The Boston Strangler (12 page)

“Isn't that amazing!” Gordon exclaimed, when he found Dr. Stratton. “Arnold said ‘I know' when you introduced us. That jarred me. He knows me.”

How could he explain that?

“I've been concentrating on him so much, I've been visualizing him until I almost live in him,” said Gordon. “Maybe it's given him a subconscious sense of having met me. If I can visualize him, maybe he can visualize me.”

Would he consider Arnold a suspect?

“He's the man,” Gordon said positively. “And that's not an easy thing for me to say, Doctor, because I have no real way of proving it.”

Now, having identified Arnold, Gordon began telling the assembled group what happened in the Nina Nichols strangling; how Arnold walked into the lobby of 1940 Commonwealth Avenue that tragic Saturday afternoon, June 30, 1962, buzzed Nina Nichols from below—the buzz heard by her sister-in-law, Mrs. Chester Steadman, over the telephone—walked up the three flights of stairs, knocked, and went in. How he approached her as if she were his mother, how she backed away, paralyzed with fear, how he choked her half unconscious, placed her in a chair, shook her, pleaded with her as if she were his mother and finally killed her, not to kill her but to silence her so she would listen.

Lieutenant Sherry broke in. “Paul, I'm new at this ESP thing. You answer one question and I'll believe you. Tell me what happened to Nina Nichols. She knows, but she's dead: only the medical examiner and I know. Can you see what happened to Nina Nichols at the time she was being murdered?”

Paul Gordon opened his mouth, but his attorney leaped to his feet. “Wait a minute, Paul! Lieutenant Sherry, if he gives you that answer, does that mean you'll arrest Paul as the Strangler?”

Sherry looked at him, as if pondering his reply, but Paul spoke up, back to his original gambit. “I don't like to go into that, Lieutenant, but some day when you're not wearing a badge I'll call you and tell you what happened to Nina Nichols and the other women. Stuff like that makes me feel squeamish. I can't sleep nights, it's so real to me.”

The meeting ended soon after.

Days later, Phil and Jim interviewed Dr. Stratton and came away more puzzled than ever. The psychiatrist knew little about Gordon. He had met him as Phil's aunt had explained. The poker game at which the attorney had mentioned Gordon's name to him had been in March. Gordon had come up to Boston State Hospital a few days later and introduced himself, said Dr. Stratton casually, and had come up twice since then to consult him about various personal matters. Dr. Stratton was understandably noncommittal.

All the two detectives could think of now was that Paul Gordon had visited Boston State Hospital in March—
before
he called on Phil DiNatale in May and identified Arnold Wallace's photograph among those on his desk.

Could Paul and Arnold have met on the hospital grounds in March? Arnold was not confined to a ward. Perhaps Paul had identified the photograph not because he possessed ESP, but because he had seen and even perhaps talked with the real Arnold. That could be why Arnold appeared to know him when Dr. Stratton introduced the two men. Was the whole thing a hoax?

Or was it possible that the two had never met and Arnold, in his confused mental state, thought he knew Gordon, perhaps mistook him for one of the many physicians about the hospital?

Why was Paul Gordon so
sure
that Arnold was the Strangler?

Was
Arnold the Strangler?

In an attempt to throw light on this perplexing situation, a court order was obtained permitting the police to subject Arnold to a lie-detector test. Early in June Phil DiNatale and Jim Mellon took Arnold from the hospital to the offices of Charles Zimmerman, a private polygraph expert formerly associated with Interpol, the international detective agency. Zimmerman was frequently used by the Boston police because of his experience in the field.
*

The two detectives waited in Zimmerman's anteroom. Arnold, tall, lanky, his long jaws blue with beard, in khaki chinos and an open-necked blue shirt, sat vacantly on a chair, the two detectives in chairs next to him. Mellon, thinking the sight of girls might start Arnold talking, picked up a movie magazine from a sofa opposite them and handed it to Arnold. The latter thumbed through it. He stopped at a page showing a Hollywood starlet in a bathing suit. He did not move. His face grew dreamy.

“Arnold,” said Mellon. “What are you thinking of?”

