As it turned out, no lie detector was needed. In the interrogation room, surrounded by detectives, Pennacchio suddenly blurted, “All right, I’ll tell you everything. I did it.” While a police stenographer took down his words, he described the murder, step by step: how he had knocked on Beverly’s door just before midnight of May 5 (she had returned home around eleven o’clock, police knew), how she had let him in, how he had talked with her while she typed her thesis …
Detective Paul Cloran of Cambridge police questioned him:
“Did you stab Beverly Samans?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“With a knife.”
“Where did you get the knife?”
“In the kitchen.”
“How many times did you stab her?”
“About fifteen—I’m not sure.”
“With which hand?”
“My right.”
“Where was the body facing?”
“Toward the window.”
“What did you put in her mouth?”
“A rag.”
“Anything else?”
“I put a cloth over her mouth.”
“Did you get blood on you?”
“Yes, my pants and shirt.”
“What did you do with them?”
“I threw them into an ash barrel behind the building.”
He described the apartment, and what she wore, and how he let himself out, and where he went.
Then Pennacchio, small, dark, intense, signed his confession and sat back, exhausted.
None of it was true. He had imagined it all.
Because he had confessed, he was booked for murder but certain details he told police made it clear that he was lying, and Cambridge Judge A. Edward Viola refused to issue a murder complaint. He was held instead on the original charge of lewd and lascivious behavior. Pennacchio was mentally retarded, with the intelligence of a fifteen-year-old boy, said his lawyer. The sheer suggestibility in the situation—that detectives could think he had done it—might have led him to place himself in the Samans apartment and even to see himself going through the act of murder.
Not long after, Pennacchio eliminated himself forever as a suspect. While swimming with two teen-age girls at Pleasure Bay in South Boston, he attempted a high dive from a bridge. He struck his head and drowned.
A few days after Pennacchio’s arrest, police seized a twenty-nine-year-old man who wore horn-rimmed spectacles, a carefully trimmed moustache, and a three-quarter length jacket. His black hair was shiny with pomade. He lived in a shanty on Brownsville Street four blocks from Helen Blake, the nurse who had been strangled in Lynn on June 30, 1962. A patrolman, looking for stolen bicycles, had come upon two suitcases hidden behind the shanty. They were stuffed with newspaper clippings of the eleven stranglings. In one a diary was found, a clipping pasted on each page. Under one clipping reporting Anna Slesers’ murder on June 14, 1962, was written in ink, “I took a long walk today with my beloved Anna.” Under Helen Blake’s, “Lunched with dear Helen today.” Under Evelyn Corbin’s, “Goodbye, I’m a gone goose.”
The news flashed through Boston that a prime suspect had been caught. Reporters crowded into Lynn Police Headquarters to question Bottomly, hurriedly called to the scene. Not only was there the damning evidence of clippings and diary; the man’s history was almost too “good” to be true. He lived in Lynn (Helen Blake); had recently roomed in the Beacon Hill area (Ida Irga, Mary Sullivan), as well as in the Back Bay area (Anna Slesers, Sophie Clark, Patricia Bissette); he had lived briefly near Nina Nichols, and again near Jane Sullivan. He had worked in a bookstore in Cambridge (Beverly Samans), and—this really interested the investigators—held a job as a counterman in a doughnut shop in Salem. No one had forgotten that the day Evelyn Corbin was strangled in her Salem apartment, a fresh doughnut had been found on the fire escape outside her kitchen window. To top this formidable array of facts—only lacking was a tie-in to Joann Graff’s murder in nearby Lawrence—the man had worked as an orderly in Lynn Hospital, where Helen Blake was then associated as a practical nurse.
It meant another twenty-four hours of intense excitement—then deflation.
