The Boston Strangler (28 page)

There was little to be done with Mrs. Margaret Callahan,
*
Bottomly knew. Her lawyer had advised him that “Nothing you could say could satisfy my client in her present mental condition.” But a careful letter was sent to Mrs. Ann Johnson:

… As a result of our investigation you may be assured that Dr. Lawrence Shaw has never been connected with the Carnegie Institute in any way. He was never a member of its faculty. He was never a teacher of Sophie Clark. You may be assured that the Director of the Golden Age Society advises that Dr. Lawrence Shaw is not connected with that group in any official capacity and his name does not appear in any of the groups' rosters or other listings of individuals informally connected with the group. Further inquiries have been made with the active groups of the Golden Age Society and none of the members interviewed have any knowledge of Dr. Shaw.

It was not possible to develop any evidence which supported your allegation that Dr. Shaw has an amazing interest in cannibalism …

And, because he was dealing with the public and no lead from whatever source dared be overlooked, Bottomly added the paragraph with which he signed every letter of this nature—by now he must have dictated nearly five hundred of them:

Please be assured that either this Department or any appropriate local police department will give immediate reply on any information you may be able to provide in connection with the investigation of criminal activities.

The door had to remain open. Yet only two days before, a, former attorney had submitted the name of a man he considered a suspect. The address on the letterhead was one of distinction, the letter couched in such precise language, the arguments advanced such as to merit immediate attention. Bottomly's letter inviting the writer to call at once crossed a second note from him:

“Dear Mr. Bottomly,” he wrote. “In my previous letter I fear I was derelict in failing to mention that I was recently assaulted by a company of Boston firemen and suffered a badly injured right ankle. I regret, however, that I found it necessary to kill each and everyone of them with my Berretta automatic. I sued for damages but I have not received the court award of some one hundred eighty million dollars as yet. Respectfully yours …”

Bottomly looked at it ruefully, and passed it on.

There was no investigator who was not involved in similar episodes. One dared not separate the plausible from the implausible, for often what was dismissed as absolute nonsense—wild suspicions, elaborate hypotheses created out of hysteria and sexual fears—turned out to confound them by their relevancy.

The letter from the owner of the Berretta automatic still waited to be filed when attention suddenly centered on an Italian music teacher who might have played Mephistopheles in Gounod's
Faust
. Slender, dapper, faultlessly tailored, with compelling black eyes, he will be called here Pietro Achilles. Two elderly sisters (who will be known here as Mrs. Mary Baker and Mrs. Alice Miller) had worn out their welcome not only with the police but the newspapers by their repeated calls about him. According to Mrs. Baker, in 1961, Mr. Achilles, who was about fifty, had been hired to give piano lessons to her two nieces, daughters of her sister Alice. Achilles had all but cast a spell on her when he met her; he told her that if he had not been a pianist, he would have loved being a doctor. He could hypnotize people (she could well believe this); he enjoyed doing harmful things to his mother, he told her; he saw great beauty in a broom, and, sooner or later, was going to write a book about a broom.

On one occasion, on Thursday, August 10, 1961, at 12:45
P.M.
, when Achilles thought himself alone with Mrs. Miller in her house, Mrs. Baker, from another room, saw him come up behind her sister. Mrs. Baker put it graphically in a letter: “He had on red plastic gloves with an archery of black seams through them, he was grinning, and he stretched out his hands clawing at the air as though he was about to strangle her. When she turned he immediately dropped his hands to his side. I walked into the room and said to Mr. Achilles, because I felt I had to talk to break the tension and fear, ‘Why don't we get a recording of your voice? We understand you sing so well.'

“He said nothing but relaxed and began removing his red gloves. He pulled off the glove on his right hand and it had two snaps on the wrist. He put it into his jacket pocket and in that instant out popped the fingers of a surgical glove and part of the wrist. It was beige-shade rubber and somewhat transparent. Mrs. Miller and I both saw it, it was powdered inside with a pinkish powder. With a smile he pushed it back … He is a consummate actor. He once said, ‘Put a wig on me and I'm my mother.' He has dressed as a woman and fooled everyone …”

The sisters had been telephoning police about Achilles and the murders for some time, but a quick check of him had disclosed nothing incriminating. They had since written the Boston
Record American
, and repeatedly telephoned every law enforcement official they could reach. One of the first notes on John Bottomly's desk when he took over as coordinator months before was a memo reporting an urgent call from the sisters at 2
A.M.
that morning. Now Stephen Delaney, to stop the avalanche of calls and letters, was assigned to placate them. He had twenty other names to check out that day but something had to be done about the two ladies.

