The Boston Strangler (33 page)

The two had first met in January 1959 in Mrs. Manchester's apartment. Evelyn had moved into the building two years earlier, after her mother's death. As she lived alone—she had been divorced for many years and was childless—she began joining the Manchesters for an occasional meal. Soon she was taking at least one dinner a week with them, and all her meals on Sunday. She had few other friends—less than half a dozen names were found in her address book—and she and the older woman became close, spending time together, going shopping together. Lately, she and Bob had begun to discuss marriage. Neither mother nor son had any idea of Evelyn's true age. They assumed, as did nearly everyone else, that she was perhaps a few years older than Bob, who had just turned forty-one.

About nine-thirty Saturday night, she and Bob went on their date to Revere Beach, a strip of Ferris wheels and amusement centers on the outskirts of Boston. They returned about midnight and he said good night to her at her door. When he walked into his apartment his mother was waiting up, having a snack. “You'd better phone Evelyn about the chicken,” he said. The three were to have broiled chicken for Sunday dinner, and Evelyn, who had the fowl in her freezer, was to be reminded to take it out so it could defrost overnight. Then Mrs. Manchester got on the phone for a cozy midnight chat.

At nine o'clock Sunday morning, Bob breakfasted in Eaton's Drug Store and drove to his office in Newton Highlands, twenty-five miles away, to catch up on work. He came home about 1:15
P.M.
—a few moments after his mother had telephoned the police. As he walked in she said in great agitation, “I think something's happened to Evelyn.” He ran down the hall into her apartment, pulled the gag from her mouth, and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—but in vain. He covered her with a blanket and waited for the police. On the table was a letter she had just written to his sister, telling her they hoped to marry, perhaps as early as June.

Bob was interrogated by the police. He rarely went to his office on Sunday—why this Sunday? Could he produce anyone to prove he had been there all morning? He could not.

Then, unexpectedly, came the discovery of a far more likely suspect as the result of a series of events which at first glance had nothing to do with Evelyn Corbin.

It began Monday, September 9, the day after her murder, when an irate father strode into the office of Police Inspector J. W. Moran of Salem to announce that his sixteen-year-old daughter Sue was missing, and that he was sure she had run off with a twenty-five-year-old wife-beater and ne'er-do-well who will be known here as George McCarthy. Only a month before he had complained to the police about the man: Moran had called McCarthy in and given him a stern warning.

Now, however, Sue had vanished—she had walked out of the house just after their Sunday dinner yesterday, about one-thirty—and hadn't been seen since.

Little was known about McCarthy except that he was separated from his wife and child, was frequently in trouble with women, and numbered among his friends one Gilbert Johnson, which is not his name, who lived at 233 Lafayette Street—across the street from Evelyn Corbin's building. If McCarthy had left town with the girl, was there any meaning to this sudden departure at almost the very hour Evelyn Corbin's body was found?

Inspector Moran sent a teletype alarm. Eight days later, on September 17, a teletype message alerted him that McCarthy had been picked up in upper New York State on a stolen car charge. Yes, he admitted to police there, he had gone off with Sue, they'd had a fight, she'd left him. A week later, the girl was picked up with another man in a neighboring town. Inspector Moran went to New York, brought Sue back, and questioned the two separately.

McCarthy knew nothing about Evelyn Corbin's murder, he insisted. Saturday night, the night before her death, he was out drinking with his friend Gilbert Johnson. He had been locked out of his rooming house in Lynn for nonpayment of rent, McCarthy said, so he slept Saturday night in Johnson's apartment on Lafayette Street. Next morning, Sunday, about 11
A.M.
, he left the apartment, he said, drove to a diner, had a cup of coffee, drove to his rooming house in Lynn, climbed in a window to pick up some clothes, and drove back to Salem where he telephoned Sue to meet him just after one o'clock. On the way, he passed a friendly little dog, wagging its tail; he backed up, picked up the pup, and put it in his car.

In Salem he parked down the street from Sue's house. She came out about one-thirty. “We're driving to New York,” he told her. “How much money have you got?” She had seven dollars. All he had, he said, was five or six.

