The Boston Strangler (6 page)

Working at his typewriter in his comfortable apartment in downtown Boston, listening to radio reports of the stranglings, Gordon allowed his mind to play with the identity of the Strangler. Who was he? What would lead him to commit such crimes? Vague images of a man began to appear in his consciousness, as he was to say later. He did not summon them; they simply appeared, and with them an idea of the man's history and personality. With the Ida Irga killing, the image became so clear that Gordon telephoned a friend who was also his attorney.

The lawyer had great respect for Gordon's ESP ability. Some time before he had been faced by an unsolved arson case. Gordon had casually remarked that a boy had done it, and described him. A few days later the arsonist was caught: it was a boy who matched Gordon's description. The lawyer had been impressed. Now he listened with interest as Gordon talked. “I see the Strangler as a man in his late twenties, lonely, troubled, misunderstood, always searching for his dead mother.” He told him how, in the images that came to him, he saw the Strangler enter the Anna Slesers apartment, and vaguely what happened there. “I don't know how I get this,” said Gordon. “I just asked myself the kind of questions anyone might ask, and led myself through this experience …”

He had thought about offering his help to the police, he said, but he recalled his experiences two years before, after a housewife had disappeared from her home in a suburb of Boston. He had offered to help find her but the police dismissed him as a crackpot. He said now, “No, I guess I'll just do nothing.”

In her bedroom on the top floor of an apartment house on Commonwealth Avenue, a woman who shall be called Mrs. Margaret Callahan, thirty-eight, pencil and notebook in hand, sat with her ear pressed to the wall, listening to what was going on in the adjoining apartment. For several weeks now Mrs. Callahan had been keeping a record of the activities of one of her neighbors, Dr. Lawrence Shaw, as he shall here be known. Dark-eyed, his prematurely gray hair crew-cut, about forty, he was unmarried, a sober, methodical, intelligent man, and she had become familiar with his comings and goings, the almost clocklike routine by which he lived. Therefore, she could not help noticing when this pattern changed sharply. Then, to her surprise, he showed evidence of drinking; he appeared depressed, disorganized; he came and went at odd hours; through the thin walls she frequently heard women's voices; when she passed him on the stairs he seemed not to recognize her. These states could last a month. She began jotting down dates in her notebook.

The first had begun June 11 and ended July 12. For several weeks he was himself again. But on Monday, August 20, around midnight, she heard him leave his apartment. She jumped out of bed, threw on a robe, and ran up one flight to the roof to see which way he went. He was walking slowly, down the deserted street, in a trancelike state, and he disappeared around the corner. The next day, August 21, she passed him on the stairs. He appeared ignorant of her presence. She noticed his right arm was bruised below the elbow.

She discussed his strange behavior with her niece who lived with her. What could it mean? Could there be a connection between it—and the stranglings? In the period June 11 to July 12, when Dr. Shaw was in one of his “states,” Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, and Helen Blake had been strangled. Now Ida Irga—and again Dr. Shaw was acting strangely. Were these only coincidences?

Mrs. Callahan promised herself to learn all she could about Dr. Shaw and keep the closest watch on him. Her niece, too, would help. Quietly, Mrs. Callahan alerted two or three neighbors. They were frightened, but they would watch, too.

To calm Bostonians, three days after Ida Irga was found the Boston
Herald
published an editorial, “Hysteria Solves Nothing.” “For the rest of the population there ought to be some comfort in statistics,” it read. “If it may be fairly said the police are looking for a needle in a haystack, it may be said with equal validity that a given person's chances of becoming a victim of the killer or killers are almost nil.”

All this meant little six days later. Jane Sullivan, sixty-seven, a nurse who lived alone, was found strangled in her first-floor apartment at 435 Columbia Road, Dorchester, the other side of Boston from Ida Irga. A heavyset woman with gray bobbed hair, she worked the 11
P.M.
to 7
A.M.
shift at Longwood Hospital, where she was known as reserved, efficient, and having nothing to do with men. She had recently moved to No. 435, a red brick building with bay windows, because she feared the long nightly walk she had to take to her bus from her previous residence. At 435 Columbia Road, the bus stopped directly in front.

