The Boston Strangler (29 page)

Before the Strangler was finished, Phil thought, how many victims would there be whom he had never even touched?

*
Dr. Blume discovered that most of the letters—fully half of them were anonymous—came from women, many of whom had a homosexual turn of mind and were given to elaborate sexual fantasies. Often a sentence read, “I'm sure I know who the Strangler is. He came to my apartment, he looked strangely at me …” As Dr. Blume interpreted it, these writers nourished a subconscious wish that the Strangler
would
call on them. What Dr. Blume hoped for, above all, was that the Strangler himself might be compelled to write—and give himself away by his calligraphy.

*
Mrs. Callahan emphatically denied she had had any intimate relationship with Dr. Shaw.

14

For nearly a year, even before he had been transferred to Bottomly's investigating squad, Stephen Delaney had been quietly following a middle-aged Finnish dishwasher with the growing conviction that this strange, taciturn man, ignored by everyone, could be the Strangler. With every murder the man, who will be known here as Carl Virtanen, looked more and more the part.

Virtanen had interested Delaney since a late October afternoon in 1962, when five stranglings had been recorded. Delaney was about to leave the Lower Basin Police Station when he glanced out the window to see an arresting sight: a well-dressed, middle-aged man, complete to soft hat, white shirt and neatly tied tie, business suit and gray topcoat, racing at top speed, his coattails flying behind him, along the grassy Esplanade that borders the Charles River. As Delaney watched, the man suddenly veered off and ran up a catwalk. He stood there for a minute, looking down, both hands clutching his head, as if in absolute despair. Was the man about to jump and try to kill himself? Then he wheeled, ran down the catwalk, and began racing as swiftly in the direction from which he came, which would bring him near the station house. Delaney, then a patrolman in uniform, dashed out and headed him off. “What's the matter, fellow?” he asked, seizing his arm.

“Nothing, nothing, let me go!” He spoke in a foreign accent.

Delaney kept his grip. Though the man was tall, broad-shouldered, with a fine physique, he must have been at least in his forties, and was now pale and gasping for breath. To let him rush on might mean a heart attack. “Why don't you come in and sit down for a minute?” Delaney suggested, leading him, still protesting, to a bench inside the station house.

The other finally caught his breath. “I was running for exercise, that's all,” he said. Then he burst out, “I have to run. I have terrible things on my mind. If you only knew what I have on my mind! If I run, I forget them.” He jumped to his feet, impatient to leave.

Delaney had no right to hold him but before he left he learned his name, his address—a rooming house—and that he was a Finn. Delaney watched him hurry out into the street, then dart into the North Station. Was he going to jump in front of a train? But a moment later Virtanen reappeared and began to lope, like a long-distance runner, down Canal Street.

Something ticked in Delaney's memory. Anna Slesers, he had read, had worked as a seamstress in a shop in Canal Street. What “terrible things” had this man on his mind? Anna Slesers had come from Latvia; Virtanen from Finland. Vaguely, Delaney recalled from his high school geography that the two countries were near each other. Might not Latvians and Finns seek out each other in this country? Might Virtanen have known Anna? Although Delaney was eager to get home—today was his twin daughters' birthday and a party was waiting for him—he decided he must follow Virtanen.

It was an arduous task. The man ran here, there, stopped; once, after nearly half an hour of steady trotting, he sprang into a cafeteria, had a cup of coffee, talked vigorously to himself, pounding on the table several times, then leaped to his feet and shot out into the street again. Once he turned, caught a glimpse of Delaney, and began darting into side alleys, ducking into one entrance of a department store and out the other, redoubling on his tracks, until Delaney lost him altogether. What's this man afraid of? Delaney thought all the way home, meanwhile wondering how he could explain to his family why he was two hours late.

Between work and classes Delaney checked on Virtanen and the death of Anna Slesers. The dishwasher was a bachelor who lived alone. He moved frequently from one rooming house to another. At work, in a popular Cambridge restaurant, he was known as quiet and industrious, having nothing to do with anyone else. But early in June 1962 he had been ordered to leave a men's hotel in which he was living because of his odd behavior. He had refused to allow the maid to clean his room; wherever she looked, she reported, were newspapers, piled in closets, piled under the bed, in the bathroom; even his clothes, instead of hanging in the closet, were tightly rolled up in newspapers.