It was nothing, nothing at all, Bottomly and Police Chief John Donnelly of Lynn had to announce at a press conference. The man was a “writer of sorts”; his diary was fiction, an attempt to work out his own sexual fantasies; he claimed to belong to the American Nazi Party, which had some membership in that area; but so far as could be determined, he was harmless. The reporters were free to hasten back to cover the major story of the hour—the arrival in Boston from Toronto of the newly married Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, an event that had caused a near-riot at Logan International Airport. The writer from Lynn became merely one more page, checked in and checked out, in the growing Suspect file on the second floor of the State House.
When Bottomly left Lynn to return to his office that day he did not know that one of his most indefatigable volunteers had just returned from an out-of-town mission also dealing with the Strangler. That was Mrs. Margaret Callahan, who was just then marching furiously into her apartment after a frustrating trip to Manchester, New Hampshire, to alert local police that her neighbor, Dr. Lawrence Shaw, was there on a “skiing vacation.”
In these past months Mrs. Callahan had been more diligent than ever, as entries in her journal revealed:
In November, 1963, she had made a quick trip to New York to see Dr. Brussel after reading his analysis of the Strangler that appeared in the October 1963 issue of Pageant magazine. Dr. Brussel, she told friends later, suggested she take her material to the Boston authorities, but she knew how far that would get her. Nevertheless, she had been able to persuade Sergeant Leo Davenport of the Cambridge police to call on her on December 16 to discuss Beverly Samans’ murder. Beverly’s apartment in Cambridge was only a block from Harvard Square; and had she herself not followed Dr. Shaw to his favorite bookstore in Harvard Square and watched him purchase volumes on crime, sex, perversion, and bloody acts of murder, including even cannibalism? Not long before he boastfully showed her a Christmas card he received in December 1962 from a girl living on East Eighty-ninth Street in New York City—an address, Mrs. Callahan emphasized, that was practically around the corner from 57 East Eighty-eighth Street, where Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, two New York career girls, had been so depravedly stabbed to death on August 28, 1963. As Beverly Samans had been stabbed to death only three months before.
When Sergeant Davenport called on her, Mrs. Callahan made it a social rather than a professional occasion. She greeted him barefoot, in a colorful muumuu, her hair piled, queenly fashion, atop her head. She served him coffee, and only after he was comfortable in a deep easy chair did she seat herself cross-legged on the floor, arrange her voluminous costume about her, and begin to read from her material on Dr. Shaw, now almost as thick as a book. “Don’t you dare ask me any questions,” she warned. “I’ve spent too much time collecting this material to be interrupted. You just be quiet and listen.” But Sergeant Davenport was impatient, and as she complained to friends later, “oversecure and arrogant,” and finally she showed him out with a sharp warning that if the police were not interested she would sell her material on Dr. Shaw to the Birch Society.
On January 3, 1964, she telephoned Lieutenant Sherry to predict, on the basis of Dr. Shaw’s strange behavior the last few days, that another strangling was imminent. It was small comfort for her to say, “I told you so,” when Mary Sullivan’s body was found twenty-four hours later. On February 8 she reached Assistant Attorney General Bottomly, who invited her to bring her data to his office. She preferred instead, she told him, that he send his detectives to her home where they could look it over carefully. Two days later, on February 10, Sergeant Leo Martin and another detective visited her. They wanted to take her material to be copied and that she would not permit: they left, obviously annoyed. Then Dr. Shaw went off to New Hampshire and she dropped everything to trail him
there and back.
Now, with still more evidence, Mrs. Callahan sat down at her telephone and methodically called Life magazine; then Time magazine; then Newsweek; then Look.
Then she put in another call for Mr. Bottomly, but found herself repeatedly shunted to lesser persons in his office. She hung up in disgust.
Was there nothing a conscientious citizen could do?
She began telephoning neighbors.
In the Attorney General’s office Bill Manning typed a brief memo. It was about Mrs. Ann Johnson (which is not her real name).
A Mrs. Ann Johnson called. She lives in the same apt. bldg. as Dr. Lawrence Shaw. She reports that most of the people in and around the building believe him insane. He, according to her, has an amazingly high interest in cannibalism. He taught at Carnegie Institute when Sophie Clark went there, and Mrs. J. believes he taught Sophie. He is reported to be associated with the Golden Age Society and would therefore “get to know these older ladies that way.”
