The Boston Strangler (34 page)

Barnett thought. “On Lieutenant Donovan's desk at police headquarters,” he said. “Could of been the letter or a copy of it—”

Was he telling the truth? A quick check only ascertained that Barnett had been questioned in Lieutenant Donovan's office, that a photostat of Sophie's letter might have been on the desk—no one was sure.

Barnett refused to budge. He insisted that on the day of Sophie's murder, he had not gone out until evening; it was wet, slushy, a miserable day, and after he came home from work at Filene's about 3:30
P.M.
, it was too nasty to go out; he took a nap, woke about two hours later, had a sandwich, and dated a girl that evening. That was his story. Once, Lew admitted, he had hurt his head playing football and since had suffered dizzy spells and blinding headaches, but he had never blacked out, he said. He knew exactly what he had done that December 5.

Barnett underwent the polygraph test in New York. To put him in a proper frame of mind, the examiner said, “Lew, I'll show you how this thing works.” He placed a dollar bill, a five-dollar bill and a ten-dollar bill in three unmarked envelopes, moved them about behind his back, then brought them in front of him, and asked Barnett to take one. “Don't show it to me,” he said. “Just look at it.” Then the examiner attached the various wires from the little black box to Barnett's arm.

“I want you to answer no to all my questions,” he said. “Do you have the dollar bill?” “No,” said Barnett, grinning. “Do you have the five-dollar bill?” Again Barnett replied No. “Do you have the ten-dollar bill?” A third time Barnett said No.

The other looked up from his dials with a little smile. “Lew, you have the five-dollar bill.”

Barnett looked shocked. “Hey, that's not bad!” he said. Then: “Oh, all right, man, go on, shoot any questions you want.”

The examiner asked ten questions, carefully worded so that each one played on the following one. Some dealt with Sophie's murder; others were completely extraneous. One question was, “Were you in the apartment at the time that death came to Sophie Clark.” In his negative reply to this question, according to the polygraph, Barnett lied.

“Lew,” said the operator. “We have some discrepancies here. I'm going to ask the same questions over again, possibly not in the same sequence.”

Then, after the second series, “Lew, you are lying.”

Barnett jumped to his feet, furious. “Take this God damned thing off me! No box is telling me I'm lying!”

Denial or no, Barnett could not be eliminated. Phil DiNatale and Detective John Flynn of New York, who was working with Phil and Jim Mellon on the case, drove Barnett back to his apartment. The two Boston detectives had insufficient evidence to arrest Barnett; they would have to return without him. But Phil decided, as they drove, to bluff him. He said: “Lew, we're driving you home and when you get there I want you to get some clothes that'll last you a long time because the place we're going to take you now, the clothes have to last you a long time.”

Barnett, sitting in the back of the car, kept silent. Then, casually, he asked, “What kind of clothes you think I ought to be taking?”

“You just take what you think will last a long time,” Phil repeated. After a moment, he added, “On the other hand, come to think of it, you don't have to take anything but a toothbrush. Because the place you're going to they'll give you what you need.”

Silence again from Barnett. Detective Flynn, driving, said nothing.

“If I was the guy who did it, would I get the electric chair?”

Barnett asked the question almost conversationally. Phil had to control his voice when he answered, “No, of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because you're sick,” Phil said gently. “They don't do that, if you're sick. They take you and put you in a hospital and give you the best of care until you're cured and then they let you go.”

“Don't they try you for murder?”

“No, because you're sick and now you're cured,” Phil said. “You were sick when you did it; now you're cured.”

Barnett thought that over. The two detectives scarcely allowed themselves to breathe. Flynn was ready at any moment to jam on the brake, halt the car, and take down Barnett's confession.

“Well …” came from the back seat. Then, in a rush of words, “I'll tell you, Phil—” But whatever he was prepared to tell, he changed his mind in midstream. “Aw, the hell with it.” And he said nothing more. The detectives waited. Nothing.

I've lost him, thought Phil, despairingly. There was nothing to do now. The psychological moment had passed. I've bluffed him, thought Phil, and I couldn't hold him. Now the son of a bitch is just sitting back there waiting to hear what we have to say.

