Mellon was a tall, blond man of thirty-four. Thoughtful, resourceful (for the last half dozen years he had eked out his limited policeman’s salary by working after hours as a housing contractor), he was a man unafraid of facts. Holy Christ, he thought, how can you call this a suicide? Obviously the woman had been hit over the head in the tiny bathroom, placed upon the runner, dragged into the hall, probably raped, then strangled.
He walked back into the living room. “Did you look at the body?” he asked the policeman. Juris, sitting immobile on the sofa, seemed almost invisible, half-melted into the background.
The policeman nodded.
“You call that a suicide?” demanded Mellon, angry despite himself. He could not forgive Juris for not covering the body with a sheet.
“I’ll bet you five dollars it’s suicide,” said the other, still working on his report.
“I’ll be stealing your money, but you’ve got a bet,” said Mellon. “I say it’s definitely murder.”
He sat down next to Juris and had him repeat what he had told the policemen. “I’ll have to take you to Homicide and take a statement from you,” Mellon told him. “We’ll want your fingerprints, too, for purposes of elimination.” By this time Detective Lieutenant John Donovan, Chief of Boston’s Homicide Division, had arrived with other men and it was Mellon’s duty to join in a door-to-door questioning of tenants. But before he left the apartment, he could not help asking, “Juris, how come you can walk into a situation like this, see your mother in that position, and not cover her body?
Juris thought for a long moment. “I saw she was dead,” he said dully.
Mellon looked at him, then turned away and went down to the first floor. For nearly a decade Mellon had been assigned to night duty, from 4 P.M. to 2 A.M., covering on foot and by car an area of ten square miles of the Back Bay area, and he knew this neighborhood and the people in it. In the building lived a man well known to the police. He made a practice of corresponding with women belonging to a Lonely Hearts Club, inviting them to come to Boston and stay with him on pretext of marriage. After a week or so he would announce he’d changed his mind and send them home. Perhaps a dozen women had been involved, but only two or three had complained to the police, and all had been too embarrassed to prosecute. Now he swore he knew nothing of what had happened in Apartment 3F, but his name was put down for further checking.
In the apartment directly below Anna Slesers’ apartment lived an interior decorator. He had come home just before six o’clock and lain down for a nap. Suddenly he was awakened by a loud bump! bump! bump! overhead. He looked at his watch—he had no idea how long he’d dozed off—it was 6:10. Only ten minutes. The noise, he said, sounded like someone was moving furniture—or perhaps dancing. He had stared up at the ceiling, thinking angrily, “What do I have living upstairs now, a dancer?” A lady had moved in only two weeks ago and he knew nothing about her. The noise had subsided and then it seemed to him—he explained that his bedroom was immediately next to the stairwell—that he didn’t so much hear as feel that someone was sneaking down the stairs. No creaking of the steps: he could only say he “felt” it. After a few minutes he heard someone mounting the stairs, heavy footsteps, and a loud knocking at the door of the Slesers apartment. Then, footsteps descending again. He had rolled off his bed and looked out the window onto Gainsborough Street. He saw a thin young man in glasses and crew haircut pacing back and forth, then reentering the building; he heard him go up the stairs once more and knock again on the door.
In Apartment 4F, just above the Slesers apartment, the tenant turned out to be a forty-two-year-old student at Boston University. He, too, had heard the knocking. “Someone was pounding on that door like he was trying to wake the dead,” he said.
Mellon said, “That’s what he was trying to do—it was his mother and she was strangled.”
The other said, shocked, “You’re kidding me!”
“It’s not part of our job to kid people,” said Mellon, and returned to the Slesers apartment and took Juris in his police car to headquarters to learn a little more about Anna Slesers and who would have wanted to kill her, and why.
He was still troubled by Juris. Sitting next to him in the car, he said slowly, watching the other in the dashboard mirror, “Whoever did this will be living with it the rest of his life. He’ll be doing it over and over again in his dreams as long as he lives.” Juris’s face disclosed nothing; he said nothing.
