The Boston Stranglers (36 page)

In January 1969, Jane Britton, a Harvard graduate student in anthropology and the daughter of a Radcliffe vice president, was found dead in her apartment at 2 University Road. Someone had repeatedly bludgeoned her over the head with a sharp instrument, possibly an archaeological artifact.

There were a number of marked similarities between the murder of Jane Britton and that of Beverly Samans almost six years before: both had admitted their killer to their apartments very late at night; both were wearing nightclothes (Jane a nightgown, Beverly a housecoat); both had been killed on their beds and found lying dead there; both had suffered multiple bloody wounds and been killed with extreme sadistic violence; the heads of both were covered by an article of clothing; and the lower bodies of both had been left exposed.

Both were discovered by close men friends who were concerned about them because they had failed to keep important appointments.

Jane had kept her apartment door unlocked, so neighbors could store food in her refrigerator. Beverly had inadequate locks on her door, and was fatalistic about any danger they might fail to prevent.

Independent of the circumstances of the killings, there were likenesses between the two victims: Both were attractive, dark-haired, ambitious, intelligent, gregarious, venturesome, and highly social graduate students in their middle twenties. Both were as rigorous in their intellectual habits as they were careless housekeepers. Both were casual in their lifestyles. Both were open-minded and openhanded in their approach to people. Both had a sympathy for outcasts and pariahs. Both had trouble attracting men whose personalities were as strong and vital as their own.

There was an eerily ritualistic aspect to both murders. The upper part of Jane's body was buried beneath a mound of coats and blankets that in its conformation suggested a burial cairn. Someone had also sprinkled an ocher powder around the room—a funeral rite observed by some of the primitive cultures Jane had studied.

Beverly was stabbed in a circular pattern around and in the left breast. The injury that killed her was inflicted directly to the heart. The ligatures around her neck were not functional—they seemed rather to constitute a grotesque decoration.

Was University Road a focal point for psychotic killers obsessed with a certain type of prey?

The murder of Jane Britton, like that of Beverly Samans, is considered officially unsolved. Both case files remain open today in the Criminal Investigation Division of the Cambridge Police Department.

 

 

On Saturday, May 4, 1963, Beverly attended what would be her final class—in educational research—at Boston University. Idly commenting to herself on the burden of being compelled to listen to a dull lecture, she scrawled in her course notebook, “What sins in my life did I ever commit to deserve this?”

She did not know it, but she had just composed her own epitaph.

Retired Lieutenant John Moran of the Salem Police Department bears a pleasant resemblance to actor Andy Griffith. Six feet one inch tall and white-haired, he has a round, high-colored face with a small powder burn mark on the left cheek. The mark is a souvenir of the time Moran was shot at point-blank range by a sixteen-year-old boy he caught trying to break into the coin-changing machine of a Salem laundromat. The bullet grazed his face; if the trajectory it followed had been a millimeter to the right, Moran probably would have been killed.

Moran was one of the principal investigators of the murder of Evelyn Corbin, of 224 Lafayette Street in Salem, on September 8, 1965.

At 9:15 that morning Flora Manchester, also a resident of that apartment building on Lafayette Street, heard someone at her door. She didn't answer, but a few minutes later phoned her good friend Evelyn. Evelyn reported that
she
had heard someone at
her
door at about 9:20.

Evelyn went over to Flora's apartment for breakfast. At around 10:30, using Flora's phone, she called her sister Edna Harney. Then she returned to her own apartment to dress for church.

It was customary for her to tap on Flora's door at 11:10, as she was on her way to an 11:30 mass. This morning she didn't do so. Flora, a little concerned, called Evelyn. The phone went unanswered.

At 12:30
P.M.
, Flora telephoned Eaton's Drug Store across the street to find out if Evelyn had been in to pick up her Sunday paper. She hadn't.

Evelyn was supposed to join Flora and her forty-one-year-old son, Robert, for dinner that day. Robert had left for his office at 9:00 to attend to a backlog of paperwork.

Flora hung up from her phone call to the druggist and went to the apartment of another neighbor, Marie L'Horty. Had Marie seen Evelyn? Marie hadn't.

Now extremely worried, Flora decided to go into Evelyn's apartment and check for herself. She asked Marie to accompany her.

Using the key Evelyn had given her (Evelyn had a key to Flora's place), Flora unlocked her friend's front door and opened it. Uneasily, she peered inside the apartment.

Then she shrieked, “My God, she's been attacked.”

“I'm going to call the police,” Marie L'Horty said.

At that moment, Robert Manchester, who had been having an affair with Evelyn, arrived home from work. He went into his lover's apartment. Just last night they had been on a date to Revere Beach, a waterfront amusement park.

A few moments later Robert emerged from the apartment, his hands to his face. “She's gone,” he said to his mother.

