The Boston Strangler (9 page)

Doggedly, McNamara insisted that everything human intelligence could do was being done. Every man on his force, the eighth largest in the United States, would continue to work around the clock, “using every good, known, and solid law enforcement technique” to discover “the persons responsible for the murders.”

Although McNamara several weeks before at a closed session of the City Council had admitted that three or four of the stranglings might be connected, now he spoke only in the plural—“the persons responsible.” There were too many “dissimilarities” to make one man responsible. He would not disclose what they were, but “they indicate more than one killer.” He would not speculate beyond this.

The result was that the public was terrified not only of what it knew, but also by what it didn't know. Women now carried pepper and ammonia in their purses, tear gas bombs in their pockets, hatpins stuck in their coat sleeves; and some had even taken up judo and karate. The fear was such that when a woman came upon a bundle of six used laundered doctor's coats tossed into a corner rubbish can, panic descended on the area. Police spent two days investigating before they found that the coats had been routinely discarded by a neighborhood physician.

Holland told Jean and Loretta: “Go back to the Anna Slesers case, talk to friends and neighbors, get into the apartment. The same with the second and third strangling and right through to Patricia Bissette's. We'll print the facts: maybe these murders do fit a pattern and the pattern will point the way to the killer.” He no longer cared what McNamara or anyone else thought, whether the police believed it was one or a dozen stranglers. “Now we ourselves want to know.” The girls were to work together in a team of two, as did detectives, so one would always be a witness for the other.

They had unexpected difficulties. Repeatedly, a Mrs. Margaret Callahan telephoned them to insist they investigate her neighbor, Dr. Lawrence Shaw. She had considerable material on Dr. Shaw she was prepared to show them, if they had sense enough to recognize facts as clear as the noses on their faces—something the Boston police obviously lacked. The girls received crank letters and obscene telephone calls until finally both obtained unlisted numbers.

Each night, after their investigations on the scene, and after they cooked supper and put their children to bed, each sat behind locked doors in her home in suburban Boston—Jean in Weymouth, Loretta in Braintree—and wrote her story. Loretta worked late at night at her typewriter on the dining room table under an old-fashioned Tiffany chandelier that cast its kaleidoscopic colors on her paper to make the grotesque events she described even more unnerving. Several times she went upstairs to wake her husband Jim and insist he come down and sit by while she wrote. Both her own and Jean's photographs appeared with each article: their only safety lay in their assumption that neither of them was the Strangler's type.

How, how could it have happened? Jean and Loretta asked themselves. How
must
it have happened? Time and again they were overcome by the conviction—irrational as it was—that the dead women, killed and violated so brutally, were trying to break through, to speak from the grave to them, to help them so that they would suddenly realize. Of course! Of course, this is the way it was! That's how he got in, that's why there's never been a scream, that's how he leaves no clues—this is how it had to be!

Working on the basis of several autopsy reports they obtained through leaks in the Medical Examiner's offices, they printed a number of unpublished details. The police were indignant. Good journalism or not, Lieutenant Donovan felt it was sabotage and ordered no information given out beyond routine releases.

In these first months of 1963 a public feud got under way, between those supporting the police and those attacking them. Sides were chosen. Blake Ehrlich, Science Editor of the Boston
Herald
, retraced the crimes in a series of articles that stressed the enormous amount of police work done. The girls meanwhile charged that some written autopsy reports were still not available to the very detectives working on the cases.

At Harvard Medical School Dr. Richard Ford, Senior Medical Examiner, also read the
Record American
series with annoyance. No question of it: printing those details furnished Boston's lunatic fringe with a
modus operandi
. Now housebreakers and rapists who might have left their victims alive could silence them forever, decorate them with nylon stockings, leave them in exhibitionist poses, and go off confident the crimes would be ascribed to the Strangler.

Among the detectives themselves there was an even greater bitterness. Reporters were meddling in police work. Jim Mellon refused to read the articles. “I don't want to be confused between fact and fiction,” he told a friend. “I want to be sure that what I know comes from the case itself, not from someone's typewriter.”