When they entered police headquarters, Mellon let Juris mount the stairs ahead of him, and listened carefully. Was his tread light or heavy? It seemed to Mellon that it was light. If so, why did Juris make so much noise going up and down the stairs at 77 Gainsborough Street? Or was he imagining things—as perhaps the interior decorator in the apartment below had been imagining things?
Boston has some fifty murders each year, and so the death of Anna Slesers became one more statistic. Few of the details of the scene or the manner of her dying were made public. Two days later Lieutenant Donovan, through his right-hand man, Detective Lieutenant Edward Sherry, announced that more than sixty persons had been questioned—neighbors, friends, fellow employees, building maintenance men, the painters, the contractors who had hired them, the mailmen, delivery men, and the like—without yielding any clue as to the identity of the assailant or how he got into the apartment. Would Mrs. Slesers, shy and retiring, open her door to a stranger or even to a friend while in her robe and without her dentures?
The ransacking indicated that burglary might be the motive. Mrs. Slesers had suffered head injuries, either from a blow or a fall, but she had been strangled, no doubt of that. And though there was no evidence of rape, she had been sexually assaulted. As one detective put it, a routine housebreaking—with complications. Presumably, the assailant broke into the apartment to rob, came upon Mrs. Slesers disrobing for her bath—a woman appearing much younger than her age—was seized by an uncontrollable urge, and then strangled her fearing she might recognize him in the future.
Whatever the case, it seemed obvious the motive was not to be found in her own background. Her days were bounded by her work, her church, her music, and her son and daughter. The husband she had divorced two decades ago in Latvia had remarried long since and now lived in Canada. She had no known men friends. At work she was described as a conscientious woman who kept to herself and did not associate with other employees. No one there knew anything of her friends or her social life.
The information Juris supplied about her past in Latvia was equally unrewarding. His mother had graduated from a university as an agronomist, worked as a bookkeeper; then the war came and tossed them about until they found themselves in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany. She worked there as a kitchen helper until they came to the United States and settled in Michigan, where relatives lived. Mrs. Slesers had worked to send Juris through the University of Maryland. After his sister Maija married two years before, he and his mother had lived together until a month ago, when Juris had taken his room in Lexington. On June 1 Mrs. Slesers had moved into Apartment 3F.
Housebreaking—with complications. The complications privately troubled the police. Had the apartment really been ransacked? Or had it been made to appear so? The bedroom dresser drawers had all been pulled open, their contents disturbed, but they had not been pushed completely shut again: instead, they had been left to describe a pyramid, the lowest drawer two inches out, that above it an inch and a half, that above it one inch … A case of color slides had been carefully placed on the bedroom floor—certainly not dropped. This was no hasty search. The record player was still on, though it was silent. Mrs. Slesers could not have turned it off because Juris had fixed the master switch inside the player itself. Whoever had turned it off had actually turned off only the amplifier. Someone had taken time to do this, and to set a scene of apparent robbery—perhaps. A small gold watch was left untouched on a shelf above the tub; other modest pieces of jewelry remained in a jewel box on the dresser. If robbery had bee
n the motive, why weren’t these taken?
The Anna Slesers file was kept open. In the Homicide Division on the second floor of Police Headquarters Lieutenant Donovan and Lieutenant Sherry, though busy with other homicides—fights, drunken shootings, and the like—studied the photographs taken in Apartment 3F and the reports still filtering in. Although 90 percent of murders are solved, experience has shown that unless a murderer is caught in the first two weeks it is unlikely that he will ever be caught. There were no clues here. The life of an inoffensive woman had been suddenly and violently snuffed out and only because of the manner of her death would more than a handful of people know that she had ever existed.
One week, two weeks, passed.
Late Saturday afternoon, June 30, Nina Nichols, an energetic woman who with her gray bobbed hair and blue tennis sneakers looked younger than her sixty-eight years, hurried into the elevator of 1940 Commonwealth Avenue, bags in both hands. She had just spent three days with friends out of town and was due that evening—it was now just after five o’clock—for dinner and an overnight visit at the home of her sister, Mrs. Chester Steadman, in nearby Wellesley Hills.
