The Boston Strangler (4 page)

Yet the idea that Helen Blake, in pajamas, would have allowed a man to come into her apartment was ridiculous to those who knew her. No one could remember having seen her with a man: she had been married briefly, but her marriage had been annulled more than thirty-five years before. She lived a quiet life, accepting a private nursing case now and then; she enjoyed entertaining her friends by telling their fortunes with cards; she loved music, played the piano well, and attended many evening concerts in Lynn and Boston. There was nothing here to grasp hold of.

Little more was turned up in the door-to-door investigation. Mr. Lennon, the milkman, had been in the building only long enough to deliver his bottles. This was confirmed by the janitor who had been taking an old bed out to the street at the time, and had seen him come and go.

As far as police could determine, she had been strangled in the kitchen, then carried into the bedroom, where she had been assaulted. It must have taken a strong man: Miss Blake weighed more than 165 pounds.

When had death struck? One friend had telephoned Helen at 10
A.M.
Saturday, and several times later without result. Two others had called her Saturday afternoon, again without an answer. She had failed to keep a dinner engagement Saturday evening; and calls made to her Sunday received no response. On her bedroom wall hung a calender that required one to tear off a page a day: it showed Friday, June 29. Friday evening's newspaper was in the apartment. All of this seemed to fix the time of death between 8:15
A.M.
Saturday, when she picked up the milk, and 10
A.M.
, when she did not respond to her telephone.

Or had it really been Helen whom Annie and Margaret heard open her door at 8:15 and take in the milk? If so, would she not have put the bottles in the refrigerator, not on top of it? Had her killer slipped in when she went to the incinerator at 8
A.M.
and had he been behind her door, waiting, when she returned? Was she already dead at 8:15
A.M.
when the milk was delivered and had it been he who opened the door and brought in the bottles lest their presence in the hall cause suspicion? Had he placed them on top of the refrigerator and then continued his strange search for whatever he sought? The sounds Mrs. O'Malley in the apartment below heard at 8:30
A.M.
might actually have been the footlocker and the trunk being moved about by him. And when he was finished and departed, he might simply have allowed the door to lock itself after him, which would explain why the bolt had not been drawn and the chain not fastened.

Helen Blake, a woman of sixty-five, sexually assaulted and strangled to death in Lynn between 8
A.M.
and 10
A.M.
Saturday, June 30.

Nina Nichols, a woman of sixty-eight, sexually assaulted and strangled to death in Boston, less than an hour by trolley from Lynn, between 5
P.M.
and 6
P.M.
the same day.

Police Commissioner McNamara, a former Holy Cross star fullback who later became an FBI agent, was winding up his late Monday conference on the Anna Slesers and Nina Nichols stranglings when Detective Lieutenant Donovan told him about Helen Blake's body just found in Lynn. As the details were unfolded, he put into words an anxiety he would not admit to the press. “Oh, God,” he said, “we've got a madman loose!”

Commissioner McNamara had no idea that Helen Blake's death, already the third murder by strangulation in a two-week period, was only the beginning. In the next eighteen months eleven women in Greater Boston would be found strangled and sexually attacked without a single clue as to their killer; Boston—melodramatic as it may sound—would become a town besieged by terror. Not since Jack the Ripper murdered and dismembered women in the gaslit streets of London three quarters of a century before had anything comparable been experienced.

Boston could not know that these stranglings, each more bizarre than the one before, would give rise to the greatest manhunt in the history of modern crime, using every technique of detection, natural and supernatural: computers, clairvoyants, “sensitives,” men and women claiming ESP powers, psychiatrists armed with hypnotic drugs, hallucinating agents and truth serums, specialists in anthropology, graphology, forensic law. Here was a city laid siege to by a killer whose insanity was equaled by his cunning, who apparently could materialize within locked apartments and not only kill but do fearful things to the women he killed—without leaving a clue.

