He thought maybe “somebody was following me and stealing my customers.” That might be because the police continually watched him. He wanted to turn to someone for help, and he went to Father Kenneth Murphy, of Rescue, Incorporated, who received telephone calls from people thinking of suicide. “I never wanted to harm myself,” O’Brien said, “but ten years ago when things were kind of blue I prayed and asked God to take me out of this life, if it was His will. The good Lord decided I live a little longer.”
Why should the police watch him?
“I don’t know. Maybe because once in Providence I saw a very attractive girl walking and I thought I’d like to talk to her. I began walking toward her, then I realized it wasn’t right to talk to a strange girl, so I turned and walked away before I reached her.” Perhaps they watched him because on another occasion, when he was sitting on a bench in Providence State House, waiting to apply for unemployment insurance—he had attempted selling oranges from a cart, but that venture failed, too—a strange man sat down beside him, introduced himself as a physician, and “began pressing hard on the idea that I was a homosexual. I had all the signs of such a person, he said—those were his very words.”
Julian said earnestly, “Tom, we’ve looked through your room, we know everything about you. God wants you to tell the truth. God knows you have been hurt, but you don’t have to worry any more. Just tell the truth.” With this Julian unexpectedly pushed a police photograph of Mary Sullivan’s nude body, as she was found, in front of O’Brien. “Look, Tom, you know what I’m talking about. Don’t be afraid, Tom—”
O’Brien was looking away, refusing to look at the photograph.
“No, no, Tom, you must look. Here—” He showed him a second, then a third.
Tom’s face was gray. “I don’t quite understand what you’re talking about,” he said, agitated. “You show me pictures, pictures of dead women, terrible, terrible, what do you mean?”
“How do you know they’re dead women?” Julian demanded.
“I don’t know but they look dead, so I guessed they were dead. Oh, they’re terrible, terrible.” He was trembling violently.
“Don’t you remember this girl, Tom,” Julian said, holding up Mary Sullivan’s photograph. “Tom, don’t you remember taking off her shoes, and then spreading her legs—”
“No, no, never, never. This is all new to me.”
“But when a woman sits on a sofa and crosses her legs, doesn’t that upset you—”
He denied it. “No, no, not upset. Any normal man would be a little excited—”
“People saw you standing in front of this girl’s house,” said Peter with authority. Witnesses had seen Mary Sullivan—or someone resembling her—before her apartment house on Charles Street taking record albums out of her blue Vauxhall, assisted by an unidentified man, on January 4, the day of her murder.
“Not me,” said Tom. “It’s all new to me.”
He denied every suggestion that put him on the scene of any strangling, or in Filene’s, where Mary Sullivan worked during Christmas, or in any hospital when any victim had been there.
Bottomly produced the apartment sketches found in his room. What did the X’s mean?
“Oh, gee, those were art exercises,” he said. “I was studying to be a commercial artist. You make the overall sketch first, putting the X’s as you go along to indicate what you must ink in, then you go over it later and ink them in.”
Why had he drawn the exteriors of apartment houses?
That was a game he played with his brother, who used to drop in of an evening. They would sit on Tom’s cot and his brother would say, “Do you remember the building we lived in on Leyland Street?” Then each would draw it as they remembered it, then compare drawings and argue who was right. “It was just something to do,” said Tom.
Why had he blotted out eleven female figures in the Yoga book?
Was that the number? He didn’t know why eleven. But he always covered female figures; when he copied from ancient statues in his art work, he liked to draw in dresses and skirts.
Why were the knotted scarves and ties in his drawer?
“I was saving those to give to St. Vincent de Paul.”
Why had he written ALWAYS RUN FROM TEMPTATION INSTANTLY!
“Well, if you leave temptation instantly, you conquer the temptation,” he said. “That’s very important. That’s why we are not all saints. But when temptation comes and we try to fool with it, then we get hurt.”
The questioners were silent. O’Brien was obviously tired. What had they achieved? Here was Peter’s man. They had questioned him, they had confronted him with the photographs of the victims, Peter had borne down on him—and O’Brien had admitted nothing.
