The Boston Strangler (27 page)

Now, as they read the pages of the eleven casebooks they collated and cross-indexed in the office, as they read the Girls' confidences to friends and schoolmates, as they read the reports of psychologists to whom some of the Girls had turned for help with their emotional problems, as they read the letters the Girls had written and received, as they read of their private possessions, including the contents of their purses the day of their deaths, the Strangler's young victims were all but alive to them. Sandra and Jane spoke of them familiarly and with the assurance—and understanding—of intimate friends. “Oh, Sophie would never do that!” or “Joann's mother was very possessive,” or “This problem came up and Pat just didn't know how to handle it.”

Of no one in their own circle of the living did Sandra and Jane know as much about as they knew about the dead girls. They defended them in spirited discussions with the detectives (who were inclined to agree with the psychiatrists that the younger victims might have brought their fate on themselves): Don't be too hard on Mary, she was turning over a new leaf; yes, Beverly was forever involved with offbeat characters but all she wanted was to help—she just had too big a heart; Sophie was integrity itself and if she'd been ready to cheat on her boyfriend, she might be alive today; Evelyn hoped to marry Bob but there was this cozy threesome with Bob and his mother …

Against one wall of the vault room leaned an enormous bulletin board ten feet long, six feet high. Tacked on it were the glossy police photographs of the stranglings—exteriors of each apartment house, interiors of each apartment, photographs of front and back staircases, halls, roofs, service entrances. Missing only were photographs of the victims' bodies as they were found. In deference to Sandra and Jane (as well as to secretaries going in and out of the offices), these had been tacked on the reverse side of the board so they faced the wall. By tacit agreement only detectives and visiting out-of-town police were permitted to move the board aside and slip behind it to look upon the Strangler's work.

Few emerged unmoved. It was a shattering experience to look at the photographs.

The excitement in the office was constant. For one tense twenty-four-hour period Bottomly had a confession to Beverly Samans' murder, dictated and signed by a twenty-eight-year-old Daniel J. Pennacchio, a busboy in a Cambridge cafeteria. Pennacchio had been arrested in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge after nurses saw him lying on the floor outside the ladies' rest room, peeping under the door. A quick check disclosed that he had been a student for eleven years at Fernald School for Retarded Children, where Beverly Samans had taught. He had been discharged in June 1963. When his photograph appeared in the press, letters poured in from women in the Belmont area where he lived. They knew him well. They had seen him standing for hours beside his car, watching girls pass by, every now and then opening the door of the car and smilingly inviting one girl or another to enter it. One letter, summing up most of the others, warned, “Don't let this man get away. He's the man you're looking for. If he gets off free, you will have a lot of people storming the State House. Get going on him and he will confess, and don't let him off on a lie detector test. That is a lot of hooey. He could control his emotions while under the machine.” It was signed “A Woman Who Lives Alone.”

As it turned out, no lie detector was needed. In the interrogation room, surrounded by detectives, Pennacchio suddenly blurted, “All right, I'll tell you everything. I did it.” While a police stenographer took down his words, he described the murder, step by step: how he had knocked on Beverly's door just before midnight of May 5 (she had returned home around eleven o'clock, police knew), how she had let him in, how he had talked with her while she typed her thesis …

Detective Paul Cloran of Cambridge police questioned him:

“Did you stab Beverly Samans?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“With a knife.”

“Where did you get the knife?”

“In the kitchen.”

“How many times did you stab her?”

“About fifteen—I'm not sure.”

“With which hand?”

“My right.”

“Where was the body facing?”

“Toward the window.”

“What did you put in her mouth?”

“A rag.”

“Anything else?”

“I put a cloth over her mouth.”

“Did you get blood on you?”

“Yes, my pants and shirt.”

“What did you do with them?”

“I threw them into an ash barrel behind the building.”

He described the apartment, and what she wore, and how he let himself out, and where he went.

Then Pennacchio, small, dark, intense, signed his confession and sat back, exhausted.

None of it was true. He had imagined it all.

