The Boston Strangler (19 page)

On the last page there was a single entry, dated 1953. “Called Archbishop Cushing's home. Was told to snap out of it, that I was O.K. and given the Archbishop's blessing.”

Soshnick looked up as Peter stormed in, more excited than anyone had seen him before. He dropped to his knees and began scuttling about the room, crawling under the cot, into the cramped closet, muttering under his breath, “This fellow, he put on paper all killings, we find it—” He snatched a pamphlet from the center of a pile, pressed it to his forehead. “This it!” he cried. He opened it. “Look!”

It was a text on Yoga with black-and-white drawings depicting the various positions. The first half was devoted to male figures, the second, to female. But in the second half, page after page of figures was completely blotted out with India ink. Peter jumped to his feet and held the pages against the light so that everyone could see visible, under the ink, the outlines of female figures, now seated cross-legged in the traditional lotus position, now with legs spread apart. Peter counted aloud. “One … two … three—” until he reached a triumphant “—eleven!” There must have been a dozen more pages with female illustrations, but only eleven had been blotted out.

One for each strangling.

In a bureau drawer Delaney found half a dozen men's scarves and ties tightly knotted together. In another they came upon a note pad with penciled sketches of apartment buildings, and on other pages, drawings of apartment interiors. One was a bathroom. An X had been drawn over the tub. Victim Jane Sullivan had been found in a tub. Another showed a living room and hall—the X was in the hall. Anna Slesers had been found in the hall of her apartment. Another scene showed a bedroom, an X on the bed, near the headboard. Mary Sullivan had been found propped against the headboard.

When Soshnick first set eyes on O'Brien he thought, Oh, Peter, you're way off here! What has this poor trembling little shoe salesman got to do with the stranglings? O'Brien's diary had made him even more doubtful. But—the eleven figures; and now all this …

The landlady appeared as they were leaving. Yes, this roomer was an odd one. She had taken the house over some months before and the previous owner, a woman, had warned her about O'Brien: “Never let yourself be alone with him.” She herself knew little about him except that he never used the mattress—“I guess he sleeps on the floor, he must have a bad back”—and that he took showers with his shoes on. “Did you ever hear the like?” she demanded. “Wearing your shoes?” She had complained repeatedly that the metal cleats in his heels scratched the bathtub enamel, but Mr. O'Brien did not change his habits.

Peter, the man who had said, “He love shoes! He love shoes!” looked sharply at the others. “He the one,” he said.

O'Brien's questioning at the Mental Health Center occupied the next two afternoons. First Soshnick alone questioned him, then Bottomly, Soshnick, and Peter, who was introduced as “Dr. Spitz,” a Dutch psychologist. (The name was chosen in recognition of Peter's insistence on the Strangler's sharp, “spitzy” nose.)

It was a sad experience for everyone concerned.

O'Brien, with a hospital psychiatrist on hand, sat down on the edge of his bed, trembling most of the time, turning earnestly first to one and then the other as they interrogated him. He did not have to answer questions if he did not wish to, he was told. He could have a lawyer if he wanted one. No, he said, why should he need a lawyer? He was ready to tell them what they wished to know.

Why had he written the letter to the Nursing School, Bottomly asked.

O'Brien explained that it was the last of many attempts he had made to meet a Catholic girl. Ten years before he had joined the Correy Club in Cincinnati, conducted by the Franciscan Fathers. It was a social correspondence club. Later, he joined the Scientific Marriage Foundation Club in Indiana, headed by Dr. Frank Crane; then the Boston College Catholic Marriage Club. None worked out for him. One club last August sent him the name of a nurse in Connecticut. He took a bus there, lunched once with her, and never saw her again. Once a woman came to Boston and telephoned him to meet her in her hotel room at eight o'clock in the evening. “I didn't like that, so I didn't keep the appointment.” He finally wrote the Nursing Home, giving as reference Dr. Wright, Cardinal Cushing's physician, because Dr. Wright once treated him for an ear ailment. He had had many operations for mastoid.

Yes, he had sold shoes, off and on for years. Nurses' shoes, women's orthopedic shoes. Only last January 7 he took a job in a shoe store but they dismissed him after half a day's work.

