by Susan Kelly
Mrs. Rothman and the two sons also changed their stories to accommodate Rothman’s shifting accounts of his whereabouts the day of Patricia’s death.
Hazel Bissette instructed the police to look carefully at Engineering Systems: “I think if you could concentrate a little on this company and its employees you will come up with some surprising stories.”
Carola Blume analyzed Rothman’s handwriting: “A man who is interested in money—dishonest. He is not abnormal in his sex habits, rather enjoys sensual pleasure, which would include everything ... He is not a person to be trusted ... unscrupulous ... serves own best interest or advantage.”
Jules Rothman was given polygraph examinations on several different occasions. The results did not clear him of knowledge of Patricia’s death: “Reactions exhibited on his chart indicate that he is not telling the truth about his activities on Sunday, December 30, 1962.”
There was a movement to bring the evidence in the case before a grand jury, with the intent to indict Jules Rothman for the murder of Patricia Bissette. Because of a turf squabble among the Boston Police Department, the attorney general’s office, and the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, in which the attorney general’s office, in the person of John Bottomly, accused the district attorney’s office of leaking word of the pending indictment to the press, the procedure was postponed.
Then Albert DeSalvo began confessing to the Boston stranglings.
30
The Murder of Beverly Samans, I
As Tuesday morning, May 7, 1963, passed into Tuesday afternoon, and afternoon became evening, Minnie Samans grew increasingly worried. That day was Mrs. Samans’s birthday, and she had received neither card nor gift from her daughter, Beverly. Nor had the young woman even telephoned. It was simply not like Beverly to forget an important occasion such as an anniversary or a birthday.
There was never a chance that Beverly would call her mother that Tuesday. Since very late the previous Sunday night or very early Monday morning the only child of Herman and Minnie Samans of Beckley, West Virginia, had lain dead in her apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Her killer had left her naked and supine on a disarrayed bed, legs apart, hands tied behind her with a multicolored scarf. Draped over her head and shoulders was a lace shawl or mantilla. Around her neck had been loosely knotted two nylon stockings and a white scarf. A cloth gag had been stuffed in her mouth, which the person who had found the body had removed.
She had not been raped or sexually assaulted, despite the position of her body.
She had been stabbed and slashed twenty-one times in the left breast and neck.
Twenty-six-year-old Beverly Samans, a superbly talented mezzo-soprano, had come to the Boston area in the mid-1950s to study at the New England Conservatory of Music, from which she graduated in 1959. For several years thereafter she worked at the Walter E. Fernald School, a facility for retarded and emotionally disturbed children and adolescents, as a music therapist. She left Fernald in the summer of 1962 to devote more time to her studies; she had enrolled in a master’s program in rehabilitation counseling at Boston University. What she was learning she put into practice two days a week working with patients at Medfield State Hospital. She may have been unusually empathetic to those with mental or emotional handicaps because she herself suffered from a physical one: She was nearly deaf and had to wear a hearing aid.
Despite this, music was the great love of her life and she intended to make a career of it. Her highest ambition was to sing with the Metropolitan Opera Company. She kept a piano in her apartment and played it constantly as an accompaniment to her singing. So glorious was the music Beverly made that none of her neighbors ever complained but rather simply listened—and appreciated. She was a member of several local church and temple choirs—she also played the organ at Sunday services—and of the Aeolian Singers, a group who gave concerts in and around Boston, most notably at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She took voice lessons once a week from an instructor in Braintree. On the last Sunday of her life she spent the afternoon and evening rehearsing Così fan tutte with the other cast members at the producer’s Brookline home.
Beverly, a small, attractive, dark-haired woman who dressed sufficiently stylishly for several people to comment on the fact to investigators and reporters after her death, had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Her neighbors found her friendly and pleasant, although some of them thought her a bit reserved. Her life seemed a full, active, and useful one.
It was not altogether a happy one.
Other than her killer, probably the last person to see Beverly alive was her best friend, Edith Scarcello. Known as Anya, Scarcello was the daughter of a Worcester physician. At about 8:30 Sunday night, May 5, Beverly had called Anya and suggested they get together for a light meal and some conversation. At 9:00, Anya and Beverly met at a restaurant in Brookline. Beverly was in good spirits; the rehearsal she’d just come from had gone extremely well. She and Anya talked for nearly two hours; a little before 11:00 Anya noticed the time and commented that it was getting late. A few moments later she and Beverly left the restaurant and walked to Beverly’s car, which was parked in front of Anya’s apartment on Saint Mary’s Street. They talked for another ten minutes. Then Beverly drove home to Cambridge. She arrived there probably no later than 11:30.
On Wednesday, May 8, Beverly was scheduled for choir practice at the Second Unitarian Universalist Church in Boston. She also had an afternoon rehearsal of Così fan tutte. She missed both engagements. Mary Vivian Crowley, the church organist, became concerned. It was as out of character for Beverly to skip practice without very good reason as it was for her to allow her mother’s birthday to pass unacknowledged by a card, a gift, or a phone call.
