The Boston Stranglers

by Susan Kelly

  31

  The Murder of Beverly Samans, II

  A Boston woman who knew Beverly for nine or ten years, although they were never close friends, would say this of her: “I think that she was, well, she was from a small town and I think perhaps she was a little casual about acquaintances coming and going perhaps in her apartment, more than she should have been in a city. She may have let people come and go that she wasn’t too well acquainted with. Perhaps people she had just known very casually at any of the places she worked, the people she came in contact with when she was singing professionally. She was a friendly person to people she wasn’t well acquainted with. I think that she may have been a little too free letting people come and go.”

  Irene Fink, who thought of herself as a “big sister” to Beverly, told investigators that the latter was a magnet for “kooks” whose problems she invariably undertook to solve. Not that she felt she had a choice; they were thrust on her.

  No one who knew Beverly seemed in the least surprised that she welcomed into her apartment mental patients, some of whom were potentially quite dangerous people.

  The Cambridge police found this fact of considerable interest, particularly when they arrested twenty-eight-year-old Daniel Pennacchio, a busboy at a local restaurant, on a charge of lewd and lascivious behavior.

  Pennacchio, who had been a long-term in-and-out resident of the Fernald School, where Beverly had worked from 1959 to 1962, was released for good from that institution in June 1963, although he had not been confined to the premises before that. Almost immediately he embarked on a course of behavior that ranged from the annoying to the frightening. He would stand beside his parked car hungrily ogling the women who walked by him on the sidewalk. Every so often, he’d invite one of them to get into his vehicle. No one accepted the offer, although plenty complained to the authorities about having received it. Pennacchio was finally taken into custody in Cambridge when some nurses caught him trying to peer under the door of a women’s restroom in Mount Auburn Hospital.

  At the police station, just prior to being interrogated about his Peeping Tom activities, Pennacchio announced that he was ready to confess to the murder of Beverly Samans. Detective Paul Cloran questioned him and took his statement.

  Pennacchio said that he had stabbed Beverly fifteen times with a kitchen knife, that he had put a gag in her mouth and a cloth over her head, and that he had gotten blood (as the killer must have) on his shirt and pants, which he later stuffed into a trash can behind the apartment complex.

  The parts about the gag, the head cloth, and the kitchen knife were true. And fifteen was a much better approximation of the number of times Beverly had been stabbed than Albert DeSalvo was able to give.

  Pennacchio also told Cloran that he had arrived at Beverly’s apartment shortly before midnight on May 5—she was known to have been home at that point—and that she’d let him into the place. They had chatted together while Beverly worked on her thesis.

  When the police went into Beverly’s apartment on May 8, they found page 6 of her thesis in the carriage of her typewriter adjacent to her studio bed. It had been assumed that she had been working on the dissertation when her killer interrupted her.

  Despite the astonishing accuracy of these elements of Pennacchio’s confession, there were apparently some discrepancies in it—enough to dissuade Judge Edward Viola from issuing a murder warrant, although the Cambridge police had booked him on that charge.

  The initial complaint of lewd and lascivious behavior still held.

  Whether Pennacchio had invented his confession, or had some inside knowledge of the manner of Beverly’s death, however obtained, was never determined. He died shortly after he gave his statement, in a swimming accident off South Boston’s Pleasure Island. In an effort to impress his teenage female companions, he had executed a high dive from a bridge into shallow water and ended up with his head—and whatever additional secrets it may have contained—buried in the silt of the bay.

  The mystery of Beverly’s life continued to deepen. Irene Fink denied that Beverly had ever been married to anyone, let alone a high school classmate. Irene also knew the man who Beverly had claimed to Leslie Loosli had been her husband for a few weekends, and insisted that neither wedding nor annulment had ever taken place.

  Oliver Chamberlain, who discovered Beverly’s slashed corpse, had been described in some news reports as her fiance. They were not engaged, and Beverly, according to her father, was not interested in marriage at the moment anyway. Chamberlain had been an old friend from Beverly’s days at the New England Conservatory as well as being the conductor of the musical group to which she belonged.

  At the time of her death, Beverly was seeing a young man named Gerald Shea—described in the newspapers as “tall and handsome”—but again, how close that relationship was is impossible to ascertain. Some news accounts identified Shea as her boyfriend. This may simply have been an exaggeration of the tabloid press, which then, as now, tended to label any casual male acquaintance of a female celebrity—or crime victim—her lover.

  In The Boston Strangler, Gerold Frank commented that “the professor with whom Beverly was briefly involved—married, with a family—once suggested to her that they commit hara-kiri together, because he saw no future for their love.” The eminently practical Beverly spurned this plea. Frank continues that “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.”74

  This was the same individual Leslie Loosli, Beverly’s confidante, was certain had been a bachelor. And Leslie mentioned nothing in her initial interview with Detectives Maher and Cronin about any proposed suicide pacts, which seemed an odd omission.