The girls' series of twenty-nine daily articles was brought to an end in early February. Both Jean and Loretta felt that the reason was, in part, police pressure. But their conclusions were clear:

There
was
a clear linking of the stranglings. There
was
a pattern in the choice of victims, a pattern in the crimes. Each victim was “orderly, well-groomed, self-sufficient, respectable”; each crime was “marked by a strangling, using a personal article of the victim”; each murder was committed in the victim's dwelling and each aftermath of death revealed “time spent in inspecting the victim's belongings”; and each sexual assault was “peculiarly incomplete.”
*

They summarized psychiatric opinion: the strangler was a man, intelligent, psychopathic, suffering from some form of sex deviation. The entire crime—strangling, assault, ransacking of apartment—was all part of the strange sexual urge he could not suppress. He would not become so deranged as to give himself away, and would be “more likely to continue his crimes than to stop.”

But all that brought no one closer to the Strangler.

The city waited.

A moment of comic relief came for the police when Lieutenant Sherry's net pulled in the elusive “Dr. Jonathan Logan.” He had made the error of calling a nurse whom he had taken out before: she had been warned to notify police, and when he walked into her apartment that evening, two detectives greeted him.

Dr. Logan turned out to be a slight, pleasant-faced man in his late twenties with the courteous manners of a hotel clerk. He was not a doctor but a wholesale pickle salesman. He was married, with two children and a third on the way. A little black address book in his pocket held the names of some five hundred women he had telephoned in the past year and a half: he had taken out at least one hundred of them, and his proportion of successes was remarkable. How had he found the time for these affairs? “I'd tell my wife I was going to Buffalo on a selling trip,” he said calmly. He would go to Buffalo for three or four days, call her from there to establish his alibi, then return to Boston with three full days and nights to play Casanova before reporting home again. He had never met any of his conquests at a party “on the Hill.” He chose the girls' names at random from the telephone directory, or followed a pretty girl home to learn her address and then telephoned her. He was anything but guilt-stricken, and took his successes modestly. “I've found out if they'll smile, they'll talk, and if they'll talk—” He spread his hands deprecatingly. The detectives prevailed on several women to come to Homicide and identify him through a one-way glass. One woman, however, saw him in person. She approached him and pointed an accusing finger. “Oh, John,” she said, “that you could be doing this after all that went on between us.”

The pickle salesman looked at her blankly.

“Don't you even remember me?” she said, aghast.

He blushed. “There've been so many, ma'am—” he began, apologetically, but she burst into tears and fled.

Obviously, thought Sherry, this is not the Strangler. Yet, he had the opportunity to kill them—so, too, might the Strangler operate … “Dr. Jonathan Logan” was held on a charge of “open and gross lewdness,” and after a thorough investigation, was given a suspended sentence and finally released to his wife and children.

It was a brief enough respite. In March, a Movietone News team arrived to make a documentary on the Boston Strangler. They could not have chosen a more inopportune time. On April 23,
Look
Magazine was to award Boston its All-American City Award in recognition of its civic revitalization. Nevertheless, the documentary was made. One saw Jack the Ripper in London washing his hands in the Thames, then in Boston the fog creeping over Beacon Hill, the white-faced crowds watching the body of Ida Irga taken away in an ambulance—nearly a thousand spectators had crowded the area that night while klieg lights from a local TV unit lit up the scene—Loretta and Jean working at their desks …

But it was never shown. The official reason spoke of “technical difficulties,” but obviously the police and the news media were in a dilemma: should they publicize the Strangler so that everyone in Boston would be enlisted in the search, at the cost of the city's demoralization; or should they play him down hoping that he would be caught anyway, or simply vanish?

So it rested until 7
P.M.
Wednesday night, May 8.

