The Boston Strangler (11 page)

“That fits Arnold, and Lord knows, he's filthy enough, sleeping in cellars,” said Gordon.

Phil thought, Who knows how far to go with this? Yet the man had picked out Arnold Wallace's photograph. “All right,” he said. “Let's go.” A moment later the group—Gordon, his attorney, Phil, Jim Mellon, and Frank Craemer, were driving to Westmorland Street, a long thoroughfare in Back Bay in the area where the two girls had been attacked. On Westmorland Street they left the car and continued on foot.

What took place that May evening was an extraordinary exhibition that none of the detectives would forget. As Gordon came near the scene, he seemed to bristle; he grew more and more excited. He increased his pace until he was trotting, the others hastening after him, darting to one side of the street, stopping short, absorbing the atmosphere about him, then suddenly to the other side, sniffing, listening, meanwhile talking urgently under his breath, “I'll hide here—the girl comes, I'll grab her—I'll wait for her here—” The others realized that Gordon was enacting the role of the Strangler. Now Gordon became the witness: “He grabs her—his pants are open, his penis is out—he throws her to the ground—she screams, lights go on, windows go up, students look out—he's scared now, he's running up the alley—he cuts across the street—”

Gordon raced to the other side. When the others caught up to him, he was portraying a terrified fugitive. “Where'll I go?” he moaned. “Where'll I go? I'll hide in this car—” He scurried to the parked police car. “He jumps inside, he thinks: ‘I'll hide—I'll wait—I'll wait an hour, two hours—they'll go away … Oh, I can't stand those police sirens, they're getting louder—'”

Suddenly he wheeled and began running down the street again, the others behind him. After a few steps, Jim Mellon stopped short. He thought to himself, Are you nuts? Sweet Mother of Christ, if you go on with this, you're batty! He stood there for a moment. He saw Gordon's burly figure silhouetted in the lamplight as he ran, crouching. His lawyer and Frank Craemer trotted behind him and lumbering doggedly after them was Phil DiNatale. I've had it, Mellon thought. He turned on his heel, went back to the police car, made himself comfortable in the back seat, and waited.

Back in his office, Phil gave the subject of Paul Gordon some thought. DiNatale had grown up in a police family. His father, a detective, had been in the force forty-three years. His four brothers and his two uncles were police officers. Phil had listened and benefited from their experience, and he had learned one important rule: keep an open mind, no matter how strange a man or his story might seem. This Gordon might be a crackpot. Yet perhaps he
could
sense things as others could not. Phil had never heard of extrasensory perception. From what he could make out of the attorney's briefing, it was something like a woman's intuition. Phil made several calls that night and the next day—among them to a physician, a priest, and two nuns. Had they heard of ESP? The physician said he believed it did exist in some measure; the priest said it was most difficult to determine; one nun had studied it in college, the other knew nothing about it.

I'll go along with this fellow, Phil decided. I'll find out if he's worth while. If not, I'll drop him. But I'll stick with him, step by step. He would have to do it on his own time, Phil knew, because he wasn't sure what his superiors might think. I want to see what makes this fellow tick, he told himself. Why is he coming forth with this information? For the reward? Is he mentally sick? Is he a con man? Why does he stop his description just before the murder? Because he doesn't know? Or because he does know?
Could he be the killer himself?
He's big and strong enough. There's a reason Gordon is telling us all this, thought Phil, and I'm going to find out why.

A week later Gordon dropped in again. He gave a few more details of the stranglings. “Say, would you fellows take me to some of the murder apartments?” he asked. Impressions, he said, would be far more powerful on the scene.

Phil listened to this suggestion with more eagerness than he showed. He and Jim Mellon had been checking on Arnold Wallace. Gordon was uncannily close to the truth. Phil had found a former landlady with whom Arnold's mother roomed before her death in 1961. She recalled how Arnold fought with his mother, beating and punching her to give him her welfare checks. “Once I heard an awful crash,” she said. “I ran out to see Mrs. Wallace in a heap at the foot of the stairs and when I looked up there was Arnold, standing at the top of the stairs, grinning. If that poor woman knew her son was coming over she'd run out screaming, ‘He's going to murder me.'” Arnold might actually have had a hand in her death. She had undergone an operation at Boston City Hospital on April 14, 1961. Arnold visited her shortly after she came down from surgery. When a nurse entered her room a few minutes later, Arnold was gone, but his mother lay unconscious on the floor, the various tubes through which she had been fed and given plasma torn from her body. She died later that day without regaining consciousness.

