The Boston Strangler (35 page)

“Yes,” Christopher said. “Why?”

“Oh, I don't know. It just seemed a natural question to ask.” But Mellon had learned what he wanted to know. If the boy had taken the keycase into the bathroom with him he'd have had time to detach the key. Interestingly enough, the metal tab had been replaced, the act of a compulsively neat person—such as Christopher Reid.

Repeatedly in the course of the search a suspect became almost an obsession with one detective or another. That was the situation now. Mellon could think only of Christopher Reid. One night, about ten o'clock, while watching TV with his wife—his six youngsters were in bed—Mellon stood up. “I'm going to drop in on Chris.”

His wife reacted as most wives would. “Jim, at this hour? You're crazy.”

Mellon had come to the conclusion that Christopher Reid must take a lie-detector test. He had a number of reasons for this decision. One involved Christopher's small stutter which, his mother had said, was the result of a hearing defect; he had had several operations on his ears. Jim had checked clinics to learn the degree of hearing loss, for the hearing loss cast doubt on Christopher's story that he had heard, two nights before Mary's death, a man's voice through a closed door just before he reached the third-floor landing. Mellon suspected that Christopher might have visited the apartment Friday afternoon, January 3—the day before the murder, when the three girls were at work—looked through Mary's personal effects, and made his plans then. There had been discrepancies in the stories Christopher told. Each time he was asked about the man's voice, he added more details. Mellon had suggested to Bottomly that Christopher be asked to take a lie-detector test, and Bottomly agreed it should prove useful.

Mellon wanted to call on Christopher now, late at night, hoping he would be out and only his mother would be at home. Then he would ask her if he might use the phone, allowing him to examine the Reid telephone directory. Suppose Christopher had torn out the page, brought it to the Sullivan apartment that Friday, and deliberately planted the charred fragment behind the toilet to throw police off his trail? If Mellon found pages 307–308 missing, he would be entitled to ask for a search warrant. Somewhere in Christopher's house, then, he might find something taken from Mary Sullivan's apartment.

The Reids lived only a few streets away from Mellon. When Mellon knocked, Christopher himself came to the door. Regrettably, the telephone directory would have to wait. “Hi, Chris,” said Mellon. “I just wanted to go over some of the information you gave us.” Christopher had made this request possible by volunteering the statement that he had heard the mysterious voice. At that point he became a witness.

After a few words, the detective dropped his bomb. “Chris, we're not getting very far, as you know, but we're trying our best. I think we'd like to question you a little bit more. Would you take a lie-detector test?”

The boy's face turned ashen. “What if I don't?”

“Well, that's up to you,” said Mellon. “Of all the people who have given us information on the stranglings so far, I should tell you that only one has refused, and he was an extortionist who didn't want that to come up.”

Mrs. Reid, listening to this exchange, said, “Christopher, of course you'll take the test. What have you to hide?”

“Oh, well, okay, then,” said Christopher.

A few days later, on Friday, November 27, at 2
P.M.
he was given his polygraph examination in the office of Charles Zimmerman. Jim Mellon and Steve Delaney waited in the anteroom.

Presently the door opened and Zimmerman and a harassed Christopher came out. “Jim, I'm stopping the test,” Zimmerman announced. “Chris is having a hard time remembering about the key.” He turned to the boy. “I want you to go home for a week and just think about it, Chris. I'm convinced you know whether you had the key or not. You come back next Friday, December fourth, same time, and pass that test, or tell me why not.”

The two detectives took Christopher home. “Damn it, did I have that key in my hands or didn't I?” Christopher wondered aloud.

The detectives watched him closely. Was he pretending?

At 11:40
A.M.
, Friday, December 4, the day Christopher was to take his second test, Pamela Parker, who now lived with her parents in Malden, received a telephone call. She found herself engaged in a nightmare conversation.

“Who is this? Pamela?” a man's voice asked.

She wasn't sure if she recognized it. “Who is this calling?”

The voice grew intense. “I'm going to do the same thing to you that I did to Mary. I'm going to take that broom and shove it right up …”

“Who is this? Who is this?” Pamela cried, aghast.

