The Boston Stranglers

by Susan Kelly

  Just fifteen minutes after Evans’s aborted visit, another young man appeared in search of Pat. Again, Mary told him she was away.

  Pat was extremely popular. At 9:00 P.M., two more young men, Robert Tole and Richard Leveroni, came to the apartment looking for her.

  At midnight, two young women dropped in to chat with Pat and Pam, who were home at that point. Mary was asleep.

  Despite the fact that she didn’t have to work, Mary was up early Saturday morning. Bleary-eyed, she shuffled into the kitchen as Pat and Pam were preparing breakfast at 7:30. She had cleaning and errands to do, Mary explained, and she wanted to get a jump start on those chores.

  At five that afternoon, another resident of the building heard a noise that reminded him of a baby crying. There were no infants at 44A Charles Street.

  Then Pam and Pat got home from work.

  Five pieces of physical evidence—other than the broom handle thrust into Mary’s vagina—were found at the crime scene. The first was a small metal object like a washer; the second was a charred scrap of paper that later proved to be the corner of a page torn from the 1962 West Suburban telephone directory; the third was the cigarette butts (of a brand neither Mary, Pat, nor Pam smoked) found in an ashtray near the bed in which the victim had been left, and the fourth was a piece of label from a dustpan not owned by any of the young women.

  The fifth piece of evidence had to be fished from the toilet, down which someone had tried and failed to flush it. It was a red ascot, cut in three pieces.

  In January of 1965, Albert DeSalvo told his then attorney, Jon Asgeirsson, that he had gagged Mary, put a sweater over her head, had intercourse with her, and left a knife on the bed.

  None of this was true.

  When Albert first spoke to Asgeirsson, he didn’t know about the broom and what had been done to Mary with it. By—or perhaps at—the time he confessed to her murder to Bottomly, he had been filled in on this salient detail.

  As had been the case in the murder of Ida Irga, a single never-identified fingerprint was lifted from the crime scene. If either print had been Albert DeSalvo’s it would have been recognized as such by the FBI. Long before Mary or Ida had been murdered, Albert’s prints were on file not only with the police but with the military.

  In early August 1965, a Bridgewater State Hospital inmate told authorities that Albert DeSalvo had confided to him that he had met Mary Sullivan in the summer of 1963 at Sun Dial Village, and that he had also formed an acquaintance with Nate Ward, who bragged to Albert that he too was a rapist.

  The story was a total fabrication.77

  Mary’s sister told police that Mary had bought Nate Ward ascots as gifts. Mary had shown her a red plaid one. “She said that Nathan Ward loved these ties,” according to the investigation report, “and Mary would say how good he looked in them.”

  The police found this information interesting in view of the evidence that had been found at the murder scene, even though the red ascot that had been thrown down the toilet had belonged to Pam.

  And the cops questioned whether Mary’s sister was totally credible.

  Nate married his girlfriend Betty on Valentine’s Day, 1964.

  Tommy Bahr did not go to work on the day of Mary’s murder. He told police that he spent it with two friends in Provincetown viewing the scenery. Between 6:00 and 7:00 that evening he was at an ice rink in Hyannis, watching a hockey game. It was there that he was informed, by a Howard Johnson’s coworker, that his girlfriend was dead.

  Later he went to Saint Francis Xavier Church, possibly to offer a prayer for the soul of Mary Sullivan. Mrs. Sullivan asked him to be a pallbearer at the funeral. He refused.

  On Sunday, January 5, Tommy wanted to drive Mary’s sister to Boston to pick up Mary’s clothing. He insisted several times that he be allowed to do so. He made the same demand four days later. Mrs. Sullivan would not permit it.

  In Mary’s jewelry box, police found a note that read: “DON’T LEAVE FRIDAY AFTERNOON OR NIGHT. I’ll see you. Tom.”

  It was undated.

  Later in 1964, Tommy would move into Mary’s old apartment in Sun Dial Village.