She had been dead more than a week. Her body was discovered placed in a half-kneeling position, face down in the bathtub, her face and forearms submerged in six inches of water so that her buttocks were exposed. Her cotton housecoat was pulled up over her shoulders, her girdle pushed above her waist, her underpants pulled down about her ankles. She had been strangled with two of her own nylon stockings tied together. Evidence indicated the crime had taken place in another room and she had been carried to the bathroom and placed in the tub afterwards. She was found at 4:30
P.M.
Thursday, August 30. The time of death was estimated about ten days earlier—August 20—which would mean that she and Ida Irga had been strangled within the same twenty-four-hour period. It was assumed she had been sexually assaulted but the condition of her body was such that this could not be definitely ascertained. Her apartment had been searched, but apparently nothing had been taken.

Ida Irga's son, Joseph, thirty-nine, reading the news, stared at the accompanying photograph of Jane Sullivan, taken a few weeks before her death. “It's so strange,” he exclaimed. “For a moment I thought it was my mother. They look so much alike.”

Boston knew a dreadful Labor Day weekend.

*
The Chamber of Commerce's campaign for “every individual and business organization” in the city to promote the “New Boston” was announced on June 14, 1962—the day Anna Slesers was strangled.

*
Individual reaction to these calls was surprising. Many girls and women felt an inexplicable sense of guilt. Had they brought it upon themselves? Were they encouraging men without knowing it—as though something secretly shameful, wanton, in them made itself known to men? How did the caller get their number? Had he followed them home, seen them remove their mail, looked them up in the telephone book? The idea that a mysterious stranger—perhaps even the Strangler himself—might have been watching them all this time, keeping them under surveillance without their knowledge, was all but intolerable.

3

Three months followed without a strangling.

But Boston was like a city created by a mad playwright for the Theater of the Absurd.

A long-haired man known as Psycho Charlie was arrested in the act of prying dimes out of a parking meter. Several women immediately claimed he was the man who had been running down the halls of their apartment houses slipping obscene notes under their doors. In the rear of a movie house an usher seized a dapper, moustached twenty-six-year-old youth. He indignantly identified himself as a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, but at precinct headquarters his name went on the record with the notation: “The above man apparently suffers from a form of sexual deviation; he has a climax from seeing the open toes of women in theaters or beaches; he carries a pen flashlight so he can see them in darkened theaters.” Police answered an alarm on Columbia Road, not far from Jane Sullivan's building. A woman had seen a smiling, nattily dressed man coming toward her. Only after he passed did she realize that peeping out of his breast pocket was not the white edge of a handkerchief but unmistakably the tip of a nylon stocking.

Elderly women were awakened at two and three in the morning by the ringing of their telephone. “Darling,” a husky voice whispered, “can I come over now?” In Brockton a housewife, awaiting a friend, opened her door to a knock: a strange man stood there. She fell dead of a heart attack. The stranger was selling encyclopedias.

Working women hurried home before dusk—the time the Strangler usually struck—and slammed their doors locked, only to discover hours later that in their panic they had left the keys on the outside of the door. Some found themselves in agonies of indecision the moment they arrived in their apartments. To lock the door at once might mean locking themselves in with the Strangler, waiting in a closet to pounce on them: yet they didn't dare leave the door unlocked while they looked about to see if anyone was hiding …

The “Mad Strangler” and “Phantom Strangler” and “Sunset Killer” took over the newspapers. From London came special dispatches comparing Boston's Strangler with Jack the Ripper. There were parallels but differences, too. Though seventy-five years had passed since Jack the Ripper killed seven women in the slums of London, his file still remained open at Scotland Yard. He had never been caught. He did not strangle his victims; he cut their throats, then dismembered them with the skill of a surgeon. He chose only prostitutes—as if carrying out an awful moral judgment of his own—and after each murder sent Scotland Yard taunting letters signed “Jack the Ripper.” (Some were fiendish beyond belief: in one he enclosed a human kidney, and wrote, “I ate the other one: it was delicious! Yours in Hell, Jack the Ripper.”)

