“Yes, I am, ma’am,” said Steve.
“I made a special novena. I prayed for a sign to tell me who the Strangler is, and the other night I woke up and a ball of fire was flying through my room writing out the name Achilles on the ceiling.”
Steve asked, “Well, what did your priest have to say about it?”
“You damn fool, what’s the priest have to do with this?” she demanded. “He’s not looking for the Strangler!”
“But, lady,” Steve protested weakly, “if it’s a miracle don’t you think you ought to have it verified by the priest?”
“Oh!” said Mrs. Miller, and hung up.
Steve checked. How had Beverly Samans obtained her position singing in the choir of the Second Unitarian Church? In the autumn of 1962 Mary Vivien, the organist and musical director, asked the conservatory to recommend candidates. One of the names sent to her was Beverly Samans. Another was Pietro Achilles.
The two sisters had been right. Beverly and Pietro Achilles knew each other. They had auditioned together on October 4, 1962, at the church. Beverly had obviously known Achilles before: when he entered she walked up to him—they had angry words—“They were both tense,” Miss Vivien reported to Steve—and when Beverly walked away she was noticeably upset.
Miss Vivien had decided immediately to hire Beverly, who had a lovely voice. Although she had been ready to hire Achilles to sing with her, in view of Beverly’s obvious dislike of the man she chose another candidate.
Further investigation by Steve disclosed that Achilles, a bachelor, had once told a friend how he hated his “terribly overbearing” mother.
Stephen Delaney returned to his office and wrote his notes carefully. Achilles had a cottage just outside Rockport, in Gloucester. Although Joann Graff did not spend Friday night, November 22, the night before her murder, in Rockport, she had visited Rockport that evening with a fellow worker. Achilles knew Beverly Samans and had reason to bear her a personal grudge. In casual dress Achilles invariably affected ascots; and for whatever significance it had, an ascot bought by Pat Delmore, Mary Sullivan’s roommate, as a gift for a boyfriend, had been slashed into three parts and flushed down the toilet in her apartment the day of the murder. On that day, too, cigarette butts—Salems—had been found crushed out on an ash tray near her body. Neither Mary nor her roommates smoked Salems. Pietro Achilles did.
Delaney asked himself, Could these two excitable sisters have stumbled upon an important lead? But a ball of fire writing across the ceiling … a grinning man clawing at the air with red gloves … pink-powdered surgeon’s gloves popping out of a pocket …?
He turned to Phil DiNatale, busy writing at the adjoining desk, and spoke his thoughts aloud: “Boy, we must be running scared—” Yet he marked Achilles down for additional investigation and filled out a request, to be sent to the proper authorities, for Achilles’ immigration record.
As for Phil, he only shook his head at Delaney and continued working on his own report. A month before he had gone to investigate a tip turned in by Mrs. Marjorie L. Spearing, a housewife, of 28 Webster Place. An attractive woman in her thirties, Mrs. Spearing appeared quite nervous when Phil arrived. She apologized for telephoning the Attorney General’s office, but citizens had been asked to cooperate. For some time, she had been hearing disturbing noises outside her apartment. She thought nothing of them until her attention was attracted by one of her neighbors, an athletic young salesman. “He really acts quite odd at times,” she told Phil. “He always smells of shaving lotion—not that that’s anything to hold against a man,” she hastened to add, “but so many times when my husband and I go out, we see him standing at his window behind a curtain, peering out at people.” One afternoon when she was doing laundry in the basement, her neighbor entered so silently—“on tiptoes”—that she almost screamed when she looked up to discover him watching her. But he spoke quite normally, they exchanged a few pleasantries, and he walked to the door. He could not open it, whereupon he turned to her and said sharply, “You’ve locked me in!” She was a little upset, hurried to the door herself—and had no trouble opening it. It hadn’t been locked at all.
Then about nine o’clock the night of January 4—she knew the hour because she and her husband were returning from the wake of a relative—as they were about to enter their building, the front door burst open and her neighbor, his eyes wild, carrying a brown briefcase, rushed out, jumped into his car, and roared away.