After he left, the maid found that Virtanen had spent hours deliberately tearing hundreds of pages of newspapers into shreds-small quarter-inch strips, no more than an inch long—and piling them several feet high in the bathroom. He had taken every bar of soap and as painstakingly shredded it.

When he left the hotel Virtanen chose a rooming house four blocks from Anna Slesers and three blocks from Sophie Clark.

On June 14 Anna Slesers was strangled.

Virtanen worked nights, which meant he was free to move about the city during most of the day. At what time of day had Anna Slesers actually been strangled? The original investigation had placed it in the afternoon, as late as 6:10
P.M.
, when the interior decorator who lived directly below her apartment had been awakened by loud bumping noises upstairs.

The more Delaney checked on the Slesers case, however, the more convinced he became that she had been murdered early in the day. Studying her casebook, he found that the autopsy report showed little food in her stomach (could she have gone nearly a whole day without eating?); she was known as an immaculate housekeeper, yet her kitchen wastebasket was full and her daughter, coming for her burial clothes, had found the bed unmade (would Mrs. Slesers not have emptied her wastebasket and made her bed before going out for the day?); her dentures had been found soaking in a glass of water, as if left there overnight, and the mail, delivered at 10:30
A.M.
that Thursday, was still in her mailbox when Juris Slesers had called for his mother just before 7
P.M.

If Anna Slesers had died in the morning, Delaney concluded, Virtanen could have been her murderer.

It was during the period of Anna Slesers' strangling that Virtanen began to act unpredictably at work. He threw trays about, and accused fellow workers of insulting him, of telling him “filthy stories.” Time and time again he had to be calmed down. Generally, Delaney knew from experience, dishwashers could not be depended upon; they were lonely men, usually unmarried, often mentally ill, frequently alcoholic, tending to drift from one job to another. But for a year and a half Virtanen had been a quiet, steady employee. Now he was a different man. At one time he turned and without explanation dumped a bucket of swill on a worker next to him. Because of the ease and swiftness with which he moved—because of his tremendous chest and arm development—others thought he might have been a professional boxer at one time, and they hesitated to antagonize him.

On June 20, he failed to show up for work. Usually he would telephone when he was ill; now nothing was heard from him until July 5, when he arrived at his usual time, donned his apron, and without a word began washing dishes as though he had never been gone.

In that interim Nina Nichols and Helen Blake had been strangled.

Then, in August, came Ida Irga and Jane Sullivan, on December 5, Sophie Clark, and on the last day of 1962, the discovery of Patricia Bissette's body in her apartment not far away. Letting his schoolwork slide, through January, February, and March of 1963, Delaney spent every day off following and checking on this strange troubled man whose absences were timed so suspiciously, and who lived so near the victims. He discovered that Virtanen maintained a daily routine. Since he worked nights, he rose late, around 10
A.M.
, walked briskly on the Esplanade, went to the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, read newspapers until 3
P.M.
, walked briskly back along the Esplanade, returned to his room, ate, napped until 7
P.M.
, and then in the early darkness walked along the Esplanade again, until it was time for work.

With warmer weather Delaney, who had been on guard duty at the Bunker Hill monument (a job which allowed him to study), was transferred to the police boat patrolling the Charles River. Repeatedly, as it cruised along the river banks, he saw the familiar figure of Virtanen, so easily recognizable—the man wore his hat on the back of his head—striding on the Esplanade.

On May 8 Beverly Samans was found murdered in Cambridge.

Delaney began to theorize. Beverly had attended Boston University. A natural route for her to take to and from classes would be along the Esplanade where Virtanen walked several times a day. She sang in the choir of the Second Unitarian Church of Boston. The church was in Copley Square, near the library—the very library Virtanen visited each day. Could not Virtanen on his daily walks have seen Beverly on her way to school on weekdays or on her way to the church on Sundays?