The search would cut through social and political strata. It would involve the Attorney General of Massachusetts and the FBI; the police on all levels, and the press, crusading and competitive; through it would run local political jealousies and national political hopes. It would affect the citizenry itself, setting wives against husbands, neighbor against neighbor, translating the sexual frustrations of men and women into acts astonishing and bizarre, bringing into the open an incredible cast of true life actors. Under the pressure of the Strangler, whether a man or men, and the search for him, an entire city would be stripped bare.

McNamara acted. All police leaves were cancelled. All detectives were immediately assigned to Homicide. A roundup was ordered of all known sex offenders, a check made on every man between eighteen and forty released in the last two years from mental institutions. “Special attention should be paid to persons suffering from a paranoia of mother-hate,” read one sentence of the order. McNamara and Donovan would have been the last to claim themselves experts on Freud, but the implication was clear: a deranged man, suffering from delusions of persecution, young rather than middle-aged, hating all older women because he hated his mother, therefore attacking them because each symbolized his mother.

The police appealed to women: keep your doors locked, allow no strangers to enter, report all prowlers or anyone behaving peculiarly, especially in areas where women lived alone. An emergency number—DE 8-1212—was published in all newspapers and broadcast, to be called day or night. From the apartments of the three victims, carpets, runners, linen, blankets, floor sweepings of the most minute nature were sent to police laboratories to be examined—a thread from a man's suit, a button, a single human hair. (In the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case a piece of wood had led them to Hauptmann.)

In the midst of this, on July 11, at 10
A.M.
—nine days after Helen Blake had been found—a chambermaid entered a room in a cheap hotel to clean up. A moment later she ran screaming from the room.

A nude woman lay dead across the bed. She had gray hair. She had been strangled. Her killer had choked her to death with his hands, as the autopsy later disclosed. Draped over a nearby chair were her clothes, all identification marks removed. She and a man, both drunk, had registered the night before as Mr. and Mrs. Byron Spanney. The man had been unable to write his address; the woman finally gave it to the nightclerk as 315 The Riverview, Roxbury. Sherry discovered the names were fictitious, and the address turned out to be a Catholic convent. Later the woman was identified as Mrs. Margaret Davis, sixty, a widow, of Roxbury. She had told a partial truth: nuns at 315 The Riverview had been trying to help her control her drinking. All this pointed to a run-of-the-mill homicide such as every large city knows—a derelict man and woman, a hotel assignation, a drunken fight, and a drunken murder. The police relaxed a little.

But the very absence of a pattern in this strangling—no apartment, no article of clothing used as a ligature, no obvious positioning of the body—made Lieutenant Sherry aware that there
was
a pattern. As he was to say, “The seed was planted when I stood in that hotel room and looked at the body and realized I was looking for
something
…” For the first time, against his common sense, his long experience which taught him that super-criminals exist only in fiction, he began to think, What's going on here?

Then Ida Irga was found.

*
He had been having such sessions since the first of the year, once a week. Nothing particularly serious, save a general feeling of depression. Because of the supportive therapy given him, he had been able to suggest to his mother that they live apart. Common sense dictated that, too: she wanted to live in Boston, but why should he, when he worked fifteen miles away in Lexington?

2

There are people who say that there are aspects of Boston that remain essentially unchanged since the days of Salem witchburnings: a belief that only extreme rectitude and immediate recognition of sin can cope with the evil inherent in men. Some of Boston still lives in the times of the early Lodges and Cabots and Bradfords. For all its superb educational system, Boston is one of the few cities in the United States that still permits physical punishment of children. Even today, in this fountain of intellectuality, teachers may rattan unruly boys in the elementary and junior high schools.

