peter had been right in every detail.
The room was tiny, perhaps eight by ten, in considerable disorder, with books, pamphlets, artists’ sketch pads piled everywhere. On a table were health foods—molasses, wheat germ, and the like.
The physician questioned O’Brien at some length. Yes, he had once tried to get himself committed: he had told his brother that he might have blacked out several times. The physician signed the commitment papers on the spot. Minutes later he and O’Brien were on their way to Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and the others were eagerly going through the shoe salesman’s possessions.
It was, at first sight, a pathetic haul. Here was a penciled diary, the writing going off in all directions but recognizably the same as in O’Brien’s letter, with dates indicating he had been keeping it almost from his college days. On one page, printed in huge capital letters, doubly underlined, were the words: ALWAYS RUN FROM TEMPTATION INSTANTLY! The entries told how O’Brien had sought to become a Trappist monk nearly twenty years before, but had failed. Through the years he tried one job after another, but was able to get mainly dishwashing and laundry jobs; sometimes he sold shoes. “I can’t hold a job,” he had written. “Total—sixty low-paying jobs, never more than a few weeks each. I have made a shambles of my life.”
Then, a heading “Remarks Made To Me By Others.” Soshnick read it, moved despite himself. “You’re a menace. You’re no good. You’re a GD 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. (Spoken to me by my brother.) When are you going to get married, eh? So you like that boy? Ha, ha! People like you are hit from pillar to post. You’re in mortal sin—filthy, rotten, dirty …”
This was followed by confession. “Once, while near Harvard, I looked at a girl, perhaps at her legs … At frequent occasions while walking in the street I struggle against the impulse to collide with a woman … I must stop beating my seed, and during sleep. I have tried various ways to stop this. I have been sleeping on the floor to control my improper acts in my sleep, but surely these I can’t be responsible for.” Then, later: “I am doing all that is humanly possible to master human nature and I know I am chaste at last. I am going on forty-four years, almost.”
Soshnick turned another page. Peter, already telephoned that the coast was clear, would arrive any moment now to join the search. Soshnick could not put down the diary. “I get angry, so angry. Women sitting in doctor’s offices exposing their legs. Men walking with their hands behind their backs, strolling before me. Women wearing tight-fitting dresses and highly scented with erotic perfumes … I felt I was under investigation, people watching me in the library. I went to see Dr. Flannigan. The advice I got was that I was imagining it. So I was advised to go to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for nerve treatments which turned out to be shock therapy.”
On the last page there was a single entry, dated 1953. “Called Archbishop Cushing’s home. Was told to snap out of it, that I was O.K. and given the Archbishop’s blessing.”
Soshnick looked up as Peter stormed in, more excited than anyone had seen him before. He dropped to his knees and began scuttling about the room, crawling under the cot, into the cramped closet, muttering under his breath, “This fellow, he put on paper all killings, we find it—” He snatched a pamphlet from the center of a pile, pressed it to his forehead. “This it!” he cried. He opened it. “Look!”
It was a text on Yoga with black-and-white drawings depicting the various positions. The first half was devoted to male figures, the second, to female. But in the second half, page after page of figures was completely blotted out with India ink. Peter jumped to his feet and held the pages against the light so that everyone could see visible, under the ink, the outlines of female figures, now seated cross-legged in the traditional lotus position, now with legs spread apart. Peter counted aloud. “One … two … three—” until he reached a triumphant “—eleven!” There must have been a dozen more pages with female illustrations, but only eleven had been blotted out.
One for each strangling.
In a bureau drawer Delaney found half a dozen men’s scarves and ties tightly knotted together. In another they came upon a note pad with penciled sketches of apartment buildings, and on other pages, drawings of apartment interiors. One was a bathroom. An X had been drawn over the tub. Victim Jane Sullivan had been found in a tub. Another showed a living room and hall—the X was in the hall. Anna Slesers had been found in the hall of her apartment. Another scene showed a bedroom, an X on the bed, near the headboard. Mary Sullivan had been found propped against the headboard.