It was a swelteringly hot day. Even at five, the thermometer showed nearly ninety degrees. Mrs. Nichols, once inside her fourth-floor apartment, took only enough time to throw open the windows, pull off her dress and replace it with a comfortably thin housecoat before telephoning her sister to say she was back in town and would be there around six o’clock.
As they talked, Mrs. Nichols suddenly interrupted herself. “Excuse me, Marguerite, there’s my buzzer. I’ll call you right back.” At the other end Mrs. Steadman, too, had heard it: someone buzzing Nina from the lobby. She hung up and went about her dinner preparations.
But Nina did not call back. Six o’clock came and went. Chester Steadman, an attorney who was also president of the Boston Bar Association, dialed his sister-in-law’s number. There was no answer. She must have decided not to call back and was on her way, delayed by weekend traffic.
When she did not arrive by seven-thirty, Steadman telephoned the apartment house and asked the janitor, sixty-five-year-old Thomas Bruce, if he’d look out the window and see if Mrs. Nichols’ car was still in the parking lot behind the building. When Bruce said it was, Steadman asked if he would please go up and check her apartment and see if she was all right. Maybe she’d been taken ill. Bruce went upstairs, rapped loudly on the door, finally opened it with his master key, stared for a shocked moment, hurriedly slammed it shut, and ran back to his telephone.
What the janitor saw from where he stood was an apartment that obviously had been burglarized: drawers pulled open, possessions strewn about the floor. The bottom drawer of the chifforobe was open showing, surprisingly enough, sterling silver neatly arrayed and apparently untouched. As he raised his eyes, he saw the open bedroom door and on the bedroom floor, directly in his line of vision, her feet toward him, the legs spread, the nude body of Nina Nichols. She lay dead, her eyes wide open, on a hooked rug. Her pink housecoat and white slip had been pulled up to her waist so she lay exposed; about her neck, twisted together like a rope, tied so tightly that they cut a groove into her flesh, were two nylon stockings knotted under her chin. The ends of the stockings had been arranged on the floor so they turned up on either side like a grotesque bow. Her watch was on her left wrist; on her feet were her blue sneakers.
Nina Nichols had been strangled with a pair of her own stockings, an act done in a frenzy from the look of it, and she had been criminally molested. The killer had apparently gone through the apartment in the same fury, searching, ransacking, pulling everything apart, tossing clothes and possessions wildly in all directions. Her bags had been torn open, their contents strewn about. There was her expensive camera, still in its leather case; an eight-by-ten photograph of a favorite dog; her opened black purse; a Pan American traveling bag and hatbox awry on a sofa. A photo album had been ripped apart, its leaves everywhere. A copy of that morning’s Boston Herald with the headline CIVIL RIGHTS STIR FIGHT was half buried in the disorder on the sofa. Her dress lay across the bed, on it her steel-rimmed eyeglasses as she must have left them. At the foot of the bed, a leather attaché case and a blanket folded neatly. But everywhere else—even the small drawer in the telephone stand had been pulled out and ransacked. Her address book lay open, her correspondence had been gone through.
Why? Searching for what? Money? There was less than five dollars and change in her purse. She rarely had cash in the apartment; she was reputed to pay even her newsboy by check. And though 1940 Commonwealth Avenue was still impressive, still fashionable, it was not the address of affluence it had been many years before.
A quick run-through of Nina Nichols’ background only added to the mystery. A widow for many years, she had been chief physiotherapist at Massachusetts Memorial Hospital until her sixty-fifth birthday three years ago. She had also been Secretary of the American Physiotherapy Association. Now semiretired, living on a modest income from stocks and insurance, she contributed two mornings a week to elderly charity patients at St. Patrick’s Manor, and for the last few years had also been treating a private patient, a seventy-year-old man in Webster. Her hobbies were photography and music; she spent nearly every weekend either in Duxbury, where she’d been this last week, or with other friends, women of long acquaintance, in Nonquitt, Massachusetts. (She was also a guest in Florida each winter and Maine each summer.) Her husband had died twenty years ago. She was never seen with a man. Indeed, with the exception of her brother-in-law Chester Steadman, the only man ever known by neighbors to have set foot inside Mrs. Nichols’ apartment was the painter who had worked in it when she moved in three years ago.
