The Boston Strangler

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The Boston Strangler Page 4

by Frank, Gerold;


  At eleven o’clock the next night police rushed to an apartment house on Charlesgate East, not far from Anna Slesers’. A twenty-two-year-old girl sat huddled in a chair, crying hysterically. Walking home from a movie a little while before, she had heard footsteps behind her: she walked faster; the footsteps kept pace; she began to run until she reached her apartment house. Fumbling desperately for her key, she felt a presence and turned in time to see a tall man silently looping a piece of wire about her neck. She screamed, ducked out of his arms, and broke away. Someone at that moment emerged from the apartment house; she fled inside, the man vanished. Imagination? Hallucination? Police found a four-foot length of telephone wire on the sidewalk. A few minutes later they seized a man lurking nearby. He denied everything. Unfortunately the girl could not identify him.

  At the Golden Nugget in downtown Boston a forty-five-year-old woman met a young man who said he was an ex-Marine. After the bar closed he invited her to his apartment where they could continue drinking. Instead, he forced her into the basement, seized her by the throat, raped her, and whispered, “I like to choke older women.”

  A sixty-year-old widow of a physician was watching television about 9 P.M. when a knock sounded on her front door. She opened it. A man stood there, his features indistinct in the gloom of the porch. “Your husband, the doctor, told me to look you up,” he said. The woman’s scalp prickled: her husband had been dead ten years. The man’s voice, boyish, pleasant, persuasive, went on, “He was telling me—” She slammed the door which locked automatically, called DE 8-1212 and waited, trembling, for the police. Not far away at the YWCA on the busy corner of Stuart and Clarendon Streets, the manager of the cafeteria reported a strange young man who repeatedly tried to strike up friendships with elderly ladies eating alone. What upset the manager was that on six different occasions, after the young man had finished his meal and left, the bus girl found razor blades folded in his napkin.

  Boston homicide received a telephone call: a twenty-one-year-old girl had just reported that the man, about thirty-two, with whom she had been living, had tried to strangle her six months before. “He’s in Lynn and Boston often,” she said. “He gets vicious and then blacks out. One night he smashed up all our furniture and next day didn’t remember a thing. Once he grabbed me around the throat and shouted, ‘I’ll choke you until your eyes pop out!’” She thought it only a bad joke then. Now she slept with a butcher knife under her pillow.

  When the FBI Sex Seminar got under way in early August, FBI Agent Walter G. McLaughlin of Philadelphia lectured his class of fifty on the varieties of sexual perversion (some astonishing even to veteran detectives), their relationship to different categories of sex crimes, the personalities of sex criminals, and the symptoms of their illness, the deep compulsions that could drive them, often despite themselves, to such acts. Lieutenant Sherry, a methodical man, took more than ninety pages of notes which he mimeographed for others in the department. Much as he knew, he had learned a great deal more. He hadn’t realized that many sex crimes are progressive, that for example, the man who began by exposing himself to children might later, needing more and more stimulation (like a drug addict) ultimately go on to rape and then murder. The fifty detectives emerged from the lecture room shaken, but with one certainty: never trust appearances, never overlook the kindly old man living next door; anyone, anyone—including yourself—could be the one. The evil lay in every man. God help him in whom it got out of control. One detective, father of a teen-age daughter and himself a Catholic, walked from the final lecture thinking wildly, we are all suspects; the day the Pope left Rome, he became a suspect.

  The fifty were assigned to check released sex offenders and ex-mental patients, to question neighbors and friends, to go over records; now, with their specialized knowledge, a detail dropped about a neighbor, a visitor, a stranger, would alert them. For Lieutenant Donovan and Lieutenant Sherry, for Special Officer Mellon and Detective Phil DiNatale, who cruised the Back Bay area with Mellon, and for scores of other detectives, these were busy days, nights, weekends. Sergeant John P. Harrington, specialist in administering lie detector tests, spent hours as suspects were taken out of a parade of protesting men brought in, examined, freed—and watched thereafter.