This communication, Manning added with some perplexity, was only the most recent of several—both telephone calls and anonymous letters—received from persons who named the same Dr. Lawrence Shaw as the Strangler.
For Dr. Shaw, the moment of truth came soon after. When Mrs. Callahan had first sent in his name the police made a discreet inquiry. Her description of Dr. Shaw as a man of odd habits, with few friends, was not borne out by his hospital colleagues and Mrs. Callahan’s accusations were filed away. Now, however, her material had become so formidable, her dossier so carefully documented, her complaints so clearly confirmed from other sources, that a full-scale investigation began, in the course of which Dr. Shaw was asked if he would take a lie-detector test. It was purely voluntary, the police said. He was free to refuse.
Dr. Shaw, obviously a very harassed man, was only too willing. He opened his life to the police. He told questioners that he had been having an affair for some months with Mrs. Callahan, which he ended in the summer of 1962. That was just before the Anna Slesers strangling. Rejected, humiliated, vengeful—who knew how such a woman’s mind worked?—Mrs. Callahan had managed, apparently, to convince not only her niece, but virtually every other tenant in the building that he was the strangler. He had been living an absolute nightmare: neighbors spying on him, making notes on his visitors—he was a bachelor, and enjoyed feminine companionship—following him when he left the building, telephoning each other when they saw him stop in the street to chat with a friend, keeping vigil in their cars outside his office, even trailing him on his skiing trips—and Mrs. Callahan masterminding it all!
There was little to be done with Mrs. Margaret Callahan,* Bottomly knew. Her lawyer had advised him that “Nothing you could say could satisfy my client in her present mental condition.” But a careful letter was sent to Mrs. Ann Johnson:
… As a result of our investigation you may be assured that Dr. Lawrence Shaw has never been connected with the Carnegie Institute in any way. He was never a member of its faculty. He was never a teacher of Sophie Clark. You may be assured that the Director of the Golden Age Society advises that Dr. Lawrence Shaw is not connected with that group in any official capacity and his name does not appear in any of the groups’ rosters or other listings of individuals informally connected with the group. Further inquiries have been made with the active groups of the Golden Age Society and none of the members interviewed have any knowledge of Dr. Shaw.
It was not possible to develop any evidence which supported your allegation that Dr. Shaw has an amazing interest in cannibalism …
And, because he was dealing with the public and no lead from whatever source dared be overlooked, Bottomly added the paragraph with which he signed every letter of this nature—by now he must have dictated nearly five hundred of them:
Please be assured that either this Department or any appropriate local police department will give immediate reply on any information you may be able to provide in connection with the investigation of criminal activities.
The door had to remain open. Yet only two days before, a, former attorney had submitted the name of a man he considered a suspect. The address on the letterhead was one of distinction, the letter couched in such precise language, the arguments advanced such as to merit immediate attention. Bottomly’s letter inviting the writer to call at once crossed a second note from him:
“Dear Mr. Bottomly,” he wrote. “In my previous letter I fear I was derelict in failing to mention that I was recently assaulted by a company of Boston firemen and suffered a badly injured right ankle. I regret, however, that I found it necessary to kill each and everyone of them with my Berretta automatic. I sued for damages but I have not received the court award of some one hundred eighty million dollars as yet. Respectfully yours …”
Bottomly looked at it ruefully, and passed it on.
There was no investigator who was not involved in similar episodes. One dared not separate the plausible from the implausible, for often what was dismissed as absolute nonsense—wild suspicions, elaborate hypotheses created out of hysteria and sexual fears—turned out to confound them by their relevancy.