As they drove she reached out to switch on the car radio. To her surprise he knocked her hand away roughly. “Leave it alone,” he growled. “It's not working.” They got as far as Claverack, New York, when the car broke down. They walked until they reached an apartment house. McCarthy talked the woman owner into allowing them to occupy an empty furnished apartment. She felt sorry for them, she said later—such a bedraggled young couple, with their hungry little dog.

Sue found it impossible to live with McCarthy, she told Inspector Moran. He was cruel, unpredictable, given to sudden rages. He got a job picking apples but lasted only a few hours, earning sixty cents. He began kicking the dog, for no reason, so viciously that another tenant had to take it to a veterinarian. McCarthy went into frightening tantrums, jumping up and down, shouting at the top of his voice, bursting into tears. Sue left McCarthy, met a boy, and went to live on a small farm in nearby Hudson. McCarthy, now alone, followed her to Hudson, got a job as a dishwasher, but was fired after five days when his employers found money missing. He bought a car for forty-five dollars; it broke down after a few miles. He stole another car, which brought about his arrest.

That was his story.

But when Inspector Moran checked with McCarthy's friend Johnson, important differences appeared. McCarthy had said he left Johnson's apartment across the street from Evelyn's building, at 11
A.M.
Sunday morning. But Johnson distinctly recalled that his alarm clock awakened them both at 9
A.M.
; that they had a breakfast of doughnuts and coffee in his kitchen; that McCarthy left the apartment a few minutes later, about nine-thirty. “I remember waiting for him to get out so I could lock the door and go back to bed.” He made sure to lock it, he explained, because he suspected McCarthy was a thief. “I slept all night with my wallet under my pillow.”

What, now, did Inspector Moran have?

Doughnuts
for breakfast … and a doughnut was found on the fire escape outside Evelyn Corbin's kitchen window.

McCarthy
leaving Johnson's apartment at about 9:30
A.M.
—and Evelyn Corbin strangled in her apartment across the street between 10:35
A.M.
, when she left Mrs. Manchester, and 11:15
A.M.
, when she did not answer Mrs. Manchester's telephone call.

McCarthy
leaving town at 1:30
P.M.
with Sue and violently preventing her from turning on the radio—which would have carried news of Evelyn Corbin's murder.

McCarthy
telling Sue he had “five or six dollars.” Evelyn's purse had been emptied by her killer. She rarely had much cash in it—usually, said Mrs. Manchester, five or six dollars.

Like all police involved in the search for the Strangler, Inspector Moran knew through what heartbreaking detours one could be led by coincidence. Yet …

He spoke to McCarthy's wife. They had been separated for two years. Her description of the man echoed sixteen-year-old Sue's. Not only had he beaten her and thrown her about—he was tremendously strong, said Mrs. McCarthy—but once, when their eighteen-month-old daughter annoyed him, he turned on the baby like a madman, kicking her in the face, and blacking both her eyes. His own background was vague, and always upset him; he was illegitimate, his wife said, and had learned his mother's identity only a few years before. When he was sixteen he had “some kind of mental trouble.” In bed he was a brutal, selfish man and often forced her to commit unnatural acts with him.

Inspector Moran left, pondering this last of coincidences. Evelyn Corbin's autopsy showed that she had been forced to engage in such an act—whether while living, or dying, or dead, no one knew.

After serving a brief sentence for abducting Sue, McCarthy was released from the House of Correction in late November 1963. He lived with a woman he had picked up until the early evening of Friday, December 12, when they fought over his sexual demands. He stormed out of her apartment and paced back and forth on Roslyn Street, which runs into Lafayette Street at a point less than fifty yards from the Corbin apartment. A fifty-two-year-old woman walked by: McCarthy turned, jumped her from behind, put his hand up under her dress, punched her, gouged at her eyes, tried to rape her, stifling her screams by stuffing his fingers down her throat, and left her bleeding and semiconscious on the street, in such a state that police could not question her for fifteen hours. She remained three weeks in Salem Hospital. The night before a woman had been similarly assaulted in Peabody, three miles away. Both women identified McCarthy as their assailant. He denied the assaults, though he admitted that he had passed the fifty-two-year-old woman on the street in Salem, turned, and came up behind her—but then he had simply walked away, he said.

