The Boston Stranglers (29 page)

In September of 1962, Frank Parodi, a psychiatrist at Boston State, became suspicious enough of Barrows to speak to the police about him. Parodi felt there was a “strong possibility” that his patient was indeed the Strangler.

Parodi had had a strange encounter of his own with Barrows. One evening, while the doctor was in an area of the hospital off-limits to patients, he found Barrows roaming aimlessly.

“I want to talk to you,” Barrows said.

“What about?” Parodi asked.

“The stranglings,” Barrows replied.

Parodi was about to inject Barrows with sodium pentothal—and question him—when the phone rang. It was an emergency call that Parodi had to take. The questioning never took place.

Parodi, who would soon take another job out of state, advised the police to keep a close eye on Barrows.

Eventually the authorities decided that Boston State Hospital, with its easygoing attitude toward inpatient mobility, was not the most secure facility in which to keep someone of Barrows's tendencies. In February of 1964, he was transferred to Bridgewater.

He was still there when Albert DeSalvo arrived that November.

 

 

Peter Burton enjoyed boasting about his criminal exploits as much as he did broadcasting his hatred of women. Arthur Barrows freely shared his fantasies of “screwing” women and choking them.

Did they find a receptive listener to their tales in their fellow inmate Albert? Did he mentally file away the stories they told for future reference?

At the age of twenty, Sophie Clark was beautiful, intelligent, and popular, although some of her friends considered her a bit reserved and perhaps overly cautious. As it turned out, she may not have been cautious enough.

She had been a student of medical technology at the Carnegie Institute on Beacon Hill. The day of her death, December 5, 1962, she left school after midday and returned to the apartment she shared with two other Carnegie students, Gloria Todd and Audri Adams. She shed the white lab coat she customarily wore to class—the rest of her school uniform consisted of black stockings and flat-heeled tie shoes with corrugated soles—and slipped into a housecoat. She may have puttered around the apartment for a while or simply relaxed after the morning of classes. She did start to write a letter to her steady boyfriend, Charles Drisdom, who, like Sophie's parents, lived in Englewood, New Jersey. It was close to 2:30 when she began the letter; she mentions the time in the course of it. She tells “dearest Chuck” that she's going to do some homework later and then start preparing dinner for herself, Gloria, and Audri. (That evening's menu would feature liver and onions, mashed potatoes, gravy, and a vegetable.) The letter is full of solicitude: Sophie asks Chuck if his cold is better. Would he like to have chicken when he visits next weekend, or is he tired of that dish? What does he suggest? She might be able to make a pizza this coming weekend.

The letter is unfinished. It was the last one Sophie would ever write. At 5:30 that afternoon she would be found dead on the living room floor, a nylon stocking knotted tightly around her neck and a white half-slip loosely tied over the primary ligature. She lay on her back, legs apart, the housecoat open to expose her body, still clad in menstrual harness, garter belt, stockings, and shoes. Her bra, now torn, her pink flowered underpants, and a stained sanitary napkin lay on the floor near her. She had been gagged with a white handkerchief.

Who could commit such an act?

A number of people, as it turned out.

 

 

For eighteen months prior to Sophie's murder, several of her classmates had been the unhappy targets of threatening messages. The siege had begun in June of 1961. A previous roommate of Audri Adams received a sequence of obscene letters in which the writer promised to rape her. So terrified was the young woman that she moved out of the apartment and back to her family's home in suburban Weston. She refused to venture outside except to go to class.

That September yet another Carnegie student began getting anonymous phone calls at her Roxbury home. The caller, like the letter-writer, threatened rape. In January and February of 1962, a third Carnegie student was victimized by menacing phone calls and letters stuffed into the mailbox of her Beacon Hill apartment. Throughout all ran the same theme of sexual violence.

Around this time Audri Adams and Gloria Todd, then sharing an apartment on Spruce Street in Beacon Hill, began receiving similar telephoned threats. Someone slit the convertible roof of Audri's car; Gloria's was pushed off the street and onto the sidewalk and vandalized.

And someone painted the initials “KKK” on their front door, clearly someone who didn't like the fact that a black woman (Gloria) and a white woman (Audri) were rooming together.