Because he had confessed, he was booked for murder but certain details he told police made it clear that he was lying, and Cambridge Judge A. Edward Viola refused to issue a murder complaint. He was held instead on the original charge of lewd and lascivious behavior. Pennacchio was mentally retarded, with the intelligence of a fifteen-year-old boy, said his lawyer. The sheer suggestibility in the situation—that detectives
could
think he had done it—might have led him to place himself in the Samans apartment and even to see himself going through the act of murder.

Not long after, Pennacchio eliminated himself forever as a suspect. While swimming with two teen-age girls at Pleasure Bay in South Boston, he attempted a high dive from a bridge. He struck his head and drowned.

A few days after Pennacchio's arrest, police seized a twenty-nine-year-old man who wore horn-rimmed spectacles, a carefully trimmed moustache, and a three-quarter length jacket. His black hair was shiny with pomade. He lived in a shanty on Brownsville Street four blocks from Helen Blake, the nurse who had been strangled in Lynn on June 30, 1962. A patrolman, looking for stolen bicycles, had come upon two suitcases hidden behind the shanty. They were stuffed with newspaper clippings of the eleven stranglings. In one a diary was found, a clipping pasted on each page. Under one clipping reporting Anna Slesers' murder on June 14, 1962, was written in ink, “I took a long walk today with my beloved Anna.” Under Helen Blake's, “Lunched with dear Helen today.” Under Evelyn Corbin's, “Goodbye, I'm a gone goose.”

The news flashed through Boston that a prime suspect had been caught. Reporters crowded into Lynn Police Headquarters to question Bottomly, hurriedly called to the scene. Not only was there the damning evidence of clippings and diary; the man's history was almost too “good” to be true. He lived in Lynn (Helen Blake); had recently roomed in the Beacon Hill area (Ida Irga, Mary Sullivan), as well as in the Back Bay area (Anna Slesers, Sophie Clark, Patricia Bissette); he had lived briefly near Nina Nichols, and again near Jane Sullivan. He had worked in a bookstore in Cambridge (Beverly Samans), and—this really interested the investigators—held a job as a counterman in a doughnut shop in Salem. No one had forgotten that the day Evelyn Corbin was strangled in her Salem apartment, a fresh doughnut had been found on the fire escape outside her kitchen window. To top this formidable array of facts—only lacking was a tie-in to Joann Graff's murder in nearby Lawrence—the man had worked as an orderly in Lynn Hospital, where Helen Blake was then associated as a practical nurse.

It meant another twenty-four hours of intense excitement—then deflation.

It was nothing, nothing at all, Bottomly and Police Chief John Donnelly of Lynn had to announce at a press conference. The man was a “writer of sorts”; his diary was fiction, an attempt to work out his own sexual fantasies; he claimed to belong to the American Nazi Party, which had some membership in that area; but so far as could be determined, he was harmless. The reporters were free to hasten back to cover the major story of the hour—the arrival in Boston from Toronto of the newly married Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, an event that had caused a near-riot at Logan International Airport. The writer from Lynn became merely one more page, checked in and checked out, in the growing Suspect file on the second floor of the State House.

When Bottomly left Lynn to return to his office that day he did not know that one of his most indefatigable volunteers had just returned from an out-of-town mission also dealing with the Strangler. That was Mrs. Margaret Callahan, who was just then marching furiously into her apartment after a frustrating trip to Manchester, New Hampshire, to alert local police that her neighbor, Dr. Lawrence Shaw, was there on a “skiing vacation.”

In these past months Mrs. Callahan had been more diligent than ever, as entries in her journal revealed:

In November, 1963, she had made a quick trip to New York to see Dr. Brussel after reading his analysis of the Strangler that appeared in the October 1963 issue of
Pageant
magazine. Dr. Brussel, she told friends later, suggested she take her material to the Boston authorities, but she knew how far that would get her. Nevertheless, she had been able to persuade Sergeant Leo Davenport of the Cambridge police to call on her on December 16 to discuss Beverly Samans' murder. Beverly's apartment in Cambridge was only a block from Harvard Square; and had she herself not followed Dr. Shaw to his favorite bookstore in Harvard Square and watched him purchase volumes on crime, sex, perversion, and bloody acts of murder, including even cannibalism? Not long before he boastfully showed her a Christmas card he received in December 1962 from a girl living on East Eighty-ninth Street in New York City—an address, Mrs. Callahan emphasized, that was practically around the corner from 57 East Eighty-eighth Street, where Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, two New York career girls, had been so depravedly stabbed to death on August 28, 1963. As Beverly Samans had been stabbed to death only three months before.