“I'm even going to take your underwear off, even your underpants! How would you like that? How would you like that?” He spoke jerkily, staccato, under such emotion that he began to stutter. “I'll get you like I got Mary, sooner or later! Would you like that? Would you really like that? Well, you won't have to wait.”

Then the caller slammed down the receiver.

Pamela was too distraught to call the police, but her mother did so, and Detective Tuney and Jim Mellon were at the house soon after. No, she could not recognize the voice. She knew only two boys who stuttered. One was stationed with the Army in South Carolina. The other was Christopher Reid.

Stephen Delaney checked at once. Christopher Reid had missed his first morning class at Boston University but had arrived in time for his second. At 11:40
A.M.
he was en route from home to the University. He could have gotten off the trolley and made the call. Delaney hurried to Zimmerman's office, to meet Mellon there. They brought the examiner up to date on this new development.

The three men speculated. Would the boy show up for his repeat test? Had he cracked under the strain and made the threatening telephone call to Pamela, blaming her because her keys were involved, blaming her for what was now happening to him?

But at two o'clock Christopher Reid walked in, school-books in hand. He seemed depressed.

Was anything the matter?

No, just one of those days when everything went wrong, he said. Like a man going to his execution, he followed Zimmerman into the test room. The two detectives waited outside. Both were tense.

Twenty minutes later Zimmerman emerged, shaking his head.

“He's lying! I asked him if he made any phone calls to a girl this morning and the needle went way over! I think we've got him on the ropes.” He went back.

Now excitement ran high. Mellon telephoned Bottomly. Stand by, anything might happen …

Moments later the door burst open and Christopher ran out. “Jim! Help me!” Tears streamed down his face. He had failed the test: Zimmerman had told him so. “I didn't do it, I didn't do it! God, you've got to believe me! Oh, God, how did I get into this?”

Mellon put his arm around his shoulders. “Of course, I'll help you.” He held the boy comfortingly for a moment. “But I have to warn you, Chris, as of this moment you are a suspect in the Mary Sullivan homicide and anything you say can be used against you.” He added, “I don't want you to think I'm cold-blooded but I have to make this statement to you for your own protection.”

“I know you're only doing your duty,” Christopher managed to say. Detective and suspect slowly walked across the street to a cafeteria and sat over coffee and talked. “This is the toughest part for me,” Jim said. “You're a minor and so I've got to go home to your mother and tell her you're a suspect.”

Christopher tried to gulp his coffee. “Maybe it's just as well,” he said miserably. “You can explain it better than I can.”

Mellon had a single thought. How could he push this boy toward self-revelation, perhaps even confession? Aloud he said, “You know, Chris, who among us is to know what is right and what is wrong? The things people can do in the heat of passion … At such moments we're not really ourselves.”

But Christopher only sipped his coffee in anguished silence.

In midafternoon Mellon called on Mrs. Reid. He was circumspect. Christopher's mother was a lonely, high-strung woman in her early forties who had been divorced four years ago after a long, unhappy marriage. Mother and son were known to have bitter emotional scenes. “Mrs. Reid,” Mellon began carefully, “I feel like a thief because I'm going to rob you of something that's very dear to you.” As she looked uncertainly at him, he went on. “If you're angry, I'll understand. In fact, if you react in any other way I'd be shocked. But I have to tell you that Christopher is a suspect. We consider him as such.”

Mrs. Reid jumped to her feet, and screamed, “Oh no, he couldn't have done it, he couldn't have done it!”

“I think you better get yourself a lawyer, Mrs. Reid,” Mellon said as gently as he could, and left.

An hour later Christopher was on the phone. “Jim, that lie-detector test mixed me all up. I want to have a sodium pentothal and convince you people I had nothing to do with it. I want it. Now. Today. As soon as possible.”

It was done. At eight o'clock that evening Christopher Reid was on Dr. Alexander's couch. He had come with his mother and his lawyer. Christopher suffered through his ordeal. During the time he was under sodium pentothal, Bottomly, members of his investigative staff, Lieutenants Donovan and Sherry, and other police officials entered, left, entered again. Sometimes the boy wept, as when he spoke of his parents' immaturity, their violent quarrels, their divorce—“the saddest experience of my life.” He denied that he had taken the key. He denied that he had telephoned Pamela. “I didn't use the phone all day.”