Mary left a note outlining her worries for thirty-three-year-old Oliver Chamberlain, the Aeolian conductor and a music teacher at local schools who had been good friends with Beverly and occasionally received mail at her apartment. The message had been left for Chamberlain at his rooms on Story Street in Cambridge. At 7:00 P.M., he went to Beverly’s place on University Road to check up on her. He knocked on the door and got no answer. Using the key Beverly had given him, he entered the apartment.
Six minutes later he called the Cambridge police.
One of the first people Cambridge police Detective William Maher interviewed was a young woman named Leslie Loosli, a soprano soloist in the Second Unitarian Church choir that had also featured Beverly as a soloist. Leslie and Beverly had met in the latter half of September 1962 and had hit it off immediately. At first the friendship was a professional one. Then, as time went on, Beverly began to confide in Leslie.
Leslie had noticed that when Beverly came to choir practice, she was sometimes accompanied by Anya Scarcello and a young man named Gene Graff.72 According to Leslie, the three had a very close relationship. “Gene and Anya and Beverly were like a triangle,” Leslie told Maher and state police Lieutenant William Cronin, “and they would have supper together and go out together, as if they went many, many places together at the beginning of the year.”
The last week of December 1962, Beverly went home to West Virginia for the Christmas holiday. During that vacation time she also visited Gene and his family at their home in upstate New York, and after that Beverly and the young man took a trip to the city.
On her return to Boston, Beverly told Leslie that Gene’s family had been very hospitable and that she’d enjoyed her stay with them. She was a little saddened by the fact that Gene was leaving the Boston area to take a teaching job in his home state. Then she blurted out to Leslie, “You know, he’s homosexual.” Leslie replied that she had suspected that Gene was at least bisexual.
Beverly then remarked to Leslie that very shortly after she and Gene had begun dating, he had said to her, “I must tell you something very important.” Beverly anticipated what she was about to hear and tried to make Gene’s admission a little less difficult for him. He said, “I must tell you,
you’ll hate me for it and you won’t want to go out with me any more, you won’t want to see me any more, but I must tell you: I’m homosexual.”
“I know,” Beverly replied. “I’ve known almost ever since the first time we went out.”
“But,” Gene responded, “you don’t mind? You’ll still go out with me? You don’t hate me because I’m homosexual?”
“No, I don’t hate you,” Beverly assured him. “Why should I hate you? It’s a thing, it’s a thing, that’s all.”
“I’m this kind of a person,” Beverly told Leslie. “Therefore I could go out with him, although I felt as if I were a mothering type or I were not the so-called glamour girl or femme fatale, as far as he was concerned, still he could enjoy my company and I could enjoy his.”
“At this point,” Leslie commented to Maher and Cronin, “they were still very good friends and had a good relationship.”
It didn’t last.
A week after Gene moved back to his home state, he wrote and telephoned Beverly. They spoke about how difficult it would be to maintain a long-distance relationship.
The following Sunday, as the Second Unitarian Church choir was beginning the anthem for the 11:00 service, Gene walked into the church. Leslie nudged Beverly and said, “Look who’s here.”
Beverly said, “What’s he doing here?”
Leslie replied, “Well, he must be coming to see you.”
Beverly was not only startled but very pleased to see Gene; her face shone. Leslie bit her lip and said nothing further. “It was not my business,” she told the two detectives.
Several days later Beverly revealed to Leslie that Gene had in fact come to Boston that weekend to visit his male lover, although he had spent Sunday with her. The lover had telephoned Beverly, possibly to find out when Gene was arriving.
Beverly may have felt somewhat used by Gene.
“I tried to act rather coolly toward him,” she told Leslie. “I must rid myself of this relationship because it bogs me down, Leslie, it drains me and I’m exhausted from it.”
Gene continued to visit Beverly after that, but the bond between them had weakened. Beverly was taking steps to detach herself from it. “It was always this falling-off kind of thing where he would take her out to dinner and they would have, just have, a nice pleasant conversation and she would always let him know she was trying to go on to other men and was trying to start another life,” Leslie told the police.
Beverly was not simply “emotionally and spiritually drained” by the failed affair with Gene but by her duties at Medfield State Hospital and the Fernald School. She had kept up contact with her patients at the latter. “Lots of these kids would come to the door sometimes and take her time,” Leslie told the investigators. “You know, come in and talk and then she would feed them and just, you know, play big sister to them and try to help them in any way that she could but on her own home territory and in her own apartment.”
Beverly was equally committed to her duties at Medfield State. “I’m very, very tired and I have so much work to do and I’m following up these cases at Medfield and I’m very tired from it,” she told Leslie. “I try not to become involved, but it’s very difficult because it’s not easy to forget all these sad tales of woe that you hear all day long.”
Leslie gave a summation of Beverly’s character to the two detectives: She was a very intelligent girl and I would say high-strung, and a very intensive girl. Therefore, I would say she’s the kind of person who could be drained from a situation. She was not hard-boiled, I don’t think, in any sense of the word.”
