The Boston Strangler

by Frank, Gerold;

With every best wish,

  I am,

  Sincerely,

  Thomas P. O’Brien

  “Yes!” cried Peter. “He the man!”

  The letter had come to Boston College, Sergeant Martin said, and they had turned it over to Boston police who had sent it to Homicide that very morning. Sergeant Martin had picked it up on his way over.

  In the midst of the excitement, Bottomly, who only now had been able to get from under the mass of material pouring in on him at the State House, arrived. He immediately telephoned Dr. Wright, who was Cardinal Cushing’s own physician. Yes, he knew O’Brien; he was a man in his fifties, with a history of mental illness; he had many problems. Bottomly put several men on the phones. The state police produced a record on O’Brien: as far back as 1962 someone had sent in an anonymous tip on him. A brother had attempted to persuade him to commit himself for treatment. O’Brien had briefly been in a monastic order—he had lived with the Trappist Monks at St. John’s Seminary, but the discipline was too much for him. It was a French order; many spoke with a French accent; its members dressed like priests, they were fed bread and soup … Yes, he had worked as a salesman, a door-to-door salesman, of ladies’ shoes. More specifically, nurses’ shoes.

  As each of these facts was elicited—mental illness, the French accent, the men like priests, the soup—those in the room grew more and more tense. Now Bottomly and Soshnick looked at each other in an uneasy silence. Door-to-door—this gave access to apartments. Nurses’ shoes—was this the long-sought hospital link? Would not the older victims at one time or another have worn nurses’ shoes?

  Both Bottomly and Soshnick are fast-triggered men, and it was a question now which was the more excited. Soshnick grabbed Bottomly’s arm, “Jack, we may have something—” Now half a dozen men were on the telephones. Soshnick was pacing back and forth, muttering, “We’ve got to find some way to pick him up, to have Peter see him—”

  Bottomly assigned Detective Davis and Peter to call on Thomas O’Brien—more than two men might frighten him—and see what they could learn. They would say they came in response to his letter. They found the address, a dilapidated rooming house, and rapped on a door on the second floor. After a moment, it opened little more than an inch: they caught a glimpse of the wan face of a slight, middle-aged, pinch-nosed man. A pair of pale blue eyes peered over the chain at them.

  “Yes?” The voice was high-pitched and effeminate.

  “Mr. O’Brien, you wrote to Boston College—” Davis began.

  “I don’t want to see anyone,” the man said, and shut the door. They heard the bolt drawn, then the scrape of a chair as it was jammed into place under the doorknob.

  Peter could hardly contain himself as they went down the steps. “Jesus Christ, he the man! He the murderer!”

  Twenty minutes later they held council with Bottomly. How could they question O’Brien? They could not arrest him. There were no criminal charges against him. Soshnick suddenly leaped up. He had remembered a state statute that allowed a physician to commit any person acting oddly to a mental institution—if the superintendent agrees—for ten days’ observation. Once O’Brien was hospitalized, they could question him. Soshnick would also obtain a warrant to search O’Brien’s room for evidence that might link him with the stranglings.

  The machinery was set in motion. Peter, slumped in a chair, seemed exhausted. Could he be driven back to his hotel to rest the remainder of the day?

  As they walked to his car later, Soshnick saw Crane beckoning him. He fell in step with the Californian. “When Peter’s stimulated like this, he often talks in his sleep,” the other said. “You fellows might get something valuable—”

  “Done!” said Soshnick. He decided he would stay that night in Peter’s suite, and set up a tape recorder at Peter’s bed to take down anything he might say. He dropped back to chat with Peter, only to find himself violently shoved to one side. It was Jim Crane. Soshnick looked at him in amazement. “You were getting on his right, Mr. Soshnick,” he said apologetically. Then he explained. Peter had asked the advice of three fellow psychics, two in Los Angeles, one in Chicago, before deciding to take the Boston assignment. His California colleagues saw nothing against it, but the Chicago seer felt troubled. “I see harm coming to you from the right,” he told Peter. Peter had come anyway, but had Soshnick been observant, he would have noted that whenever Peter appeared in public, Crane always walked three steps ahead and to Peter’s right, to shield him from whatever might menace him.