Bottomly asked, not unkindly, “Have you had enough of us now? You look rather tired.”
“I guess maybe I have,” said Tom. He tried to muster a smile. “I guess you probably have had enough of me.”
Late that night Peter left Boston. “My work finished,” he said. The next day the Boston newspapers would have a field day with the news of Hurkos’ secret visit, the dispute over the Attorney General’s use of a psychic, the Back Bay shoe salesman he had picked, but Peter would be away from it all, in New York, resting. He shook hands warmly with Soshnick who took him to the airport. “Julian, you my good friend,” he said. “You treat me fine. Be careful. I see broken bicycle—dangerous. Take care.” They walked to the gate. Peter patted Julian’s shoulder. “That O’Brien—you see, Julian, he the man, he the Strangler.”
Driving home, Soshnick wondered, was it O’Brien? Could Peter have been thrown off the trail by O’Brien’s letter, brought to him that day by Sergeant Leo Martin of the Boston police? Perhaps it was a man like O’Brien, and if Peter had been left to his own devices, he might have zeroed in on him. O’Brien was psychotic, a chronic paranoid. “A classical picture of paranoid ideation” he had been described by a psychiatric social worker back in October 1963, when he panicked on a dishwashing job because fellow workers “were thrusting themselves” against him, forcing him to “think lascivious thoughts.” He definitely needed commitment. Had O’Brien told the truth? A psychotic can appear to be in touch with reality when in fact he is not, Soshnick knew. Had their questioning really gotten through to O’Brien? The man himself might not know what he had done. Additional psychiatric tests must be made. It could only be hoped that he would remain committed, either by a probate judge or by his family, who had long urged him to seek hospital care; and perhaps someday the truth about him might be known. Further investigations must be made into the backgrounds of each of the eleven victims to see if their lives had ever crossed the sorry one of Thomas O’Brien.
Julian Soshnick drove his car into his garage. As he was about to pull shut the doors, he thought of Peter’s warning. Feeling a little foolish, he unlocked the padlock on the storeroom in which his wife and little daughter kept their bicycles, took each one out, and carefully examined it. His wife’s bicycle was fine. But when he turned the front wheel of his daughter’s bicycle, a cotter pin fell out and the wheel whirled off.
He stood there, utterly baffled.
Peter had left, but within seventy-two hours of his departure, while the Boston papers were full of his exploits, the FBI roused him from sleep at 3:30 A.M. February 8, in his New York hotel room and arrested him on a charge of impersonating an FBI agent. On December 10, 1963, nearly two months before, while buying gasoline in a Milwaukee suburb, he had allegedly posed as an FBI agent and showed a display of cards. He was then driving to Las Vegas to investigate the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr. Peter indignantly denied that he masqueraded as anyone: it was a misunderstanding caused by his bad English; anyway, he, Peter Hurkos was much more than an FBI agent could hope to be.
Bottomly and Soshnick seethed with anger. It was hitting below the belt. While the Boston police had not prevented Peter’s visit to Boston, they made no secret of what they thought of him. Peter’s arrest, made on the very
heels of his Boston appearance, was seen as a move to discredit Peter and the Attorney General as well. No one forgot that Commissioner McNamara was a former FBI agent. Some held, however, that politics, rather than police resentment over the Hurkos publicity, inspired the arrest; that local Democrats had engineered it to embarrass Attorney General Brooke, a Republican, on the eve of his campaign for reelection. Others found an even more Machiavellian plot. The Kennedy family, they suggested, might like to see one of their own candidates as Governor of Massachusetts in the near future, but would be reluctant to have this come about at the cost of defeating so popular a Negro as Edward Brooke, Jr., if, as appeared possible, Brooke were to be the Republican candidate. Far better to trip up Brooke in the Attorney General contest now, thus eliminating him as a gubernational candidate later.