At that hour, thirty-three-year-old Oliver Chamberlin, Jr., hurried into a red brick apartment house at 4 University Road, Cambridge, and knocked sharply on the door of his fiancée, Beverly Samans. He was worried about Beverly, an attractive, dark-haired Boston University graduate student of twenty-three who looked forward to an operatic career. A few minutes before, Oliver had found a note in his room from Mary Vivien, the organist at the Second Unitarian Church in Boston's Back Bay. “I'm concerned about Bev,” the note read. “She didn't show up for choir practice this morning or for rehearsal this afternoon.” Beverly was to appear in a production of
Così fan tutti
later in the month. Oliver and Beverly had graduated together from a music conservatory three years before: they had remained close friends since. A warm, outgoing girl, Beverly had worked as a music therapist at the Walter E. Fernald School for Retarded Children in Waverly, and currently spent two days a week as a rehabilitation counselor at Medfield State Hospital.

Now, when there was no reply to his knock, Oliver used a key she had given him to open the door.

He saw her at once. He could not help seeing her. She lay directly within his line of vision, sprawled nude on her back on her convertible sofa bed in the combination living-bedroom, her legs apart, her right leg on the bed, her left hanging over the edge between bed and wall. Her wrists had been tied behind her with a gaily-colored silk scarf glittering with sequins. A blood-stained nylon stocking and two handkerchiefs tied together were knotted about her neck; there was blood on her chest and neck; a cloth was over her mouth; a lace blouse had been draped about her shoulders.

Almost paralyzed with horror, Oliver managed to walk to the bed and stand over her. Was she dead? He pulled away the cloth over her mouth. A second cloth had been stuffed into her mouth. He pulled that out. Her mouth was open; her eyes closed; her body lifeless.

Though it appeared that Beverly Samans had been strangled, death had come as a result of stabbing—twenty-two times, four in the throat, eighteen in the left breast where the stab wounds described an unmistakable bull's-eye design—a large circle enclosing a smaller circle with the final stab wound in the center. The “decorations” about her neck appeared to be precisely that. None of them had been tied tightly enough to cause death. A bloody knife with a four-and-a-half-inch blade was found in the kitchen sink. She had been dead for forty-eight to seventy-two hours, Police Captain John Grainger of Cambridge said. Sunday's newspaper, dated May 5, was on a chair.

Sunday was the last day she had been seen alive. At 8
A.M.
, her neighbor across the hall heard Beverly practicing several arias; later that Sunday morning Beverly sang in the choir of the Second Unitarian Church as usual; in the afternoon, she attended a rehearsal of the opera in nearby Brookline, drove home at 9
P.M.
, met a girl friend for a late snack in a neighborhood restaurant, and parted from her at eleven o'clock. No one had seen her since.

Beverly was to receive her master's degree in rehabilitation counseling in June. Then she intended to go to New York for a tryout with the Metropolitan Opera. In the small two-room apartment were many classical records, sheet music and tape recordings. In her portable typewriter, set up on a coffee table a few feet from where her body lay, was page eighteen of her master's thesis. It was entitled, “Factors Pertaining to the Etiology of Male Homosexuality.”

The pattern was the same—the nylon stockings, the decorations, the body's position, the victim's background—music and hospital. Only the stabbing was different. Some detectives theorized that Beverly might have developed such powerful throat muscles from singing that the Strangler, unable to render her unconscious at once, had seized a knife and stabbed her. Only that was different—and the fact that Beverly had been exploring a subject that might well have brought her into the world of the Strangler.

No notes were found on the coffee table nor on her desk. Could she have been writing her thesis without notes? She undoubtedly sat on the end of the bed when she typed. A chair stood nearby, facing the typewriter. Someone could have been seated there, giving her information for her thesis. Was it he who killed her and took her notes with him?

In Boston, detectives learned the news on the police teletype. Since the crime occurred in Cambridge, it was not in their jurisdiction. They could not help feeling something akin to relief. The Strangler had struck on the other side of the Charles River, and now their colleagues in Cambridge were caught up in the nightmare, too. As each day passed without a major development in the Beverly Samans case, the harassed men of Homicide went about their endless investigations in Boston proper with a kind of grim satisfaction. They were not the only detective force to be baffled, outraged, and made ridiculous before the press and the world by a madman.