Delaney, thirty-two, and appearing at least ten years younger, was a man of great tenacity. He had set his heart on becoming a criminologist. On evenings and days off he attended Boston University under the G.I. Bill of Rights, majoring in Sociology. Although he was married and had eight children, with a ninth on the way, he took every available moment away from his family for the search.

Now, when he got on the telephone to Mrs. Miller, his ears rang. “I don't think much of the Boston police,” she began angrily. “I've been calling and calling. Now you'd better listen to me. Have you checked Rockport where Mr. Achilles has a summer cottage?”

“No, we haven't,” said Steve. “Why?”

“Why? Because Joann Graff spent her last night in Rockport!”

Steve knew nothing about that. He made a note to look into it. Mrs. Miller went on sharply, “And you should have checked the conservatory, because I saw Beverly Samans there when Pietro Achilles was there. Those two knew each other.”

The name of Pietro Achilles had never appeared in the Beverly Samans file. Steve asked, “What makes you so suspicious about this man Achilles?”

Mrs. Miller could hardly control herself. “Doesn't it mean anything to you that he sees great beauty in a broom, that he wants to write a book about a broom?”

“Why should that be important?”

“You fool, you fool, you know why a broom is important! Because the Strangler used it—”

Steve was surprised. The details on the assault on Mary Sullivan had never appeared in the newspapers, although it was common knowledge in the street. He heard Mrs. Miller's voice, “And he's just as the psychiatrists say the Strangler would be—a loner who hates women, who came from a South European background … Oh!” She literally stamped her foot at the other end. “I tell you, young man, I've been making novenas and praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary—” She stopped. “Are you a Catholic?”

“Yes, I am, ma'am,” said Steve.

“I made a special novena. I prayed for a sign to tell me who the Strangler is, and the other night I woke up and a ball of fire was flying through my room writing out the name Achilles on the ceiling.”

Steve asked, “Well, what did your priest have to say about it?”

“You damn fool, what's the priest have to do with this?” she demanded. “He's not looking for the Strangler!”

“But, lady,” Steve protested weakly, “if it's a miracle don't you think you ought to have it verified by the priest?”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Miller, and hung up.

Steve checked. How had Beverly Samans obtained her position singing in the choir of the Second Unitarian Church? In the autumn of 1962 Mary Vivien, the organist and musical director, asked the conservatory to recommend candidates. One of the names sent to her was Beverly Samans. Another was Pietro Achilles.

The two sisters had been right. Beverly and Pietro Achilles knew each other. They had auditioned together on October 4, 1962, at the church. Beverly had obviously known Achilles before: when he entered she walked up to him—they had angry words—“They were both tense,” Miss Vivien reported to Steve—and when Beverly walked away she was noticeably upset.

Miss Vivien had decided immediately to hire Beverly, who had a lovely voice. Although she had been ready to hire Achilles to sing with her, in view of Beverly's obvious dislike of the man she chose another candidate.

Further investigation by Steve disclosed that Achilles, a bachelor, had once told a friend how he hated his “terribly overbearing” mother.

Stephen Delaney returned to his office and wrote his notes carefully. Achilles had a cottage just outside Rockport, in Gloucester. Although Joann Graff did not spend Friday night, November 22, the night before her murder, in Rockport, she
had
visited Rockport that evening with a fellow worker. Achilles knew Beverly Samans and had reason to bear her a personal grudge. In casual dress Achilles invariably affected ascots; and for whatever significance it had, an ascot bought by Pat Delmore, Mary Sullivan's roommate, as a gift for a boyfriend, had been slashed into three parts and flushed down the toilet in her apartment the day of the murder. On that day, too, cigarette butts—Salems—had been found crushed out on an ash tray near her body. Neither Mary nor her roommates smoked Salems. Pietro Achilles did.