They rode in silence until they were in front of Barnett's apartment house. Phil turned to him. “I'll tell you what, Lew. We're going to give you another chance. We're not going to take you anywhere. We're going to cool you off a bit—just let you alone.”

Barnett exclaimed, almost in shock, “You mean you're not going to arrest me? You're not going to take me in?”

“Nope,” said Phil.

He and Flynn watched Barnett scramble out of the back seat as though the car were about to explode.

Phil let Barnett cool for a week, then they approached him again. They found him in a bar. He looked startled to see them. Phil, acting as though he carried a warrant, said, “Look, Lew, you left Boston without telling us. That means anytime you go back, you're going to be picked up and held for questioning. That's always going to hang over your head. You say you're innocent; why don't you help us wrap this up and help us get off your back? Come back to Boston with us now and on your own accord to take a second lie-detector test. If you're innocent, what have you got to be afraid of?”

Barnett agreed. He returned to Boston with them.

Zimmerman, the polygraph examiner, chatted with Barnett before the test. Barnett was on his mettle. “You tell me how I got into her apartment and we'll talk turkey,” Barnett challenged him. Zimmerman interpreted this to mean that he knew something he had not yet told, and was fencing to learn just how much the police knew.

The polygraph, when Barnett took it, indicated that he was hiding something. Zimmerman reported to Jim Mellon, waiting in an adjoining room, that Barnett was involved “by personal or remote contact with a person who died by other than natural causes.”

Mellon decided to bluff, as Phil had done in New York. He strode into the test room to confront Barnett, still attached to the machine. “Kid, this is it, you flunked it. You couldn't make time with Sophie, so you knocked her off. Now, why don't you come clean? You go along with us and we'll go along with you. You're lying—you can't fool the machine.”

Barnett shook his head doggedly. “Oh, no, man, oh, no,” he said. “These boxes are for the birds. This thing isn't going to make me a killer. I need more than that.”

What now?

“Okay, Lew,” said Mellon. “But in fairness to you, we think you should be interviewed by some psychiatrists at Boston University School of Medicine. You game?”

“Sure, sure,” said Barnett expansively. To Mellon it appeared as though the youth, in his enormous conceit, was playing a game with them—a kind of Russian roulette in which he was prepared to admit everything but only if they trapped him.

The session that same afternoon at Boston University was equally inconclusive, save that the psychiatrists had no doubt that Barnett was emotionally ill and in need of psychiatric help. For his part, Barnett only grew more incensed. “Man, you think I could have killed Sophie and not known about it?” Yes, of course he had had dizzy spells, but he had never blacked out …

Such things were possible, he was told. Would he be willing to find out—to be placed under a hypnotic drug? Again, challenged in this fashion, he agreed.

May 14, 1964. Even as Lewis Barnett lay down on Dr. Leo Alexander's couch, a sample of his handwriting was analyzed by Dr. Carola Blume. She found him cruel, violent, impulsive; able to control himself; probably psychotic; intelligent and vain. “He looks like a person who should not be left on his own in the community.” He could not be excluded from the investigation, she felt.

Under Methedrine Barnett emerged, surprisingly enough, as a bisexual, kept by both men and women, and a man who enjoyed sadistic lovemaking—he called it “constructive lovemaking”—with women. At that time he was supported by a homosexual hairdresser with whom he lived. The hairdresser had been a guest at Sophie Clark's twentieth birthday party, two days before her death. As Barnett went into a deeper hypnotic state, he began to weep. He was conscience-stricken, he said, but not because he had killed Sophie Clark. He had never touched her. He was overcome by guilt because he had not dropped in on her the afternoon of her death—that December 5, 1962. He'd been thinking of telephoning her, he'd been thinking of dropping over to see her, but hadn't wanted to leave the house because the weather was so bad … “If only I'd been there,” he cried emotionally. “I'd have saved her, I'd have protected her …” Later, moaning and twisting, he whispered, “I know confession is good for the soul, Doctor. I want to confess my failure to save Sophie's life. I'm ready to serve time until they find the real killer …”

To Dr. Alexander, this seemed out of character with Barnett's personality, which he described as “not that of an overconscientious person but rather that of a totally amoral psychopath.” Dr. Alexander felt that Barnett protested far too much: that he spoke of his guilt to cover his positive reaction to many damaging questions in his polygraph. He shared Dr. Blume's view that Lewis Barnett could not be altogether eliminated from the investigation into Sophie Clark's death.