  Police showed the page from the West Suburban telephone directory to one of Mary’s sisters. She thought she recognized a name on it as one Mary had mentioned to her. She had the impression this man drove a Cadillac.

  The page fragment had been found by the toilet; presumably whoever had disposed of the ascot had accidentally dropped it there.

  Or it might have been planted, a false clue designed to lead the police from the trail of the real killer.

  One month after Mary’s death, her mother and her sister Diane went to Saint Anthony’s Shrine in Boston, where Mary may have spent the early hours of New Year’s Day. They were looking for a small suitcase belonging to Mary, one in which she’d kept cosmetics and personal papers, most notably the Christmas cards she’d received. The suitcase was not found in the apartment on Charles Street, so Mrs. Sullivan thought Mary might have accidentally left it behind in the church.

  Mrs. Dodd recalls that there were a number of priests—“maybe twenty or so”—present, all of whom seemed “nervous and upset” to see the two women. Searching for the lost and found booth, Mrs. Sullivan and Diane ended up in the office of an individual Mrs. Dodd describes as the head of the church. The ensuing scene confused and frightened her. The priest pushed his chair back from the desk, rose, and exclaimed to Mrs. Sullivan, “Who are you to accuse anyone of murder?”

  Mrs. Sullivan’s jaw dropped in shock. Diane was equally dumbfounded. Certainly no accusations of murder against anyone had been lodged. “All we were trying to do was get to the lost and found department,” Mrs. Dodd reiterates.

  The two were hustled from the church.

  Equally troubling to Mrs. Dodd is the memory of an earlier incident also involving Saint Anthony’s. “It was one of the priests from there who gave Mary the last rites,” says Mrs. Dodd. “The day after [the murder] my mother sent him a thank you gift, a communion plate, the kind you put under your chin.” The priest never acknowledged Mrs. Sullivan’s expression of gratitude.

  Ultimately she learned that he had indeed received the plate. But almost immediately afterward—within a da or so, Mrs. Dodd is sure—he went to a monastery in New Jersey. Upon his arrival, he took the vow of silence required of all members of the order.

  Suffolk County Medical Examiner Michael Luongo tested the mucoid substance that had dripped from Mary’s mouth onto her breast and found it to contain “great masses of spermatozoa.” The substance was reexamined in the spring of 1965, however, by a New York pathologist, Alexander Wiener, who not only found no spermatozoa in the sample but no presence of semen in it, either—only the epithelial cells normally present in saliva.

  The thick white stains found on the blanket on which Mary’s body had lain were apparently not semen, either. They contained no spermatozoa.

  On February 11, 1965, one Robert Eugene Pennington, alias J. C. Lundy, was arrested in Gary, Indiana. Pennington, thirty-four, had escaped from the Iowa State Penitentiary on March 12, 1963, where he had been confined since 1959. As a fugitive he had traveled around the country, employed sometimes by moving companies and sometimes by circuses. A short man of stocky build, he had curly brown hair, gray eyes, a tattoo on his upper right arm that said “Ruby,” and the tattoo of a cross on his left palm. A deformed leg caused him to walk with a limp.

  Following his arrest in Indiana, he was rendited to California, which had outstanding warrants on him for kidnapping, child molestation, and at least two counts of murder.

  Pennington—or Lundy, to use his circus name—wanted to die. He was quoted as saying, “I am definitely going to the gas chamber even if I have to kill a guard.”

  On Thursday, March 18, 1965, Pennington was being interrogated by a police captain in Indio, California. In the middle of the questioning, Pennington passed the captain a slip of paper. “Check this out,” he said.

  The ca
ptain looked at what was written on the paper. It read: “In apartment—Mary—Charles St., Boston—strangled her, young, white, January 3 or 4, 1964.”

  On February 21, 1965, Pennington had informed the same police official that he had had “an operation preventing his production of spermatozoa.”

  Pennington would not elaborate on the contents of the note.