Arnold looked at him. His voice was far away. He was holding the magazine in both hands on his lap. “I'm screwing this girl right now,” he said. “I got her on that couch.” His eyes closed, and he was lost in his private fantasies. He slowly relaxed. His eyes opened. Arnold glanced at the two detectives staring at him, and the same slow, vacant grin appeared on his face. “I do it in my mind,” he said boastfully, almost like a little boy.

The lie-detector test, when he took it, was inconclusive.

Arnold Wallace had an I.Q. of between 60 and 70. The normal figure is 100 to 110. His low intelligence was one barrier to communication with him. Add to that his psychotic state and his ability to put himself into a world where fantasy and reality were one, and it seemed obvious that any conversation with him must be as inconclusive as the polygraph test. One could not believe his denials—or, for that matter, his confession, were he ever to confess.

The two men took him back to Boston State Hospital.

There was nothing to do but check and recheck circumstantial evidence, and try to make up their minds about the amazing Paul Gordon who knew so much and said he learned it telepathically from Arnold Wallace, the Strangler.

*
The polygraph is an instrument that simultaneously measures and records changes in blood pressure, respiration, and electric resistance due to perspiration while a subject answers questions. These readings, interpreted by a highly trained examiner, are believed by many to be an almost infallible test of truth or falsehood. Lie-detector evidence, however, is not admissible as legal evidence in court.

6

July, August, September, 1963.

The days ticked off through the hot summer. Each week that passed without a strangling was accepted gratefully. It seemed possible once more to buy newspapers without fear that the same headline would leap at one, and to become involved again in what took place outside Boston—Pope John's death and Pope Paul's election, the Soviet's achievement in sending a woman into space, the welcome given by millions to a Bostonian named John F. Kennedy during his tour of Europe, the extraordinary civil rights march on Washington, D.C.

On Sunday, September 8, people sunned themselves in the Public Garden or strolled on the green Esplanade on the banks of the Charles. Perhaps some may have remembered the tense Labor Day weekend just a year before, after the discovery of sixty-seven-year-old Jane Sullivan's body—and the realization that she and Ida Irga, a woman of seventy-five, had been strangled in the same twenty-four-hour period. Those grotesque crimes, indeed all the grotesque crimes before and since, seemed far away that peaceful summer day.

That morning, shortly before ten o'clock in suburban Salem, Mrs. Evelyn Corbin dropped in to have Sunday breakfast with her good friend, Mrs. Flora Manchester, sixty-six, who lived down the hall on the first floor of a five-story red brick building at 224 Lafayette Street. Mrs. Corbin was blond, blue-eyed, and vivacious, a petite divorcée of fifty-eight who looked nearly fifteen years younger. Few knew her real age. She had celebrated her birthday two days before: everyone assumed that it was at most her forty-fifth. She had a modest job in the lamp-assembly line at the Sylvania Electric Company, and had been going with Mrs. Manchester's son Bob, forty-one, for some time. The three were almost a family group.

It was the habit of the two women to take Sunday breakfast together, each still in nightgown and housecoat; then Mrs. Corbin would return to her apartment and dress for 11:30
A.M.
Mass at nearby St. Theresa's Chapel. On her way out she would rap twice on Mrs. Manchester's door to signal her departure. Returning an hour or so later she would knock again to indicate she was back.

Bob, a sales engineer, had left at 9
A.M.
for his office in Newton Highlands, twenty-five miles away, to catch up on work. The two women had one bit of gossip—someone had tampered with both their doors earlier that morning. Mrs. Manchester had no doubt of it. About 9:10, someone had tried a key in the lock, found it wouldn't work, and went away. She had been so upset that although Mrs. Corbin lived only a few yards down the hall, she telephoned her. “Someone just tried my door,” she said. “Was it you?”

“No,” said Evelyn. She sounded equally puzzled. “Someone tried mine only a minute ago.” She had looked out, but no one was there.

Both women dismissed it from their minds, and Mrs. Corbin left about 10:35 for her own apartment to prepare for church.

Mrs. Manchester heard no double knock at 11:10, the usual time. When she had not heard it by 11:15, she telephoned Evelyn to warn her she'd be late for Mass. There was no answer. At 12:30
P.M.
, having heard neither the signal for departure nor return, Mrs. Manchester telephoned Eaten's Drug Store across the street, where Evelyn always picked up her Sunday paper on the way back from church. No, she had not been there yet.