Charge and countercharge filled the press. One newspaper headlined its story Hurkos Framed. Bottomly demanded to know why the FBI hadn’t told him they planned to arrest Hurkos: it was a courtesy due the Attorney General’s office. And why had the arrest taken place when it had—so long after the alleged offense? “It took us two hours to find Hurkos in an actor’s home in California, yet it took the FBI nearly two months to get their man,” Bottomly declared angrily. At the State House rumors flew that the FBI had originally planned an even more spectacular denouement to the Hurkos chapter—to arrest him in the Attorney General’s office itself—but finally decided this was going too far.
The brickbats came from all sides. The Civil Liberties Union questioned whether Tom O’Brien’s civil rights had not been ridden over roughshod. The Boston Herald accused Assistant Attorney General Soshnick and Detective Davis of using an “instrument of tyranny” when they obtained a general search warrant to search O’Brien’s room.*
Actually Bottomly had little time to devote to these internecine battles. He had been put in authority, he knew, because he had a reputation for getting things done, for cutting through red tape, for taking aid and information where he needed it and when he needed it.
He urged that the reward for the Strangler be increased from $5,000 to $10,000 a strangling. A bill to that effect went to the House of Representatives and was promptly passed with Governor Peabody’s approval. Bottomly recruited additional members to his Medical-Psychiatric Committee. They included Dr. James A. Brussel, of New York, whom Bottomly reached in Uganda—the psychiatrist was on a month-long African safari—and Dr. Carola Blume, chief psychologist of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health. Since her early days in Berlin, Dr. Blume had made a hobby of graphology, or the analysis of character through handwriting, and she now began to study letters sent in by the public.
Bottomly received the latest report on the computer program. Clerks had nearly finished reading some ten thousand source documents, underlining key data as they did so. This would be encoded on punch cards so it could be fed to the computer. Each card could handle one thousand items. Key numbers would be given to each breakdown: associations, occupations, locations, objects, actions, motivations, and the like, so that all information would be translated into computer data.
* Interestingly enough—and taking some of the sting out of these complaints—on February 13 when O’Brien’s ten-day commitment expired, the staff of the Mental Health Department recommended thirty-five days’ additional observation. In the end, O’Brien voluntarily recommitted himself to the institution.
10
A few days before, in the maximum security ward of Bridgewater State Hospital—a section that with its heavy bars, massive locked doors, cement blocks, and innumerable keepers is far better described as a prison—Dr. Ames Robey sat with David Parker.
They were seated in the ward outside Parker’s cell, with half a dozen guards conveniently near.
David was high, and talking, his eyes shining. “Do you know what I’d do with women?” he demanded. “If I had my way I’d torture them …” He hated them, they were not to be trusted. At this very moment they were the “recipients of the justice of my anger,” because “they wear the pants and they shouldn’t wear them.”
From the beginning of David’s commitment on January 22, he had been extremely psychotic. He had attempted suicide, ripping his left arm open with his nails, banging his head against the walls of his cell, rubbing the yellow naphtha institutional soap into his eyes. This last gave him severe conjunctivitis but otherwise did not harm him. However the attempt warranted placing him in isolation, and on suicide precaution—which meant a cell in maximum security without clothes or shoes lest he injure himself or even attempt to hang himself. Light came through a small square barred window: food was pushed to him through a narrow opening some six inches across in the heavy metal door through which one could peep at him. In the more violent cases these peepholes were always covered. One slipped the cover aside with great care lest the sick creature inside fling the contents of his toilet pail through it at the observer. Tall, handsome, naked as a child, David had thrown himself about wildly. Now, however, psychotic but at the moment not violent, he was able to talk with Dr. Robey. He was dressed in a faded open shirt, beltless slacks, and was barefoot. Dr. Robey, knowing David was an expert in judo and karate, took no chances, which explained why he spoke with David outside his cell rather than venturing inside it.
“A world without women?” Dr. Robey was saying.