  Then on August 21, Ida Irga, a quiet, inoffensive woman of seventy-five, so retiring as to be all but invisible to any outside her immediate family, was found strangled in her locked apartment.

  She lived on the top floor of 7 Grove Street, a five-story brick apartment house in Boston’s West End, an area fashionable thirty-five years ago when she first moved there with her husband. Now it was the wrong side of Beacon Hill; run-down and shabby, it had become a Bohemian district frequented by students, artists, and homosexuals.

  Mrs. Irga had been dead about two days. She had been strangled by human hands; then one of her own pillow cases had been tightly tied about her neck. She had been sexually molested. A short, stocky woman with iron-gray hair, widowed for more than thirty years, she lived quietly and cautiously. She shopped daily for her small needs and had been making weekly visits for a skin ailment to Massachusetts Memorial Hospital. She rarely went out after dark except to walk to a concert in the nearby Esplanade. Her three-room apartment had been searched, but her purse, containing money, was untouched on a bookcase, as were a gold watch and pin. Save for the disorder in the drawers and closets, the apartment was spotlessly clean. There were no signs of forcible entry.

  She had last been seen Sunday—two days before—taking the sun with a woman friend on Boston Common. Just before dusk she had left—“I want to get home before dark,” she had said—and returned to her apartment. At 1 P.M. Sunday, she had telephoned her sister, Mrs. Ronya Brooks of Dorchester, to say she would give her part of a chicken she’d prepared so Ronya wouldn’t have to cook in such hot weather. Ronya, however, heard nothing from her on Monday. When she telephoned Ida early Tuesday evening and got no answer, she called the caretaker of the building. He sent his thirteen-year-old son with a passkey—and the boy had come back to stammer out what he had found.

  So far, all too familiar. But the manner in which Ida Irga’s body was left pointed with awful emphasis to the pattern, now even more bizarre. Police Sergeant James McDonald, first on the scene, began his report in this manner: “… Upon entering the apartment the officers observed the body of Ida Irga lying on her back on the living room floor wearing a light brown nightdress which was torn, completely exposing her body. There was a white pillowcase knotted tightly around her neck. Her legs were spread approximately four to five feet from heel to heel and her feet were propped up on individual chairs and a standard bed pillow, less the cover, was placed under her buttocks …” He did not write that the ankles were locked into position between the vertical wooden rungs of the backs of two dining room chairs and that the body had been so placed, in this grotesque parody of the obstetrical position, feet facing the entrance of the apartment; that this was the sight that struck one brutally, almost like an assault on one’s eyes, that one could not escape seeing the moment one opened the door.

  These appalling details were not made public: only that she had been strangled and criminally attacked. The rest was withheld. Not only was it too shocking to print, but the police desperately wanted to be in possession of facts known only to themselves and the killer. It gave them something to watch for, a slip of the tongue, a detail dropped that only the guilty man could know. The impact of Ida Irga’s strangling—now the fourth such murder—struck Boston with accumulative force.

  Wild stories began to circulate, whispered by one woman to another, told authoritatively by cabdrivers to curious out-of-town passengers, stories which vaguely approximated the truth: that the bodies were left exhibited in obscene positions, that the killer did not rape his victims—this was frightful enough—but assaulted them with a “foreign object,” attacking them in death or as they lay dying … Chilling reports appeared in the press. The Strangler was a man “of animal strength in h
is hands and arms” (a heavy belt, such as that used on suitcases, had been found almost torn in two next to Nina Nichols’ body), who “scaled the apartment house walls to reach open windows.” His great strength might explain why no victim had ever been heard to scream—he worked so quickly, garroting them with his hands or the crook of his arm so powerfully that he rendered them unconscious instantly.

  Women all but barricaded themselves in their apartments.