Even as the newspaper reported these parallels, attempts were made to reach out to the Strangler. The Boston
Advertiser
, remembering the success of a public appeal to the “Mad Bomber” who had terrorized New York in the 1940's and 1950's, printed a front page
APPEAL TO THE STRANGLER
.

“Don't kill again,” it began. “Come to us for help … You are a sick man. You know it …” It paid tribute to him as “a clever man smart enough to have avoided detection by the shrewdest detectives in the community,” and went on, “This appeal is to you the man you were before this terrible urge overwhelmed you. YOU don't want to kill again, but you know you will unless you give yourself up.”

No reply came.

Two days after Labor Day Dr. Richard Ford, Chairman of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University, called together state and Boston law enforcement officials, medical examiners, and psychiatrists to “exchange ideas.” Some way must be devised to meet this siege by a maniac. Boston, with its great universities, its law and medical schools, its hospitals, clinics, and diagnostic centers, its NASA installations, surely possessed as formidable a concentration of human intelligence as anywhere else in the world. It was ironic that this community which called itself the Athens of America, which prided itself upon its rationality, should find itself—as it did now—at the mercy of a supreme irrationality.

“Since robbery is not the motive, we are dealing with a demented man,” Dr. Ford said flatly. As chief Suffolk County Medical Examiner, he was familiar with the autopsies of the victims. Beyond his initial statement he would not go. It might be one man, it might be many. “There is nothing to tie these crimes together, no single proof,” he said. “The more such things happen, the more are likely to happen because—and you can quote me—because the world is full of screwballs and there are so many around we just couldn't begin to round them all up.” He and his associates were looking for “a common denominator,” perhaps to be found “in how and when these women met their deaths, or in something about the places in which they lived, or in something relating to their mode of living. All we know is that we are looking for one or more insane persons.”

If one eliminated Margaret Davis, was there a common denominator? Music? Association with a hospital? Helen Blake and Jane Sullivan were nurses. Nina Nichols was a physiotherapist. Anna Slesers and Ida Irga had both recently been outpatients. Had the killer met his victims at a concert or in a hospital, ingratiated himself and so prepared the way for his fatal visit? Was he even now to be found seated quietly in a concert audience, or working in a hospital as an attendant, an orderly, or even a physician?

The ransacking of apartments might also be a common denominator. What was the killer searching for? He searched carefully, and obviously he wore gloves, for no fingerprints had ever been found. Why had he gone through his victims' possessions, pulled out drawers, emptied pocketbooks, even thumbed through appointment books and personal letters? Was it to learn all he could about the woman he had killed? If—as many theorized—he attacked these elderly women because each in his deranged mind represented his mother whom he hated yet loved, he might be searching for a clue—an object, a talisman, something—to link her with himself, to identify her as
his
mother. Or it might be fetishism. He could be a man so terrified of women that he was driven to hunt for a handkerchief, an article of feminine apparel that would give him the essence of femininity without its menace.

And why did he leave his victims in obscene positions, as if deliberately to debase and degrade them, why the grotesque “decoration” about their necks, the streamers, the bows, the knots? And what about the mysteriously incomplete “sexual assault” or “sexual molestation”? Was the killing incidental to the assault, or theassault incidental to the killing? Most rape-murder cases were easily reconstructed. An attractive young woman, a discarded suitor or workman who saw her, or a burglar who came upon her by accident, or a rapist who followed her—then murder in a moment of panic to silence her or prevent her from identifying him. None of these patterns appeared likely here, although all were within the realm of possibility.

Psychiatrists tried to analyze the strangler. Dr. Philip Solomon, Psychiatrist in Chief at Boston City Hospital, suggested that he might be a Dr. Jekyll–Mr. Hyde personality—a man who worked at a menial job, perhaps in a hospital; a man who might seem quiet and well-adjusted when actually he was a “psychotic sex pervert suffering from the most malignant form of schizophrenia,” a disease in which the victim lives in a world of fantasy which he thinks is real. If not caught such a man would kill again. His obsession would give him no peace. But the forces driving him would sooner or later cause him to make a slip so he could be caught.