The letter from the owner of the Berretta automatic still waited to be filed when attention suddenly centered on an Italian music teacher who might have played Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust. Slender, dapper, faultlessly tailored, with compelling black eyes, he will be called here Pietro Achilles. Two elderly sisters (who will be known here as Mrs. Mary Baker and Mrs. Alice Miller) had worn out their welcome not only with the police but the newspapers by their repeated calls about him. According to Mrs. Baker, in 1961, Mr. Achilles, who was about fifty, had been hired to give piano lessons to her two nieces, daughters of her sister Alice. Achilles had all but cast a spell on her when he met her; he told her that if he had not been a pianist, he would have loved being a doctor. He could hypnotize people (she could well believe this); he enjoyed doing harmful things to his mother, he told her; he saw great beauty in a broom, and, sooner or later, was going to write a book about a broom.
On one occasion, on Thursday, August 10, 1961, at 12:45 P.M., when Achilles thought himself alone with Mrs. Miller in her house, Mrs. Baker, from another room, saw him come up behind her sister. Mrs. Baker put it graphically in a letter: “He had on red plastic gloves with an archery of black seams through them, he was grinning, and he stretched out his hands clawing at the air as though he was about to strangle her. When she turned he immediately dropped his hands to his side. I walked into the room and said to Mr. Achilles, because I felt I had to talk to break the tension and fear, ‘Why don’t we get a recording of your voice? We understand you sing so well.’
“He said nothing but relaxed and began removing his red gloves. He pulled off the glove on his right hand and it had two snaps on the wrist. He put it into his jacket pocket and in that instant out popped the fingers of a surgical glove and part of the wrist. It was beige-shade rubber and somewhat transparent. Mrs. Miller and I both saw it, it was powdered inside with a pinkish powder. With a smile he pushed it back … He is a consummate actor. He once said, ‘Put a wig on me and I’m my mother.’ He has dressed as a woman and fooled everyone …”
The sisters had been telephoning police about Achilles and the murders for some time, but a quick check of him had disclosed nothing incriminating. They had since written the Boston Record American, and repeatedly telephoned every law enforcement official they could reach. One of the first notes on John Bottomly’s desk when he took over as coordinator months before was a memo reporting an urgent call from the sisters at 2 A.M. that morning. Now Stephen Delaney, to stop the avalanche of calls and letters, was assigned to placate them. He had twenty other names to check out that day but something had to be done about the two ladies.
Delaney, thirty-two, and appearing at least ten years younger, was a man of great tenacity. He had set his heart on becoming a criminologist. On evenings and days off he attended Boston University under the G.I. Bill of Rights, majoring in Sociology. Although he wa
s married and had eight children, with a ninth on the way, he took every available moment away from his family for the search.
Now, when he got on the telephone to Mrs. Miller, his ears rang. “I don’t think much of the Boston police,” she began angrily. “I’ve been calling and calling. Now you’d better listen to me. Have you checked Rockport where Mr. Achilles has a summer cottage?”
“No, we haven’t,” said Steve. “Why?”
“Why? Because Joann Graff spent her last night in Rockport!”
Steve knew nothing about that. He made a note to look into it. Mrs. Miller went on sharply, “And you should have checked the conservatory, because I saw Beverly Samans there when Pietro Achilles was there. Those two knew each other.”
The name of Pietro Achilles had never appeared in the Beverly Samans file. Steve asked, “What makes you so suspicious about this man Achilles?”
Mrs. Miller could hardly control herself. “Doesn’t it mean anything to you that he sees great beauty in a broom, that he wants to write a book about a broom?”
“Why should that be important?”
“You fool, you fool, you know why a broom is important! Because the Strangler used it—”
Steve was surprised. The details on the assault on Mary Sullivan had never appeared in the newspapers, although it was common knowledge in the street. He heard Mrs. Miller’s voice, “And he’s just as the psychiatrists say the Strangler would be—a loner who hates women, who came from a South European background … Oh!” She literally stamped her foot at the other end. “I tell you, young man, I’ve been making novenas and praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary—” She stopped. “Are you a Catholic?”
The Boston Strangler Page 21