The last was composed of a gynecologist, a psychiatrist with a background in sex crimes, an internist, the medical examiners who had done autopsies on the eleven victims, and a physician with experience in clinical anthropology. Later other psychiatrists, a chemist, and a graphologist would be added as consultants.
The committee was headed by Dr. Donald P. Kenefick of the Law-Medicine Research Institute of Boston University. Its task was to evaluate the information in the casebooks, analyze evidence as it developed, and attempt to produce a “psychiatric profile”—a character-personality sketch—of the killer or killers. It was a job, Dr. Kenefick remarked, comparable to “trying to reconstruct a dinosaur.”
Had the women been murdered because they happened to be on the scene when the assailant arrived? That had been the hope—if hope is the word—in the Anna Slesers case, the very first. But in view of the later stranglings, this hypothesis had come increasingly into question. Was it not plausible that each woman, whether young or old, had been chosen? Chosen to be assaulted? Chosen to be killed? Chosen to be left on display?
If this was the case, what made the killer select these women? Was it to be found in the women themselves? Or was it something that the murderer, in his insanity, fancied he saw in them?
One fact stood out startlingly. All but two stranglings took place on weekends. Anna Slesers’ occurred on June 14, a Thursday. But June 14 was Flag Day, observed as a holiday in many states. Sophie Clark had been strangled on December 5—a Wednesday. However one might explain the date of Sophie’s death, the murderer might be someone who came to the Boston area only on weekends and holidays—perhaps a student, who would be free at such times.
Bottomly knew the sharp cleavage between the two public points of view, one represented by Jean Cole and Loretta McLaughlin, that the stranglings were the work of one man—the other, by Lieutenant Donovan, Chief of Homicide, the hard-nosed professional police view that, until proved otherwise, these were separate murders with elements of imitation because of so much publicity, and should be treated as unrelated crimes even while police remained alert for similarities.
Donovan, a police official with twenty-three years’ experience and himself the son of a police officer who had spent forty years on the Boston force, was a huge, taciturn man of forty-seven whose pale blue eyes rarely changed expression even when he smiled. He spoke out of knowledge of some three hundred homicide investigations. Of course, he asserted, the women were mainly living alone, because women living alone were the easiest prey. Of course there had been no screams, because the man who strangled them used the simplest, most universal method—the arm choke, or garrote, seizing them from behind about the neck in the crook of his arm.* Of course stockings, brassieres, and the like had been used, undoubtedly after the women had been rendered unconscious, because these natural ligatures were always available on the scene. As for gaining entry into locked apartments—in some cases the locks were faulty (Juris Slesers had forced open his mother’s door with a shove of his shoulder), in others the assailant might have used a celluloid or plastic strip to slip the lock, and in still others, the women themselves might have opened their doors expecting a delivery boy or repairman. And police knew only too well, Lieutenant Donovan added, how surprisingly many women, if they are rung from the vestibule below, simply press their buzzer to open the door and wait expectantly for whoever it might be.
What Bottomly had in mind, after discussion with police experts, was a reversal of usual detective practice. Generally, given a crime, police look for persons capable of committing it, persons who use a particular “M.O.,” or method of operation. Criminals hold pretty much to their own specialties. The breakers-and-enterers—the “B and E” men—are burglars. They break into houses and shops. Some work only shops; some work only the first floor of houses; some work only second stories; some concentrate on apartments, specializing in entering via fire escapes and through roof trapdoors; some use keys, made by impression, or manage in other ways to force open locks; but however they operate, they restrict their activities to “B and E.”
Similarly, purse snatchers and pickpockets hew to their own line. This explains why the victim of a pickpocket frequently finds his wallet returned a few days later, discovered by some passerby in the alley or ashcan where it had been tossed. The cash is gone, of course, but the valuable credit cards, personal blank checks and keys to car, office, and home have not been taken. The criminal has no interest in forgery, car theft, or burglary. He is a pickpocket.