Until long after midnight Lieutenant Sherry and fellow detectives remained on the scene. Sherry, a gentle, gray-haired bachelor in his fifties, whose chief interest for the last twenty-three years had been his work, had been sitting down to dinner in his apartment a few streets away when the call came. He had hurriedly driven over and arrived just as Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Luongo completed his examination. What Sherry looked for most hopefully was evidence that something had been stolen—a valuable watch, a camera, a ring—that could be traced to a pawnshop. But it appeared that nothing had been taken. Her camera was worth at least three hundred dollars, and among the most easily pawned of all objects. Yet if not robbery, why the disorder?
The detectives went from door to door asking questions, but the only clue was the mysterious sound of the buzzer. According to Mrs. Steadman, it sounded in her sister’s apartment at 5:10; when she hung up she’d glanced at the clock to gauge her dinner preparations. Had her sister let up whoever had buzzed her from below? Would she have been expecting him? There were no signs of forcible entry. “We don’t know whether she admitted him or he used a master key,” said Sherry. “There is no indication that he broke in.” Would Nina Nichols, eminently respectable, living a life devoid of male friends, have allowed a strange man to enter her apartment while she was wearing only a thin flannel robe over her slip?
Although it was nearly 3 A.M. Sunday before Sherry got to bed, he was at Homicide at 8 A.M. that morning going over the Nichols and Slesers cases with Donovan. Sixteen days apart but in a five-mile-square area, two elderly women strangled and sexually molested, their apartments ransacked … Police Commissioner Edmund McNamara, whom Mayor Collins had appointed less than two months before to revitalize the city’s police force, called a conference of department heads for the next day, Monday, July 2.
For Mrs. Annie Winchell, seventy-five, and her next-door neighbor, Margaret Hamilton, seventy, of Lynn, Massachusetts, a town several miles north of Boston, Monday was a troubling day. Both lived on the second floor of 73 Newhall Street, a bay-windowed, red brick apartment house that had known better times. Mrs. Winchell lived in Apartment 8, Mrs. Hamilton in Apartment 10. Their neighbor across the hall in Apartment 9 was Helen Blake, sixty-five, a retired practical nurse. The morning really began for the women when they he
ard their mail dropped before their doors. Then, in their dressing gowns, they would open their doors, pick up the mail, and stand in their doorways exchanging gossip and news of the day. They looked forward to their morning meetings almost like young girls in a dormitory. But this Monday, though Annie and Margaret had collected their mail and talked together for nearly ten minutes, Helen had not appeared.
Come to think of it, they hadn’t heard or seen her since early Saturday. They had been tenants a long time here; the sounds of their neighbors getting ready for the day were familiar to them. Helen’s door had opened twice Saturday morning, that was certain: just before eight o’clock, when she’d gone down the hall taking rubbish to the incinerator—her businesslike footsteps sounded clearly coming and going on the linoleum-covered corridor—and then, some fifteen minutes later, when she took in the milk. A moment before they’d heard the milkman, Mr. Lennon, and the clank of the two bottles he put down before her door, and then his footsteps vanishing.
As Monday wore on they discussed Helen’s absence, more and more worried, and finally confided in Mrs. Mabel O’Malley, who lived on the first floor just below Helen. No, Mrs. O’Malley had not heard or seen anything of her over the weekend. But she recalled that Helen had gone about her household duties Saturday morning with her usual vigor. No one looking at Helen Blake, sturdy, bob-haired, and energetic, would have taken her to be sixty-five. Mrs. O’Malley particularly remembered that Helen had flung open her bedroom window and shaken out a rug or two just above her own bedroom window—this just after 8 A.M. And about 8:30 she heard the sound of Helen moving furniture about as she house-cleaned.
The Boston Strangler Page 2
