The Boston Strangler (18 page)

There was a definite medical-hospital background. His father was a chemist, his mother a social worker. “He had a very strange childhood,” one schoolmate said. “I don't think his father was around until he was three or so, and he was brought up by women, and nurses, and he hates them.” He was known to be subject to wild fits of violence and intense anger.

Did David Parker possess the psychopathology of the Strangler? Bottomly wondered. Clearly this boy who not only sold but took dangerous hallucinating drugs, who experimented with deadly explosives, who married a girl he was convinced had betrayed him with his dearest friend, who hated women, who had once almost strangled his wife, whose I.Q. reflected superior intelligence, was emotionally disturbed—a dangerous and unpredictable man, especially when under the influence of drugs. Could he be capable of the Strangler's crimes? Could anyone but a man of superior intelligence have managed all that the Strangler had done without making a false step, or leaving a single clue, or betraying himself in any fashion?

What might be learned if David Parker could be carefully questioned and studied by a skilled psychiatrist without being aware that he was a suspect?

There was one door open to Bottomly and he used it. In Massachusetts any male over seventeen charged with a crime can, if his crime or his behavior warrant it, be sent for thirty-five days' psychiatric observation to the State Hospital at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, twenty-five miles from Boston. The hospital's role is to determine the defendant's competence to stand trial. Bridgewater deals almost solely with the courts: virtually every temporary patient behind its walls is a person under criminal indictment sent there for pretrial observation. On January 22, the day David was arrested, Judge A. Edward Viola in Cambridge had observed the strangeness of his manner (standing before him, David had leaped onto a table and begun his hillbilly jig) and had ordered him to Bridgewater.

Bottomly telephoned Ames Robey, Medical Director at the institution. Would Dr. Robey, himself a psychiatrist, give David Parker—and, in the future, any others who might be singled out by Bottomly—special attention? Would he and his colleagues examine and observe Parker with a view to eliciting material helpful in the strangling investigations?

Dr. Robey, precocious, pipe-smoking, scholarly, who at the age of thirty-five had been appointed to this important post only a year before, agreed. He and his associates would consider it part of their responsibility to the people of the Commonwealth. However, every safeguard would be taken to protect the civil rights of patients. (Dr. Robey was particularly interested in this, for one of his specialties was the legal aspects of psychiatry.) That meant if David Parker told Dr. Robey that he was indeed a murderer, this confession could not be used as legal evidence against him, particularly in the absence of a lawyer to advise Parker what to answer and what not to answer. Nor would Dr. Robey testify in court as to what he had learned during his examinations. He would deliberately make no detailed notes on his interviews to avoid any chance that these would be later used to deprive the patient of his rights.

What Dr. Robey, in effect, promised Bottomly was this:

If the persons you wish us to question are sufficiently lucid, or if by medication we can improve them so they can be lucid, we shall question them. If we elicit suspicious material, we shall forward it to you informally to guide you in your further investigations. If we find nothing suspicious, we shall report that as well. If, in our opinion, the suspect could not be capable of the stranglings, we shall say so. Our purpose is to help you find the guilty and eliminate the innocent.

Before Bottomly turned his attention to Peter Hurkos again, he sent Dr. Robey a long memo on the eleven stranglings, listing clues that might guide him and his associates in their interrogations. New facts were being elicited every day as both Lieutenant Donovan's Homicide Division and Bottomly's investigators pushed more deeply into each strangling. Dr. Robey would be kept up to the minute.

9

It was 4
A.M.
Sunday, February 2, when Julian Soshnick, asleep in the room adjoining Peter Hurkos' in the Battle Green Motel in Lexington, suddenly awakened. Jim Crane was bending over him, flicking his ear. “He's started to talk,” Crane whispered. “I've turned on the recorder—”

Soshnick tiptoed into the next room. Peter lay asleep, snoring gently. On his pillow, six inches from his face, rested the microphone leading to the tape recorder. Three detectives sat in the room, illuminated only by the cold moonlight filtering through a half-drawn window blind. Crane put his finger to his lips; the men waited.