Justifiably frightened by these incidents, Gloria and Audri moved to 315 Huntington Avenue that spring. Sophie joined them there that September, when school resumed. The disgusting phone calls continued unabated. The caller, speaking in an obviously disguised voice, vowed he would come to the apartment and assault Gloria and Audri. Interestingly, none of these threats were directed at Sophie—who of the three roommates was the one who ended up sexually violated and dead. Was she the victim of a deranged bigot who saw in a woman who was half-black and half-white the perfect symbol of his rage at the spectacle of representatives of the two races living, studying, and socializing together? Someone who, to express his total contempt for his victim, didn't bother to rape her but ejaculated on the carpet near her body instead?

This was one theory, and it remains a plausible one. Most authorities, however, tend to the belief that Sophie was killed by someone she knew and felt comfortable admitting to the apartment. Her death may have been the result of what Edmund McNamara calls “a rape gone wrong”—in which her assailant was so revolted by the evidence of her menses that he wouldn't complete the sexual attack he'd intended and so garroted his victim in a rage of frustration.

Despite her modesty, reserve, and caution, Sophie came in regular contact with a number of unsavory characters—some of whom had long-standing criminal records for sexual offenses. Many of them were associated with the Carnegie Institute.

Far from occupying a rung in the upper echelons of academe, or even its middle, Carnegie had no scholarly accreditation whatsoever. It was indeed on the verge of being closed down by order of the court—an injunction against it had been sought by the Massachusetts attorney general's office. Countless complaints about the place were on file with the Boston Better Business Bureau. The Approving Authority for Schools of Medical Technology in Massachusetts had awarded Carnegie its seal of disapproval. The American Medical Association found the school's training requirements substandard to its own.

Carnegie was one of a chain of schools owned and operated by a lawyer named E. L. Koenemann of Cleveland, Ohio. In addition, Koenemann ran a lending service to which the students at his schools could apply for tuition loans. (The tuition at the Boston branch of the school was twelve hundred dollars, steep for the early 1960s. A decade later, an institution such as Boston College would still be charging only a little over two thousand dollars.) Koenemann was also the founder and director of an accrediting agency. Its purpose was to award accreditation to his own schools, since nobody else would.

Lawsuits were pending against the various Carnegie schools not only in Boston but in Washington, D.C., and Cleveland.

Carnegie purported to graduate expert X-ray technicians, laboratory technicians, and dieticians. Yet its curriculum offered courses in poise, wardrobe, and elocution—hardly essential skills, one would think, for a career amid test tubes and slides. Carnegie also gave a course in the maintenance of “a live [presumably a misprint for ”lithe“] well-proportioned body,” again not a credential a health care worker might be expected to list at the top of her resume.

Carnegie did not require its entering students to have good scholastic records. It apparently didn't even require grade transcripts. Its campus recruiters were salesmen who received a $125 commission for each student who enrolled and paid the tuition. The commission itself came out of a $150 application fee tendered by the student.

Among the Carnegie faculty was a radiation therapist who had been dismissed from a Pennsylvania college for running a phony cancer cure business on the side. Another was an alcoholic sexual pervert who had once operated his own “School of X-Ray Technology” under the Carnegie aegis. Yet another was a narcotics-addicted doctor whom Carnegie actually fired for being unfit, which says a lot given the caliber of the employees the school retained.

The shadiest member of this retinue of undesirables, however, was its dean, an habitue of Boston's sex-for-sale Combat Zone who had managed to rack up an impressive series of arrests for open and gross lewdness, unnatural acts, and suspicion of grand larceny of an automobile. His name was William Russell Keany. Those who knew him described him as a very intelligent and highly cynical opportunist with a mean streak that never stayed very well hidden. One acquaintance said of him: “He is like the man Oscar Wilde described—one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

On the day of her death, Sophie left Carnegie at 12:30
P.M.
She and her classmates had been scheduled that afternoon to have their pictures taken for the house organ of a laundry company. The photographer wasn't able to make it to the school to do the shoot, however, because his truck wouldn't start. At 1:00
P.M
., Keany announced to the students that the picture session had been canceled.

