The Boston Strangler

by Frank, Gerold;

  10. About noon Richard Chicofsky, manager of a grocery store at 48 Charles Street, a few doors from Mary’s building, saw a girl taking things out of a small blue car. She appeared to be having trouble with the car; the hood was up.

  11. Just before 1 P.M., Sims Murray, a neighbor, out walking his Afghan dog, saw a blue car parked on Charles Street. A girl carrying a bundle of record albums tied with a string was about to enter 44A Charles Street, and a man, whom he could not remember distinctly, was opening the door for her. The difficulty was that Murray, who had glimpsed them for only half a minute as he turned the corner, could not remember whether this was Wednesday, January 1, the day Mary moved into her apartment, or Saturday, January 4, the day she was strangled.

  12. At 2:50, a schoolteacher living on the second floor of 2 Pruner Street, which faces the rear of 44A Charles Street, was standing at her bay window looking down into the street, waiting for her escort to pick her up at three o’clock. It was too cold to wait outside. She happened to lift her head and saw the left profile of a man framed in a third-floor window of 44A. She saw him quite clearly; the street was about fifty feet wide, the sun was shining into the window, he stood motionless, a tall man with reddish-brown hair, looking straight ahead of him. She guessed he must be standing in the hall waiting for an apartment door to open. She thought to herself, “What am I doing, staring like this at a strange man!” looked down into the street, saw her friend’s car arrive, and hurried downstairs.

  It was not a hallway window. It was the bathroom window of Mary Sullivan’s apartment. The man she saw was staring at himself in the mirror.

  At 6:10 Pam and Pat returned from work. They had stopped to shop and their arms were full of packages. Mary’s car was parked in the street; she must be home. But there was no answering buzz when they pressed the bell downstairs. Pam managed to fish out her keys and open the downstairs door. The two girls trudged upstairs. The apartment door was locked. Pam knocked and shouted without avail.

  “She must be sleeping,” she said, and unlocked the door. The lights in the hall and bathroom were both on. Mary was not on the day couch. Pam glanced into the bedroom. In the gloom she made out Mary, sitting up in Pat’s bed as though she had fallen asleep against the headboard. “She must be sleeping,” she said again, when she came back to the kitchen, “but it’s a funny way to be sleeping.” And why had Mary taken Pat’s bed? She removed her coat and hat, vaguely troubled. “Come here, Pat.” Both girls tiptoed to the bedroom and peeped in. They could make out very little. They returned to the kitchen. They looked at each other, suddenly frightened.

  “Call her,” Pam suggested. “No, you call her,” the other said. Pam called Mary’s name loudly, three or four times. Only silence. “Oh, really!” she exclaimed, angry at herself and Pat. She strode into the bedroom and switched on the light.

  It was then they stumbled into the dusk of busy Charles Street and called the police.

  Aside from the fact that 44A Charles Street and particularly Apartment 2 must have been busy as a bus station, what was one to make of all this? There were two additional, completely inexplicable facts. At 6:30 P.M. Friday, January 3, the day before Mary’s death, the telephone rang in the home of Mary’s parents in Hyannis.

  “Long distance calling for Mrs. John T. Sullivan,” said the operator. “This is Mrs. Sullivan,” said Mary’s mother, who had answered the phone. She heard the operator’s voice: “Sir, there’s your party.” Then silence. “Hello, hello,” said Mrs. Sullivan. She heard—it was unmistakably clear—someone breathing heavily into the telephone. But he uttered no word.

  “Hello! Can you hear me?” she shouted into the mouthpiece.

  Only heavy breathing for what seemed an interminable time, though Mrs. Sullivan repeated again and again, “Can you hear me? Hello! Hello! This is Mrs. Sullivan—”

  Then came a click. He had hung up.

  Mrs. Sullivan replaced the receiver. Bad connection? But the breathing was so distinct he might have been in the room with her. Would he not have called back immediately? A prank?