Arnold insisted that she was sleeping peacefully when he left. If one wished, one could assume that she had convulsively thrown herself out of bed. But nurses said wooden sides had been fitted to it …

Important as that was in placing Arnold into the psychological pattern of the Strangler, more important was the fact that he had escaped from Boston State Hospital five or six times—
and each time coincided with a strangling!

Was that coincidence only? thought Phil. Or had Gordon, with his ESP, actually zeroed in on the Strangler? There was no use questioning Arnold: he denied everything, but he was schizophrenic, and his answers made little sense.

Aloud Phil said, “That sounds like a good idea, Paul.” Jim Mellon was not on duty that evening, but Detective Craemer and two other colleagues went along. They decided to go first to Sophie Clark's. The group drove there and parked near her apartment house at 315 Huntington Avenue.

Gordon spoke. “The killer first met Sophie in that drugstore.” He pointed to the Gainsborough Pharmacy on the corner of Huntington and Gainsborough Street. Around the corner was Anna Slesers' apartment. “They had a cup of coffee together, and he got to know her. She'd shop at the A and P a few doors down the street there. He'd see her in the place, then walk home with her.”

He led the others to the rear of 311 Huntington Avenue. He was about to go into the basement when Phil said, “Sophie didn't live in this building, Paul. She lived two doors down, at 315.” Gordon brushed him aside. “I know, but the killer entered this cellar. You see, they all connect, like dungeons.” Gordon was moving rapidly now, and the detectives were hard put to keep up with him as he hustled into the first building, out of it, into another, through service entrances, around furnaces and storage rooms, until they were in the basement of 315—Sophie's building.

Phil marveled, thinking, I'm eighteen years in the Back Bay, I know these places, but, by God, this character knows them as well as I do … Either he's a good bird dog, or that ESP really means something, or else he's been here before and memorized the place.

Gordon suddenly stopped. “See that door? The killer hid behind it for a couple of hours waiting for Sophie to come home. It was a wet slushy day; he was conscious he would leave wet footprints, so he rubbed his feet to dry them over there, and he was nervous, smoking cigarettes all the time. You open that door and you'll find a pile of butts behind it. Chesterfields.”

Dutifully Phil opened the heavy door: three or four butts lay on the cement floor. They did not appear to be stacked: rather they were spread over a five square foot area. But a man might have flipped them so they fell in that pattern. They were Chesterfields.

“Now, please follow me,” said Gordon. He hurried up two flights of back steps. “We're coming to a door with plate glass on it,” Gordon announced. Sure enough, around a turn in the stairs they came upon a glass-plated door. Now they were before Apartment 3C, directly under the Sophie Clark apartment. Gordon had become agitated; perspiration showed on his forehead; he was actually trembling.

“What's the matter, Paul?” Phil asked.

Gordon was pale. “There is something inside there that upsets me. It's making me ill.”

“Well,” said Phil casually, “you know, Paul, this isn't Sophie's apartment. Hers is one flight up—4C.”

“Oh, oh!” said Gordon. “You see, when I get near it—”

They went up one more flight and stood at the door of 4C. Gordon seemed to have himself under control, his voice strong and eager. “As you go in the door, remember that coffee table I told you about. The telephone table, the prints on the wall, the two sofas I mentioned—one black, on the right side of the living room, one brown, on the other side. The killer sat in the brown one for a while. You'll find a bookcase in the right-hand corner near the window and a gray easy chair next to it.”

The furnished apartment in which Sophie and her two roommates had lived had since been rented by two youths attending Boston University. One boy was home and let the men in. There was no indication that he knew what had taken place there before.