Such certainties help immensely in crime detection for they enable police to concentrate their search.
But what was one to do about the Strangler?
A check showed that nearly five hundred sex offenders capable of such murders had been released in Massachusetts alone within the last year. Thousands more, certainly, had been freed in other states. Some idea of the scope of the sex offender problem could be gained by FBI figures issued only the year before: a sexual assault of one kind or another took place every twenty-eight minutes, day and night. Since in the Strangler murders one was dealing with a demented man, who might have no record as a sex criminal or might never have been arrested, the field was limitless. And as he obviously worked alone, and belonged to no criminal ring or gang, one could not turn to stool pigeons, disgruntled associates or confidants who might in a drunken moment reveal information to a bartender who in turn could tip off the police.
In short, the usual procedures seemed to hold little hope.
But if one assumed that the women were not accidental victims but had been chosen, the thing to do was to work from the victims outward as well as to look among criminals for the assailant. That meant examining each victim’s life back to her birth until every knowable fact had been ascertained about her. Every suspect would have to be examined similarly, with the same thoroughness, to determine if he possessed the psychopathology required to commit such a grotesque crime. The answers must be found either in the lives of the victims, or in the lives of the suspects, or both.
As all this material flowed into the casebooks, and the casebooks grew, they would be studied continuously by the Medical-Psychiatric Committee to determine what the victims had in common, as well as to paint a personality portrait of the killer or killers.
Once every fact was gathered, how were they to be correlated? Sometimes Bottomly thought his dream verged on the fantastic. Yet it was practicality itself. The data already gathered, and the additional data produced as investigators probed deeper and deeper into each case, could be fed into a digital computer. This would include every important date in the victim’s life: every name in her address book; every place of employment; every restaurant she frequented, every concert she attended, every hospital in which she had been a patient, or worked, or in which she had visited friends. It would include the schools she attended, the names of her classmates, the church in which she was confirmed, the names of her teachers, the names of every clerk who waited on her in shops and department stores, her physicians, dentists, lawyers, and professional men, even the accountants who made out her income tax—in short, every human contact in her life.
Then the police would feed into the machine similar material relating to every suspect, hoping that at some juncture two facts, two numbers, two pieces of data would coincide: suspect and victim would have been at the same place at the same time. Or have a friend in common. Or have been served by the same salesman.
At least it would be one clue, one tiny, usable clue!
Bottomly suited action to the word. A computing firm in Concord that was involved in the nation’s space program volunteered its services to work with Robert Roth, Director of the Massachusetts Bureau of Identification. As new pages were added to the casebooks, the information was transferred to punch cards, and experts began preparing it for the electronic brain. It meant, as of January 1964, beginning to process information from ten thousand source documents figuring so far in the investigation. Roth established other cat
egories for the computer: the victim’s race, religion, occupation and hobbies, clothing worn at time of attack, date and time of death, day of the week, position of body when found, where in room, type of room, window blinds up or down—every physical variable.
A second project would be devoted to suspects alone, emphasizing each man’s environment, his relationship with his mother and with women in general, his sex habits, and any abnormal facet of his behavior.
The offer came from a well-known Boston industrialist who wished to remain anonymous. Why not make use of Peter Hurkos, the famous Dutch mystic, who had reportedly helped solve twenty-seven murders in seventeen countries? He was now in the United States. Police in half a dozen American cities had already made use of him. If Hurkos would accept the assignment, Boston should jump at the chance. There would be no cost to the Commonwealth, for the writer of the letter was so convinced of Hurkos’ abilities that he and a group of friends would pay Hurkos’ fee—perhaps a thousand dollars or so—and expenses. For eighteen months the police had tried everything they knew—in vain. Since orthodox measures had failed, why not try unorthodox measures? What had one to lose?