  Little more than twenty-four hours later, on Saturday night, only a few moments after the police had called to notify them of their daughter’s death, the telephone rang again in the Sullivan home. Again it was long distance, a person-to-person call, for Mrs. John T. Sullivan.

  The family was in a state of shock. Mary’s sixteen-year-old brother David answered the phone. “No,” he said to the operator, “Mrs. Sullivan can’t come to the telephone. Will he talk to anyone else?” He heard the operator say, “All right, sir, go ahead.” He listened, as had his mother the night before. There were no words spoken at the other end. He heard only a heavy breathing—and after several seconds, the click as the caller hung up.

  Wherever Mary had applied for a job, she had left her parents’ name, address, and telephone number in Hyannis. Was her murderer to be found among those who employed her, in the many places where she had sought jobs?

  The clues in hand were the telephone page, and for whatever value they had, the slashed ascot, the Salem cigarette butts, the metal washer.

  Who was the stranger whose voice Christopher Reid said he heard as he climbed the stairs to the apartment Friday, the stranger he imagined to be tall, with a protruding Adam’s apple, who was alone in the apartment with Mary the day before her death?

  Who was the man who was seen helping her with her car, in front of 44A Charles Street, the day of her death?

  Who was the man seen through the window of her bathroom on the day of her death at the hour that might well have been the very hour of her death?

  None of these had come forward to identify—and clear—themselves. If they were innocent, why should they not have done so?

  In an all-night cafeteria on Homosexual Row, Jim Mellon sat at a table along the wall, slowly disposing of a plate of ham and eggs.

  It was 10 P.M. The man for whom he waited each night had arrived only minutes before.

  He was short, thin, about forty-six, trying desperately to hold on to his youth, Mellon thought: the inch-and-a-half crepe rubber soles to make him appear taller, the iron-gray hair carefully pomaded, the face shaved to the quick, the clothes a little too sharp. Mellon had heard others call him “Jack.” Mellon, in his own mind, had dubbed him “The King of the Fags.” Years of patrolling the Public Gardens before teaming up with Phil DiNatale in a cruising car had given Mellon an almost unerring eye in picking out homosexuals.

  Now the detective was convinced that this powdered, elaborate man who sat at the same table in this cafeteria from ten to midnight dawdling over a tray of coffee and toast, and smoking innumerable cigarettes, played an important role in the homosexual community. Jack, Mellon had concluded—and he had discussed it with Lieutenant Tuney—was a traffic supervisor handling the busy flow of nightly homosexual activities in Boston. He served a purpose. Youths under eighteen could not be served at bars and had to turn to private parties if they wished to drink with friends. Mellon had seen boys, obviously homosexuals by their manner, enter the cafeteria, order a snack which they took to a table, then, before leaving, drop over to Jack’s table, chat a few minutes, sometimes jot down a note or two, and hurry off. Jack knew all that was going on each night in the city’s busy netherworld—its society of sexual deviates of both sexes, homosexuals, Lesbians, transvestites. Jack was a communications center. He told the boys and girls where the action was.

  Mellon had checked on him. Jack worked as a restorer of antique furniture. The first time Mellon had seen him, weeks before, had not been in the cafeteria, however. It had been, interestingly enough, in an antique shop whose name and number were listed in the first column of the telephone page resurrected from the thumbnail-size piece of charred paper found in Mary Sullivan’s bathroom.

  Were two separate lines of investigation beginning to converge, at last?

  Jim Mellon sat, and watched.

  * That possibility opened many doors. The detectives were now examining the liv
es of the Girls. What of the Old Women? Not their later years, but their youth. What secrets lay there? Who, out of their past, might have emerged now, years later, to render his insane judgment? It was discovered that one of the older victims at sixteen had won a beauty contest, at seventeen had borne an illegitimate child. But this line of investigation seemed going desperately—and cruelly—far afield. The fact was noted, but not pursued.

  16

  If the Mary Sullivan case was baffling, that of Beverly Samans, stabbed to death in Cambridge, was equally so because of the puzzling bypaths into which it led investigators. Not only had she been writing a thesis on homosexuality, but one of her best friends was a homosexual youth whom she had recently helped break off a relationship with another boy. Beverly’s own emotional problems had caused her to seek help from a therapist.