“I just shivered,” she told Phil. “I turned to my husband and I remember my exact words: ‘If there was a strangling today, I’ll bet he’s the man the police should look for.’”
Next morning she opened her newspaper—and there were the headlines—Mary Sullivan, a nineteen-year-old girl, strangled! She did not know what to think. One day recently when she went out to shop, the salesman’s car was parked at the curb. On impulse she peeked in. On the dashboard where a small religious statue of the Virgin usually stood, there was now a small bear, standing on his hind legs, its arms up in a strangling position. She finally decided she would have no peace until she reported him. “I don’t know whether it means anything,” she said, “but I read that some people believe the Strangler was not after Mary but one of her roommates—and one of her roommates came from Malden. So does this man. And his actions that day …!”
Phil asked, “What else can you tell me about him?”
Mrs. Spearing rubbed her fingers agitatedly. “He’s quite charming when he smiles. But at other times his eyes seem to glare and when he’s angry they’re like an insane person’s.” She was also troubled because he told her he attended night school in order to become a state trooper, and everyone knew, she said, that there are no state trooper night schools.
Phil had dutifully taken down her information—she was certainly in a state, he thought, or she wouldn’t be so upset over what was probably a miniature Smokey the Bear on the man’s dashboard—but he wrote his report and turned it in to Bottomly. A check on the salesman produced nothing suspicious. Now, a month later, Phil was adding a final paragraph:
Mrs. Emily Powers of 27 Maplewood Street reported she was cleaning the Venetian blinds in her kitchen about 9 o’clock this A.M. when she looked out to see a woman opening a third floor window across the street in the building at No. 28 Webster Street. Mrs. Powers reports she saw the woman open the window about a foot high, stick her head through, wiggle her body forward until she pushed herself all the way through the opening, and then drop head first to the ground. Woman identified as Mrs. Marjorie Spearing, 34, dead on arrival. Husband says wife has been suffering nervous breakdown for the past two months over the stranglings. Husband said her doctor has been trying to convince Mrs. Spearing to go to a hospital. She was supposed to have an appointment with the doctor this afternoon.
Before the Strangler was finished, Phil thought, how many victims would there be whom he had never even touched?
* Dr. Blume discovered that most of the letters—fully half of them were anonymous—came from women, many of whom had a homosexual turn of mind and were given to elaborate sexual fantasies. Often a sentence read, “I’m sure I know who the Strangler is. He came to my apartment, he looked strangely at me …” As Dr. Blume interpreted it, these writers nourished a subconscious wish that the Strangler would call on them. What Dr. Blume hoped for, above all, was that the Strangler himself might be compelled to write—and give himself away by his calligraphy.
* Mrs. Callahan emphatically denied she had had any intimate relationship with Dr. Shaw.
14
For nearly a year, even before he had been transferred to Bottomly’s investigating squad, Stephen Delaney had been quietly following a middle-aged Finnish dishwasher with the growing conviction that this strange, taciturn man, ignored by everyone, could be the Strangler. With every murder the man, who will be known here as Carl Virtanen, looked more and more the part.
Virtanen had interested Delaney since a late October afternoon in 1962, when five stra
nglings had been recorded. Delaney was about to leave the Lower Basin Police Station when he glanced out the window to see an arresting sight: a well-dressed, middle-aged man, complete to soft hat, white shirt and neatly tied tie, business suit and gray topcoat, racing at top speed, his coattails flying behind him, along the grassy Esplanade that borders the Charles River. As Delaney watched, the man suddenly veered off and ran up a catwalk. He stood there for a minute, looking down, both hands clutching his head, as if in absolute despair. Was the man about to jump and try to kill himself? Then he wheeled, ran down the catwalk, and began racing as swiftly in the direction from which he came, which would bring him near the station house. Delaney, then a patrolman in uniform, dashed out and headed him off. “What’s the matter, fellow?” he asked, seizing his arm.
