Sunday morning, May 5, Beverly sang in the church choir as usual. On the way home, about 12:30 P.M., she stopped at her friend Edith’s, to leave a medical book she had borrowed for research on her thesis. About 8:30 that night she telephoned Edith; she had just returned from rehearsing Così fan tutti with the full cast of six at the Brookline home of John Ring, the producer. Would Edith join her for a late snack? The two girls met about nine o’clock in the Beacon Restaurant around the corner from Edith’s apartment at 90 St. Mary’s Street. Beverly was full of enthusiasm; the rehearsal had gone splendidly. First she had rehearsed individually with her singing coach who came up from New York to teach in Brookline. He felt certain she had a good chance to get a job with the Met, once she came to New York after receiving her degree. Then the entire cast had rehearsed. Everything had gone off fine, just fine.
After a while, Edith looked at her watch. “Oh, my, it’s nearly eleven o’clock,” she said. The two left the restaurant a few minutes later. Beverly’s car was parked in front of Edith’s apartment. The two strolled there and talked for about ten minutes. Beverly was in high spirits, thinking of New York and the future. Then she got into her car and drove away.
Beverly Samans drove home to her death.
And what was one to say about her fellow-victim, Evelyn Corbin, in Salem? Evelyn’s death seemed even more puzzling because of the precision with which her killer had to carry out his murder, assault, and search. He had to get to her between the time she returned from brunch with her neighbor, Mrs. Manchester, and the time she left for church—at most, a half hour—in a busy apartment house on a Sunday morning, with tenants going in and out, a newsboy making repeated visits to collect money, and neighbors at the window watching the church-day traffic outside.
Consider the timetable of Evelyn Corbin’s last hours at 224 Lafayette Street, in Salem, that Sunday, September 8, 1963.
At 9:15 A.M., someone tampered with her door. A few minutes later she answered Mrs. Manchester’s telephone call—someone had been at her door. At nine-thirty, Evelyn dropped into Mrs. Manchester’s apartment for breakfast. Less than an hour later she returned to her own apartment to dress in order to go to Mass, to leave at eleven-ten for the eleven-thirty services. She never got out of her apartment.
At ten-thirty, a tenant on the floor above came down the stairs on his way to Eaton’s Drug Store to pick up his Sunday paper. He noticed a man standing in front of Evelyn’s door. He was unable to describe him later because—as luck would have it—he was without his glasses, which had been broken the night before. He returned and made breakfast. Suddenly he heard a long scream, followed by a short one—“as though someone had been startled.” It was about eleven o’clock. He dismissed it as noise from the children playing outside.
About 10:15, in her ground-floor apartment across the street, a woman saw a strange man walk by looking up intently at the windows of 224. She was tempted to open her window and call out, “Can I help you? Who are you looking for?” but thought better of it. The stranger was heavy-set, about thirty-five or forty, with brown wavy hair. He walked with a distinct limp.
About 10:25, Richard and Susan Bernard awoke in their third-floor apartment at 224. Susan was making toast when the fuse blew out. It was eleven o’clock—the electric clock had stopped. Richard went to the basement, fixed the fuse, and returned. He heard and saw nothing.
At 10:30, Mrs. Alice Finch left her apartment in 224 to go across the street for her paper. When she came back, noting and hearing nothing, she prepared for a visit to her sister in Marblehead. Just before she left she heard a door slam somewhere in the building. She looked up and down the hall. Nothing was to be seen. Later that afternoon, over her sister’s radio, she heard the news of Evelyn Corbin’s strangling. It took hours for her to muster enough courage to return home. She left finally at six o’clock saying, “I have to go back sometime—”
At 10:30, Victoria Deutch and her sister Charlotte were sitting reading—as was their Sunday morning habit—in their front parlor in 231 Lafayette Street, across the street from the Corbin building. Charlotte happened to look up from her paper to see, through the window, a man with a briefcase emerge from the entrance of 224.
“Isn’t that odd,” she remarked to her sister, “a salesman soliciting on a Sunday.”
He stood on the sidewalk, looking intently up and down the street. Then he turned and walked quickly away.