This is too big for me, thought Delaney. He was a policeman and homicides were the province of detectives. He gave Carl Virtanen's name to Boston Homicide to be checked. They reported that Virtanen had no police record, but had been a mental patient some years before in Medfield State Hospital. “He's a harmless kook,” a detective said. “Mind if I check a little more on him?” Delaney asked. “Go ahead,” said the other. “It's one less headache for us.”

Medfield State Hospital.

Beverly Samans had done rehabilitation work at Medfield State Hospital.

Delaney dug doggedly though the records.

Yes, Carl Virtanen had been a mental patient at Medfield in 1955 and 1956. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. He had been committed because he threatened to kill his mother.

And more—

In 1957, Virtanen's mother had been taken to Massachusetts General Hospital for gall bladder surgery. She spoke only Finnish and her physician had to interpret for her. She was returned from surgery to her own room at 8
P.M.
After visiting hours that night she was found half out of bed, in convulsions. “She was trying to tell us something,” a nurse told Delaney. “But we couldn't understand her language and she went into a coma and never regained consciousness.”

Delaney, in the course of days, finally found a sister of Virtanen's living in Boston. There was no charge against her brother, he assured her, but since Carl lived in the Beacon Hill area and had been a mental patient and since the police were checking such persons, “We just want to know something about him.”

“I can't tell you much,” she said. “Carl never got along well with me—or with Mother. But don't take that wrong,” she hastened to add, and her next words set the little hairs on the back of Steve Delaney's neck bristling. “He loved Mother. He was with her when she died.”
*

Now Delaney was all but obsessed. He gave up his studies altogether. Because of Virtanen he had already dropped behind in his education: he might as well forget it. He could always work out a college degree but he could not always catch the Strangler.

After Evelyn Corbin's murder in Salem on September 8, Delaney spent his days off trying to determine if Virtanen had been in Salem. He had little success. In the midst of his search came new stimulation—a widely-quoted article in the October 1963 issue of
Pageant
magazine in which Dr. Brussel predicted the type of man the Strangler would turn out to be:

“I would say he has an athletic, symmetrical build and a burning desire to get rid of energy … He is between thirty and forty, the time of age when a paranoid reaches the peak of his mental disorder. He has never been married, and never will be, because he is sexually abnormal. He is a lone wolf.… He could never work with anyone standing over him.… The killings have something to do with his mother. The hospital angle is too strong to ignore and the chances are excellent that the trouble surrounding his relationship with his mother has something to do with a hospital.… He definitely lives alone, probably near the center of the city …”

Delaney read this with mounting excitement. “Athletic … build … burning desire to get rid of energy … between thirty and forty … paranoid … never married … lone wolf … trouble … with his mother … something to do with a hospital … lives alone …”

Dr. Brussel, the man who had described the Mad Bomber down to his buttoned double-breasted suit, might have had Carl Virtanen in front of him as he wrote this description.

Then, on Saturday, November 23, the day after President Kennedy was assassinated, Joann Graff was strangled in Lawrence. Delaney thought, Joann was a Lutheran. Virtanen, he had learned, was also a Lutheran. That was one bond between the two. Joann had asked a Latvian minister to help her meet people when she first came to Lawrence. A glance at the map showed that Latvia was, indeed, just across a fjord from Finland. Virtanen might have known Anna Slesers. By the same token, he might also have come to know Joann—this shy girl, who would permit no one she did not know to enter her apartment. Had Carl Virtanen been in Lawrence when Joann Graff was murdered?

Now every moment that he had off Delaney spent in Lawrence making the rounds of places where Virtanen might have been seen, especially hotels, restaurants, and diners. At one restaurant the short-order cook said, “I've seen that man.”

It was a Saturday, the day after President Kennedy had been assassinated. He had been walking sadly to work when he saw his friend Luigi just ahead of him. He needed someone to share his deep emotion over the terrible thing that had happened, so he had quickened his step and with a subdued “Hi, Luigi,” put his hand on the other's shoulder.