Peter spoke. “Sophia morte … Sophia morte!” It was a deep, strained voice, then came five or six swift words in a foreign tongue. The voice did not sound like Peter's, nor had it any trace of his familiar Dutch accent. Then, the gentle snore again. No question of it, Peter was sound asleep. It was no act. He spoke once more. “Hallo, hallo!” A pause. “Engineero, engineero …” He began counting, “Una, dua, treya, Radio Internationale, W-two-D-K-one, W-two-D-K-one, hallo, hallo—” So would a radio ham announcer call out the letters of his station. Then again, slowly, sadly, the deep sepulchral voice, “Sophia mortica … Sophia mortica, Sophia—a-a …”

Soshnick tiptoed about making a quick whispered check. No one recognized the language. Soshnick himself knew a smattering of French, German, Latin, and Hebrew, and a little Spanish; it vaguely resembled Spanish, but whatever the tongue, the words obviously meant “Sophia dead” or “Sophia is dying” or “Sophia killed.”

Sophia. Sophia. Although Soshnick was not too familiar with the individual stranglings, he had read up on the cases since being assigned to Peter. Sophia must refer to Sophie—Sophie Clark, the Negro girl murdered on December 5, 1962, more than a year ago. Again, the gentle snores, interrupted by several short sentences in the same unfamiliar language.

“W-two-D-K-one, W-two-D-K-one, Radio Internationale, Radio Internationale,” came Peter's words, intoned with almost metronomic precision. Suddenly his voice changed. It became high and feminine, almost whispery, a Boston voice speaking English with no trace of foreign accent: “I take the shoes off! Here is the body! I take the shoes off! I undress her! Oh, I go to church, I go to church. I do nothing wrong. I know what is right. I told you I do right.” Almost petulantly, “I do right: I wash my hands in toilet.”

Then, silence. His snores rose and fell. A detective gently picked up the microphone and whispered into it, for the record: “It is now four-fourteen
A.M.
, February second, 1964. Peter Hurkos is sound asleep. He is talking in his sleep.”

Peter began again, but now his voice dropped in pitch. It had almost a brogue, the heavy, matter-of-fact growl of a detective. “Yeah, you was right.” Then, with a sigh, “No, I'm not mad at you. You wash your hands in toilet. I'm not mad.” Soothingly, reassuringly: “Sure you go to heaven! Sure.” He talked as if comforting a frightened child. Then, in a voice unexpectedly sly, cunning, almost like a man playing a children's game with children, “I find you through the toilets. I
find
you …”

A long silence. No one moved. Peter, the no-nonsense detective again: “You call this holy water? You're nuts! For the monks, eh? You are nuts!” Minutes passed. “And the monks don't like you? I don't blame them. Bring it to the monks, the toilet water? You make the cross in the toilet water?” Disgusted: “I tell you, you are nuts!”

The snores resumed, and he did not speak again.

After breakfast, Soshnick telephoned Bill Manning in Bottomly's office and reported what happened. Would Manning look through the Sophie Clark casebook and see if he could find anything bearing on this? Would he also check the call letters W2DK1? Julian was sending the tape into the office. Would they get a man from Berlitz to tell them what language Peter spoke—if it was a recognizable language—and translate what he said?

Later that day Manning reported back. “Julian, I won't comment on what I'm telling you. I am just telling it to you so you will know. Peter spoke Portuguese but the sentences were too fragmentary to make any sense except for the words ‘Sophia dead.' Sophie Clark was a Negro, as you know, but we've learned that she was only half-Negro. Her father was Portuguese. There are no call letters W-two-D-K-one listed in any international registry we can find, but there is a small ham radio station in New Jersey with the call letters W-two-D-K. We made a little check on it. That's owned—” he paused, almost as if fighting to control his voice “—that's owned by a man who turns out to be Sophie Clark's cousin.”

Soshnick looked at the receiver and hung up. If all that meant anything, it meant they must really give serious consideration to Peter's suspect. Now it was even more important not only to pick up the shoe salesman and question him, but to allow Peter to question him too—perhaps even break him down.

Early next morning Soshnick was at O'Brien's door. He was accompanied by a physician and Detective Davis and Officer Stephen Delaney—the latter recently appointed to Bottomly's task force. Because publicity would certainly attend picking up O'Brien, Peter was told to remain in his motel in Lexington, and out of sight.

O'Brien was not home. Soshnick had no doubt what to do. He telephoned Peter in Lexington. “He's not in his room,” he said. “Where's he gone, Peter?”

