The Boston Strangler (32 page)

Apparently, some kind of campaign was under way to annoy Beverly, and two other girls who often sang with her. All three had had their photographs in a newspaper advertisement announcing their appearance at a Palm Sunday service.

First, one of the girls had received an obscene telephone call. A day later, the other girl's phone rang. “Phyllis,” said an unfamiliar voice, “I want you to accommodate me. Ruth told me to call you because she said she couldn't accommodate me, but that you could.” Phyllis, who knew nothing of Ruth's call, assumed this might be someone wanting to take voice lessons.

“Who is this?” she asked.

“Oh, you know who it is,” the voice said teasingly. But Phyllis could not place it. Was it one of the boys in the orchestra? “Well, what is it you want?” she asked.

As Phyllis told the story later, “He seemed hesitant. Then he finally told me what he wanted. I said, ‘Oh,' and hung up.”

In the following week the three girls were called again. They compared notes. Sometimes the voice was that of a young man, sometimes an older man. Was it a group, two or three fellows, setting up this inexplicable, frightening siege?

Beverly was upset when she talked about it to Nick. At other times, in other ways, she seemed fatalistic. Once, discussing the stranglings on their drive to Medfield, Nick asked, “What would you do if the Strangler came knocking at your door?”

“Nothing, I guess,” she said. “He won't have a hard time getting in—my door lock isn't good and I can't lock my windows.”

“Why don't you get them fixed?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, if he really wants to get in, locks won't keep him out.”

Death had struck her at a crossroads in her life. She was trying to decide whether to continue rehabilitation counseling or “chuck it all” and devote herself to a singing career. Beverly had a promising mezzo-soprano voice; she was soloist every Sunday morning at the Second Unitarian Church, took weekly voice lessons, and participated in many operettas and concerts. A future seemed assured. But she was almost irresistibly drawn to emotionally troubled people. That had led her after graduation in 1959 from a music conservatory to take a job as a music therapist at Fernald School for Retarded Children. She left there in August 1962 to study for a master's degree in rehabilitation counseling at Boston University. This was the course that required field work with disturbed patients at Medfield, so that she found herself drawn in even deeper.

Nor did Beverly make matters easy for herself. She continued her friendship with her former students at Fernald, in violation of institution rules, allowing them to drop in on weekends at her apartment to play the piano and talk over their problems. Friends warned her against this open house. These boys—some were over twenty—were disturbed,
*
and at least one was so infatuated with her that he had been taken out of Fernald and given a job as a hospital orderly in another town. “But these kids have no parents,” she would say. “Somebody's got to help them.”

Beverly told herself she was really giving therapy to her homosexual friends, and in any event, gaining data for her thesis. She realized it was not a healthy situation. “I've got to stop this,” she would say. “I'm fed up with mothering mentally crippled men. It drains me.…” And then she would lament, “Where can I find a man who knows how to treat a woman as a woman?” Yet one of her closest friends was a twenty-three-year-old student who, after dating her several times, said suddenly, “I've got to tell you something you'll hate me for—you'll never go out with me again—I'm homosexual.”

“I know,” she said. “I've known it almost from the first time we went out.”

“And you don't mind?” he asked anxiously. “You'll still go out with me, you don't hate me?”

“No,” she said. “Why should I hate you? It's just a thing, a thing, that's all.”
†

She told her friend Phyllis, “That's the kind of a person I am. Therefore I could go out with him, although I felt as if I were mothering him. Still, he could enjoy my company, and I could enjoy his …”

Beverly had problems with men generally. Scarcely anyone knew—not even her parents, she said—that she had once been secretly married. It was during her first year in Boston, just after she came from her hometown, Buckley, West Virginia, and enrolled in Boston University. She was only seventeen, he was eighteen, she was Jewish, he was Catholic. It lasted scarcely two weekends, and was annulled. Even then, “the more we were together, the more it seemed I was a leaning post, a sister, a mother—but not a wife,” she told one friend. And with insight into her own problems, Beverly added, “I guess my going out with homosexuals, my interest in rehabilitation and sick people, all ties in with my marriage that never worked out.”