“Nothing, nothing, let me go!” He spoke in a foreign accent.
Delaney kept his grip. Though the man was tall, broad-shouldered, with a fine physique, he must have been at least in his forties, and was now pale and gasping for breath. To let him rush on might mean a heart attack. “Why don’t you come in and sit down for a minute?” Delaney suggested, leading him, still protesting, to a bench inside the station house.
The other finally caught his breath. “I was running for exercise, that’s all,” he said. Then he burst out, “I have to run. I have terrible things on my mind. If you only knew what I have on my mind! If I run, I forget them.” He jumped to his feet, impatient to leave.
Delaney had no right to hold him but before he left he learned his name, his address—a rooming house—and that he was a Finn. Delaney watched him hurry out into the street, then dart into the North Station. Was he going to jump in front of a train? But a moment later Virtanen reappeared and began to lope, like a long-distance runner, down Canal Street.
Something ticked in Delaney’s memory. Anna Slesers, he had read, had worked as a seamstress in a shop in Canal Street. What “terrible things” had this man on his mind? Anna Slesers had come from Latvia; Virtanen from Finland. Vaguely, Delaney recalled from his high school geography that the two countries were near each other. Might not Latvians and Finns seek out each other in this country? Might Virtanen have known Anna? Although Delaney was eager to get home—today was his twin daughters’ birthday and a party was waiting for him—he decided he must follow Virtanen.
It was an arduous task. The man ran here, there, stopped; once, after nearly half an hour of steady trotting, he sprang into a cafeteria, had a cup of coffee, talked vigorously to himself, pounding on the table several times, then leaped to his feet and shot out into the street again. Once he turned, caught a glimpse of Delaney, and began darting into side alleys, ducking into one entrance of a department store and out the other, redoubling on his tracks, until Delaney lost him altogether. What’s this man afraid of? Delaney thought all the way home, meanwhile wondering how he could explain to his family why he was two hours late.
Between work and classes Delaney checked on Virtanen and the death of Anna Slesers. The dishwasher was a bachelor who lived alone. He moved frequently from one rooming house to another. At work, in a popular Cambridge restaurant, he was known as quiet and industrious, having nothing to do with anyone else. But early in June 1962 he had been ordered to leave a men’s hotel in which he was living because of his odd behavior. He had refused to allow the maid to clean his room; wherever she looked, she reported, were newspapers, piled in closets, piled under the bed, in the bathroom; even his clothes, instead of hanging in the closet, were tightly rolled up in newspapers.
After he left, the maid found that Virtanen had spent hours deliberately tearing hundreds of pages of newspapers into shreds-small quarter-inch strips, no more than an inch long—and piling them several feet high in the bathroom. He had taken every bar of soap and as painstakingly shredded it.
When he left the hotel Virtanen chose a rooming house four blocks from Anna Slesers and three blocks from Sophie Clark.
On June 14 Anna Slesers was strangled.
Virtanen worked nights, which meant he was free to move about the city during most of the day. At what time of day had Anna Slesers actually been strangled? The original investigation had placed it in the afternoon, as late as 6:10 P.M., when the interior decorator who lived directly below her apartment had been awakened by loud bumping noises upstairs.
The more Delaney checked on the Slesers case, however, the more convinced he became that she had been murdered early in the day. Studying her casebook, he found that the autopsy report showed little food in her stomach (could she have gone nearly a whole day without eating?); she was known as an immaculate housekeeper, yet her kitchen wastebasket was full and her daughter, coming for her burial clothes, had found the bed unmade (would Mrs. Slesers not have emptied her wastebasket and made her bed before going out for the day?); her dentures had been found soaking in a glass of water, as if left there overnight, and the mail, delivered at 10:30 A.M. that Thursday, was still in her mailbox when Juris Slesers had called for his mother just before 7 P.M.
If Anna Slesers had died in the morning, Delaney concluded, Virtanen could have been her murderer.