  On June 25, 1963, Sergeant James Sugrue of the Cambridge Police Department made out a report (called a Six-Fifty) to Captain Edward Tierney in which he gave an account of an incident brought to his attention by the wife of a Boston University professor. “She overheard the man who lives in the next apartment to them tell her husband that he was the man who killed the woman in Cambridge,” Sugrue wrote. “The only description she gave of this man is that he always carries a briefcase.”

  The information was titillating, but not terribly helpful. Tens of thousands of men in the Boston-Cambridge area carried briefcases every day.

  An eccentric and rather sinister man—one whose name would later crop up in connection with the murder of Joann Graff—was considered a fair suspect for Beverly’s murder by the Strangler Bureau. This individual, a singer, had turned up at a September 1962 audition for the Second Unitarian Church choir; the normally easygoing Beverly had an argument with him. She later told Mary Vivian Crowley that he wasn’t reliable.

  No evidence connected this man with Beverly’s death.

  The investigation of Beverly’s murder, when it was taken over by the Strangler Bureau, had a rather ludicrous sidebar. On April 10, 1965, John Bottomly wrote an irate letter to Middlesex County Medical Examiner Peter Delmonico in which he accused Delmonico (who had performed Beverly’s autopsy) of giving a guided tour of the murder scene to a Globe reporter and a Record American reporter as well as handing over to them copies of Beverly’s thesis. Five days later Delmonico fired back to Bottomly a reply that dripped with sarcasm: “Upon receipt of this note, may I respectfully request that you write a note for the record to the effect that there has been a very serious misunderstanding about my apparent lack of cooperation with reference to your investigation of the [Beverly Samans] case. This may be a better representation of the truth of the matter and may also help to negate any strong innuendos or language that might not have been justified under the circumstances. Thanks very, very much for your kind and cooperative attention.”

  On April 22, Bottomly wrote a sheepish apology to the outraged Delmonico, deploring the “misunderstanding” and expressing his and Attorney General Brooke’s gratitude for the doctor’s he
lp.75

  In January of 1963, the water pipes in Beverly’s building had frozen and burst. As a result, the ceiling in her apartment collapsed. Leslie Loosli advised her to move; Beverly shrugged and replied that she’d given the landlord hell about the situation. The men who came to repair the damage did most of their work in her apartment.

  It was speculated that one of these workmen may have returned five months later and assaulted and killed Beverly.

  None of them was Albert DeSalvo.

  Most Cambridge police who investigated the Beverly Samans murder believe today that if she wasn’t killed by Daniel Pennacchio, she was slain by someone very like him: one of the many seriously disturbed individuals she took under her wing and to whom she offered not only her compassion but her hospitality. Or less likely, she may have been murdered by one of the men she was interviewing for material for her thesis, who panicked at the realization that his sexual orientation might become semipublic knowledge.

  There is a third possible solution to Beverly’s murder—one that lies in the very apartment building she had lived in for four years.

  Today, the big red-brick pile that occupies a block on Mount Auburn Street and University Road has been rehabilitated and gentrified, a glossy, ultramodern office and residential condominium complex attached to it. In Beverly’s time, however, and indeed throughout the remainder of the 1960s and 1970s, the place was occupied primarily by students and artists and was renowned not only for its Bohemian flavor but its general decrepitude and extremely lax security.

  University Road—the building was named after its address—was situated just outside Harvard Square, then as now a Petri dish of the avant-garde culture.

  “The Harvard Square scene in that period was what I think of as high-class low-class,” says one woman. “Meaning that you could say the most outrageous and vulgar things, but get away with it if you said them in a prep school accent. And you could be as promiscuous as a bunny rabbit and never become declasse, as long as you had the proper pedigree and antecedents, and you had gone to the right schools, and you knew the right people. About the worst thing you could be was bourgeois. What a ghastly, unforgivable sin that was. It was a milieu that had its own rigid rules for behavior—it was the accepted convention of the unconventional to be shocking. This was how you demonstrated that you weren’t, gasp, horror of horrors, middle-class. The whole way of thinking was very much the nostalgic de la boue attitude of the French aristocrats after the Revolution.”76

  Into this surreal world, in 1959, had wandered Beverly Samans, a bright, curious, adventurous, and somewhat naive twenty-two-year-old from a small town in West Virginia.

  Just across the street from her apartment, a very young and not yet famous Joan Baez and an equally youthful and unknown Bob Dylan were playing to reverently hushed audiences at the Club 47. And a block away, on Brattle Street, in the shabby and subterranean Club Casablanca, poet Gregory Corso held court, along with that doomed hothouse flower of the American aristocracy and Andy Warhol queen Edith Sedgwick.

  The Casablanca—or the Casa B, as it was known until it was urban-renewed out of existence several years ago—was the essence of the Square distilled in one grubby and cavernous room dominated by a funky jukebox filled with recordings by Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf and German drinking songs. Most of its waiters were Harvard upperclassmen. “It was a place where a lot of disparate people came together,” says Joy Pratt, who served drinks there in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “People sowed their wild oats in the Casablanca and then went on to become stockbrokers.”

  Not all of them.

  Head bartender Jack Reilly kept a close eye on his diverse—and often outre—clientele. “There was never any trouble,” says Joy Pratt.