When Soshnick first set eyes on O’Brien he thought, Oh, Peter, you’re way off here! What has this poor trembling little shoe salesman got to do with the stranglings? O’Brien’s diary had made him even more doubtful. But—the eleven figures; and now all this …
The landlady appeared as they were leaving. Yes, this roomer was an odd one. She had taken the house over some months before and the previous owner, a woman, had warned her about O’Brien: “Never let yourself be alone with him.” She herself knew little about him except that he never used the mattress—“I guess he sleeps on the floor, he must have a bad back”—and that he took showers with his shoes on. “Did you ever hear the like?” she demanded. “Wearing your shoes?” She had complained repeatedly that the metal cleats in his heels scratched the bathtub enamel, but Mr. O’Brien did not change his habits.
Peter, the man who had said, “He love shoes! He love shoes!” looked sharply at the others. “He the one,” he said.
O’Brien’s questioning at the Mental Health Center occupied the next two afternoons. First Soshnick alone questioned him, then Bottomly, Soshnick, and Peter, who was introduced as “Dr. Spitz,” a Dutch psychologist. (The name was chosen in recognition of Peter’s insistence on the Strangler’s sharp, “spitzy” nose.)
It was a sad experience for everyone concerned.
O’Brien, with a hospital psychiatrist on hand, sat down on the edge of his bed, trembling most of the time, turning earnestly first to one and then the other as they interrogated him. He did not have to answer questions if he did not wish to, he was told. He could have a lawyer if he wanted one. No, he said, why should he need a lawyer? He was ready to tell them what they wished to know.
Why had he written the letter to the Nursing School, Bottomly asked.
O’Brien explained that it was the last of many attempts he had made to meet a Catholic girl. Ten years before he had joined the Correy Club in Cincinnati, conducted by the Franciscan Fathers. It was a social correspondence club. Later, he joined the Scientific Marriage Foundation Club in Indiana, headed by Dr. Frank Crane; then the Boston College Catholic Marriage Club. None worked out for him. One club last August sent him the name of a nurse in Connecticut. He took a bus there, lunched once with her, and never saw her again. Once a woman came to Boston and telephoned him to meet her in her hotel room at eight o’clock in the evening. �
�I didn’t like that, so I didn’t keep the appointment.” He finally wrote the Nursing Home, giving as reference Dr. Wright, Cardinal Cushing’s physician, because Dr. Wright once treated him for an ear ailment. He had had many operations for mastoid.
Yes, he had sold shoes, off and on for years. Nurses’ shoes, women’s orthopedic shoes. Only last January 7 he took a job in a shoe store but they dismissed him after half a day’s work.
Peter interrupted. “You was fired because you have trouble with lady. When you fitted lady’s shoe, she crossed legs—like this—and you get excited. You could not control yourself. That’s why you fired.”
“Well, I wasn’t very comfortable, I guess,” O’Brien said. He stopped. “Please, may I have a glass of water. My mouth is dry.” He was given the water. “It wasn’t that I wanted to do anything wrong, it’s just that it was a new experience for me.”
“You never get blackout when you see women with legs crossed?” Peter demanded.
“I don’t recall anything like that, no.”
Peter asked, “Tom, that fat monk with glasses, why he not like you, so you quit?”
Both Bottomly and Soshnick glanced at “Dr. Spitz.” There had been no mention anywhere of a “fat monk with glasses.”
“Oh, you mean the Trappist monk?” said Tom. “Well, the life there was very difficult, my ear hurt—”
Peter took another tack. “Do you know you have lost a button when you go into apartment to sell shoes to lady?”
“Lost a button?” O’Brien seemed completely puzzled.
“Yes, she invite you in for coffee, you go in, you lost button from jacket of suit. Right?”
No, no, said O’Brien. He had never been invited into a lady’s apartment. He had never sold apartment to apartment—only store to store. When he lost his job January 7, he tried selling a line of shoes to hospitals and stores, but failed to make a single sale in the entire month.
The Boston Strangler Page 14