At ten o’clock or so Denis Angelopoulis, the fifteen-year-old newsboy who delivered papers in the neighborhood, left his apartment at 32 Hazel Street, around the corner from Evelyn Corbin, to begin his Sunday morning collections. He had four customers in the Corbin building. First he decided to call on his girl friend Donna, fourteen, who lived across the street at 233, before she went to church. He walked with her out of the building: she went on to church, he returned home for a bite and then, at eleven o’clock, began his collections in the Corbin building. Two of his customers were in; a third, in Apartment 13, had left the money under her mat; the fourth was out. Going through the halls and up and down the stairs of 224, Denis saw nothing, heard nothing.
In the apartment next door to Evelyn’s, Mrs. Carl Lesche was not feeling well and stayed in bed all morning. Her bed backed against the wall of Evelyn’s bedroom. Mrs. Lesche heard nothing—“not a sound”—and she would have heard, she said, as much as a cough.
From 9:45 until 10:45, James Halpin was sitting in front of his building at No. 232 waiting for Denis to show up with his paper. During that time he saw nothing out of the ordinary. About ten-thirty, he recalled later, he saw Denis and his girl friend Donna walk out of No. 233, across the street. They held hands for a moment, then parted, she going in one direction, he in the other.
It was all peaceful, with only the sound of people going and coming from church: a quiet Sunday morning in a green and peaceful suburb, similar to a thousand quiet Sunday mornings in a thousand green and peaceful suburbs.
Who was the man standing in front of Evelyn Corbin’s door? The man with the briefcase? The man limping by, looking so searchingly into the windows of her building?
Curious, too, were the events of the night before her murder.
About 9 P.M. that Saturday night, Alan Spanks, whose wife Betty, like Evelyn Corbin, worked at Sylvania, heard a knock on his kitchen door at 233 Lafayette Street. A man over six feet tall, between thirty-five and forty, with iron-gray hair, wearing a gray sweater and dark gray pants, stood there. “May I see Betty, please?”
“She’s not home,” said Spanks. His wife worked the 3 to 11 P.M. shift. “I’m her husband. Is there any message?”
“My girl friend said your wife is looking for another job and I thought I might have something for her,” said the stranger. “I’ll come back.” He left. He did not return.
When Betty came home that night her husband told her about the visitor. She did not know the man he described. She was not looking for another job. She had never, never said anything like that to anyone.
Not until they heard of Evelyn Corbin’s murder did they tell the police of the incident.
That Saturday night—at almost the same time the stranger knocked on the Spanks’ door—Evelyn herself came out on the back porch of her apartment to take the air. She had a date later with Bob Manchester. George Tremblay, the janitor, walked through the back yard on an errand. “Isn’t it a beautiful night!” she exclaimed, and stood there for a moment, breathing deeply. Then she went in. Although she was known for her good spirits, she had recently felt depressed. A week before her doctor had prescribed a tranquilizer for her. He remarked upon her youthfulness. On Friday, September 6—two days before her death—she would be fifty-eight, and she had not yet reached the menopause.
That Friday began auspiciously. Fellow workers serenaded her—one brought her a vial of perfume—but she became upset just before leaving when she learned she was to be shifted from a sitting to a standing-up job, paying less money. She spoke then of quitting, perhaps, and
marrying Bob Manchester very soon. No one at Sylvania, where she’d worked for the last twenty years, had known her to go out with anyone but Bob.
The two had first met in January 1959 in Mrs. Manchester’s apartment. Evelyn had moved into the building two years earlier, after her mother’s death. As she lived alone—she had been divorced for many years and was childless—she began joining the Manchesters for an occasional meal. Soon she was taking at least one dinner a week with them, and all her meals on Sunday. She had few other friends—less than half a dozen names were found in her address book—and she and the older woman became close, spending time together, going shopping together. Lately, she and Bob had begun to discuss marriage. Neither mother nor son had any idea of Evelyn’s true age. They assumed, as did nearly everyone else, that she was perhaps a few years older than Bob, who had just turned forty-one.