Delaney asked himself, Could these two excitable sisters have stumbled upon an important lead? But a ball of fire writing across the ceiling … a grinning man clawing at the air with red gloves … pink-powdered surgeon's gloves popping out of a pocket …?

He turned to Phil DiNatale, busy writing at the adjoining desk, and spoke his thoughts aloud: “Boy, we must be running scared—” Yet he marked Achilles down for additional investigation and filled out a request, to be sent to the proper authorities, for Achilles' immigration record.

As for Phil, he only shook his head at Delaney and continued working on his own report. A month before he had gone to investigate a tip turned in by Mrs. Marjorie L. Spearing, a housewife, of 28 Webster Place. An attractive woman in her thirties, Mrs. Spearing appeared quite nervous when Phil arrived. She apologized for telephoning the Attorney General's office, but citizens
had
been asked to cooperate. For some time, she had been hearing disturbing noises outside her apartment. She thought nothing of them until her attention was attracted by one of her neighbors, an athletic young salesman. “He really acts quite odd at times,” she told Phil. “He always smells of shaving lotion—not that that's anything to hold against a man,” she hastened to add, “but so many times when my husband and I go out, we see him standing at his window behind a curtain, peering out at people.” One afternoon when she was doing laundry in the basement, her neighbor entered so silently—“on tiptoes”—that she almost screamed when she looked up to discover him watching her. But he spoke quite normally, they exchanged a few pleasantries, and he walked to the door. He could not open it, whereupon he turned to her and said sharply, “You've locked me in!” She was a little upset, hurried to the door herself—and had no trouble opening it. It hadn't been locked at all.

Then about nine o'clock the night of January 4—she knew the hour because she and her husband were returning from the wake of a relative—as they were about to enter their building, the front door burst open and her neighbor, his eyes wild, carrying a brown briefcase, rushed out, jumped into his car, and roared away.

“I just shivered,” she told Phil. “I turned to my husband and I remember my exact words: ‘If there was a strangling today, I'll bet he's the man the police should look for.'”

Next morning she opened her newspaper—and there were the headlines—Mary Sullivan, a nineteen-year-old girl, strangled! She did not know what to think. One day recently when she went out to shop, the salesman's car was parked at the curb. On impulse she peeked in. On the dashboard where a small religious statue of the Virgin usually stood, there was now a small bear, standing on his hind legs, its arms up in a strangling position. She finally decided she would have no peace until she reported him. “I don't know whether it means anything,” she said, “but I read that some people believe the Strangler was not after Mary but one of her roommates—and one of her roommates came from Malden. So does this man. And his actions that day …!”

Phil asked, “What else can you tell me about him?”

Mrs. Spearing rubbed her fingers agitatedly. “He's quite charming when he smiles. But at other times his eyes seem to glare and when he's angry they're like an insane person's.” She was also troubled because he told her he attended night school in order to become a state trooper, and everyone knew, she said, that there are no state trooper night schools.

Phil had dutifully taken down her information—she was certainly in a state, he thought, or she wouldn't be so upset over what was probably a miniature Smokey the Bear on the man's dashboard—but he wrote his report and turned it in to Bottomly. A check on the salesman produced nothing suspicious. Now, a month later, Phil was adding a final paragraph:

Mrs. Emily Powers of 27 Maplewood Street reported she was cleaning the Venetian blinds in her kitchen about 9 o'clock this
A.M.
when she looked out to see a woman opening a third floor window across the street in the building at No. 28 Webster Street. Mrs. Powers reports she saw the woman open the window about a foot high, stick her head through, wiggle her body forward until she pushed herself all the way through the opening, and then drop head first to the ground. Woman identified as Mrs. Marjorie Spearing, 34, dead on arrival. Husband says wife has been suffering nervous breakdown for the past two months over the stranglings. Husband said her doctor has been trying to convince Mrs. Spearing to go to a hospital. She was supposed to have an appointment with the doctor this afternoon.