The Boston Strangler (20 page)

Bottomly and Soshnick seethed with anger. It was hitting below the belt. While the Boston police had not prevented Peter's visit to Boston, they made no secret of what they thought of him. Peter's arrest, made on the very heels of his Boston appearance, was seen as a move to discredit Peter and the Attorney General as well. No one forgot that Commissioner McNamara was a former FBI agent. Some held, however, that politics, rather than police resentment over the Hurkos publicity, inspired the arrest; that local Democrats had engineered it to embarrass Attorney General Brooke, a Republican, on the eve of his campaign for reelection. Others found an even more Machiavellian plot. The Kennedy family, they suggested, might like to see one of their own candidates as Governor of Massachusetts in the near future, but would be reluctant to have this come about at the cost of defeating so popular a Negro as Edward Brooke, Jr., if, as appeared possible, Brooke were to be the Republican candidate. Far better to trip up Brooke in the Attorney General contest now, thus eliminating him as a gubernational candidate later.

Charge and countercharge filled the press. One newspaper headlined its story
Hurkos Framed
. Bottomly demanded to know why the FBI hadn't told him they planned to arrest Hurkos: it was a courtesy due the Attorney General's office. And why had the arrest taken place when it had—so long after the alleged offense? “It took us two hours to find Hurkos in an actor's home in California, yet it took the FBI nearly two months to get their man,” Bottomly declared angrily. At the State House rumors flew that the FBI had originally planned an even more spectacular denouement to the Hurkos chapter—to arrest him in the Attorney General's office itself—but finally decided this was going too far.

The brickbats came from all sides. The Civil Liberties Union questioned whether Tom O'Brien's civil rights had not been ridden over roughshod. The Boston
Herald
accused Assistant Attorney General Soshnick and Detective Davis of using an “instrument of tyranny” when they obtained a general search warrant to search O'Brien's room.
*

Actually Bottomly had little time to devote to these internecine battles. He had been put in authority, he knew, because he had a reputation for getting things done, for cutting through red tape, for taking aid and information where he needed it and when he needed it.

He urged that the reward for the Strangler be increased from $5,000 to $10,000 a strangling. A bill to that effect went to the House of Representatives and was promptly passed with Governor Peabody's approval. Bottomly recruited additional members to his Medical-Psychiatric Committee. They included Dr. James A. Brussel, of New York, whom Bottomly reached in Uganda—the psychiatrist was on a month-long African safari—and Dr. Carola Blume, chief psychologist of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health. Since her early days in Berlin, Dr. Blume had made a hobby of graphology, or the analysis of character through handwriting, and she now began to study letters sent in by the public.

Bottomly received the latest report on the computer program. Clerks had nearly finished reading some ten thousand source documents, underlining key data as they did so. This would be encoded on punch cards so it could be fed to the computer. Each card could handle one thousand items. Key numbers would be given to each breakdown: associations, occupations, locations, objects, actions, motivations, and the like, so that all information would be translated into computer data.

*
Interestingly enough—and taking some of the sting out of these complaints—on February 13 when O'Brien's ten-day commitment expired, the staff of the Mental Health Department recommended thirty-five days' additional observation. In the end, O'Brien voluntarily recommitted himself to the institution.

10

A few days before, in the maximum security ward of Bridgewater State Hospital—a section that with its heavy bars, massive locked doors, cement blocks, and innumerable keepers is far better described as a prison—Dr. Ames Robey sat with David Parker.

They were seated in the ward outside Parker's cell, with half a dozen guards conveniently near.

David was high, and talking, his eyes shining. “Do you know what I'd do with women?” he demanded. “If I had my way I'd torture them …” He hated them, they were not to be trusted. At this very moment they were the “recipients of the justice of my anger,” because “they wear the pants and they shouldn't wear them.”