Later there would be those who said it was not the stranglings that shocked Boston so much: it was the abhorrent sexual aspect that summoned to mind in Bostonians deep lurking fears of Sodom and Gomorrah. Such acts would have caused a strong impact anywhere; but Boston was especially vulnerable. It could not avoid its double legacy of Calvinist Puritanism, reflected in the Yankee Protestant population, and Jansenist repression, reflected in the newer Irish Catholic immigrant population. The city that produced a Watch and Ward Society was still a city that prided itself on its conservatism; where one had difficulty buying “pornographic” literature (one had to go across the Charles River into Cambridge even to see a copy of
Lolita
when that book first came out); where producers of plays had to delete lines found acceptable elsewhere; and where bars closed at 1
A.M.
forcing the thirsty to search out an “after hour” club if they wanted to drink. College students in such places as Berkeley or Ann Arbor might live by sexual codes that dismayed their parents; but in Boston, as recently as 1964, students at Boston College hung in effigy a novelist who dared advocate bigamy. Taking a page out of Hawthorne, they strung their straw man up between two poles, painted a scarlet
A
on his chest, and marched with him through Boston Common carrying banners proclaiming LET'S KEEP BOSTON CLEAN!

Yet had the Strangler—if the Strangler it was—ceased after three women, it is quite possible that the deaths of Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, and Helen Blake might slowly have been absorbed in the general stream of daily life. In the course of a year in Boston nearly 20,000 crimes of all kinds occur; in June 1962, excluding the three women, many other murders had taken place with hardly more than a paragraph in the newspapers. Most were sordid affairs, mainly in the Bowery-like South End.

Though Precinct No. 4, which commands this area, was at times the busiest police precinct in the United States, it still remained one of the least publicized. Violent death might carry a kind of horrid glamour in New York or Chicago, but it was a facet of life that Bostonians characteristically preferred to keep swept under the rug.

Horrifying as the stranglings were, they might also have been crowded out of the public mind by the transformation the city itself was undergoing. For that summer of 1962, things were at last looking up in Boston. A Boston man was in the White House, the Speaker of the House of Representatives was a Bostonian, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was from Boston. Matching this coming to power on the national scene was a stirring within Boston itself. After more than thirty years of stagnation, the city was beginning to struggle to its feet. Boston had been the only large city in the United States to lose population in the postwar boom. In half a century it had dropped from the fourth largest city in the country to the thirteenth. For nearly three decades there had been no new construction of any consequence. Now, suddenly, enormous projects that would change the face of one fourth of the city had finally gotten off the planning boards. Estimated to embrace some billion dollars in new construction, they included the $200,000,000 Prudential Insurance Company complex, the new $200,000,000 sixty-acre Government Center, the $100,000,000 waterfront development program, and some fourteen separate slum clearance programs. Surrounding the city were the growing space-based electronic industries; soon to come were the multimillion-dollar National Aeronautics and Space Administration installations. In downtown Boston the first girders were already rising to support a fifty-two-story office building, the tallest skyscraper outside New York and the heart of the Prudential complex.

Perhaps because a Boston man
was
in the White House, and because of that beneficent influence, for the first time the two great disparate elements in Boston—the old Protestant Yankee families representing wealth, and the new Irish Catholic families representing political power—had joined hands. They had joined forces under a newly elected Mayor, John F. Collins, a man of energy and ambition, to back these ventures. The result was that a New Boston was in the making—a renaissance was under way. And that was the moment—the very moment that this hideous series of crimes broke out to hold up a completely different picture of the city to the shocked attention of the world.
*

Among the most embarrassed was Police Commissioner McNamara. He had been appointed to eliminate graft, for his predecessor had resigned under fire after CBS presented a television documentary, “Biography of a Bookie Joint,” which showed a suspicious connection between the police and horsebetting parlors. He was also expected to streamline the force so it could cope more efficiently with crime. And now, in his first weeks in office, he already faced three unsolved and particularly dreadful sex slayings of women. McNamara appealed for it all to be played down while he threw every available man into the search. One man might have done them all, but there was no proof. And any publicity given a crime always brought out imitators. Everyone knew that if you printed news about suicides, you would invariably read a few days later of one or two poor, sick human beings who had followed suit. There was every reason not to talk or speculate publicly about a strangler or stranglers.