  By this time Soshnick had given up attempting to make value judgments on Peter Hurkos. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said humbly. “I didn’t know.”

  * At 1 A.M., January 5, a few hours after Mary Sullivan’s body was found, a man walked into Station Three to announce that he had killed his wife. Lieutenant Donovan had to divorce Lieutenant Sherry completely from the Sullivan investigation to work on it.

  * Dr. Luongo, the medical examiner who had performed most of the autopsies, had often stated privately—it was not something to be blared aloud—how easy it is to kill by strangling. In ancient times the Roman robber killed quickly, without much fuss, by exerting pressure on the neck arteries carrying blood to the brain. It brought complete incapacity in three seconds. Nor did it require great strength.

  * Doubleday and Company, New York, 1961.

  8

  While Soshnick prepared for his all-night session with Peter Hurkos, Bottomly was poring over a report just brought to him entitled “David Parker.” A dozen others lay on his desk, including the last-minute information from Donovan’s men who had so far questioned hundreds of persons in connection with the Mary Sullivan murder.

  At the moment, David Parker (which is not his name) intrigued Bottomly. What with Hurkos pursuing Thomas O’Brien, the shoe salesman, Detectives DiNatale and Mellon checking on Arnold Wallace and Paul Gordon, various committees—medical, computing, legal—already at work, Bottomly felt like a juggler trying to keep a dozen brilliantly spinning pinwheels in the air. But something had to be done immediately about Parker, because charges, however minor, had been brought against him. He was in police hands, and it would be possible, if one moved swiftly, to place him under psychiatric study.

  The Parker story, as unfolded to Bottomly by Cambridge police, was as follows.

  On Wednesday afternoon, January 22, Detective Sergeant Leo F. Davenport was typing notes at his desk at police headquarters, Cambridge, when he looked up to see Officer James Roscoe bring in a tall, slender, bearded youth in his early twenties. Bearded college students were no novelty in Cambridge, and this youth would have attracted no special attention save that his jet black hair, obviously dyed, was curled in ringlets pasted on his forehead; a large gold earring pierced his right ear; his face—his features were quite handsome—had been darkened by a suntan preparation, and he wore sandals on his bare feet—this in mid-January with the temperature well below freezing.

  Davenport knew him as a brilliant former Harvard student who had caused Cambridge police trouble before.

  “Hello, David,” he said, and turned to Officer Roscoe. “What’s it now?” Over the policeman’s shoulder he could see in the anteroom a young girl, quite pregnant, watching nervously.

  Roscoe, cruising through Harvard Square a few minutes before, had come upon a crowd watching David struggling to force a young lady—the girl in the other room—into his car. “Take your hands off this girl,” Roscoe ordered him, whereupon David pulled her even more violently, shouting, “She’s my wife and she’ll go with me where I want her to go!”

  His eyes looked dilated; he seemed like a wild man. The girl screamed, and as he fought with her his tweed jacket opened to reveal a dagger stuck in his belt. Roscoe grabbed him with one hand, pulled his gun with the other, and then took the dagger away. David loosed his grip on the girl and danced up and down in a very frenzy of protest. “Don’t you dare stop me!” he cried. “I’m on my way to Hollywood.”

  The girl—it was his wife—mana
ged to say, “Officer, I’m afraid of him—he’s been acting strange for a long time.”

  Roscoe had arrested him on charges of disturbing the peace.

  Sergeant Davenport was a sharp, lean, irreverent man in his early forties, who had twenty years’ experience with Cambridge students behind him. He had spent months working—it was still his major task—on the murder of Beverly Samans. He was perhaps as well informed as any man on life in the Cambridge-Harvard area. It had not surprised him to discover that a woman living down the hall from Beverly, who had heard nothing the Sunday night of the murder, had been in bed with her boyfriend most of the evening, the TV turned up loudly so no one would suspect she was entertaining anyone; or that not far away lived a student from India who invited girls up to his room where, quoting Shakespeare on the ennobling qualities of suffering, he lashed them with a whip; or that Beverly herself (as Sergeant Davenport had determined) had a number of men friends, among them a distinguished professor known for the urbanity with which he had seduced several girls in his classes. Sergeant Davenport was accustomed to the many varieties of human behavior, and like his colleague Lieutenant Sherry in Boston, took much of it philosophically and even sympathetically.

