The Boston Stranglers (38 page)

In the second half of her senior year in high school, Mary had been a food service worker at Cape Cod Hospital. During her stay in Hyannis, she worked as a door-to-door seller of encyclopedias and for the telephone company. Jerrell Wilcox, a phone company coworker, thought highly of Mary, describing her as “very sentimental.”

She was also very generous. In December of 1962, she took in a pregnant and unmarried friend, Jean. Jean, in addition to her other difficulties, was unemployed and broke. Mary let her live in the Sun Dial Village apartment for three months without paying rent.

Mary's generosity was all the more impressive in view of the fact that she herself was unemployed from January to April of 1963. To pay the rent and buy groceries, she took in ironing. Her clients were male students at Cape Cod Community College.

Jean moved out in March, and in June, Mary acquired another roommate, Wendy, who because she had a job at a local nursing home was able to contribute to the household upkeep. Wendy was also a student at the community college, as was her boyfriend Mike—who lived downstairs with Nate Ward for a short while.

In August of 1963, Mary and Nate finally parted. The breakup was probably acrimonious; Mrs. Sullivan later stated that Mary's defection had sent Nate into “a wild rage.” However it came about, the split was long overdue. Mrs. Sullivan said that Mary had instigated the parting, which if true shows that she was finally developing some healthy spirit. It is possible that Mary had wanted out of the relationship long before, but had procrastinated for fear of insulting Merry Ward.

Perhaps it was simply that she had found a more appealing man. In the late summer of 1963 she became friendly with Tommy Bahr, who was working as an assistant manager of the Barnstable Howard Johnson's. They went to church together every Sunday at Saint Francis Xavier. They began dating in mid-September.

Tommy had just moved in downstairs with Nate, who was also a waiter at the Howard Johnson's. The tension must have been considerable.

Nate found himself a new girlfriend, Betty. Mary's sister Diane thought he had done so solely to make Mary jealous. He had not lacked for female companionship prior to that; in July he had impregnated a young woman from Connecticut.

Wendy, Mary's new roommate, disliked Nate intensely. She thought him cowardly, a game player. And he eyed her in a way she considered “perverted.”

He was certainly not stable in his employment. Between the summer of 1962 and that of 1963 he held four jobs: at a dredging company, at a gas station, at a trading stamp redemption center, and at Howard Johnson's. He also enrolled in the community college but soon dropped out.

In the fall of 1963, Mary left the Sun Dial apartment and went to live in Whitman, near Cape Cod, with Merry Ward, now married to a man named Frank Lombardi. She commuted to Boston, where she had taken a job at Filene's—and where she would meet Pat Delmore and Pam Parker. She continued to date Tommy Bahr.

Nate's new girlfriend, Betty, moved in with Wendy.

A week before her death, Mary quit Filene's and took a receptionist's position with a Boston finance company. She went to work there on Friday, January 3, 1964. Her first day at work would be her last.

Just two days before that, she had moved in with Pam and Pat at 44A Charles Street.

By the winter of 1963, Mary was again having boyfriend problems. Tommy was not sufficiently attentive; she took up with a man named Clyde in order to make Tommy jealous, or so her friend Wendy said. Furthermore, someone identified only as “Don, a steeplejack [who] was staying at the Reindeer Motel in West Yarmouth,” had been badgering Mary to date him. She would have nothing to do with this man, succinctly described by Wendy's boyfriend Mike as “a creep.” Don was so desperate for Mary's favor that he pleaded with Mike to intercede for him. Mike declined.

On January 4, 1964, the day of Mary's death, Wendy received a letter from her. It had been written just before Mary's move to Boston. She had gone, she informed Wendy, to a New Year's party in Whitman, which had been “lousy.” At 1:00
A.M.
on January 1, she drove to Sun Dial Village. There she saw Tommy with another woman.

Patricia Delmore would later tell police that she thought Mary had shown up at 44A Charles Street sometime between 2:00 and 3:00
A.M.
on January 1, in the mistaken belief that either Pam or Pat would be there.

Wendy seemed sure that after leaving Sun Dial Village, Mary had driven to Clyde's place in Centerville.

