The Strangler

by William Landay

  Michael lobbed an apologetic smile toward the older couple seated in the gallery. They blinked back at him as if he were speaking a foreign language—which he was, that is, he was not speaking Italian. And with that Michael nodded smartly to the judge, throwing the ball to him just as a second baseman turning a double play will pivot and whip the ball on to first base.

  “Well.” The judge sighed. “I find for the Commonwealth essentially on the grounds that counsel just stated.”

  Afterward, as Michael stuffed his files back into his trial bag, a court officer and the Cavalcantes approached him from different directions.

  Mr. Cavalcante hesitated behind the bar railing. He was a small man, turned out in an old three-piece suit made from a rough, nappy wool. He held his hat over his heart. “Why did you say nothing about the, the”—he turned to his wife—“delinquenti.”

  “Mafiosi, eh, gengsters, bad guys.”

  “Gengsters. Why did you say nothing about the gengsters?”

  The court officer handed Michael a slip of paper: Call Wamsley ASAP.

  “You can talk to the Redevelopment Authority,” Michael answered absently.

  “The Redevelopment don’t do nothing. They sent the gengsters. Now you send me back to the Redevelopment?”

  Michael tried to focus on the old man, but his mind was on the message from his boss. It was rare that Wamsley or anyone from the office would bother him in court. That was the best thing about being on trial: You could not be disturbed. The joke in every lawyer’s office was that there were only two places where you could not be called to the telephone, the bathroom and the courtroom.

  “The Redevelopment says, ‘Go to Medford, there is an apartment for you.’ That’s all they know, over and over, ‘there is an apartment for you, there is an apartment for you.’ Nothing about the gengsters.”

  “Look, just call the police. If you want to report a crime, call the police. I’m sorry, Mr. Cavalcante, Mrs. Cavalcante, I’ve got to go, I’m sorry.”

  The old couple stood staring. The man turned his head slightly, as if he had not heard the answer or was expecting to hear more.

  George Wamsley bore a faint resemblance to Mr. Wizard. His ears protruded like a butterfly’s wings. His hair was forever mussed though he was forever combing it. His teeth were big and horsey. He was rumored to be a genius, and inside the Eminent Domain Division of the A.G.’s office, which Wamsley headed, he was revered. He would sweep through the office with loping strides and a whooping laugh, lavishing extravagant praise on the young lawyers who worked for him, complimenting them on this motion or that brief, engaging in earnest discussions of mundane cases, and in his wake would be a sort of turbulence, a high. You felt ravished and energized by him. Somehow some of his wet and goofy enthusiasm got into you, and you in turn churned up his enthusiasm with your work. Your work! No longer were you a bureaucrat or some mustache-twirling villain out of Dickens, preying on the poor in the name of progress (a turnpike, a parking garage). You were part of a grand, historic effort to build a great city out of a decrepit one. Never had eminent domain seemed so damn interesting.

  No doubt at any other time a man like George Wamsley would never have accepted the job of running the Eminent Domain Division. He had had choices. He was a Lowell cousin, a friend of the poet. A gentleman dilettante before the war—the sort of cultivated Yankee crank who dabbled in Negro music and sailboat racing and Oriental mysticism—Wamsley first found his stride after the fighting stopped, as an adjutant in the American sector of Berlin. In the straitened chaos of 1945 and ’46 Berlin, an energetic polymath like George Wamsley could get things done. He spoke three of the four languages that were about. He enjoyed the dives on the Ku’damm and the improvised bar in the ruins of the Hotel Adlon. He collected antiques in exchange for Army beef and Lucky Strikes. War, at least the ruins of it, turned out to be a great adventure. When he returned to the States, Wamsley had drifted back to Mother Harvard, the law school this time, with the vague idea that a law practice might be a nice roost from which to pursue other interests. And then he had ingested the New Boston bug, another city in need of rebuilding, another project of a scale commensurate with his bounding energy. By now he’d even taken up an interest in modernist architecture; he thought he might try architecture school at some point.