About nine-thirty Saturday night, she and Bob went on their date to Revere Beach, a strip of Ferris wheels and amusement centers on the outskirts of Boston. They returned about midnight and he said good night to her at her door. When he walked into his apartment his mother was waiting up, having a snack. “You’d better phone Evelyn about the chicken,” he said. The three were to have broiled chicken for Sunday dinner, and Evelyn, who had the fowl in her freezer, was to be reminded to take it out so it could defrost overnight. Then Mrs. Manchester got on the phone for a cozy midnight chat.
At nine o’clock Sunday morning, Bob breakfasted in Eaton’s Drug Store and drove to his office in Newton Highlands, twenty-five miles away, to catch up on work. He came home about 1:15 P.M.—a few moments after his mother had telephoned the police. As he walked in she said in great agitation, “I think something’s happened to Evelyn.” He ran down the hall into her apartment, pulled the gag from her mouth, and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—but in vain. He covered her with a blanket and waited for the police. On the table was a letter she had just written to his sister, telling her they hoped to marry, perhaps as early as June.
Bob was interrogated by the police. He rarely went to his office on Sunday—why this Sunday? Could he produce anyone to prove he had been there all morning? He could not.
Then, unexpectedly, came the discovery of a far more likely suspect as the result of a series of events which at first glance had nothing to do with Evelyn Corbin.
It began Monday, September 9, the day after her murder, when an irate father strode into the office of Police Inspector J. W. Moran of Salem to announce that his sixteen-year-old daughter Sue was missing, and that he was sure she had run off with a twenty-five-year-old wife-beater and ne’er-do-well who will be known here as George McCarthy. Only a month before he had complained to the police about the man: Moran had called McCarthy in and given him a stern warning.
Now, however, Sue had vanished—she had walked out of the house just after their Sunday dinner yesterday, about one-thirty—and hadn’t been seen since.
Little was known about McCarthy except that he was separated from his wife and child, was frequently in trouble with women, and numbered among his friends one Gilbert Johnson, which is not his name, who lived at 233 Lafayette Street—across the street from Evelyn Corbin’s building. If McCarthy had left town with the girl, was there any meaning to this sudden departure at almost the very hour Evelyn Corbin’s body was found?
Inspector Moran sent a teletype alarm. Eight days later, on September 17, a teletype message alerted him that McCarthy had been picked up in upper New York State on a stolen car charge. Yes, he admitted to police there, he had gone off with Sue, they’d had a fight, she’d left him. A week later, the girl was picked up with another man in a neighboring town. Inspector Moran went to New York, brought Sue back, and questioned the two separately.
McCarthy knew nothing about Evelyn Corbin’s murder, he insisted. Saturday night, the night before her death, he was out drinking with his friend Gilbert Johnson. He had been locked out of his rooming house in Lynn for nonpayment of rent, McCarthy said, so he slept Saturday night in Johnson’s apartment on Lafayette Street. Next morning, Sunday, about 11 A.M., he left the apartment, he said, drove to a diner, had a cup of coffee, drove to his rooming house in Lynn, climbed in a window to pick up some clothes, and drove back to Salem where he telephoned Sue to meet him just after one o’clock. On the way, he passed a friendly little dog, wagging its tail; he backed up, picked up the pup, and put it in his car.
In Salem he parked down the street from Sue’s house. She came out about one-thirty. “We’re driving to New York,” he told her. “How much money have you got?” She had seven dollars. All he had, he said, was five or six.
As they drove she reached out to switch on the car radio. To her surprise he knocked her hand away roughly. “Leave it alone,” he growled. “It’s not working.” They got as far as Claverack, New York, when the car broke down. They walked until they reached an apartment house. McCarthy talked the woman owner into allowing them to occupy an empty furnished apartment. She felt sorry for them, she said later—such a bedraggled young couple, with their hungry little dog.