From the beginning of David's commitment on January 22, he had been extremely psychotic. He had attempted suicide, ripping his left arm open with his nails, banging his head against the walls of his cell, rubbing the yellow naphtha institutional soap into his eyes. This last gave him severe conjunctivitis but otherwise did not harm him. However the attempt warranted placing him in isolation, and on suicide precaution—which meant a cell in maximum security without clothes or shoes lest he injure himself or even attempt to hang himself. Light came through a small square barred window: food was pushed to him through a narrow opening some six inches across in the heavy metal door through which one could peep at him. In the more violent cases these peepholes were always covered. One slipped the cover aside with great care lest the sick creature inside fling the contents of his toilet pail through it at the observer. Tall, handsome, naked as a child, David had thrown himself about wildly. Now, however, psychotic but at the moment not violent, he was able to talk with Dr. Robey. He was dressed in a faded open shirt, beltless slacks, and was barefoot. Dr. Robey, knowing David was an expert in judo and karate, took no chances, which explained why he spoke with David outside his cell rather than venturing inside it.

“A world without women?” Dr. Robey was saying.

David smiled. “Oh, wonderful, absolutely wonderful!” Some day he would carry out a private plan. “I want to buy an island off the coast of Australia and prohibit any female from setting foot in it. A world without women! A man's kingdom—and to make doubly sure, I'd set machine guns around the perimeter as well as barbed wire, just in case, to keep them out.”

He went on. He knew one girl, in Cambridge, whom he did not hate too bitterly. Since he had been kicked out of Harvard he had been living in New York City, working in an office, but he came up to Boston to see her every time he could.

Dr. Robey moved carefully as he led the conversation around to David's sexual habits. Under his questioning David admitted he had had homosexual experiences. “I didn't play any active part, I didn't like it, but I did it,” he said.

“Tell me, David, before you were married, how did you get along with that girl friend in Cambridge?”

David pursed his lips. “Pretty well,” he said. Sometimes, for no reason at all, however, she “would have nothing to do with me.” How did he feel when she acted like this? “Feel?” David flashed a glance at his questioner filled with such hostility that even its glimpse shook Dr. Robey.

“I'd get so angry I just wanted to destroy,” he said. He would leave her apartment and walk the streets of Cambridge and Boston, “looking for a woman.”

Dr. Robey digested this information. He ventured:

“When would you come up to visit her?”

“Usually on weekends,” David replied. “That's the only time I could get away from my job.”

Dr. Robey tamped his pipe with a trembling finger. As he knew from the information given him so far, nine of the eleven stranglings took place on weekends, the exceptions being Anna Slesers' on a Thursday, June 14, and Sophie Clark's on Wednesday, December 5. Forgetting those, however, was it only by chance that David's visits from New York coincided with the others? Then Dr. Robey realized: June 14 was Flag Day—a legal holiday in New York State, where David worked.

He asked, “Did your employer let you off on holidays, too?”

David nodded. “Yes, usually the afternoon before.”

So he could have been in Boston that day, too.

That left only December 5 to be accounted for. Perhaps further questioning would fit that date into the pattern, too. But Dr. Robey did not pursue this line too far. He wanted to learn as much about David as possible without giving himself away. The boy had no idea that he was under suspicion for the stranglings: all he knew about his internment in Bridgewater was that he had been sent there for possession of a dangerous weapon. He considered it a trumped-up charge—arresting a man for carrying a stage prop!—and had said as much. It did not occur to him that one is hardly committed to a mental institution for such a reason. But one of the marks of a psychotic condition is the inability to recognize the incongruous. Nonetheless, Dr. Robey had great respect for David's intelligence. The boy had admitted he manufactured the drugs he sold. His skill with explosives had already been remarked upon.

Dr. Robey had listened to David, in his extremely psychotic stage, hallucinating wildly in his cell, screaming that he was all-powerful, shouting contempt at all of stupid mankind, marching in circles like some naked, deranged young god hour after hour proclaiming that he possessed a magic to neutralize those who schemed to destroy the universe, that he had gone beyond the Einstein theory, that he had designed rockets and built atomic bombs, that voices implored him to save the world. “I'm going to find the formula that will save mankind!” he had cried.