He had apparently informed Sophie (and her alone) of the cancellation at least a half-hour earlier. That was why she had gone home. The normal ending time for day classes at Carnegie was 2:00
P.M
.

Keany's rancid reputation, coupled with his knowledge of Sophie's whereabouts the afternoon of her murder, drew the attention of some investigators. Competing for their interest, however, were two other outstanding suspects. One was the young “honey-haired” man who, giving his name as Thompson, had come to the door of Sophie's neighbor Marcella Lulka and made suggestive remarks to her. Over two years later Mrs. Lulka would tell police that George Nassar was identical to “Thompson” but for his hair color.

The other suspect was the twenty-two-year-old son of a Cambridge minister. His name was Albert Williams.

At 4:30
P.M
. on December 5, Eartis Riley, the wife of Anthony Riley, the nurse who'd attempted to resuscitate Sophie, heard a knock on the door of the apartment she shared with her husband at 315 Huntington Avenue. It was Al Williams. He said he was there to collect a book Tony Riley had promised to lend him. Eartis noticed immediately that Al was sweating profusely and seemed extremely agitated. He explained that he'd just come up five flights of stairs, and furthermore that it was hot in the building. It wasn't. Eartis got rid of him.

Just before 6:00 that evening, Al visited another acquaintance, Antoinette Grace, who lived nearby on Symphony Road. She let him into her apartment; he asked her if he could sleep there that night.

Antoinette had been listening to the radio when Williams showed up on her doorstep. A few minutes after she admitted him to the apartment, a news bulletin interrupted the regularly scheduled program. It was announced that a young woman had been found murdered at 315 Huntington Avenue.

“I'm going over,” Antoinette said.

“I'm not going near that place,” Williams replied. Then he left the apartment.

Antoinette described Williams to the police as being an “oddball.” She also told them that he had been “sort of forcing his attentions on her.”

Where Williams spent the night is unclear. He couldn't go to his parents' home in Cambridge—his father had kicked him out of it six months previously and hadn't seen him since. He
did
pay a brief visit to his grandparents at their Boston home on West Canton Street, where he wasn't particularly welcome either. When police interviewed the grandparents later that evening they claimed to have no idea where Williams was now. Nor were they especially cooperative with the authorities.

Williams was the possessor of a medical discharge from the army as well as a long criminal record. The police had been looking for him anyway in connection with breaking and entering and larceny and assault charges.

He had also once worked as a laboratory technician, which of course was what Sophie had been studying to be.

The killer did not ransack the apartment, but he did search it, rifling through photographs, examining the contents of bureau drawers, and scattering several packages of cigarettes on the floor. He left behind virtually no physical evidence of his presence
⁷⁰
—not even wet footprints on the carpet, despite the fact that it had been raining heavily that afternoon.

It emerged that Williams had not only known Sophie but had dated her at least once—about three and a half weeks before her murder, he'd taken her to the movies. Audri and Gloria said that he'd visited the apartment on two or three other occasions.

Those who knew Williams often used the word “neurotic” when referring to him. He sometimes suffered blackouts, the result of a head injury sustained in adolescence. He had always been a braggart and a troublemaker.

Williams was a bisexual who had been kept by men as well as women, necessary because he was unable to hold even menial jobs. He was also a sadist; he enjoyed inflicting pain and punishment on his female sexual partners.

The police finally tracked him down and questioned him. They had to release him; there was no physical evidence left at the crime scene sufficient to press charges against him. After that he vanished again—and wasn't found again until May of 1964. At that time, he was staying in a hotel in Harlem.

He agreed to take a lie detector test, and one was given him in New York. The polygraph operator asked the key question: Had Williams been in Sophie's apartment the afternoon of her death? He answered no.

According to the test results, he was lying.

The polygraph was readministered. The operator asked the same questions. Again, the machine indicated that Williams was lying.

This was still not enough to charge Williams with homicide. He was free to go. Police could only hope that given Williams's tendency to boast of his sexual exploits, he might one day slip and incriminate himself to a friend or acquaintance, who might then turn state's witness.

Unfortunately he never slipped—or if he did, no one bothered to inform the authorities.