David smiled. “Oh, wonderful, absolutely wonderful!” Some day he would carry out a private plan. “I want to buy an island off the coast of Australia and prohibit any female from setting foot in it. A world without women! A man’s kingdom—and to make doubly sure, I’d set machine guns around the perimeter as well as barbed wire, just in case, to keep them out.”
He went on. He knew one girl, in Cambridge, whom he did not hate too bitterly. Since he had been kicked out of Harvard he had been living in New York City, working in an office, but he came up to Boston to see her every time he could.
Dr. Robey moved carefully as he led the conversation around to David’s sexual habits. Under his questioning David admitted he had had homosexual experiences. “I didn’t play any active part, I didn’t like it, but I did it,” he said.
“Tell me, David, before you were married, how did you get along with that girl friend in Cambridge?”
David pursed his lips. “Pretty well,” he said. Sometimes, for no reason at all, however, she “would have nothing to do with me.” How did he feel when she acted like this? “Feel?” David flashed a glance at his questioner filled with such hostility that even its glimpse shook Dr. Robey.
“I’d get so angry I just wanted to destroy,” he said. He would leave her apartment and walk the streets of Cambridge and Boston, “looking for a woman.”
Dr. Robey digested this information. He ventured:
“When would you come up to visit her?”
“Usually on weekends,” David replied. “That’s the only time I could get away from my job.”
Dr. Robey tamped his pipe with a trembling finger. As he knew from the information given him so far, nine of the eleven stranglings took place on weekends, the exceptions being Anna Slesers’ on a Thursday, June 14, and Sophie Clark’s on Wednesday, December 5. Forgetting those, however, was it only by chance that David’s visits from New York coincided with the others? Then Dr. Robey realized: June 14 was Flag Day—a legal holiday in New York State, where David worked.
He asked, “Did your employer let you off on holidays, too?”
David nodded. “Yes, usually the afternoon before.”
So he could have been in Boston that day, too.
That left only December 5 to be accounted for. Perhaps further questioning would fit that date into the pattern, too. But Dr. Robey did not pursue this line too far. He wanted to learn as much about David as possible without giving himself away. The boy had no idea that he was under suspicion for the stranglings: all he knew about his internment in Bridgewater was that he had been sent there for possession of a dangerous weapon. He considered it a trumped-up
charge—arresting a man for carrying a stage prop!—and had said as much. It did not occur to him that one is hardly committed to a mental institution for such a reason. But one of the marks of a psychotic condition is the inability to recognize the incongruous. Nonetheless, Dr. Robey had great respect for David’s intelligence. The boy had admitted he manufactured the drugs he sold. His skill with explosives had already been remarked upon.
Dr. Robey had listened to David, in his extremely psychotic stage, hallucinating wildly in his cell, screaming that he was all-powerful, shouting contempt at all of stupid mankind, marching in circles like some naked, deranged young god hour after hour proclaiming that he possessed a magic to neutralize those who schemed to destroy the universe, that he had gone beyond the Einstein theory, that he had designed rockets and built atomic bombs, that voices implored him to save the world. “I’m going to find the formula that will save mankind!” he had cried.
Calmed down but still psychotic, he wept. “The only way I can get the world’s attention is to destroy part of it—and especially the women.”
“Why the women?” Dr. Robey asked.
“They have only one function. They have to be shown that function.” But he refused to explain further and grew agitated when pressed. What was clear was that he rebelled violently at women in positions of dominance.
Dr. Robey changed the subject. “David, do you drink?”
“Only beer.”
“Do you have a favorite beer?”
“Well, what I really like best I can’t get around here. It’s called Lucky Lager.”
Dr. Robey almost jumped in his seat. Lucky Lager was sold only in California. What startled him was the fact, among those given him by Bottomly, that tavern keepers in the neighborhoods of two stranglings—Joann Graff in Lawrence, and Mary Sullivan in Boston—had reported that on the day of the strangling a customer asked for “Lucky Lager beer” in one instance, and “Lucky beer” in the other. The request was so unusual that the bartenders remembered it.*
The Boston Strangler Page 15