Astonishingly enough, the apartment was almost exactly as Gordon had described it. The bookcase was where he said it would be, the gray easy chair next to it. Only one sofa—a black one—was seen on the right side of the room. There was no telephone table, however, in the hall, and no prints on the wall.

While Gordon went about, touching and examining, Phil took the new tenant aside, talked with him softly, then came back to look at Gordon with renewed interest. There had been a brown couch when he rented the place, the boy said: the day they moved in, they put it down in the cellar. There had been a telephone table in the hall, and there might well have been two pictures on the wall, for the plaster showed the holes. And the back door, as Gordon had told Phil days before, was nailed shut.

How could Gordon know all this unless he had been in the apartment when the three girls lived there? Or unless he really possessed ESP?

Gordon led the way into the bathroom. “Look here,” he said. He stared at the white medicine chest. “The killer looked through this for a razor. Why the hell would he want a razor?” Gordon seemed as puzzled as anyone as he went back to the living room. “I picture the killer sitting here on the brown sofa. Sophie is in the kitchen preparing supper. The phone rings—”

Phil almost started, but said nothing.

“Sophie comes out to answer it, but she has to pass by him to get to the telephone in the hall, and she's afraid because every time she tried to go by, he grabs at her. Finally she makes a break for it, he grabs her, they struggle, he strikes her on the side of the head, and she falls unconscious …”

Through Phil's mind ran the fact that Audri Adams, Sophie's roommate, had telephoned Sophie at two-thirty. She was O.K. then. Gloria Todd, her other roommate, telephoned her at four-thirty, to ask her about mail. The telephone rang and rang, without answer.

“Then I picture him—” Gordon was drawling his story, slowly, as one trying to remember. “—I picture him going into the bathroom and tearing up the shower curtains, maybe to use them to tie her up—and he sees he can't take them down because they're on hooks, and have to be unhooked, so he grabs at the door of the medicine cabinet—he's going to open it to get that razor—perhaps to cut her throat—then he realizes girls don't shave, no razor, so he doesn't even open the door. He's in a hurry—just breezes in and out of the bathroom. When he came back into this room, Sophie was just coming to—he began choking her, then he'd wait for her to come to consciousness, then choke her again—” He stopped.

“Then what happened?” demanded Phil.

Again Gordon evaded the question. “I can't tell you that—I don't care to, because when I get that close to the victim, in my mind, at least, I don't want to look at what happened. I don't want to see it. I'm telling you about the cigarettes and the rest because maybe that'll be helpful to you—that's all.”

The men left the apartment. Phil suggested they drive around the corner to 77 Gainsborough Street, Anna Slesers' building. They parked in front of No. 77, and Gordon retold his story—Arnold leaning against the tree, the arrival of the ice cream truck … DiNatale, looking down this street of identical buildings, each with its huge, silent bay window, thought, People sit at those windows day and night looking out from behind their curtains. Old ladies sit there for hours. A thousand eyes were on this street the day the Strangler mounted the seven steps to the stoop, pulled open the door of No. 77—and no one saw anything. Nothing at all.

On the morning of May 20 Phil and Jim were suddenly summoned to Boston State Hospital, to find Paul Gordon and his attorney, a number of police officials, and Dr. Stratton and several other psychiatrists.

Everyone was in a state of excitement. Paul Gordon had identified Arnold Wallace as the man he had visualized as the Strangler.

Gordon had called upon Dr. Stratton the day before with a request: “Could I meet Arnold Wallace? I want to see if he and the man I see are the same person.”

Dr. Stratton took Gordon into a reception room and sent an orderly for Arnold. As they waited, Gordon said, “When this fellow opens his mouth, you'll see a missing tooth here—” He indicated one of his own front teeth.

A few minutes later the tall figure of Arnold came into view down the corridor. Gordon whispered excitedly to Dr. Stratton: “That's your fellow!”

Dr. Stratton presented the two to each other. “Paul, this is Arnold Wallace. Arnold, this is Paul Gordon.” Arnold looked at Paul, held out a limp hand. “Yes, I know,” he said, surprisingly.

The three talked for a few minutes, then Dr. Stratton left for an appointment. Five minutes later Gordon emerged. Arnold had returned to his ward.