But now, when she did seek out other, stronger men, it seemed that most of them bristled in her presence, that they would “go on the defensive.” In recent months she had been depressed, although she tried not to show it, and that, together with her inability to “meet the right man” was part of the entire complex of difficulties that led her to seek psychiatric help not long before death came to her.

There was little to be learned from her last days.

On Friday before the Sunday of her murder Beverly called Nick Thiesse to say he could go on to Medfield without her that morning. She felt unwell. Saturday he saw her in class: she still felt unwell. Nick's wife was expecting a baby at any moment and Beverly's last words to him as they parted in class were, “Be sure to call me as soon as the baby arrives.”

Sunday morning, May 5, Beverly sang in the church choir as usual. On the way home, about 12:30
P.M.
, she stopped at her friend Edith's, to leave a medical book she had borrowed for research on her thesis. About 8:30 that night she telephoned Edith; she had just returned from rehearsing
Così fan tutti
with the full cast of six at the Brookline home of John Ring, the producer. Would Edith join her for a late snack? The two girls met about nine o'clock in the Beacon Restaurant around the corner from Edith's apartment at 90 St. Mary's Street. Beverly was full of enthusiasm; the rehearsal had gone splendidly. First she had rehearsed individually with her singing coach who came up from New York to teach in Brookline. He felt certain she had a good chance to get a job with the Met, once she came to New York after receiving her degree. Then the entire cast had rehearsed. Everything had gone off fine, just fine.

After a while, Edith looked at her watch. “Oh, my, it's nearly eleven o'clock,” she said. The two left the restaurant a few minutes later. Beverly's car was parked in front of Edith's apartment. The two strolled there and talked for about ten minutes. Beverly was in high spirits, thinking of New York and the future. Then she got into her car and drove away.

Beverly Samans drove home to her death.

And what was one to say about her fellow-victim, Evelyn Corbin, in Salem? Evelyn's death seemed even more puzzling because of the precision with which her killer had to carry out his murder, assault, and search. He had to get to her between the time she returned from brunch with her neighbor, Mrs. Manchester, and the time she left for church—at most, a half hour—in a busy apartment house on a Sunday morning, with tenants going in and out, a newsboy making repeated visits to collect money, and neighbors at the window watching the church-day traffic outside.

Consider the timetable of Evelyn Corbin's last hours at 224 Lafayette Street, in Salem, that Sunday, September 8, 1963.

At 9:15
A.M.
, someone tampered with her door. A few minutes later she answered Mrs. Manchester's telephone call—someone had been at
her
door. At nine-thirty, Evelyn dropped into Mrs. Manchester's apartment for breakfast. Less than an hour later she returned to her own apartment to dress in order to go to Mass, to leave at eleven-ten for the eleven-thirty services. She never got out of her apartment.

At ten-thirty, a tenant on the floor above came down the stairs on his way to Eaton's Drug Store to pick up his Sunday paper. He noticed a man standing in front of Evelyn's door. He was unable to describe him later because—as luck would have it—he was without his glasses, which had been broken the night before. He returned and made breakfast. Suddenly he heard a long scream, followed by a short one—“as though someone had been startled.” It was about eleven o'clock. He dismissed it as noise from the children playing outside.

About 10:15, in her ground-floor apartment across the street, a woman saw a strange man walk by looking up intently at the windows of 224. She was tempted to open her window and call out, “Can I help you? Who are you looking for?” but thought better of it. The stranger was heavy-set, about thirty-five or forty, with brown wavy hair. He walked with a distinct limp.

About 10:25, Richard and Susan Bernard awoke in their third-floor apartment at 224. Susan was making toast when the fuse blew out. It was eleven o'clock—the electric clock had stopped. Richard went to the basement, fixed the fuse, and returned. He heard and saw nothing.