It was during the period of Anna Slesers’ strangling that Virtanen began to act unpredictably at work. He threw trays about, and accused fellow workers of insulting him, of telling him “filthy stories.” Time and time again he had to be calmed down. Generally, Delaney knew from experience, dishwashers could not be depended upon; they were lonely men, usually unmarried, often mentally ill, frequently alcoholic, tending to drift from one job to another. But for a year and a half Virtanen had been a quiet, steady employee. Now he was a different man. At one time he turned and without explanation dumped a bucket of swill on a worker next to him. Because of the ease and swiftness with which he moved—because of his tremendous chest and arm development—others thought he might have been a professional boxer at one time, and they hesitated to antagonize him.
On June 20, he failed to show up for work. Usually he would telephone when he was ill; now nothing was heard from him until July 5, when he arrived at his usual time, donned his apron, and without a word began washing dishes as though he had never been gone.
In that interim Nina Nichols and Helen Blake had been strangled.
Then, in August, came Ida Irga and Jane Sullivan, on December 5, Sophie Clark, and on the last day of 1962, the discovery of Patricia Bissette’s body in her apartment not far away. Letting his schoolwork slide, through January, February, and March of 1963, Delaney spent every day off following and checking on this strange troubled man whose absences were timed so suspiciously, and who lived so near the victims. He discovered that Virtanen maintained a daily routine. Since he worked nights, he rose late, around 10 A.M., walked briskly on the Esplanade, went to the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, read newspapers until 3 P.M., walked briskly back along the Esplanade, returned to his room, ate, napped until 7 P.M., and then in the early darkness walked along the Esplanade again, until it was time for work.
With warmer weather Delaney, who had been on guard duty at the Bunker Hill monument (a job which allowed him to study), was transferred to the police boat patrolling the Charles River. Repeatedly, as it cruised along the river banks, he saw the familiar figure of Virtanen, so easily recognizable—the man wore his hat on the back of his head—striding on the Esplanade.
On May 8 Beverly Samans was found murdered in Cambridge.
Delaney began to theorize. Beverly had attended Boston University. A natural route for her to take to and from classes would be along the Esplanade where Virtanen walked several times a day. She sang in the choir of the Second Unitarian Church of Boston. The church was in Copley Square, near the library—the very library Virtanen visited each day. Could not Virtanen on his daily walks have seen Beverly on her way to school on weekdays or on her way to the church on Sundays?
This is too big for me, thought Delaney. He was a policeman and homicides were the province of detectives. He gave Carl Virtanen’s name to Boston Homicide
to be checked. They reported that Virtanen had no police record, but had been a mental patient some years before in Medfield State Hospital. “He’s a harmless kook,” a detective said. “Mind if I check a little more on him?” Delaney asked. “Go ahead,” said the other. “It’s one less headache for us.”
Medfield State Hospital.
Beverly Samans had done rehabilitation work at Medfield State Hospital.
Delaney dug doggedly though the records.
Yes, Carl Virtanen had been a mental patient at Medfield in 1955 and 1956. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. He had been committed because he threatened to kill his mother.
And more—
In 1957, Virtanen’s mother had been taken to Massachusetts General Hospital for gall bladder surgery. She spoke only Finnish and her physician had to interpret for her. She was returned from surgery to her own room at 8 P.M. After visiting hours that night she was found half out of bed, in convulsions. “She was trying to tell us something,” a nurse told Delaney. “But we couldn’t understand her language and she went into a coma and never regained consciousness.”
Delaney, in the course of days, finally found a sister of Virtanen’s living in Boston. There was no charge against her brother, he assured her, but since Carl lived in the Beacon Hill area and had been a mental patient and since the police were checking such persons, “We just want to know something about him.”
“I can’t tell you much,” she said. “Carl never got along well with me—or with Mother. But don’t take that wrong,” she hastened to add, and her next words set the little hairs on the back of Steve Delaney’s neck bristling. “He loved Mother. He was with her when she died.”*
The Boston Strangler Page 22