  Because her murder had the earmarks of a classical homosexual stabbing—wounds in throat and breast—Sergeant Davenport wondered whether she might have been killed by someone in her circle of friends who became enraged when he discovered she was using his private life as material for her thesis. Or it might have been another, a sexually abnormal, emotionally disturbed boy who thought himself in love with her, who wanted to prevent her from leaving Boston—and so centered his attack on her throat, because it was her voice that was taking her away. He might have stabbed her in that almost mathematically precise bull’s-eye pattern in her breast because her breast held a fetish significance for him. Sergeant Davenport spent hours talking with psychiatrists. Could Beverly have teased her killer—not necessarily on the night of her murder—by offering her breasts as a token, allowing him to fondle them, yet holding back the ultimate reward?

  One thing seemed certain. In no other case—not even Mary Sullivan’s—had a victim been surrounded by so many bizarre persons; some played a role in her life, others were simply part of the world in which she lived.

  Aside from the Indian student with his whips and quotations from Shakespeare, there were many others. One was a nineteen-year-old hospital orderly whose specialty it was to “cut open heads and bellies” for autopsies. The job description was his own. He had visited friends in Beverly’s building, 4 University Road. His friends reported that he spoke constantly about the stranglings. He denied killing Beverly. He had never known her, he said. As police questioned him, he toyed with a small silver pocket knife. Another was a husky, one-time Harvard student who made a practice, when a girl companion glanced away, of placing the tip of his lighted cigarette next to her ankle. She would jerk her foot away in pain and look down to discover a hole burned in her stocking and a blister forming on her leg. “Of course I’m not the Strangler,” he told police disdainfully. “But I am sadistic and girls from coast to coast bear my trademark.” The professor with whom Beverly was briefly involved—married, with a family—once suggested to her they commit hara-kiri together, because he saw no future for their love. “He’s out of his mind to suggest such a thing,” Beverly said to a friend. “I have a lot of things I want to live for. I’m not ready to die.” The professor was an odd man indeed: reports came to police that he would describe to listeners in detail the finer techniques of strangling, topping that off with a dissertation on the art of seduction.

  It was true that Beverly, as she complained, seemed to draw kooks to her. Sunday, May 5, only a few hours before her death, she told her friend Edith Scarcello, twenty-five, that she had received an invitation from a man to spend the next weekend as his house guest in the New Jersey nudist colony to which he belonged. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?” Beverly exclaimed. She thought it hilarious.

  If there were strange friends, there were also strange premonitions. On her twice-weekly visits—each Tuesday and Friday—to Medfield State Hospital to carry out field work with disturbed persons, she would be driven by Nicholas Thiesse, twenty-five, a married graduate student taking the same course. One morning, two months before her death, when he picked her up, she greeted him with, “Nick, I’m scared.”

  “What about?”

  “I’ve been receiving crank calls.” Someone had telephoned her two nights before explaining that he was a singer “and would like to get together to sing with me and when could he come over. I said, ‘Who are you?’ and he said, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ and hung up. He called me the next night, too, and I hung up on him this time because only a week before that some fellow called and said, ‘Bev, I want to talk to you about the Kinsey report.’ I didn’t know him and that frightened me.”

  Apparently, some kind of campaign was under way to annoy Beverly, and two other girls who often sang with her. All three had had their photographs in a newspaper advertisement announcing their appearance at a Palm Sunday service.

  First, one of the girls had received an obscene telephone call. A day later, the other girl’s phone rang. “Phyllis,” said an unfamiliar voice, “I want you to accommodate me. Ruth told me to call you because she said she couldn’t accommodate me, but that you could.” Phyllis, who knew nothing of Ruth’s call, assumed this might be someone wanting to take voice lessons.

  “Who is this?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know who it is,” the voice said teasingly. But Phyllis could not place it. Was it one of the boys in the orchestra? “Well, what is it you want?” she asked.