  On March 19, 1965, he was sentenced to one year to life on the child molestation charge. He was sent to an institution similar to Bridgewater; the state of California was positive it had the evidence needed to convict him for at least two of the murders of which he had been accused.

  Incarcerated, Pennington talked no further—except to vow that if he had to kill again in order to be executed, he would do so.

  On July 7, 1964, Beacon Hill resident Sims Murray was hypnotized and questioned about what he had noticed at noon on a day very early in January when he had taken his dog for a walk on Charles Street:

  ... I see a girl with records (LPs), a bundle of them, carrying them with both hands, tied with a string. There was a car with someone helping her move. He is average, little under 6 feet, darkish hair, a little bald, face always away from me; not attractive, just average, wearing a jacket ... The girl had on a raincoat, she is shorter than I am, brownish hair, loafers. Can’t see his feet, no hat, he is in back of car, no glasses, clean shaven, fat nose, not pointed ... Never saw the man before or since ... He was wearing blue corduroy pants, Canadian warm-up jacket ...

  The only problem was, Murray couldn’t remember if this event had occurred on January 1 or January 4. Thinking it wasn’t important, he did not report the incident to the police until the very end of the month, after he’d seen Mary’s photo in the paper and decided she was the young woman who had been carrying the bundle of records.

  Sims Murray, shown a photograph of Albert DeSalvo, did not recognize it. What he had probably seen was Pam Parker’s father helping her unpack her car on January 1.

  William Robert Evans, Patricia Delmore’s principal boyfriend, assured a member of the Strangler Task Force several times that he would do whatever he could to help it in its investigation.

  After Mary’s death, a Boston University student claimed that not only had he known her, but that he was the Strangler. (He also claimed to know who had committed the Plymouth mail robbery.) His friends and acquaintances thought him an “oddball,” “a leech as well as a liar,” a manipulator who was always seeking sympathy. He was a kleptomaniac. He also had a criminal record: a conviction for breaking and entering.

  He had worked on Cape Cod in the summer of 1963. Employed by the Cotuit Cemetery, he had been fired for breaking into the storage house, stealing a bag of fertilizer, and dumping it into a mailbox.

  The Boston police had received an anonymous call from a man who claimed to be the Strangler. For a number of reasons, they thought the caller might be this BU student, trying to draw attention to himself.

  In 1964, he sued the Boston Police Department for false arrest—not, however, on any murder charge. The suit was, his friends thought, just another one of the illicit money-making schemes he was forever devising.

  No evidence appeared to exist to link him further with Mary Sullivan.

  Meanwhile, the authorities were growing more and more interested in the ever-helpful and cooperative William Robert Evans. At the end of November 1964, they asked him to take a polygraph examination. The relevant question here would be the whereabouts of Pam Parker’s apartment key, the one that had vanished during Evans’s visit to 44A Charles Street on January 2, 1964. Whoever had killed Mary had not broken into the apartment—he had either been admitted to it or unlocked the door.

  Evans was, according to case records, a rather troubled person: a product of a broken home who fought violently with his mother. He had never had any sexual experience. He knew of Mary’s checkered past, although he claimed to find her unappealing. It was his belief that the killer had really been after his girlfriend Pat, whom Evans considered gorgeous and sexy.

  The polygraph results were not favorable to Evans.

  A little before noon on December 4, 1964, exactly eleven months after the murder of Mary Sullivan, Pam Parker received a phone call at the home of her parents in Malden.

  She picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

  There was a brief silence. Then a male voice said, “Who’s this, Pamela?”

  “Who is this calling?” she replied.

  The person on the other end of the line didn’t identify himself. Instead, he said, “I’m going to do the same thing to you that I did to Mary. I’m going to take that broom and shove it right up your cunt.”

  The caller was breathing heavily. His voice was deep, nervous, and vibrant with hatred. He sounded as if he meant every word of his dreadful threat.

  “Who is this?” Pam said. “Who is this?”