Why not? thought Bottomly. But there was a problem. To be accused of taking seriously seers, psychics, and others with “supernatural” powers, to accept their evidence against a citizen, smacked of witchcraft. And in Boston, of all places, which had never forgotten the Salem witch trials of the 1690’s. Bad enough for Bottomly to risk certain criticism but to place Brooke in this position seemed unfair.
On the other hand, Bottomly, a rational and realistic man who possessed a strong vein of skepticism, had witnessed phenomena which made him think twice before dismissing anything in human experience as nonsense. Once, at a party in wartime London, a gray-haired woman had been introduced to him. She was a psychic, his host said, with a smile. She had shaken hands pleasantly with Bottomly, asked for his wallet, and holding it between her palms, proceeded in a heavy Hungarian accent to tell him facts about his early childhood that not even friends at home knew. He and the woman had never met before, nor was there any likelihood that their paths could have crossed. She was a refugee just escaped from Budapest; they had no mutual acquaintances. In any event, much of what she told him he had all but forgotten himself.
Putting that aside, he had long been intrigued by telepathic experiments conducted by friends in the National Aeronautic and Space Administration laboratories at Cambridge. It was known that the human brain generates a measurable electrical current. These scientists proceeded on the theory that if the brain could send forth such impulses, it was conceivable that it could also pick them up. Could not such emanations be produced by thought? And might not sensitivity to them be more developed in some persons than in others? In NASA files, he had been told, was a documented case of a human sender and receiver—that is, two men telepathically attuned to each other—who had worked together during a critical period in the war. One had been smuggled into occupied France, the other sent to London. A number of times, at a fixed hour, they had attempted to communicate. One, seated in his apartment on the outskirts of Paris, concentrated on sending a specific message; the other, seated in a London flat, concentrated all his powers on receiving it. Several times the message had come through. The team was not always successful but their rate of success far exceeded the wide range of mathematical probability.
On Bottomly’s own staff, Detective Tommy Davis, an expert on electronic matters, had once reported a fascinating experiment in infrared phenomena. At eleven o’clock one night he photographed a parking lot filled with automobiles. At 1 A.M. when the owners had driven their cars away and the lot was empty, he took another photograph from the same vantage point, this time under infrared light. It showed the lot crowded with the automobiles that had been there two hours before! The images had remained—to be picked up by infrared rays. The two photographs were identical. The one taken under infrared was somewhat ghostly, but the negative was clear enough to discern the make of car and even the license numbers.
Who was to say what impressions—visual, psychic, the products of reality or men’s thoughts—existed all about us, only waiting for an instrument sensitive enough to pick them up?
Now this man Hurkos …
A book entitled The Door to the Future, by Jess Stearn,* with a long chapter on Peter Hurkos, had been forwarded to Bottomly with other material on the Dutch mystic.
Bottomly glanced through its pages. Hurkos, he read, was known in occult circles as a psychometrist—that is, one who divines facts about an object or its owner by touching or being near the object. A man in his forties, he had originally been a house painter in Holland. In 1943 he fell thirty-five feet from a ladder, fractured his skull, and lay in a coma for three days. When he regained consciousness, he was in a hospital bed and a doctor was leaning over him. Hurkos’ first words were, “Doctor, don’t go! Something terrible will happen!”
The physician who, it turned out, had been planning to take a trip abroad, joked with Hurkos, then left the country—and was killed shortly after. During Hurkos’ recuperation he began telling fellow patients and nurses about themselves; his fame grew after he left the hospital; he was called in to find one lost child, then another, then missing persons, stolen property—he had helped Scotland Yard find the stolen Stone of Scone, a national treasure—and finally, murderers. He was said to have solved one murder simply by pressing the victim’s photograph against his forehead. Taken to the scene of a crime, Bottomly read, Hurkos often solved it, some speculated, because of his extreme sensitivity “to the auras, emanations, or odic life force clinging to that scene.”