Sue found it impossible to live with McCarthy, she told Inspector Moran. He was cruel, unpredictable, given to sudden rages. He got a job picking apples but lasted only a few hours, earning sixty cents. He began kicking the dog, for no reason, so viciously that another tenant had to take it to a veterinarian. McCarthy went into frightening tantrums, jumping up and down, shouting at the top of his voice, bursting into tears. Sue left McCarthy, met a boy, and went to live on a small farm in nearby Hudson. McCarthy, now alone, followed her to Hudson, got a job as a dishwasher, but was fired after five days when his employers found money missing. He bought a car for forty-five dollars; it broke down after a few miles. He stole another car, which brought about his arrest.
That was his story.
But when Inspector Moran checked with McCarthy’s friend Johnson, important differences appeared. McCarthy had said he left Johnson’s apartment across the street from Evelyn’s building, at 11 A.M. Sunday morning. But Johnson distinctly recalled that his alarm clock awakened them both at 9 A.M.; that they had a breakfast of doughnuts and coffee in his kitchen; that McCarthy left the apartment a few minutes later, about nine-thirty. “I remember waiting for him to get out so I could lock the door and go back to bed.” He made sure to lock it, he explained, because he suspected McCarthy was a thief. “I slept all night with my wallet under my pillow.”
What, now, did Inspector Moran have?
Doughnuts for breakfast … and a doughnut was found on the fire escape outside Evelyn Corbin’s kitchen window.
McCarthy leaving Johnson’s apartment at about 9:30 A.M.—and Evelyn Corbin strangled in her apartment across the street between 10:35 A.M., when she left Mrs. Manchester, and 11:15 A.M., when she did not answer Mrs. Manchester’s telephone call.
McCarthy leaving town at 1:30 P.M. with Sue and violently preventing her from turning on the radio—which would have carried news of Evelyn Corbin’s murder.
McCarthy telling Sue he had “five or six dollars.” Evelyn’s purse had been emptied by her killer. She rarely had much cash in it—usually, said Mrs. Manchester, five or six dollars.
Like all police involved in the search for the Strangler, Inspector Moran knew through what heartbreaking detours one could be led by coincidence. Yet …
He spoke to McCarthy’s wife. They had been separated for two years. Her description of the man echoed sixteen-year-old Sue’s. Not only had he beaten her and thrown her about—he was tremendously strong, said Mrs. McCarthy—but once, when their eighteen-month-old daughter annoyed him, he turned on the baby like a madman, kicking her in the face, and blacking both her eyes. His own background was vague, and always upset him; he was illegitimate, his wife said, and had learned his mother’s identity only a few years before. When he was sixteen he had “some kind of mental trouble.” In bed he was a brutal, selfish man and often forced her to commit unnatural acts with him.
Inspector Moran left, pondering this l
ast of coincidences. Evelyn Corbin’s autopsy showed that she had been forced to engage in such an act—whether while living, or dying, or dead, no one knew.
After serving a brief sentence for abducting Sue, McCarthy was released from the House of Correction in late November 1963. He lived with a woman he had picked up until the early evening of Friday, December 12, when they fought over his sexual demands. He stormed out of her apartment and paced back and forth on Roslyn Street, which runs into Lafayette Street at a point less than fifty yards from the Corbin apartment. A fifty-two-year-old woman walked by: McCarthy turned, jumped her from behind, put his hand up under her dress, punched her, gouged at her eyes, tried to rape her, stifling her screams by stuffing his fingers down her throat, and left her bleeding and semiconscious on the street, in such a state that police could not question her for fifteen hours. She remained three weeks in Salem Hospital. The night before a woman had been similarly assaulted in Peabody, three miles away. Both women identified McCarthy as their assailant. He denied the assaults, though he admitted that he had passed the fifty-two-year-old woman on the street in Salem, turned, and came up behind her—but then he had simply walked away, he said.
This man, thought Moran. He claims he was in Johnson’s apartment until eleven o’clock Sunday morning. Johnson swears he left at nine-thirty. If he left at nine-thirty, he could easily have walked into the Corbin building, slipped the lock on Evelyn’s door with a celluloid strip, waited for her to return from the Manchester apartment, and jumped her from behind the moment she turned her back to lock the door. She had not even had time to remove her robe and slippers …
Moran questioned McCarthy about Evelyn Corbin.
The Boston Strangler Page 25