  Michael never knew what to make of Wamsley. He considered his boss a curiosity, a strange exotic bird from a faraway WASP country of which he’d heard rumors. Wamsley considered Michael a sort of exotic, too, a policeman’s son and an inveterate laconic, maybe a little dull but a Harvard man, a good sober presence to have at one’s right hand. Wamsley had recruited Michael to be his adjutant, and Michael felt a suitable gratitude, even affection, for his loony and possibly brilliant boss.

  That afternoon when Michael entered the corner office of the Attorney General, it was Wamsley he noticed first. Wamsley was seated in a wing chair facing the A.G.’s desk, and from behind Michael saw only his skinny legs double-crossed. Wamsley unwound his legs and twisted around to peer at Michael over the back of the chair, as a child might. “Ah, Michael. The indispensable man.”

  The Attorney General, Alvan Byron, emerged from a bathroom off the office, wiping his hands with a paper towel. “Graveyards are filled with indispensable men. That’s what de Gaulle said.”

  “Cheerful thought,” Michael responded.

  Alvan Byron was a big man, his torso one enormous barrel. The A.G. favored big collars, French cuffs, and peaked lapels despite the prevailing fashion. His anachronistic suits seemed to place him in an earlier, more glamorous era. Though he was one-quarter Scot, Byron was at the moment considered the highest-ranking Negro elected politician in the country, and his career already seemed to have acquired an irresistible velocity. Alvan Byron was bigger than Boston.

  “Big news, Mr. Daley.” Byron settled himself at the desk. “We’re taking over the Strangler case.”

  Michael let slip an undecorous guffaw.

  “Something funny?”

  “No. Just, I know someone who’ll be happy to hear it.”

  “A lot of people will be happy to hear it. It’s time for a fresh pair of eyes.”

  “Boston PD isn’t going to be happy to hear it.”

  “No.” Byron gave Wamsley a glance. “We have some ideas about that, too.”

  Michael sat there nodding, with a dumb, bemused grin. He thought, You two have absolutely no idea. You could put Sherlock fucking Holmes on the Strangler case and nothing—nothing—you could do would satisfy Boston Homicide. What he said was: “Well, Criminal Division has a lot of good guys. I’m sure they’ll do a good job.”

  “That wasn’t exactly what we had in mind—”

  “Criminal Division isn’t getting it,” Wamsley interjected.

  “No? Who then?”

  “A special bureau we’re creating,” Wamsley enthused. “Kind of an all-star team. With all the men and resources they’ll need, regardless of jurisdiction or expense.”

  “Did you see this?” Byron tossed a copy of the morning’s Observer across the desk. A splashy three-column headline:

  STRANGLER INVESTIGATION RIDDLED WITH ERRORS

  The byline read, Amy Ryan and Claire Downey.

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  “That’s your sister-in-law, isn’t it, this Amy Ryan?” Byron bored in.

  “Something like that.”

  “Well,” Wamsley continued, “we think she’s hit the nail square on the head. BPD had its chance. They tried the old-fashioned way. Now it’s our turn.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Meaning the case is just too big for one department, even Boston’s. You have thirteen women dead, a serial-murder investigation that spans four cities and three counties. These local departments aren’t used to working together. They don’t know how to communicate. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. What’s needed is a coordinated approach. It’s just the sort of case we should be intervening on. Even
more important, what you have in this case is a killer who is canny enough or unpredictable enough or just crazy enough that traditional methods have failed utterly. What’s needed is new thinking.”

  “New thinking?”