Bottomly read on. In Miami, in October 1958, a cabdriver had been shot to death in a downtown street. A few hours later, a Navy commander had been fatally shot in his apartment not far away. Both had been killed by bullets from a .22 automatic. Hurkos had been sent for; he seated himself in the dead man’s taxicab and at once described the murderer in detail to Detective Lieutenant Thomas Lipes, Chief of Miami’s Homicide Squad.
Bottomly acted. He asked his Administrative Assistant, Bill Manning, to check at once with the police chiefs cited in the book, and especially with Lieutenant Lipes, known as a hardheaded, no-nonsense police official. When Manning reached him on the telephone, it was obvious that Lipes had been greatly impressed by Hurkos. “He helped us tremendously on two homicides,” Lipes told Manning. “I know you people are skeptical up in Boston about things like this, but believe me, this man has something you and I haven’t got.”
Okay, thought Bottomly. We’ll try him on condition that Commissioner McNamara and other police officials agree that Hurkos’ work will not interfere with theirs. Bottomly himself was confident of that: all investigations would go on as before; this would simply be an added investigation. Brooke had promised the people of Boston that “everything humanly possible” would be done to find the Strangler. Even if Hurkos had no special powers, surely bringing into the search a new mind, an investigator accustomed to out-of-the-ordinary murder cases, a man who had worked with police throughout the world, should help. Even if Hurkos only succeeded in irritating Boston detectives so that they redoubled their efforts to prove him a fraud, the increased activity might be advantageous.
Bottomly strode into an outside room and tossed The Door to the Future on Bill Manning’s desk. “Read up on this fellow Hurkos, and get hold of him,” he said. “I want to talk to him.”
Late Wednesday night, January 29, Detective Sergeant Leo Martin drove Bottomly to the Providence, Rhode Island, airport to pick up Peter Hurkos, arriving from California. Manning had traced him to the home of Glenn Ford, the actor, who, Hurkos said, planned to play him in a film based on his career as the world’s best-known psychometric detective.
Bottomly had spoken to Hurkos, who had agreed to come to Boston on the condition that no publicity of any kind appear until he had completed his work and left town. Otherwise, he said, the crowds of curiosity seekers would constantly imp
ede him.
Arranging this sub rosa visit to Boston had taken all of Bottomly’s ingenuity. Though Police Commissioner McNamara doubted strongly—profanely would be a more accurate word—that Peter Hurkos could be of any help, he would not stand in the way. Bottomly had also managed to obtain a pledge of secrecy not only from local newspapers, radio, and television, but from The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, the Associated Press, United Press International, Time, and Newsweek, as well as from every correspondent of foreign newspapers and magazines. Save in time of war, so complete a blanketing of the world’s communication media was unheard of: it had taken two days of meetings in Brooke’s office to do it, but it had been done. And finally, lest Peter be recognized in Boston’s busy Logan Airport, Bottomly had asked him to land at Providence, forty-four miles away.
The plane had arrived early: Hurkos had to be paged. In the corner of the terminal Bottomly and Sergeant Martin saw a giant of a man, some four inches taller than Bottomly—which meant at least six feet eight—wearing a huge cowboy hat, yellow cowboy boots and trousers, a wide leather belt, and a yellow-fringed leather shirt. The figure rose and bore down on them.
“I’m Jim Crane,” he announced. He looked at them from a pair of suspicious blue eyes. “You got any identification?”
Bottomly knew of Crane. This man was a West Coast speculator who had taken Peter’s advice on a gold mine investment, and had been so delighted with the result that he had appointed himself Peter’s bodyguard. In a deep side pocket Bottomly made out the bulge of a revolver.
After satisfying himself as to their credentials, Crane vanished in the direction of the balcony restaurant to return with a heavyset, heavy-jowled man about six feet tall, with curly black hair and darting black eyes—the celebrated Dutch mystic himself. He turned out to be a very engaging man, completely uninhibited, who spoke sharp, quick sentences, impatiently, in bad English, with a thick Dutch accent.
The Boston Strangler Page 11