Evelyn was indeed gone. Her body lay faceup on a disordered bed, its lower half completely exposed. There were two stockings knotted around her neck and one around her left ankle—her feet may have been tied together by her attacker, who cut the bond before he left the apartment.

She was wearing white ankle socks, a torn nightgown, and a housecoat from which three buttons were missing.

There was blood in both her ears and semen in her mouth.

The bed and floor were littered with crumpled lipstick and semen-stained tissues. A pair of underpants, lipstick-stained just above the crotch, lay at the foot of the bed. They had been used to gag Evelyn; Robert had yanked them from her mouth in a frantic but futile effort to resuscitate her.

The blond divorcee, who everyone thought had looked twenty years younger than her true age, had performed, or been forced to perform, oral sex before being strangled.

Evelyn, whose marriage had broken up three decades earlier, had worked for Sylvania Electric as a lamp assembler. She had moved to 224 Lafayette Street in 1959, after the death of her mother. She was known as a quiet and pleasant woman who, despite her friendliness, was somewhat timorous. She would never admit a strange man to her apartment—especially not if she were clad only in a nightgown and bathrobe.

She had written a letter to a relative—never finished and never mailed—in which she spoke of her dream that she and Robert Manchester would be married in the spring of 1964. Robert, like his mother, was apparently unaware that his fiancee was seventeen years older than he.

And there was one other secret Evelyn kept from Manchester: While she was involved with him, she was also seeing another man.

 

May 7, 1992, was a gorgeous day, sunny and far warmer than the weather forecasters had predicted. John Moran, ten years retired from the Salem Police Department, spent it taking a visitor on a guided tour of the murder scene of Evelyn Corbin.

He remembers the day of Evelyn's death well. He was one of the first to arrive at 224 Lafayette Street in response to Marie L'Horty's phone call.

Moran believes that he knows who killed Evelyn Corbin, and that person was not Albert DeSalvo. “It was just impractical for DeSalvo to come down and pick out a house on a foggy Sunday morning in Salem.”

Another factor had always niggled at Moran: In his confession to Evelyn's murder, Albert said that he'd gotten her to admit him to the apartment because the “super” (superintendent) of the building wanted him to check a leak.

The handyman who took care of such matters at 224 Lafayette Street did not refer to himself by this term. It isn't one that is used in Salem, according to Moran. In any case, Evelyn knew the handyman and also knew that he didn't work Sundays. And there were no emergencies in the building—certainly not in Evelyn's apartment—that would have caused him to disrupt his normal schedule.

Albert DeSalvo told Bottomly that he had come to Evelyn's front door.

Moran knew exactly how Evelyn's killer had entered her apartment: He had climbed the fire escape and crawled in through a window.

He had left evidence of his presence on the fire escape.

 

 

Evelyn, a nervous woman, had called the police on a number of occasions before her death to report prowlers in the neighborhood or outside her building. She may have imagined some of these menacing presences, mistaking the rustle of leaves or the creak of a tree branch in the wind for the sound of someone trying to break into her home. Then again, she may not have. In the days before her murder, other people in nearby buildings had complained of men acting suspiciously in the area.

On the morning of Evelyn's murder, a tall, gray-haired man in a dark suit was observed loitering inside as well as outside 224 Lafayette Street.

The previous evening, at 9:00, a man who lived at 233 Lafayette Street answered a knock on his door. A tall gray-haired man, a stranger, asked to see the man's wife. She wasn't in, the apartment dweller replied. The stranger said that he'd heard that the woman was looking for a new job, and that he had a lead on one for her. He promised to return when the wife was home. He never did.

The woman in question did not recognize the description her husband gave of the visitor. Nor was she looking for different work.

At around 11:00 in the morning on September 7, someone had rung the doorbell of Yvonne Michaud, who also lived at 233 Lafayette Street.

That address would shortly assume enormous importance in the investigation of Evelyn's murder.

 

 

On Monday, September 9, 1963, a man who lived on Dunlap Street in Salem reported to the police that his sixteen-year-old daughter had run off with a twenty-five-year-old married man from Lynn. Moran, who would spend the next three weeks, day and night without interruption, probing Evelyn's murder, took the complaint.

Moran knew who the Lynn man was, and what he knew he didn't like. The man was a thief. And he was a psychotic. His name was Robert Cambell, and he had been thrown out of his own home by his wife after she had witnessed him kicking their toddler daughter in the face. The child had wandered into a room Cambell was painting and disturbed him at his labors.

He had gone thereafter to live in a boardinghouse in Lynn, from which he was expelled for nonpayment of rent.

On his uppers, he sought refuge in Salem. On the Saturday night before Evelyn's murder, Cambell and the acquaintance he bunked with at 233 Lafayette Street bought a box of doughnuts for their Sunday breakfast. That morning, Cambell woke up, put some of the doughnuts in his pockets, and left 233 Lafayette—about an hour and a half before Evelyn's death.