  Now he turned to Parker who had been listening to Roscoe’s recital in high good humor.

  “David, what the hell is the matter with you?”

  “Nothing,” said David lightly. “Why?” He was sitting on a wooden bench, drumming his fingers steadily on the side.

  Sergeant Davenport looked at him. Only six weeks before David had been marched into the station house on the same charge—disturbing the peace. He had been going from house to house ringing doorbells, then careening through backyards, dancing and singing. He was under some kind of stimulant: his eyes seemed glazed, he rambled in his speech, he couldn’t remember his address, he broke into sudden bursts of laughter. When asked his age, he retorted, “Last time I measured it, it was twenty-two.” Once in his cell, he paced back and forth, laughing to himself.

  At that time a check disclosed that he had been arrested two years before, in April 1961, while still a student at Harvard. Police had come upon him and four other boys “acting suspiciously.” They searched them and found on David a homemade bomb—a foot-long piece of steel pipe, plugged at both ends and filled with gunpowder that he admitted he took from shotgun shells he had bought at Sears Roebuck. Attached was an ingenious battery device to detonate it. The other boys attended Harvard, too. According to one, David had been making bombs of this nature for weeks, giving them to students to explode at night on the Esplanade, the grassy walk bordering the Charles River, to startle the strollers and lovers under the trees.

  At Harvard, David was regarded with awe as having an almost genius intelligence—his I.Q. ranged between 150 and 170.

  Shortly after this, he was caught selling narcotics—including the dangerous mind-expanding drugs, mescaline and lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, the most powerful hallucinating compound known—to students in Harvard Square. He was promptly dropped from school. Then came his arrest six weeks ago, when he was dancing and singing in the streets; and now this altercation with his wife.

  Something struck a chord of memory in Sergeant Davenport’s mind. David’s was not an ordinary beatnik costume. Then he remembered. More than twenty years ago, while stationed in the Navy in San Francisco, Sergeant Davenport had gone to see Paul Robeson, the Negro singer, in Othello. He had never forgotten Robeson’s magnificent performance—nor his appearance.

  There was no doubt of it—the dagger that was stuck in his waist, the earrings, the beard, the hair, the stuff on his face, and the sandals. “David,” he said, “you look just like Othello.”

  David smiled broadly. “Bravo, Sergeant,” he said. “You hit it. As a matter of fact, I’m living the part of Othello.”

  “Yes, you fit the picture perfectly, except for one thing—”

  “I know,” said David. “I don’t put on enough Man-Tan to make my face as dark as the Moor’s.”

  Why was he going about in public like this? David explained painstakingly he had formed a dramatic troupe. “We’re getting ready to go to Hollywood,” he said. “We’re going to make a film showing why people should love policemen.” He laughed.

  Davenport said, “David, you don’t have to go to Hollywood. You better go to a psychiatrist.”

  “I just did,” said David with a smirk. “When I was arrested last month they sent me to Westborough Hospital but the doctors said I was sane.”

  Sergeant Davenport asked, “Why the dagger? That’s carrying concealed weapons. You know it’s against the law.”

  “Oh, it’s just a stage prop,” said David. “I carry it all the time so that when I display my talents I’ll have it.”

  And the altercation with his wife?

  “That’s her fault,” said David indignantly. “I’d just bought some champagne and cheese, I rented a sweet little car from Avis, and I wanted to take her out on a picnic. That’s all.”

  “David,” Sergeant Davenport said reasonably, “you know people don’t go on picnics in January. It’s too cold.”

  “It’s never too cold to have fun,” said David, impatiently. “She didn’t want to come and I was trying to get her into the car.” He stood up and danced a little hillbilly jig, at which point Sergeant Davenport decided there was no use in continuing the conversation, sent him to await court hearing, and turned to the girl.