Calmed down but still psychotic, he wept. “The only way I can get the world's attention is to destroy part of it—and especially the women.”

“Why the women?” Dr. Robey asked.

“They have only one function. They have to be shown that function.” But he refused to explain further and grew agitated when pressed. What was clear was that he rebelled violently at women in positions of dominance.

Dr. Robey changed the subject. “David, do you drink?”

“Only beer.”

“Do you have a favorite beer?”

“Well, what I really like best I can't get around here. It's called Lucky Lager.”

Dr. Robey almost jumped in his seat. Lucky Lager was sold only in California. What startled him was the fact, among those given him by Bottomly, that tavern keepers in the neighborhoods of two stranglings—Joann Graff in Lawrence, and Mary Sullivan in Boston—had reported that on the day of the strangling a customer asked for “Lucky Lager beer” in one instance, and “Lucky beer” in the other. The request was so unusual that the bartenders remembered it.
*

“O.K.,” said Dr. Robey. “We'll talk again, David.” And he returned to his office and his records to mull over these coincidences.

The last strangling, Mary Sullivan's, was on Saturday, January 4. That was also David's wedding day in New York City. When had Mary been strangled? Her body had been found Saturday at 6:20
P.M.
by her two roommates, Pat and Pam, on their return from their jobs at Filene's. Medical Examiner Luongo then estimated that she had been dead “several hours.” That might well mean Saturday morning. When had David been married? In the late afternoon. Dr. Robey checked a map. It was only 220 miles from Boston to New York. David could have been in Boston in the morning and in New York in the afternoon.

Dr. Robey thought furiously. When not completely psychotic, David was a likeable youth with considerable charm who made friends easily. He looked like a thousand other personable young men. If you saw him walk by you'd think, There's a college kid—and forget his face. And he had superb physical coordination, the grace of a dancer; he could move like a wisp of fog, slip in and out of places without being seen.

On his next visit to David, Dr. Robey found him much improved. Dr. Robey, accompanied this time by a fellow psychiatrist, had an idea in mind. “David, you're doing fine,” he said, after a few minutes of amiable conversation. He turned to a keeper. “Will you get David his shoes? I think he can have them now and his feet must be cold.”

He watched as the boy slipped on his shoes and tied the laces—tied them with the extra half hitch, and then the bow—the Strangler's knot.

Dr. Robey's associate, trying to conceal his excitement, handed David a piece of string. “David,” he said recklessly, “if you were going to kill somebody, what kind of knot would you tie?”

It was a grievous tactical error. David drew back. “Hey, what's going on here?” He looked suspiciously from one man to the other. “Do you think I'm the Boston Strangler, or something?” He turned and sat in a corner of the cell, arms hugging his knees. “I want my lawyer,” he said. The questioning was over. He knew he was a suspect.

That night David wrote to his lawyer asking him to “close down and destroy my laboratory.” The letter was intercepted: the Secret Service, which had kept an eye on David because of his narcotics involvement, investigated. The boy did have a laboratory in New York State, not far from his office.

Later, Dr. Robey tried to summarize what he had learned about David Parker. The high intelligence; the Lucky Lager beer; the medical-hospital background—father a chemist, mother a social worker; the hatred of women and the fantasies of torturing and destroying them; the near-strangling of his wife; the strong possibility that he was in Boston each time, or virtually each time a strangling occurred; the knot he tied—everything fitted. As the murder of Joann Graff the day after Kennedy's assassination fitted, and as the Mary Sullivan murder fitted. For the first might have been an extraordinary act of paranoid egomania—to strike with such God-like power at so awful a moment; and the second was sheer omnipotence—to murder in the morning and marry in the afternoon!

If one studied the eleven murders, one saw how they grew more bizarre until in Mary Sullivan's case all the stops were out, almost as though: This is my grand triumph, the most elaborate creation of them all … Behold, World!

How like a David!

The question then rose, how did he choose his victims?