  As Phyllis told the story later, “He seemed hesitant. Then he finally told me what he wanted. I said, ‘Oh,’ and hung up.”

  In the following week the three girls were called again. They compared notes. Sometimes the voice was that of a young man, sometimes an older man. Was it a group, two or three fellows, setting up this inexplicable, frightening siege?

  Beverly was upset when she talked about it to Nick. At other times, in other ways, she seemed fatalistic. Once, discussing the stranglings on their drive to Medfield, Nick asked, “What would you do if the Strangler came knocking at your door?”

  “Nothing, I guess,” she said. “He won’t have a hard time getting in—my door lock isn’t good and I can’t lock my windows.”

  “Why don’t you get them fixed?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, if he really wants to get in, locks won’t keep him out.”

  Death had struck her at a crossroads in her life. She was trying to decide whether to continue rehabilitation counseling or “chuck it all” and devote herself to a singing career. Beverly had a promising mezzo-soprano voice; she was soloist every Sunday morning at the Second Unitarian Church, took weekly voice lessons, and participated in many operettas and concerts. A future seemed assured. But she was almost irresistibly drawn to emotionally troubled people. That had led her after graduation in 1959 from a music conservatory to take a job as a music therapist at Fernald School for Retarded Children. She left there in August 1962 to study for a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling at Boston University. This was the course that required field work with disturbed patients at Medfield, so that she found herself drawn in even deeper.

  Nor did Beverly make matters easy for herself. She continued her friendship with her former students at Fernald, in violation of institution rules, allowing them to drop in on weekends at her apartment to play the piano and talk over their problems. Friends warned her against this open house. These boys—some were over twenty—were disturbed,* and at least one was so infatuated with her that he had been taken out of Fernald and given a job as a hospital orderly in another town. “But these kids have no parents,” she would say. “Somebody’s got to help them.”

  Beverly told herself she was really giving therapy to her homosexual friends, and in any event, gaining data for her thesis. She realized it was not a healthy situation. “I’ve got to stop this,” she would say. “I’m fed up with mothering mentally crippled men. It drains me.…” And then she would lament, “Where can I find a man who knows how to treat a woman as a woman?” Yet one of her closest friends was a twenty-three-year-old student who, after dating her several times, said suddenly, “I’ve got to tell you something you’ll ha
te me for—you’ll never go out with me again—I’m homosexual.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve known it almost from the first time we went out.”

  “And you don’t mind?” he asked anxiously. “You’ll still go out with me, you don’t hate me?”

  “No,” she said. “Why should I hate you? It’s just a thing, a thing, that’s all.”†

  She told her friend Phyllis, “That’s the kind of a person I am. Therefore I could go out with him, although I felt as if I were mothering him. Still, he could enjoy my company, and I could enjoy his …”

  Beverly had problems with men generally. Scarcely anyone knew—not even her parents, she said—that she had once been secretly married. It was during her first year in Boston, just after she came from her hometown, Buckley, West Virginia, and enrolled in Boston University. She was only seventeen, he was eighteen, she was Jewish, he was Catholic. It lasted scarcely two weekends, and was annulled. Even then, “the more we were together, the more it seemed I was a leaning post, a sister, a mother—but not a wife,” she told one friend. And with insight into her own problems, Beverly added, “I guess my going out with homosexuals, my interest in rehabilitation and sick people, all ties in with my marriage that never worked out.”

  But now, when she did seek out other, stronger men, it seemed that most of them bristled in her presence, that they would “go on the defensive.” In recent months she had been depressed, although she tried not to show it, and that, together with her inability to “meet the right man” was part of the entire complex of difficulties that led her to seek psychiatric help not long before death came to her.

  There was little to be learned from her last days.

  On Friday before the Sunday of her murder Beverly called Nick Thiesse to say he could go on to Medfield without her that morning. She felt unwell. Saturday he saw her in class: she still felt unwell. Nick’s wife was expecting a baby at any moment and Beverly’s last words to him as they parted in class were, “Be sure to call me as soon as the baby arrives.”