  That was not always true in the early morning hours, after the Casa B had sounded its last call for drinks and the habitues went elsewhere to continue the party. Where they went, most often, was to University Road—the place a number of them called home.

  Novelist Lee Grove, a Harvard graduate student in the early 1960s, describes this movable feast and its sponsors: “You would go to the Casa B to encounter people you suspected were wonderfully decadent, and then you would go across the street to University Road and discover real decadence.”

  People came and went there as they pleased; none of the entrances to the building were ever locked. Nor were the apartments themselves. A Casablanca bartender opened his door late one night to find on the threshold a nubile young woman, a stranger to him, who offered him her body as a gift. He accepted. The gift turned out to be the kind that keeps on giving: the bartender contracted a troublesome venereal disease.

  Lee Grove found some of the sights and sounds of University Road ultimately more disturbing and repellent than exotic and seductive, and curtailed his visits to friends living there. “It was,” he says flatly, “the perfect place for a murder.”

  The history of University Road proved him right.

  Just eighteen months prior to Beverly Samans’s death, a young woman occupant of the building had been pistol-whipped. She was never able to identify her attacker.

  Violent fights took place at University Road in the aftermath of parties thrown by one especially notorious resident, who would get his underaged guests drunk, photograph them in compromising positions, and then use the pictures for blackmail. He was eventually murdered by one of the adolescents he picked up and seduced.

  In January 1969, Jane Britton, a Harvard graduate student in anthropology and the daughter of a Radcliffe vice president, was found dead in her apartment at 2 University Road. Someone had repeatedly bludgeoned her over the head with a sharp instrument, possibly an archaeological artifact.

  There were a number of marked similarities between the murder of Jane Britton and that of Beverly Samans almost six years before: both had admitted their killer to their apartments very late at night; both were wearing nightclothes (Jane a nightgown, Beverly a housecoat); both had been killed on their beds and found lying dead there; both had suffered multiple bloody wounds and been killed with extreme sadistic violence; the heads of both were covered by an article of clothing; and the lower bodies of both had been left exposed.

  Both were discovered by close men friends who were concerned about them because they had failed to keep important appointments.

  Jane had kept her apartment door unlocked, so neighbors could store food in her refrigerator. Beverly had inadequate locks on her door, and was fatalistic about any danger they might fail to prevent.

  Independent of the circumstances of the killings, there were likenesses between the two victims: Both were attractive, dark-haired, ambitious, intelligent, gregarious, venturesome, and highly social graduate students in their middle twenties. Both were as rigorous in their intellectual habits as they were careless housekeepers. Both were casual in their lifestyles. Both were open-minded and openhanded in their approach to people. Both had a sympathy for outcasts and pariahs. Both had trouble attracting men whose personalities were as strong and vital as their own.

  There was an eerily ritualistic aspect to both murders. The upper part of Jane’s body was buried beneath a mound of coats and blankets that in its conformation suggested a burial cairn. Someone had also sprinkled an ocher powder around the room—a funeral rite observed by some of the primitive cultures Jane had studied.

  Beverly was stabbed in a circular pattern around and in the left breast. The injury that killed her was inflicted directly to the heart. The ligatures around her neck were not functional—they seemed rather to constitute a grotesque decoration.

  Was University Road a focal point for psychotic killers obsessed with a certain type of prey?

  The murder of Jane Britton, like that of Beverly Samans, is considered officially unsolved. Both case files remain open today in the Criminal Investigation Division of the Cambridge Police Department.

  On Saturday, May 4, 1963, Beverly attended what would be her final class—in educational research—at Boston
University. Idly commenting to herself on the burden of being compelled to listen to a dull lecture, she scrawled in her course notebook, “What sins in my life did I ever commit to deserve this?”

  She did not know it, but she had just composed her own epitaph.

  32

  The Murders of Evelyn Corbin and Joann Graff

  Retired Lieutenant John Moran of the Salem Police Department bears a pleasant resemblance to actor Andy Griffith. Six feet one inch tall and white-haired, he has a round, high-colored face with a small powder burn mark on the left cheek. The mark is a souvenir of the time Moran was shot at point-blank range by a sixteen-year-old boy he caught trying to break into the coin-changing machine of a Salem laundromat. The bullet grazed his face; if the trajectory it followed had been a millimeter to the right, Moran probably would have been killed.

  Moran was one of the principal investigators of the murder of Evelyn Corbin, of 224 Lafayette Street in Salem, on September 8, 1965.

  At 9:15 that morning Flora Manchester, also a resident of that apartment building on Lafayette Street, heard someone at her door. She didn’t answer, but a few minutes later phoned her good friend Evelyn. Evelyn reported that she had heard someone at her door at about 9:20.

  Evelyn went over to Flora’s apartment for breakfast. At around 10:30, using Flora’s phone, she called her sister Edna Harney. Then she returned to her own apartment to dress for church.

  It was customary for her to tap on Flora’s door at 11:10, as she was on her way to an 11:30 mass. This morning she didn’t do so. Flora, a little concerned, called Evelyn. The phone went unanswered.