Diane Sullivan Dodd says today that Mary spent the predawn hours of New Year's Day sitting in Saint Anthony's Shrine in Boston.

 

 

Mary moved into 44A Charles Street on January 1, a Wednesday. On January 2, Pat's boyfriend William Robert Evans and one of his buddies visited the apartment. All three young women had been present; Evans was introduced to Mary. He and his friend stayed from 7:30 until 11:00 that night.

The next day, the last full day of Mary's life, Pam noticed that her apartment key had been removed from the case in which she normally kept it.

Mary went to work. She left the finance company at 5:30 and drove to a service station, where she had the license plates on her blue Vauxhall—bought with a loan cosigned by Merry Ward Lombardi's husband—changed.

At 7:30 that night, Evans returned to 44A Charles. Speaking through a closed door, Mary informed him that Pat had gone to visit her parents in Lowell. Evans would tell police that he thought he heard a man's voice, low but nasal, inside the apartment. It had stopped as soon as he had knocked. It might have been the voice of a radio announcer. Evans was curious enough, he said, to check later whether any programs broadcast at that hour featured a host or a disk jockey who spoke in such a fashion. He could find none that did.

Just fifteen minutes after Evans's aborted visit, another young man appeared in search of Pat. Again, Mary told him she was away.

Pat was extremely popular. At 9:00
P.M
., two more young men, Robert Tole and Richard Leveroni, came to the apartment looking for her.

At midnight, two young women dropped in to chat with Pat and Pam, who were home at that point. Mary was asleep.

Despite the fact that she didn't have to work, Mary was up early Saturday morning. Bleary-eyed, she shuffled into the kitchen as Pat and Pam were preparing breakfast at 7:30. She had cleaning and errands to do, Mary explained, and she wanted to get a jump start on those chores.

At five that afternoon, another resident of the building heard a noise that reminded him of a baby crying. There were no infants at 44A Charles Street.

Then Pam and Pat got home from work.

 

 

Five pieces of physical evidence—other than the broom handle thrust into Mary's vagina—were found at the crime scene. The first was a small metal object like a washer; the second was a charred scrap of paper that later proved to be the corner of a page torn from the 1962 West Suburban telephone directory; the third was the cigarette butts (of a brand neither Mary, Pat, nor Pam smoked) found in an ashtray near the bed in which the victim had been left, and the fourth was a piece of label from a dustpan not owned by any of the young women.

The fifth piece of evidence had to be fished from the toilet, down which someone had tried and failed to flush it. It was a red ascot, cut in three pieces.

 

 

In January of 1965, Albert DeSalvo told his then attorney, Jon Asgeirsson, that he had gagged Mary, put a sweater over her head, had intercourse with her, and left a knife on the bed.

None of this was true.

When Albert first spoke to Asgeirsson, he didn't know about the broom and what had been done to Mary with it. By—or perhaps at—the time he confessed to her murder to Bottomly, he had been filled in on this salient detail.

As had been the case in the murder of Ida Irga, a single never-identified fingerprint was lifted from the crime scene. If either print had been Albert DeSalvo's it would have been recognized as such by the FBI. Long before Mary or Ida had been murdered, Albert's prints were on file not only with the police but with the military.

 

 

In early August 1965, a Bridgewater State Hospital inmate told authorities that Albert DeSalvo had confided to him that he had met Mary Sullivan in the summer of 1963 at Sun Dial Village, and that he had also formed an acquaintance with Nate Ward, who bragged to Albert that he too was a rapist.

The story was a total fabrication.
⁷⁷

 

 

Mary's sister told police that Mary had bought Nate Ward ascots as gifts. Mary had shown her a red plaid one. “She said that Nathan Ward loved these ties,” according to the investigation report, “and Mary would say how good he looked in them.”

The police found this information interesting in view of the evidence that had been found at the murder scene, even though the red ascot that had been thrown down the toilet had belonged to Pam.

And the cops questioned whether Mary's sister was totally credible.

Nate married his girlfriend Betty on Valentine's Day, 1964.