When Sergeant Davenport called on her, Mrs. Callahan made it a social rather than a professional occasion. She greeted him barefoot, in a colorful muumuu, her hair piled, queenly fashion, atop her head. She served him coffee, and only after he was comfortable in a deep easy chair did she seat herself cross-legged on the floor, arrange her voluminous costume about her, and begin to read from her material on Dr. Shaw, now almost as thick as a book. “Don't you dare ask me any questions,” she warned. “I've spent too much time collecting this material to be interrupted. You just be quiet and listen.” But Sergeant Davenport was impatient, and as she complained to friends later, “oversecure and arrogant,” and finally she showed him out with a sharp warning that if the police were not interested she would sell her material on Dr. Shaw to the Birch Society.

On January 3, 1964, she telephoned Lieutenant Sherry to predict, on the basis of Dr. Shaw's strange behavior the last few days, that another strangling was imminent. It was small comfort for her to say, “I told you so,” when Mary Sullivan's body was found twenty-four hours later. On February 8 she reached Assistant Attorney General Bottomly, who invited her to bring her data to his office. She preferred instead, she told him, that he send his detectives to her home where they could look it over carefully. Two days later, on February 10, Sergeant Leo Martin and another detective visited her. They wanted to take her material to be copied and that she would not permit: they left, obviously annoyed. Then Dr. Shaw went off to New Hampshire and she dropped everything to trail him there and back.

Now, with still more evidence, Mrs. Callahan sat down at her telephone and methodically called
Life
magazine; then
Time
magazine; then
Newsweek;
then
Look
.

Then she put in another call for Mr. Bottomly, but found herself repeatedly shunted to lesser persons in his office. She hung up in disgust.

Was there nothing a conscientious citizen could do?

She began telephoning neighbors.

In the Attorney General's office Bill Manning typed a brief memo. It was about Mrs. Ann Johnson (which is not her real name).

A Mrs. Ann Johnson called. She lives in the same apt. bldg. as Dr. Lawrence Shaw. She reports that most of the people in and around the building believe him insane. He, according to her, has an amazingly high interest in cannibalism. He taught at Carnegie Institute when Sophie Clark went there, and Mrs. J. believes he taught Sophie. He is reported to be associated with the Golden Age Society and would therefore “get to know these older ladies that way.”

This communication, Manning added with some perplexity, was only the most recent of several—both telephone calls and anonymous letters—received from persons who named the same Dr. Lawrence Shaw as the Strangler.

For Dr. Shaw, the moment of truth came soon after. When Mrs. Callahan had first sent in his name the police made a discreet inquiry. Her description of Dr. Shaw as a man of odd habits, with few friends, was not borne out by his hospital colleagues and Mrs. Callahan's accusations were filed away. Now, however, her material had become so formidable, her dossier so carefully documented, her complaints so clearly confirmed from other sources, that a full-scale investigation began, in the course of which Dr. Shaw was asked if he would take a lie-detector test. It was purely voluntary, the police said. He was free to refuse.

Dr. Shaw, obviously a very harassed man, was only too willing. He opened his life to the police. He told questioners that he had been having an affair for some months with Mrs. Callahan, which he ended in the summer of 1962. That was just before the Anna Slesers strangling. Rejected, humiliated, vengeful—who knew how such a woman's mind worked?—Mrs. Callahan had managed, apparently, to convince not only her niece, but virtually every other tenant in the building that he was the strangler. He had been living an absolute nightmare: neighbors spying on him, making notes on his visitors—he was a bachelor, and enjoyed feminine companionship—following him when he left the building, telephoning each other when they saw him stop in the street to chat with a friend, keeping vigil in their cars outside his office, even trailing him on his skiing trips—and Mrs. Callahan masterminding it all!