It meant one more man to be kept under surveillance. Barnett's great weakness was his braggadocio. He might yet boast to friends, to girls, to fellow employees, how he had taken in the police and all their experts in two cities. He was given a bus ticket back to New York where Homicide detectives were asked to watch him indefinitely.

*
Daniel Pennacchio, the twenty-eight-year-old cafeteria worker who falsely confessed to Beverly's murder, was, the reader will remember, a former Fernald student.

†
She had taken the same cool, clinical attitude in her thesis. Pointing out that the subject was considered “taboo” in the study of man, she wrote: “This paper attempts to examine some of the causative factors contributing to homosexuality in males … It will be obvious that, whatever the causation, this writer feels that the practice of homosexuality is a matter of personal choice and that part of the difficulties connected with it stem from the attitude which society maintains toward it.”

17

It was November 1964, a full ten months since Mary Sullivan's murder, and Jim Mellon in his frustration was like a man possessed. Although he had been involved in so many sorties—Arnold Wallace and Paul Gordon and Lew Barnett and many less important suspects—he had been unable to get Mary's strangling out of his mind, and had made it his special assignment.

He had begun to be convinced there were four possibilities. Mary had been killed (1) by someone out of her old background, the Cape Cod area in which she had been born, grown up, and worked before coming to Boston; (2) by someone out of her new background, the Charles Street circle, which included Christopher Reid and the other youths who were in and out of her apartment; (3) by a total stranger, that is, the Strangler. The fourth possibility he considered was that she had been killed in error, by someone who meant to kill either Pat or Pam, her roommates, or perhaps even the girl—a nurse—who had been the two girls' roommate before Mary.

Jim, with Steve Delaney, had spent weeks in and about Hyannis, questioning all who had known Mary. They had interrogated and cross-checked the boys whose cottage in Dennisport she had visited the summer of 1962; they had interviewed all her fellow employees at each place she had worked since leaving high school; they had questioned and requestioned Pat and Pam. Jim had all but worn a hole in his pocket carrying about the test tube containing the washer he found on her bed; he had exhausted himself running down names and firms listed on the mysterious telephone page; and now he had come back once more to Christopher Reid, and to the old police proverb, “Investigate your informant.”

He could not get Christopher out of his thoughts. The boy's high-strung character; his story about the male voice he heard through the door, his elaboration of that voice into a tall, thin man with a protruding Adam's apple, his zeal in checking radio stations to prove that the voice did not come from the radio … why this need to provide a lover for Mary Sullivan?

Was it an alibi for himself?

There was also the question of a missing key.

On January 2, two evenings before Mary's death, Christopher and a friend had dropped into the apartment at 44A Charles Street. Pam and Mary were there. Christopher had met Mary for the first time then; he had been there from 7:30
P.M.
until 11 o'clock, long enough to familiarize himself with the layout of the rooms. The next day, January 3, the day before the murder, Pam Parker noticed that one of the three keys in her keycase—the middle one, that to the apartment—was missing. She remembered having left the case on the table for a day or so.

Someone had extracted the key. Could it have been Christopher? It would have taken several minutes because a small removable metal tab linked the key tightly to the ring. It was a nuisance, one had to struggle to detach it; could Christopher have managed to do it without being observed?

In the months since Mary's murder Mellon had made it a point to keep in touch with him. Christopher had said he wanted to help, and often chatted over the telephone with Mellon on one phase or another of the investigation. Only a few days before, after returning from the Cape, Jim telephoned Christopher to say he was back and to ask if anything new had come up. Just before ending the conversation, Jim asked, “By the way, Chris, when you were in the apartment on January second, did you have occasion to go to the bathroom?”