  “Yes, yes.” Wamsley was giddy and sincere, and what he was saying made a superficial sort of sense. You could almost believe it. “An interdisciplinary, unconventional, scientific approach. Detectives unblinkered by experience, by what they know, or think they know, is the right way to investigate a homicide. If experience shows anything, it’s that people tend to see only what they’re looking for. They will overlook the most obvious evidence because it does not fit their preconceived notion of what clues ought to look like or where they should be found. We think this case could benefit from a fresh approach. We think the answer—the critical clue, the correct suspect—is probably already there in the data, somewhere in that haystack. The trick is to find it, to isolate it from all the background noise, and to do that before the strangler strikes again. If we could just aggregate all the evidence we have, synthesize it, and subject it to rigorous scientific methodology, we could really crack this thing. We could subject all that data to computer analysis—”

  “Alright, George,” Byron said. “I think he’s got it.”

  “Well,” Michael ventured, “it all sounds very interesting. You mind if I ask why you pulled me out of court to tell me all this?”

  “The new bureau is going to be headed up by Mr. Wamsley.”

  “It is?”

  Wamsley grinned. “It is.”

  “George, you don’t have any experience investigating homicides. Do you?”

  “Absolutely none.”

  Michael thought at this point that he knew why he was here. Nutty as it was, they meant to put Wamsley in charge of the new Strangler bureau, and Michael would be asked to take over Eminent Domain. Michael thought he was up to it despite his relative lack of experience, he thought the others would accept him. And in the New Boston era, who knew where it might lead?

  “Michael, George has asked that you be detailed to the new bureau as well.”

  “What! I’ve never investigated a homicide in my life.”

  “Precisely!” Wamsley boomed.

  “Precisely? Look, all I know is eminent domain. What am I gonna do—take away the Strangler’s parking space? This is crazy.”

  “It’s not all that crazy, Michael,” Byron insisted. “You’re a bright guy. Your dad was in Boston Homicide, which will give you a little credibility with these guys. And you probably absorbed more from him than you realize. Anyway, your primary responsibility will be administrative. The bureau will be staffed up with detectives and experts and whatnot. Your job, with George here, will just be to synthesize it all, to keep everybody pulling in the same direction. We’re not asking you to do anything you’re unqualified for. We’re not stupid. You underestimate yourself, Michael.”

  “No, no, I estimate myself just right. I’m not a detective. I can’t even figure out the cases on Perry Mason.”

  Byron chortled. “No one’s asking you to be a detective. We’re asking you—no, we’re telling you—to be part of a team, a team that needs your particular skills.”

  “What skills? I don’t have skills. Ask anyone.”

  “Michael, do you know what I see when I look at you?” Byron fixed his eyes on Michael. “I see a bright young lawyer who is satisfied doing work that is beneath him. He comes from a family of cops, he has a good mind, yet he wants no part of the biggest murder case that ever happened in this city. It makes me wonder, what is he so afraid of? What does he want?”

  “Maybe I just don’t want to touch murder cases. Cuts a little close to home, you know?”

  “I see. Your father.” The city rustled outside. Byron considered it a moment. “Well, I’ll tell you what, Michael. You help me here, catch me a strangler, and I promise you, you can try eminent domain cases to your heart’s content.”

  10

  It had begun in the summer of 1962. On June 14, a rainy Thursday evening, a fifty-six-year-old woman named Helena Jalakian was raped and murdered in her apartment near Symphony Hall. The case drew little attention. The newspapers reported that she had been strangled but no details were given. Boston averaged about a murder a week; there did not appear to be anything exceptional about this one. But the stranglings continued. Four more in the next four weeks. And by July, in the humid heat of summer, the panic was on. There was a lull from mid-July to mid-August—no murders. Then two in two days, August 19 and 21. There could be no doubt that the seven stranglings were all the work of one man. At first the newspapers did not know what to call him. They tried out Phantom and Fiend, even The Silk Stocking Murderer, before they finally settled on The Strangler. But they believed in him, they believed he had murdered all those women, and so did everyone else.