  She refused to come into the room until her husband had been led out. She was slight, which made her pregnancy seem even more advanced, and she was obviously terrified. “I’m scared to death of him,” she said in a whisper. “He tried to strangle me once.” She went on to tell how he had suddenly seized her in their bedroom and bent her back on the bed, both hands tightened on her throat … “It was awful!” she said. “His eyes were almost of one color, you could hardly tell the pupils from the whites, I think he was on LSD, his hands were actually around my neck—”

  He had stopped as suddenly as he began. He pulled his hands back, stood up, said majestically, “I have decided I shall not strangle you,” turned his back, and walked out of the room.

  When had they been married? “Two weeks ago,” she said, without embarrassment. “January fourth.” Automatically the date registered in Sergeant Davenport’s mind. That was the day Mary Sullivan was strangled. The girl went on to explain that David believed the baby about to be born was not his but that of his closest friend. “And he insisted, just the same, on having him as his best man at our wedding. He’s so strange!” She was too nervous to be questioned further and was permitted to go.

  Sergeant Davenport thought, For a bride of two weeks, she’s a long way gone—seven or eight months … In Othello, the Moor actually strangles his wife, thinking she betrayed him with his best friend … And David’s more than a little hoppy, too …

  He decided to check into David Parker. He ordered his court and probation records, and spent the next days interviewing the boy’s former roommates and friends.

  What Davenport had learned in this past week now held Bottomly’s attention.

  David was known as an oddball among his friends. He had studied drama, traveled to Europe, attended a school on karate. He told friends he took Methedrine, and more than once had tried LSD, which is far more potent and may cause psychoses in those who take it—sometimes permanent psychoses. When he was under the influence of these drugs, his friends actually feared him: one came upon him walking in circles in his room, striking his head against the walls, “speaking badly of himself.” At Westborough Hospital where he had been sent a few weeks before, he had been found suffering from a “personality disorder,” and after being given large doses of Thorazine, a powerful tranquilizer, had been discharged, although the court-appointed physician who recommended his hospitalization thought he was suffering from “acute schizophrenia.”

  There was a definite medical-hospital background. His father was a chemist, his mother a soc
ial worker. “He had a very strange childhood,” one schoolmate said. “I don’t think his father was around until he was three or so, and he was brought up by women, and nurses, and he hates them.” He was known to be subject to wild fits of violence and intense anger.

  Did David Parker possess the psychopathology of the Strangler? Bottomly wondered. Clearly this boy who not only sold but took dangerous hallucinating drugs, who experimented with deadly explosives, who married a girl he was convinced had betrayed him with his dearest friend, who hated women, who had once almost strangled his wife, whose I.Q. reflected superior intelligence, was emotionally disturbed—a dangerous and unpredictable man, especially when under the influence of drugs. Could he be capable of the Strangler’s crimes? Could anyone but a man of superior intelligence have managed all that the Strangler had done without making a false step, or leaving a single clue, or betraying himself in any fashion?

  What might be learned if David Parker could be carefully questioned and studied by a skilled psychiatrist without being aware that he was a suspect?

  There was one door open to Bottomly and he used it. In Massachusetts any male over seventeen charged with a crime can, if his crime or his behavior warrant it, be sent for thirty-five days’ psychiatric observation to the State Hospital at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, twenty-five miles from Boston. The hospital’s role is to determine the defendant’s competence to stand trial. Bridgewater deals almost solely with the courts: virtually every temporary patient behind its walls is a person under criminal indictment sent there for pretrial observation. On January 22, the day David was arrested, Judge A. Edward Viola in Cambridge had observed the strangeness of his manner (standing before him, David had leaped onto a table and begun his hillbilly jig) and had ordered him to Bridgewater.

  Bottomly telephoned Ames Robey, Medical Director at the institution. Would Dr. Robey, himself a psychiatrist, give David Parker—and, in the future, any others who might be singled out by Bottomly—special attention? Would he and his colleagues examine and observe Parker with a view to eliciting material helpful in the strangling investigations?