This man, thought Moran. He claims he was in Johnson's apartment until eleven o'clock Sunday morning. Johnson swears he left at nine-thirty. If he left at nine-thirty, he could easily have walked into the Corbin building, slipped the lock on Evelyn's door with a celluloid strip, waited for her to return from the Manchester apartment, and jumped her from behind the moment she turned her back to lock the door. She had not even had time to remove her robe and slippers …

Moran questioned McCarthy about Evelyn Corbin.

The man laughed. He laughed through most of the interrogation. It was not a rational reaction. Moran accused him bluntly of Evelyn Corbin's death. “We've got enough to convict you,” he said, bluffing.

“Oh,” said McCarthy airily, “you'll find I'm not guilty.”

“Suppose you're not guilty but you're convicted anyway and sent to prison for life. Doesn't that worry you?” Moran demanded.

“Nope,” said McCarthy. Though he hired an attorney, he still appeared to treat it all as a joke.

Would he take a lie-detector test? No, said his attorney.

Nor would his client answer any further questions about the murder of Evelyn Corbin.

There was no way to compel him, as there had been no way to compel Carl Virtanen. Though Salem police strongly suspected that McCarthy had killed Evelyn Corbin, there was no legally acceptable evidence against him. As there was none, so far, against any other suspect, whether believed to be the multiple or individual murderer in the strangulations.

That was the immovable barrier against which, time and again, the search had to crash. Rarely are there witnesses to murder. There were none to the stranglings.

While Moran made his reports to the Attorney General's office, the team of Mellon and DiNatale were wrestling with a parallel problem—a suspect who could not be pinned against the wall. He was the six-foot-four, twenty-three-year-old Negro Casanova, Lew Barnett, believed involved in the strangling of Sophie Clark. Barnett was wily and cunning. He admitted nothing save that he knew Sophie, and had been in her apartment once or twice.

Sophie's friends had always been suspicious of Barnett. In school in his early years he was known as a troublemaker; later many girls shunned him because of his belligerence and his habit of bragging about his conquests, true or fancied. Yet there had been nothing to hold him for; after questioning, he had been told he was free, but to notify police if he left the city. Some weeks later he was discovered gone; he had simply vanished from his job as a porter at Filene's, and given no one a forwarding address. He was traced through several states as far as Florida, finally back to New York, and there, in May 1964, Phil DiNatale and Jim Mellon called on him. They had traced him by his social security number. With the exception of one's fingerprints, this apparently is the one unchangeable fact about all of us.

When the two detectives walked in on him in a Harlem hotel room, the pressure had been off Barnett for some months; they felt it the psychological moment to approach him.

Barnett was astonished to see them. Yes, he was still broken up about Sophie's death. As her friend it had been a terrible blow to him.

“If you're her friend, you won't mind taking a lie-detector test, will you?” he was asked. All Sophie's friends had done so as a routine procedure to eliminate them so police could move on in their search for the killer.

Thus challenged, Barnett said, sure, he would take the test.

He had maintained he had been alone with Sophie only once: the night of November 11, 1962, when he took her to see the film
The Longest Day
. Her roommates, however, had told the two detectives they were sure Lew had spent at least two afternoons with her. Barnett was asked if this was true.

“I don't know, man,” said Barnett. “I think I remember one other time when I brought records to her apartment—” But that was it, he insisted. He had not seen her alone again; he had seen her Saturday, December 1, four days before her death on Wednesday, December 5.

On the dresser in Sophie's apartment had been a book of short stories. “Lew,” Mellon asked, “did you ever read that book?”

No, Barnett replied. But he recalled reading a letter she was writing to a “Dearest Chuck”—something about her having liver and onions—

Mellon stiffened. Lew Barnett must have been in the apartment the very hour of her murder. How else could he have known about the letter?

“Where'd you see it?” Mellon demanded.