Was he telling the truth?

If he did not call, who did call Pamela on
this
day? The only other supposition was difficult to accept—that someone who knew Christopher was to take the test today had telephoned and threatened Pamela in an attempt to incriminate Christopher.

“Did you kill Mary Sullivan?” he was asked.

“No.”

“Do you know who did?”

“Not the remotest idea.”

A few questions later: “Are you close to tears? Your voice suddenly changed. What thought occurred to you?”

“I'm scared,” said Christopher. “I'm scared the Mary Sullivan case will be pinned on me.”

“How can it be pinned on you?” Dr. Alexander asked.

“By a process of my not answering the lie-detector test correctly in relation to the results they wanted. They seem to think I had a key to the apartment for a period of time, which I didn't. They seem to think I was in the apartment on Friday, the day before it happened. I wasn't.”

He had heard a man's voice when he climbed the stairs Thursday evening, two days before the murder? Yes, yes. Why hadn't he gone into the apartment? Mary wouldn't let him in. Why? “I don't know—maybe she was taking a shower, or in her lingerie.”

“Why should she do that with another man in the apartment?”

Christopher lay silent for a moment. “For sexual reasons,” he said. He had been told that Mary had been “a naughty girl,” but “I never tried to provoke sex on her. She wasn't that appealing to me.”

He had never had a homosexual experience, he said, though he had been approached. Nor had he ever had sexual intercourse with a girl.

“Who was the killer after?”

Christopher answered surprisingly: “He was after Pat.”

“Who was the killer?” Everyone in the room was on edge.

But he replied, “I don't know.”

“How do you know the killer was after Pat, then?”

“She's very beautiful, a very sexy girl.”

He had no other explanation, he said.

Why had he done so badly on both polygraph tests?

“The examiner scared hell out of me. I admit I'm, shall we say, brilliant … You might not think so … I knew I was nervous and every time I'd hear the word Sullivan I'd jump.”

In the end, the interrogators concluded that Christopher Reid could control himself under drugs. Nothing conclusive had been determined. The situation stood where it had stood before.

There was one more test. It was to place Christopher in Mary Sullivan's bathroom, standing before the mirror, and ask the schoolteacher, who on the day of Mary's murder had seen a man's face framed in that bathroom window, to stand again at her own window—and see if Christopher Reid resembled him.

That was done. On a sunny day, at the same hour—2:50
P.M.
—Christopher stood in Mary Sullivan's bathroom, facing the mirror, his left profile to the window. Phil DiNatale, Jim Mellon, and Steve Delaney took turns standing there, too, to give the schoolteacher a multiple choice.

She could not say that it was Christopher. She felt the man she saw January 4 was taller than any of them. But she could not be sure.

The next morning Jim Mellon, determined to come to a conclusion, began a campaign.

He telephoned half a dozen of Christopher's fellow students, introducing himself: Jim Mellon, Attorney General's office. What could they tell him about Christopher Reid? Was he subject to fits of temper? Capable of great violence? Had they noticed any change in behavior recently? Each friend, he knew, would immediately telephone Christopher to warn him that an Officer Mellon had been making inquiries about him. That would exert one pressure on the boy.

To build up a second Mellon stationed himself in front of Boston University each morning and afternoon where Christopher could not fail to see him when he came and left classes. To know he was under such surveillance would certainly wear him down.

If Christopher had an accomplice, Mellon reasoned, sooner or later the pressure would lead one to telephone the other. Accordingly, he obtained court permission to place a twenty-four-hour tap on the Reid telephone.

Finally, he left orders with a tailor who serviced the Reid household that any clothes sent out to be cleaned or repaired should be delivered immediately—before anything was done to them—to the police for overnight chemical examination. One could not know what might be found, even at this late date, on one of Christopher's suits—perhaps a thread from the red ascot, or lint from the blanket on Mary's bed, or a torn button with its washerlike backing missing.