“He go to church,” Peter answered promptly. “He a religious nut. I see him walk into church now.” He described the church, the kind of steeple, the neighborhood. “That can only be Our Lady of Victories,” said Detective Davis. “It's about ten blocks from here.”

Leaving Delaney on the scene in case O'Brien returned, they drove to the church. Services were ending: they made a careful search, but their man was not there. Again Julian telephoned Peter. “God damn, you just miss him,” said Peter, in Lexington. “Go back—you find him in room.”

When they arrived Delaney reported that O'Brien had walked in a few minutes before. “Did he say where he'd been?” Soshnick asked. Delaney nodded. “At church—Our Lady of Victories,” he said. “I told him you were looking for him, and he said, ‘I guess I'm in trouble now.'”

A moment later in response to their knock O'Brien opened the door. Soshnick formally introduced himself. “I'm from the Attorney General's office, these gentlemen are police officers, and this gentleman is a doctor. May we come in?”

“Yes, of course,” said O'Brien. Then, in his high-pitched voice, “I'm so glad you came, finally.”

Soshnick's mind flashed back to the notorious lipstick murders in Chicago in the 1940's, the scrawled message on the walls of a victim's apartment, “For heavens sake catch me before I kill more, I cannot control myself.” When he realized that the single cot in the room had no mattress—only bedsprings—he felt a complete sense of unreality.

Was this the Strangler before them?

They saw a small, emaciated man who could not have weighed more than 130 pounds, about five feet seven—exactly the height Peter had marked off in his room in Lexington; he was in his mid-fifties, effeminate in manner, standing almost apologetically to one side, nervously rubbing his hands together. His nose was thin and sharp—“spitzy”—as Peter had said. On his left arm was a scar—as Peter had said. The thumb of his right hand was deformed—as Peter had said. Peter had been right in every detail.

The room was tiny, perhaps eight by ten, in considerable disorder, with books, pamphlets, artists' sketch pads piled everywhere. On a table were health foods—molasses, wheat germ, and the like.

The physician questioned O'Brien at some length. Yes, he had once tried to get himself committed: he had told his brother that he might have blacked out several times. The physician signed the commitment papers on the spot. Minutes later he and O'Brien were on their way to Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and the others were eagerly going through the shoe salesman's possessions.

It was, at first sight, a pathetic haul. Here was a penciled diary, the writing going off in all directions but recognizably the same as in O'Brien's letter, with dates indicating he had been keeping it almost from his college days. On one page, printed in huge capital letters, doubly underlined, were the words: ALWAYS RUN FROM TEMPTATION INSTANTLY! The entries told how O'Brien had sought to become a Trappist monk nearly twenty years before, but had failed. Through the years he tried one job after another, but was able to get mainly dishwashing and laundry jobs; sometimes he sold shoes. “I can't hold a job,” he had written. “Total—sixty low-paying jobs, never more than a few weeks each. I have made a shambles of my life.”

Then, a heading “Remarks Made To Me By Others.” Soshnick read it, moved despite himself. “You're a menace. You're no good. You're a GD liar. You're a disgrace to Boston College. You're a womanish man. I'd rather see you dead drunk in the streets than see you as you are. (Spoken to me by my brother.) When are you going to get married, eh? So you like that boy? Ha, ha! People like you are hit from pillar to post. You're in mortal sin—filthy, rotten, dirty …”

This was followed by confession. “Once, while near Harvard, I looked at a girl, perhaps at her legs … At frequent occasions while walking in the street I struggle against the impulse to collide with a woman … I must stop beating my seed, and during sleep. I have tried various ways to stop this. I have been sleeping on the floor to control my improper acts in my sleep, but surely these I can't be responsible for.” Then, later: “I am doing all that is humanly possible to master human nature and I know I am chaste at last. I am going on forty-four years, almost.”

Soshnick turned another page. Peter, already telephoned that the coast was clear, would arrive any moment now to join the search. Soshnick could not put down the diary. “I get angry, so angry. Women sitting in doctor's offices exposing their legs. Men walking with their hands behind their backs, strolling before me. Women wearing tight-fitting dresses and highly scented with erotic perfumes … I felt I was under investigation, people watching me in the library. I went to see Dr. Flannigan. The advice I got was that I was imagining it. So I was advised to go to St. Elizabeth's Hospital for nerve treatments which turned out to be shock therapy.”