  And why not? The cases were similar. The victims were all older white women. The youngest, Jalakian, was fifty-six; the oldest was seventy-five. All lived alone, quietly, in smaller apartment buildings, three to six stories high, mostly nineteenth-century structures of stone or brick with thick walls which, it was noted, were highly soundproof. The victims dressed neatly. They looked younger than their true ages. To some, they even resembled one another. With one exception, they had been killed midweek, Monday through Thursday; perhaps the Strangler prowled on his way to or from work. The killer left a signature, too: the garrotes, which were braided together from the victims’ own stockings and cords from their housecoats, were tied off in a big theatrical bow around their necks. The murder scenes were all bloody; the victims had been beaten and raped. Some of the corpses were mutilated. Some were arranged in obscene poses.

  The police had no witnesses, no physical evidence of any real value, no sign of forced entry. The police commissioner, a former college football player and by-the-book FBI man named Edmund McNamara, could not do much more than order more and more overtime for detectives. Over and over, he admonished women to keep their doors locked and not open them to strangers, to buy a watchdog, and to call a special emergency phone number if they had any information—DE 8-1212. It became known as the “Strangler Number.” But no arrests.

  It was the summer of the Strangler, the summer no one slept.

  Then the Strangler went quiet. September passed without a murder, and October and November.

  On December 5, he struck. The victim was a twenty-year-old colored girl, very pretty, a student, killed in the apartment she shared with two roommates. On New Year’s Eve, he killed another young girl, this one white, twenty-three, a lovely blond secretary. These two cases did not fit the Strangler pattern. The victims were young, one was a Negro. Both had been strangled, but neither had any external injuries, nor had they been raped. The secretary was found lying in bed, neatly tucked in. She looked like she was sleeping peacefully. To the city Homicide cops, it seemed unlikely that the Strangler had killed these girls. But the press and public instantly credited them to the Strangler. A lone villain in the classical mode made a neater story—easier for the newspapermen to write, easier for readers to grasp.

  In 1963 the stranglings were erratic and widely spaced: in March, a sixty-eight-year-old woman in the city of Lawrence, a half-hour’s drive from Boston; in May, a young girl in Cambridge; nothing all summer, then another young girl in September, again outside the city. Through it all, the police and public retained their different views of the cases. The cops saw a dozen murder cases, perhaps related, perhaps not. The public saw only the Boston Strangler.

  On November 22, hours after President Kennedy died, the Strangler struck one last time, killing Joanne Feeney in the West End. Another old woman, another obscenely posed corpse. It was a return to the form of those first killings in the summer of ’62, as if the Strangler was announcing, I’m still here.

  11

  The murder books. In each there was a photo of the victim as she had looked around the time of her murder. There was more, of course. A murder book
was the repository of every scrap of paper the police had compiled about a homicide, and Michael dutifully slogged through all thirteen of the Strangler books—detectives’ reports, witness statements, field interrogation reports, autopsy and crime-lab reports, mug shots. But it was the snapshots of the victims’ faces that gave him a frisson of mortality. They were such ordinary women, stern-looking old ladies with outdated names, Eva, Helena, Lillian, Margaret, and smiling pretty young girls named Beverly and Judy and Patty.

  In the murder-scene photos Michael searched for those same faces, as if the reality in the earlier photograph would continue until canceled; only a photograph could disprove another photograph. But he could not recognize the women’s faces on their dead bodies. In the wide shots, of bodies outstretched, or trussed, or tossed like rag dolls, the victims seemed to have no faces at all. A smudge, a stain, that was all he could make out. Even in the remorseless granular close-ups of the victims’ heads, he could not find the living women’s faces.

  Soon, too soon, he decided he could not stare at the pictures anymore. Enough. It was morbid. The cycle of emotions stirred by violent images was similar to that stirred by pornographic ones: shock, fascination, monotony, finally revulsion. Worse, mortal questions—what did it mean, exactly, to die?—were yawning before him. He slipped the pictures back into their manila envelopes. Decided he would maintain from the outset a greater emotional distance from the whole business. He would reduce these thirteen murders to data. He would organize the essential facts of each case, chart it all in columns labeled Date, Location, V’s Age, Details of Attack, Other Evidence, Witnesses, Suspects. Patterns would naturally emerge.