Peter interrupted. “You was fired because you have trouble with lady. When you fitted lady's shoe, she crossed legs—like this—and you get excited. You could not control yourself. That's why you fired.”

“Well, I wasn't very comfortable, I guess,” O'Brien said. He stopped. “Please, may I have a glass of water. My mouth is dry.” He was given the water. “It wasn't that I wanted to do anything wrong, it's just that it was a new experience for me.”

“You never get blackout when you see women with legs crossed?” Peter demanded.

“I don't recall anything like that, no.”

Peter asked, “Tom, that fat monk with glasses, why he not like you, so you quit?”

Both Bottomly and Soshnick glanced at “Dr. Spitz.” There had been no mention anywhere of a “fat monk with glasses.”

“Oh, you mean the Trappist monk?” said Tom. “Well, the life there was very difficult, my ear hurt—”

Peter took another tack. “Do you know you have lost a button when you go into apartment to sell shoes to lady?”

“Lost a button?” O'Brien seemed completely puzzled.

“Yes, she invite you in for coffee, you go in, you lost button from jacket of suit. Right?”

No, no, said O'Brien. He had never been invited into a lady's apartment. He had never sold apartment to apartment—only store to store. When he lost his job January 7, he tried selling a line of shoes to hospitals and stores, but failed to make a single sale in the entire month.

He thought maybe “somebody was following me and stealing my customers.” That might be because the police continually watched him. He wanted to turn to someone for help, and he went to Father Kenneth Murphy, of Rescue, Incorporated, who received telephone calls from people thinking of suicide. “I never wanted to harm myself,” O'Brien said, “but ten years ago when things were kind of blue I prayed and asked God to take me out of this life, if it was His will. The good Lord decided I live a little longer.”

Why should the police watch him?

“I don't know. Maybe because once in Providence I saw a very attractive girl walking and I thought I'd like to talk to her. I began walking toward her, then I realized it wasn't right to talk to a strange girl, so I turned and walked away before I reached her.” Perhaps they watched him because on another occasion, when he was sitting on a bench in Providence State House, waiting to apply for unemployment insurance—he had attempted selling oranges from a cart, but that venture failed, too—a strange man sat down beside him, introduced himself as a physician, and “began pressing hard on the idea that I was a homosexual. I had all the signs of such a person, he said—those were his very words.”

Julian said earnestly, “Tom, we've looked through your room, we know everything about you. God wants you to tell the truth. God knows you have been hurt, but you don't have to worry any more. Just tell the truth.” With this Julian unexpectedly pushed a police photograph of Mary Sullivan's nude body, as she was found, in front of O'Brien. “Look, Tom, you know what I'm talking about. Don't be afraid, Tom—”

O'Brien was looking away, refusing to look at the photograph.

“No, no, Tom, you must look. Here—” He showed him a second, then a third.

Tom's face was gray. “I don't quite understand what you're talking about,” he said, agitated. “You show me pictures, pictures of dead women, terrible, terrible, what do you mean?”

“How do you know they're dead women?” Julian demanded.

“I don't know but they look dead, so I guessed they were dead. Oh, they're terrible, terrible.” He was trembling violently.

“Don't you remember this girl, Tom,” Julian said, holding up Mary Sullivan's photograph. “Tom, don't you remember taking off her shoes, and then spreading her legs—”

“No, no, never, never. This is all new to me.”

“But when a woman sits on a sofa and crosses her legs, doesn't that upset you—”

He denied it. “No, no, not upset. Any normal man would be a little excited—”

“People saw you standing in front of this girl's house,” said Peter with authority. Witnesses had seen Mary Sullivan—or someone resembling her—before her apartment house on Charles Street taking record albums out of her blue Vauxhall, assisted by an unidentified man, on January 4, the day of her murder.

“Not me,” said Tom. “It's all new to me.”

He denied every suggestion that put him on the scene of any strangling, or in Filene's, where Mary Sullivan worked during Christmas, or in any hospital when any victim had been there.

Bottomly produced the apartment sketches found in his room. What did the X's mean?