Later that day, Salem police found a doughnut on the fire escape outside Evelyn's window. She did not eat doughnuts, nor was she in the habit of tossing stale baked goods out her window to feed the birds.

Cambell and his teenage companion left Salem during the early afternoon on September 8. Cambell was adamant about not listening to the radio as he drove; he did not want to hear any news reports.

He told the girl with him that he had five or six dollars. That amount was missing from Evelyn's handbag.

Cambell and his partner in flight had picked up a stray puppy before leaving Salem. After their car broke down, they holed up in a small town in New York State. The girl deserted Cambell after he abused the dog so badly it required veterinary treatment. She went to Hudson, New York, with another man. Cambell followed her in a stolen car and was arrested for auto theft.

A few months later, having served a short prison sentence, he was back in Salem. He moved in with a woman who shortly ejected him from her house because of his violent behavior and nonstop demands for oral sex. Cambell's wife had made a similar complaint.

Evelyn had fellated her killer, probably under extreme duress.

On the corner of Roslyn and Lafayette streets one night, Cambell assaulted a fifty-two-year-old woman. He had rape in mind: He punched his victim, gouged at her eyes, and shoved his fingers down her throat to gag her. He left her bleeding and semiconscious on the sidewalk.

He had done exactly the same thing to another woman in Peabody, a town adjacent to Salem, the previous night.

Both victims positively identified Cambell as their attacker. Charged with the assaults, he was tried, convicted, and imprisoned for eight years.

His whereabouts today are unknown.

 

 

When Albert DeSalvo began confessing to the stranglings, Moran asked his chief, City Marshal John Tully, to seek permission from the attorney general's office to interview DeSalvo. Moran had some very specific questions he wanted to ask about the murder of Evelyn Corbin.

Tully made the request several times. It was never granted. It was never even acknowledged.

Moran says he never received back from the Strangler Bureau the information he submitted to it on the Corbin killing—although he had been wise enough to keep copies of the files for himself.

There is an echo here of the Beverly Samans case. John Grainger, captain of detectives for the Cambridge Police Department, had prepared a list of questions relevant to the Samans murder and submitted it to the Strangler Bureau. Those questions were never asked of DeSalvo, a former Cambridge detective maintains today.

Moran interviewed Robert Cambell concerning his whereabouts on the morning of Evelyn's death. Cambell lied, demonstrably so, in saying that he had left 233 Lafayette Street at 11:00
A.M.
, when it was known that he had departed there at least an hour and a half earlier. “He went into tantrums and had rages,” Moran says, adding with considerable understatement, “he was a pretty unstable character.”

Moran, convinced that Cambell had slain Evelyn when she interrupted him burglarizing her apartment, forcing her to fellate him before killing her, was never able to collect the one final piece of evidence that would justify Cambell's arrest on a homicide charge.

Thirty years later, Moran is philosophical about the situation. “There are,” he says, “a lot more murderers walking the streets than there are behind bars.”

 

 

Attorney General Edward Brooke's 1964 report on the coordination of the stranglings characterized Joann Graff, who was raped and strangled in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the weekend of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as “an inhibited, obsessively neat, and insular personality.” After her death, some newspaper reports described her as “a statuesque blonde,” a phrase that bestowed on her a creamy aura of Marilyn Monroe-like sensuality. The truth, at it usually does, probably lay somewhere in the middle.

Twenty-three-year-old Joann Graff had graduated from the University of Chicago Downtown in June of 1963. There she had been a member of the Art League Paper and the Zion Lutheran Senior Choir and Concert Orchestra. She had attended the Chicago Art Institute and, prior to that, the Chicago Vocational School.

She had come to Lawrence in the summer of her graduation year; she had taken a job as an industrial designer for Bolta Products. For a short while she lived at the YWCA. What she wanted, ideally, was to board with a nice family in the Lawrence area. She even asked the pastor of her church if he could help her locate one within reasonable commuting distance of her job. He couldn't. On July 23, she moved into a second-floor apartment at 54 Essex Street in Lawrence, although not without trepidation. She wanted assurance from her landlord that the neighborhood was safe. He told her it was.

Exactly four months later she would die there, in considerable pain and terror.

Before that point, however, she had decided that she liked the independence of living alone. And perhaps also the peace and quiet and privacy; she had grown up in a large family.

People who spoke publicly about her after her death described her as a retiring, though pleasant, young woman. Elsie Hartung of Methuen, the town next door to Lawrence, who often had Joann to dinner, told reporter Richard Remmes of the
Boston Herald
that Joann “had no boyfriends and would not even wear a flashy print dress. She was a member of the Missouri Synod which is much stricter [than the mainstream Lutheran church].”