At 10:30, Mrs. Alice Finch left her apartment in 224 to go across the street for her paper. When she came back, noting and hearing nothing, she prepared for a visit to her sister in Marblehead. Just before she left she heard a door slam somewhere in the building. She looked up and down the hall. Nothing was to be seen. Later that afternoon, over her sister's radio, she heard the news of Evelyn Corbin's strangling. It took hours for her to muster enough courage to return home. She left finally at six o'clock saying, “I have to go back sometime—”

At 10:30, Victoria Deutch and her sister Charlotte were sitting reading—as was their Sunday morning habit—in their front parlor in 231 Lafayette Street, across the street from the Corbin building. Charlotte happened to look up from her paper to see, through the window, a man with a briefcase emerge from the entrance of 224.

“Isn't that odd,” she remarked to her sister, “a salesman soliciting on a Sunday.”

He stood on the sidewalk, looking intently up and down the street. Then he turned and walked quickly away.

At ten o'clock or so Denis Angelopoulis, the fifteen-year-old newsboy who delivered papers in the neighborhood, left his apartment at 32 Hazel Street, around the corner from Evelyn Corbin, to begin his Sunday morning collections. He had four customers in the Corbin building. First he decided to call on his girl friend Donna, fourteen, who lived across the street at 233, before she went to church. He walked with her out of the building: she went on to church, he returned home for a bite and then, at eleven o'clock, began his collections in the Corbin building. Two of his customers were in; a third, in Apartment 13, had left the money under her mat; the fourth was out. Going through the halls and up and down the stairs of 224, Denis saw nothing, heard nothing.

In the apartment next door to Evelyn's, Mrs. Carl Lesche was not feeling well and stayed in bed all morning. Her bed backed against the wall of Evelyn's bedroom. Mrs. Lesche heard nothing—“not a sound”—and she would have heard, she said, as much as a cough.

From 9:45 until 10:45, James Halpin was sitting in front of his building at No. 232 waiting for Denis to show up with his paper. During that time he saw nothing out of the ordinary. About ten-thirty, he recalled later, he saw Denis and his girl friend Donna walk out of No. 233, across the street. They held hands for a moment, then parted, she going in one direction, he in the other.

It was all peaceful, with only the sound of people going and coming from church: a quiet Sunday morning in a green and peaceful suburb, similar to a thousand quiet Sunday mornings in a thousand green and peaceful suburbs.

Who was the man standing in front of Evelyn Corbin's door? The man with the briefcase? The man limping by, looking so searchingly into the windows of her building?

Curious, too, were the events of the night before her murder.

About 9
P.M.
that Saturday night, Alan Spanks, whose wife Betty, like Evelyn Corbin, worked at Sylvania, heard a knock on his kitchen door at 233 Lafayette Street. A man over six feet tall, between thirty-five and forty, with iron-gray hair, wearing a gray sweater and dark gray pants, stood there. “May I see Betty, please?”

“She's not home,” said Spanks. His wife worked the 3 to 11
P.M.
shift. “I'm her husband. Is there any message?”

“My girl friend said your wife is looking for another job and I thought I might have something for her,” said the stranger. “I'll come back.” He left. He did not return.

When Betty came home that night her husband told her about the visitor. She did not know the man he described. She was not looking for another job. She had never, never said anything like that to anyone.

Not until they heard of Evelyn Corbin's murder did they tell the police of the incident.

That Saturday night—at almost the same time the stranger knocked on the Spanks' door—Evelyn herself came out on the back porch of her apartment to take the air. She had a date later with Bob Manchester. George Tremblay, the janitor, walked through the back yard on an errand. “Isn't it a beautiful night!” she exclaimed, and stood there for a moment, breathing deeply. Then she went in. Although she was known for her good spirits, she had recently felt depressed. A week before her doctor had prescribed a tranquilizer for her. He remarked upon her youthfulness. On Friday, September 6—two days before her death—she would be fifty-eight, and she had not yet reached the menopause.

That Friday began auspiciously. Fellow workers serenaded her—one brought her a vial of perfume—but she became upset just before leaving when she learned she was to be shifted from a sitting to a standing-up job, paying less money. She spoke then of quitting, perhaps, and marrying Bob Manchester very soon. No one at Sylvania, where she'd worked for the last twenty years, had known her to go out with anyone but Bob.