 

 

Tommy Bahr did not go to work on the day of Mary's murder. He told police that he spent it with two friends in Provincetown viewing the scenery. Between 6:00 and 7:00 that evening he was at an ice rink in Hyannis, watching a hockey game. It was there that he was informed, by a Howard Johnson's coworker, that his girlfriend was dead.

Later he went to Saint Francis Xavier Church, possibly to offer a prayer for the soul of Mary Sullivan. Mrs. Sullivan asked him to be a pallbearer at the funeral. He refused.

On Sunday, January 5, Tommy wanted to drive Mary's sister to Boston to pick up Mary's clothing. He insisted several times that he be allowed to do so. He made the same demand four days later. Mrs. Sullivan would not permit it.

In Mary's jewelry box, police found a note that read: “
DON'T LEAVE FRIDAY AFTERNOON OR NIGHT
. I'll see you. Tom.”

It was undated.

Later in 1964, Tommy would move into Mary's old apartment in Sun Dial Village.

 

 

Police showed the page from the West Suburban telephone directory to one of Mary's sisters. She thought she recognized a name on it as one Mary had mentioned to her. She had the impression this man drove a Cadillac.

The page fragment had been found by the toilet; presumably whoever had disposed of the ascot had accidentally dropped it there.

Or it might have been planted, a false clue designed to lead the police from the trail of the real killer.

 

 

One month after Mary's death, her mother and her sister Diane went to Saint Anthony's Shrine in Boston, where Mary may have spent the early hours of New Year's Day. They were looking for a small suitcase belonging to Mary, one in which she'd kept cosmetics and personal papers, most notably the Christmas cards she'd received. The suitcase was not found in the apartment on Charles Street, so Mrs. Sullivan thought Mary might have accidentally left it behind in the church.

Mrs. Dodd recalls that there were a number of priests—“maybe twenty or so”—present, all of whom seemed “nervous and upset” to see the two women. Searching for the lost and found booth, Mrs. Sullivan and Diane ended up in the office of an individual Mrs. Dodd describes as the head of the church. The ensuing scene confused and frightened her. The priest pushed his chair back from the desk, rose, and exclaimed to Mrs. Sullivan, “Who are you to accuse anyone of murder?”

Mrs. Sullivan's jaw dropped in shock. Diane was equally dumbfounded. Certainly no accusations of murder against anyone had been lodged. “All we were trying to do was get to the lost and found department,” Mrs. Dodd reiterates.

The two were hustled from the church.

Equally troubling to Mrs. Dodd is the memory of an earlier incident also involving Saint Anthony's. “It was one of the priests from there who gave Mary the last rites,” says Mrs. Dodd. “The day after [the murder] my mother sent him a thank you gift, a communion plate, the kind you put under your chin.” The priest never acknowledged Mrs. Sullivan's expression of gratitude.

Ultimately she learned that he had indeed received the plate. But almost immediately afterward—within a da or so, Mrs. Dodd is sure—he went to a monastery in New Jersey. Upon his arrival, he took the vow of silence required of all members of the order.

 

 

Suffolk County Medical Examiner Michael Luongo tested the mucoid substance that had dripped from Mary's mouth onto her breast and found it to contain “great masses of spermatozoa.” The substance was reexamined in the spring of 1965, however, by a New York pathologist, Alexander Wiener, who not only found no spermatozoa in the sample but no presence of semen in it, either—only the epithelial cells normally present in saliva.

The thick white stains found on the blanket on which Mary's body had lain were apparently not semen, either. They contained no spermatozoa.

 

 

On February 11, 1965, one Robert Eugene Pennington, alias J. C. Lundy, was arrested in Gary, Indiana. Pennington, thirty-four, had escaped from the Iowa State Penitentiary on March 12, 1963, where he had been confined since 1959. As a fugitive he had traveled around the country, employed sometimes by moving companies and sometimes by circuses. A short man of stocky build, he had curly brown hair, gray eyes, a tattoo on his upper right arm that said “Ruby,” and the tattoo of a cross on his left palm. A deformed leg caused him to walk with a limp.

Following his arrest in Indiana, he was rendited to California, which had outstanding warrants on him for kidnapping, child molestation, and at least two counts of murder.