  Donovan’s men had to question Ida Irga’s neighbors on Grove Street through closed doors. Even their badges handed through the gap between door and jamb, open only as much as a safety chain would allow, would not admit them. Gas meter readers, telephone installers, delivery boys were frustrated; Avon and Fuller Brush sales plummeted; political candidates for state senate and house, canvassing for votes, were brusquely turned away. There were runs on door locks and locksmiths; the demand for watchdogs, for dogs of any kind, cleaned out the Animal Rescue League pound minutes after it opened each morning. Elderly widows living alone arranged for their married children to phone them three times a day. With the frightening stories of what the Strangler actually did to his victims came reports of weird experiences throughout the city: a nurse who telephoned the police about a prowler received a doll in her mail a week later with a miniature nylon stocking twisted about its neck, and a scrawled note, THE POLICE CAN’T WATCH YOU FOREVER. Women, many in tears, called the policeto complain of obscene calls: men murmuring unprintable suggestions over the phone, or simply breathing heavily on the other end, and then hanging up without a word.*

  Other women were receiving calls from a physician unknown to them saying, “I want to check your heart,” and demanding, almost imperiously, “When is the best time for me to call?” One woman, in near hysteria, reported that she had seen a man, rouged and lipsticked but clearly a man, wearing women’s clothes and high heels, dressed all in brown with long white kid gloves, riding up and down a self-service elevator in her apartment house, not far from where Nina Nichols had lived.

  Amid the panic came intense speculation. One strangler—or more? If one, what kind of a man and how could he, as the police put it, “cajole his victims into inviting him into their apartments?” Did they know him? Did he choose them? Was he a homosexual? Someone like the strange, demented young man played by Tony Perkins in the Hitchcock horror film Psycho, who suffered from a mother complex and a murderous hatred of women? A man outwardly normal, inwardly psychotic, deranged, hallucinating? Perhaps—and this might explain how the killer got doors to open—perhaps a woman?

  Among those caught up in speculation was a forty-three-year-old free-lance advertising copywriter who shall be called Paul M. Gordon, who in his spare time bred tropical fish, practiced weight lifting, and dabbled in hypnotism and psychic phenomena. He had satisfied himself and his wife that he possessed ESP—extrasensory perception. He had been in correspondence with Dr. J. B. Rhine at Duke University, foremost authority on the subject, but had declined Dr. Rhine’s invitation to come to Duke for testing, on the ground that he was not a performer and had no need to prove his gift to anyone.

  Working at his typewriter in his comfortable apartment in downtown Boston, listening to radio reports of the stranglings, Gordon allowed his mind to play with the identity of the Strangler. Who was he? What would lead him to commit such crimes? Vague images of a man began to appear in his consciousness, as he was to say later. He did not summon them; they simply appeared, and with them an idea of the man’s history and personality. With the Ida Irga killing, the image became so clear that Gordon telephoned a friend who was also his attorney.

  The lawyer had great respect for Gordon’s ESP ability. Some time before he had been faced by an unsolved arson case. Gordon had casually remarked that a boy had done it, and described him. A few days later the arsonist was caught: it was a boy who matched Gordon’s description. The lawyer had been impressed. Now he listened with interest as Gordon talked. “I see the Strangler as a man in his late twenties, lonely, troubled, misunderstood, always searching for his dead mother.” He told him how, in the images that came to him, he saw the Strangler enter the Anna Slesers apartment, and vaguely what happened there. “I don’t know how I get this,” said Gordon. “I just asked myself the kind of questions anyone might ask, and led myself through this experience …”

  He had thought about offering his help to the police, he said, but he recalled his experiences two years before, after a housewife had disappeared from her home in a suburb of Boston. He had offered to help find her but the police dismissed him as a crackpot. He said now, “No, I guess I’ll just do nothing.”

  In her bedroom on the top floor of an apartment house on Commonwealth Avenue, a woman who shall be called Mrs. Margaret Callahan, thirty-eight, pencil and notebook in hand, sat with her ear pressed to the wall, listening to what was going on in the adjoining apartment. For several weeks now Mrs. Callahan had been keeping a record of the activities of one of her neighbors, Dr. Lawrence Shaw, as he shall here be known. Dark-eyed, his prematurely gray hair crew-cut, about forty, he was unmarried, a sober, methodical, intelligent man, and she had become familiar with his comings and goings, the almost clocklike routine by which he lived. Therefore, she could not help noticing when this pattern changed sharply. Then, to her surprise, he showed evidence of drinking; he appeared depressed, disorganized; he came and went at odd hours; through the thin walls she frequently heard women’s voices; when she passed him on the stairs he seemed not to recognize her. These states could last a month. She began jotting down dates in her notebook.