“Oh, gee, those were art exercises,” he said. “I was studying to be a commercial artist. You make the overall sketch first, putting the X's as you go along to indicate what you must ink in, then you go over it later and ink them in.”

Why had he drawn the exteriors of apartment houses?

That was a game he played with his brother, who used to drop in of an evening. They would sit on Tom's cot and his brother would say, “Do you remember the building we lived in on Leyland Street?” Then each would draw it as they remembered it, then compare drawings and argue who was right. “It was just something to do,” said Tom.

Why had he blotted out eleven female figures in the Yoga book?

Was that the number? He didn't know why eleven. But he always covered female figures; when he copied from ancient statues in his art work, he liked to draw in dresses and skirts.

Why were the knotted scarves and ties in his drawer?

“I was saving those to give to St. Vincent de Paul.”

Why had he written ALWAYS RUN FROM TEMPTATION INSTANTLY!

“Well, if you leave temptation instantly, you conquer the temptation,” he said. “That's very important. That's why we are not all saints. But when temptation comes and we try to fool with it, then we get hurt.”

The questioners were silent. O'Brien was obviously tired. What had they achieved? Here was Peter's man. They had questioned him, they had confronted him with the photographs of the victims, Peter had borne down on him—and O'Brien had admitted nothing.

Bottomly asked, not unkindly, “Have you had enough of us now? You look rather tired.”

“I guess maybe I have,” said Tom. He tried to muster a smile. “I guess you probably have had enough of me.”

Late that night Peter left Boston. “My work finished,” he said. The next day the Boston newspapers would have a field day with the news of Hurkos' secret visit, the dispute over the Attorney General's use of a psychic, the Back Bay shoe salesman he had picked, but Peter would be away from it all, in New York, resting. He shook hands warmly with Soshnick who took him to the airport. “Julian, you my good friend,” he said. “You treat me fine. Be careful. I see broken bicycle—dangerous. Take care.” They walked to the gate. Peter patted Julian's shoulder. “That O'Brien—you see, Julian, he the man, he the Strangler.”

Driving home, Soshnick wondered,
was
it O'Brien? Could Peter have been thrown off the trail by O'Brien's letter, brought to him that day by Sergeant Leo Martin of the Boston police? Perhaps it was a man like O'Brien, and if Peter had been left to his own devices, he might have zeroed in on him. O'Brien was psychotic, a chronic paranoid. “A classical picture of paranoid ideation” he had been described by a psychiatric social worker back in October 1963, when he panicked on a dishwashing job because fellow workers “were thrusting themselves” against him, forcing him to “think lascivious thoughts.” He definitely needed commitment. Had O'Brien told the truth? A psychotic can appear to be in touch with reality when in fact he is not, Soshnick knew. Had their questioning really gotten through to O'Brien? The man himself might not know what he had done. Additional psychiatric tests must be made. It could only be hoped that he would remain committed, either by a probate judge or by his family, who had long urged him to seek hospital care; and perhaps someday the truth about him might be known. Further investigations must be made into the backgrounds of each of the eleven victims to see if their lives had ever crossed the sorry one of Thomas O'Brien.

Julian Soshnick drove his car into his garage. As he was about to pull shut the doors, he thought of Peter's warning. Feeling a little foolish, he unlocked the padlock on the storeroom in which his wife and little daughter kept their bicycles, took each one out, and carefully examined it. His wife's bicycle was fine. But when he turned the front wheel of his daughter's bicycle, a cotter pin fell out and the wheel whirled off.

He stood there, utterly baffled.

Peter had left, but within seventy-two hours of his departure, while the Boston papers were full of his exploits, the FBI roused him from sleep at 3:30
A.M.
February 8, in his New York hotel room and arrested him on a charge of impersonating an FBI agent. On December 10, 1963, nearly two months before, while buying gasoline in a Milwaukee suburb, he had allegedly posed as an FBI agent and showed a display of cards. He was then driving to Las Vegas to investigate the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr. Peter indignantly denied that he masqueraded as anyone: it was a misunderstanding caused by his bad English; anyway, he, Peter Hurkos was much more than an FBI agent could hope to be.