Fourteen months later, Carola Blume would analyze Beverly’s handwriting for the Strangler Task Force: “Beverly Samens [sic] was sensitive, would have relationships with any type person, would go along, was uninhibited. She was logical, had a high level of intelligence, was egotistical, a high-strung individual. She would help others, but for her own good. Other people had to fill her own need. She was hungry for people. Beverly was careless, untidy, quick, did not waste any time.” She had a great need for variety in her life and “was aggressive and active, could be quite systematic and at times could be brought out of her regular way of life and conversely she was or rather could be completely out of order and completely mixed-up.”
Despite the poor wording of the above quote, the analysis it contained did seem to capture the essence of Beverly’s personality.
The two detectives interviewing Leslie Loosli at 2:00 in the morning of May 9, 1963, wanted to know if there had been a particular reason for Beverly choosing as the topic for her master’s thesis “Some Factors Pertaining to the Etiology of Male Homosexuality.”
Leslie asked if she could answer that question by providing some background on Beverly’s life. On Easter Sunday, 1963, Mary Vivian Crowley had held a small postconcert party at her house. Among the guests were Beverly and Leslie. Beverly had a few drinks and began to relax after the pressure and excitement of that day’s choral performance. She began talking with Leslie.
“You know,” she said, “I was married once before.”
“No, I didn’t know that, Beverly,” Leslie replied.
“Oh, yes,” Beverly continued. “Even my parents will never know, because I’ll never tell them. Yes, I was married when I was about seventeen, and it was just one of those things. I was getting out of high school and I married this fellow and we had a few weekends together in a hotel room or motel, wherever we were together. We were married, it was perfectly all right, but then we separated.”
Beverly then implied that the marriage had been quickly and quietly annulled at the behest of the boy’s parents (she was Jewish; he was Catholic). Leslie got the impression that the youth had been bisexual or gay and very much under the domination of his father and mother. “The longer we were together, married,” Beverly said, “it was as if I was more of the leaning-post, sister kind of thing or the mother kind of thing. I really didn’t feel as if I was losing that much by agreeing to have it annulled.”
“Well, then,” Leslie said, “that explains to me why you went out with Gene and why you’re [studying] rehabilitation.” 73
“Well,” Beverly said. “Yes, it all does tie in with this marriage I had several years previous, which never worked out.”
She complained to Irene Fink, a friend from her hometown of Beckley, West Virginia, that the only kind of men she attracted were “weak” ones who wanted to unload their problems on her.
Shortly after the episode with Gene, Beverly went to Leslie and asked, “Where can I find a man who knows how to treat a woman like a woman and find a nice guy to go out with? I can’t meet anyone where I am. I can’t seem to find anyone whom I’m interested in.”
That spring, she thought she had found two. One was a middle-aged professor at a local college, a good-looking man who seemed quite taken with her. The other was “a tall, dark, and handsome man”—a type Beverly, like countless other women, found irresistible—“ at Boston University in one of her classes.” Beverly met him at the end of February or the beginning of March, when he invited her for coffee at the student union. He had been interested in her for a while, he said, but reluctant to approach her because he’d thought she was seriously involved with Gene Graff.
Beverly had thought this beau ideal of her romantic imagination was shy. She found out differently on their first date. “I had to fight him off a little that night,” she told Leslie. “But he’s still very nice and you can’t blame a guy for trying.”
Leslie thought the young man’s name was Ronnie.
Whatever dreams Beverly might have harbored about Ronnie dissolved quickly. He proposed to her a week after they’d met; she was basically too sensible a person to be swept off her feet by his apparent ardor. “I’m not going out with him anymore,” she informed Leslie. “He makes too many demands upon my femininity and I just don’t know him that well.”
Beverly may have been delicately hinting that she found Ronnie annoyingly, or maybe alarmingly, oversex
ed, and she resented the pressure he put on her to sleep with him. She was clearly suspicious of the motive behind his proposal. “He’s in love with me and wants to marry me and I think he’s out of his mind.”
Leslie told the detectives that the last time she’d seen Beverly was at the conclusion of the services at the Second Unitarian Church at noon on Sunday, May 5. A half hour later, Beverly was at Anya Scarcello’s apartment returning a medical textbook the latter had lent her.
Leslie added that she was never quite sure of what had happened between Beverly and the middle-aged professor. She knew only that Beverly had found him quite attractive and was extremely excited about his attentions. This man was somehow involved with television; he had asked Beverly if she knew of a “femme fatale” sort of woman who could appear in some production with which he was involved. Beverly suggested herself, jokingly. The professor said she wasn’t the type he had in mind. Beverly swallowed this mild insult with good humor and told the professor he might want to speak with the tall, blond Leslie.
Leslie was positive this man was a bachelor. Another witness seemed equally sure he was married.
Toward the end of the interview, Leslie described to the two detectives the obscene phone calls that she, Beverly, and another woman had begun receiving after a group photograph featuring the three at a musical event had appeared in the newspapers. They had begun in March. That month Beverly mentioned them to another friend of hers, a fellow student at BU and a coworker at Medfield State. She had, according to this man, found these anonymous requests for sexual favors, couched in the most filthy language, quite upsetting.
Increasingly she felt the pressure of the circumstances of her life: overwork, worry about career plans, and romantic difficulties. In the weeks before her death, Beverly, who dedicated her life to helping the emotionally disturbed back to mental health, sought psychiatric care for her own inner turmoil.