  The first had begun June 11 and ended July 12. For several weeks he was himself again. But on Monday, August 20, around midnight, she heard him leave his apartment. She jumped out of bed, threw on a robe, and ran up one flight to the roof to see which way he went. He was walking slowly, down the deserted street, in a trancelike state, and he disappeared around the corner. The next day, August 21, she passed him on the stairs. He appeared ignorant of her presence. She noticed his right arm was bruised below the elbow.

  She discussed his strange behavior with her niece who lived with her. What could it mean? Could there be a connection between it—and the stranglings? In the period June 11 to July 12, when Dr. Shaw was in one of his “states,” Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, and Helen Blake had been strangled. Now Ida Irga—and again Dr. Shaw was acting strangely. Were these only coincidences?

  Mrs. Callahan promised herself to learn all she could about Dr. Shaw and keep the closest watch on him. Her niece, too, would help. Quietly, Mrs. Callahan alerted two or three neighbors. They were frightened, but they would watch, too.

  To calm Bostonians, three days after Ida Irga was found the Boston Herald published an editorial, “Hysteria Solves Nothing.” “For the rest of the population there ought to be some comfort in statistics,” it read. “If it may be fairly said the police are looking for a needle in a haystack, it may be said with equal validity that a given person’s chances of becoming a victim of the killer or killers are almost nil.”

  All this meant little six days later. Jane Sullivan, sixty-seven, a nurse who lived alone, was found strangled in her first-floor apartment at 435 Columbia Road, Dorchester, the other side of Boston from Ida Irga. A heavyset woman with gray bobbed hair, she worked the 11 P.M. to 7 A.M. shift at Longwood Hospital, where she was known as reserved, efficient, and having nothing to do with men. She had recently moved to No. 435, a red brick building with bay windows, because she feared the long nightly walk she had to take to her bus from her previous residence. At 435 Columbia Road, the bus stopped directly in front.

  She had been dead more than a week. Her body was discovered placed in a half-kneeling position, face down in the bathtub, her face and forearms submerged in six inches of water so that her buttocks were exposed. Her cotton housecoat was pulled up over her shoulders, her girdle pushed above her waist, her underpants pulled down about her ankles. She had been strangled with two of her own nylon stockings tied together.
Evidence indicated the crime had taken place in another room and she had been carried to the bathroom and placed in the tub afterwards. She was found at 4:30 P.M. Thursday, August 30. The time of death was estimated about ten days earlier—August 20—which would mean that she and Ida Irga had been strangled within the same twenty-four-hour period. It was assumed she had been sexually assaulted but the condition of her body was such that this could not be definitely ascertained. Her apartment had been searched, but apparently nothing had been taken.

  Ida Irga’s son, Joseph, thirty-nine, reading the news, stared at the accompanying photograph of Jane Sullivan, taken a few weeks before her death. “It’s so strange,” he exclaimed. “For a moment I thought it was my mother. They look so much alike.”

  Boston knew a dreadful Labor Day weekend.

  * The Chamber of Commerce’s campaign for “every individual and business organization” in the city to promote the “New Boston” was announced on June 14, 1962—the day Anna Slesers was strangled.

  * Individual reaction to these calls was surprising. Many girls and women felt an inexplicable sense of guilt. Had they brought it upon themselves? Were they encouraging men without knowing it—as though something secretly shameful, wanton, in them made itself known to men? How did the caller get their number? Had he followed them home, seen them remove their mail, looked them up in the telephone book? The idea that a mysterious stranger—perhaps even the Strangler himself—might have been watching them all this time, keeping them under surveillance without their knowledge, was all but intolerable.

 

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