  “I’m even going to take your underwear off, even your underpants, I’ll use those,” the caller continued. “How would you like that, how would you like that? I’ll get you sooner or later like I got Mary. Would you like that, would you really like that? Well, you won’t have to wait. Would you like that?”

  He broke the connection.

  Aghast, Pam dialed the number of the Malden bridal shop where her mother worked. Mrs. Parker immediately called the police.

  There was one other peculiarity about the caller’s voice, Pam told the detectives. He stuttered. Did she know anyone who did? the investigators asked. Yes, Pam answered, two people.

  One of them was William Robert Evans.

  That very afternoon, Evans was scheduled to take another polygraph examination. These were its results:

  Based on the examinations conducted, it is the considered opinion of this examiner that Evans:

  1. Is not telling the truth concerning the extent of his knowledge and/or involvement in the death of MARY SULLIVAN.

  2. Cannot be eliminated from this investigation.

  It would be no surprise to this examiner if Evans turns out to be the person who caused Mary SULLIVAN’s death.

  Note: The charts were examined by other examiners ... who confirmed the findings as outlined in the report.

  On December 22, 1964, John Bottomly requested from Edward Brooke permission to seek a court order to tap Evans’s mother’s home telephone. Said Bottomly’s memo, “He has ‘failed’ two polygraph tests. These is considerable circumstantial evidence which places him in the position of No. 1 suspect. Among other things his statement suggested the possibility that he may have an accomplice or be an accomplice to the murder.”

  No one in the Sullivan family ever really recovered from Mary’s death, perhaps because for all of them the case was never closed, the mystery never solved. Casey Sherman, Diane Dodd’s son, attributes his uncle David’s premature death in early 1995 to an anguish that never faded and essentially crippled his existence.

  Nor was there ever any surcease for Mrs. John Sullivan, who died in 1994. At the time of her death, she had in her possession some of Mary’s personal effects. They now belong to Mrs. Dodd, who refers to them as “artifacts.”

  Like all of Mary’s survivors, Mrs. Dodd believes that the killer was never caught. It galls her that he is quite probably still alive and very likely free, enjoying the life of which he so brutally deprived Mary.

  And what are her feelings about the man who confessed to Mary’s murder? “What would I say to Albert DeSalvo if he were still alive?” Diane Dodd repeats the question and ponders it. Then she sighs, “I would say to him: You didn’t do it. You’re a creep, but you didn’t do it.”

  PART SIX

  34

  Final Thoughts

  That many of the Boston stranglings were copycat crimes is beyond doubt. Starting with the death of Anna Slesers on June 14, 1962, the circumstances of the killings were so thoroughly and so well documented in the newspapers that anyone who wanted to rid himself of an inconvenient woman, or kill one for the thrill of it, or for any other
reason, had a blueprint to do so. The killer could also be assured that the press—particularly the Record American—would attribute the crime to the Phantom Fiend, as would public opinion, which then, as now, was shaped by the media.

  The police always knew better.

  The press contention was that the murders were identical in method. They were not: No similarity whatever exists between the relatively delicate killing of Patricia Bissette, whose murderer tucked her into bed, and the ghastly homicidal violation inflicted on Mary Sullivan, whose killer’s intent was not just to degrade his victim by shoving a broom handle into her vagina but to taunt the discoverer of her corpse by placing a greeting card against her foot. Beverly Samans was stabbed but not sexually assaulted; Joann Graff was raped vaginally and strangled. Evelyn Corbin had performed—probably under duress—oral sex on her killer. Jane Sullivan was dumped facedown to rot in a bathtub. Ida Irga was left in the living room with her legs spread out and propped up on a chair.

  These are hardly identical modi operandi.

  Nor does the fact that the women who died by strangulation were garroted by articles of their own clothing point to a single killer. Virtually every adult woman owns hosiery, brassieres, blouses, scarves, or bathrobes with tie belts. All of these provide excellent and readily available ligatures for a killer—particularly one who doesn’t wish to be observed carrying a murder weapon to the crime scene.