A half hour later Mrs. Manchester, another neighbor at her side—Mrs. Manchester had a heart condition and wasn't sure she'd be up to handling things if Evelyn had taken ill—unlocked Mrs. Corbin's door with the key she had. They found Evelyn Corbin sprawled across her bed, still in the blue nightgown and gray housecoat, the white ankle socks and slippers, she'd worn to breakfast a few hours before.

She had been strangled with two of her nylon stockings, tied together at the throat, and knotted with the extra half hitch. The front of her housecoat had been ripped open with such violence that three buttons had flown off, exposing her left breast. Her night gown had been pushed up; her right leg extended on the bed, the other placed at almost right angles dangling over the side so that she lay nude and grossly exposed. Her killer had stuffed her underpants into her mouth as a gag, and tied a third nylon stocking in an elaborate bow about the ankle of her left foot, hanging motionless a few inches above the floor. The knot here, too, was the double half hitch—the Strangler's knot.

She had been sexually assaulted in a manner the newspapers found difficult to describe, save to say evidence indicated that her killer “had satisfied an unnatural sexual appetite in the commission of his crime.”

Salem police had only to note a few other facts. The apartment had been locked. Mrs. Corbin's possessions had been searched. Two bureau drawers were half open. Apparently nothing had been taken. A jewelry tray had been removed and carefully set on the floor. Her empty purse was found on the floor beside the bed, its contents dumped on a couch nearby. She had recently visited friends in Salem Hospital. She was an accomplished pianist—sheet music lay on the bench before the baby grand in her living room.

Again there were no clues—or were there? There was the tampering with the doors that morning. Outside Mrs. Corbin's kitchen window, on the rear fire escape, police found a fresh doughnut. No doughnuts were found in the apartment, nor had any tenants tossed doughnuts from the windows above.

The terror was still at work, and if possible, even more awful. For a little while he had turned his attentions to younger women. Had he now come back to his first prey again? A year had passed since Ida Irga and Jane Sullivan, and more than a year since Anna Slesers and Helen Blake and Nina Nichols, and it had begun all over again.

On Friday, November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

From one-thirty that afternoon—the hour of his death—a distrait Boston, its shops closed, its streets all but empty, sustaining a sense of loss more personal than any other city, for this had been his home, began the long mourning vigil. At 12:17 the next afternoon—Saturday, November 23—the people of Boston saw President Lyndon B. Johnson en route to St. John's Cathedral for memorial services, and then watched as the TV cameras moved to the White House to show dignitaries slowly entering the East Room where the casket of John Kennedy lay, banked with flowers.

And in the hours that immediately followed, between 12:30
P.M.
and 3:30
P.M.
that Saturday afternoon, as Boston and the rest of America sat numbly before its television screens, a quiet, retiring twenty-three-year-old girl named Joann Graff was raped and strangled to death in her locked apartment in suburban Lawrence, an hour's drive from Boston.

She was strangled with two nylon stockings intertwined with a leg of her black leotard, tied about her neck in an elaborate, flowing bow, like a circus clown's bow tie, and with the extra half hitch—the Strangler's knot. She lay diagonally across her bed, nude save for a pink blouse bunched up about her shoulders, her legs wide apart, the left extended directly forward, the other bent almost at right angles, dangling over the edge of the bed, a white slipper still on the foot. The front of her blouse had been ripped open with such violence that four buttons had popped off. There were unmistakable teeth marks on her left breast. Under her head was found the earpiece of her metal-rimmed glasses, surprisingly old-fashioned for a girl of twenty-three.

A Salem detective left the scene muttering, “It's like rerunning a film of Evelyn Corbin.”

Joann's one-room apartment had been ransacked, but left untouched on the table was an envelope with her gas bill and several dollars. There was no sign of forced entry. A girl with few friends, she had come from Chicago five months ago after graduation from the Chicago Art Institute, and she taught sixth grade Sunday School at the Lutheran Redeemer Church in Lawrence. She was so conservative that she thought most print dresses too gaudy to wear. The firm for which she worked as a designer, creating motifs for automobile upholstery, tablecloths, and trays, was directly across the street from Lawrence General Hospital.