The Boston Strangler

by Frank, Gerold;

  “O.K.,” said Dr. Robey. “We’ll talk again, David.” And he returned to his office and his records to mull over these coincidences.

  The last strangling, Mary Sullivan’s, was on Saturday, January 4. That was also David’s wedding day in New York City. When had Mary been strangled? Her body had been found Saturday at 6:20 P.M. by her two roommates, Pat and Pam, on their return from their jobs at Filene’s. Medical Examiner Luongo then estimated that she had been dead “several hours.” That might well mean Saturday morning. When had David been married? In the late afternoon. Dr. Robey checked a map. It was only 220 miles from Boston to New York. David could have been in Boston in the morning and in New York in the afternoon.

  Dr. Robey thought furiously. When not completely psychotic, David was a likeable youth with considerable charm who made friends easily. He looked like a thousand other personable young men. If you saw him walk by you’d think, There’s a college kid—and forget his face. And he had superb physical coordination, the grace of a dancer; he could move like a wisp of fog, slip in and out of places without being seen.

  On his next visit to David, Dr. Robey found him much improved. Dr. Robey, accompanied this time by a fellow psychiatrist, had an idea in mind. “David, you’re doing fine,” he said, after a few minutes of amiable conversation. He turned to a keeper. “Will you get David his shoes? I think he can have them now and his feet must be cold.”

  He watched as the boy slipped on his shoes and tied the laces—tied them with the extra half hitch, and then the bow—the Strangler’s knot.

  Dr. Robey’s associate, trying to conceal his excitement, handed David a piece of string. “David,” he said recklessly, “if you were going to kill somebody, what kind of knot would you tie?”

  It was a grievous tactical error. David drew back. “Hey, what’s going on here?” He looked suspiciously from one man to the other. “Do you think I’m the Boston Strangler, or something?” He turned and sat in a corner of the cell, arms hugging his knees. “I want my lawyer,” he said. The questioning was over. He knew he was a suspect.

  That night David wrote to his lawyer asking him to “close down and destroy my laboratory.” The letter was intercepted: the Secret Service, which had kept an eye on David because of his narcotics involvement, investigated. The boy did have a laboratory in New York State, not far from his office.

  Later, Dr. Robey tried to summarize what he had learned about David Parker. The high intelligence; the Lucky Lager beer; the medical-hospital background—father a chemist, mother a social worker; the hatred of women and the fantasies of torturing and destroying them; the near-strangling of his wife; the strong possibility that he was in Boston each time, or virtually each time a strangling occurred; the knot he tied—everything fitted. As the murder of Joann Graff the day after Kennedy’s assassination fitted, and as the Mary Sullivan murder fitted. For the first might have been an extraordinary act of paranoid egomania—to strike with such God-like power at so awful a moment; and the second was sheer omnipotence—to murder in the morning and marry in the afternoon!

  If one studied the eleven murders, one saw how they grew more bizarre until in Mary Sullivan’s case all the stops were out, almost as though: This is my grand triumph, the most elaborate creation of them all … Behold, World!

  How like a David!

  The question then rose, how did he choose his victims?

  Dr. Robey speculated. All of us, he believed, are able to recognize a “kindred soul.” Often we can sense almost at a glance if a stranger is someone with whom we can get along, who is simpatico. Dr. Robey once had a woman patient who possessed this intuitive ability to an astonishing degree. She could enter a roomful of people and spot the one man there whose company she thought she would enjoy. Seven times she had done it—and seven times the man she chose turned out to be an alcoholic. Even more incredibly, in two instances the man had not yet become an alcoholic; his drinking problem had not yet shown itself.

  Now, consider the eleven victims. Similarities in the personalities of the older women had been remarked upon: orderly, reserved, rigidly respectable, compulsively neat, and, in most cases, having had nothing to do with men for years. Joann Graff, though only twenty-three, bespectacled and retiring, could have been a younger version of the older victims and belonged in their category. Sophie Clark, also reserved, methodical, modest, might be included too. Of the remainder, almost the opposite was true: Beverly Samans, Patricia Bissette, Evelyn Corbin and Mary Sullivan were all outgoing and interested in men.

  Dr. Robey thought, Was it possible that these women, whatever their symptoms—overt sexual concern, fear of men, compulsive neatness—was it possible that through nonverbal communication, through their manner of walk, dress, appearance, glances at strangers—they conveyed a pathology, a sexual personality, unconsciously perceived by the Strangler? Perhaps wandering through the city, not knowing what he sought yet able to spot it, whatever it was, the Strangler saw it in them and responded to it.

  Why the ransacking of the apartments? Here Dr. Robey reached far out. Whatever the man sought, he failed to find. If he were a fetishist, he might look for a certain type of shoe, or wig, or article of woman’s clothing. But nothing of this sort appeared to have been taken. Dr. Robey could only assume that he searched for something with sexual connotation—some sort of phallic instrument. Dr. Robey recalled a male patient who in his fantasies believed that women had penises. On a conscious level he knew this was nonsense, but when psychotic he believed it. Now, artificial penises did exist. In brothels one could be entertained by prostitutes, one girl strapping such a device upon her to play the male and going through the act of love with the other girl. David had spent some time in Paris where exhibitions of this sort were almost routine. The device was also used at homosexual parties. David had admitted homosexual experiences. If David were the Strangler, he might in his madness look for this device in his victims’ belongings, because he was a homosexual and yet at the same time feared his homosexual desires. Thus, he was seeking out women, thereby removing the onus of homosexuality, but women with penises, thereby making them less threatening to him. That would explain the molestation—the use of a foreign object, a bottle, a broom—as though the Strangler, enraged because he did not find penises on his victims, were to proclaim, “You don’t have it here, but I have this one!”

  Was all that too fanciful? Dr. Robey wondered. Yet he had seen such pathology; and after all, one was dealing with twisted minds and twisted hungers.

  Whatever the case, these were matters to be discussed with Bottomly and the Medical-Psychiatric Committee. He called Bottomly. As a result, a day after Peter Hurkos left Boston, Bottomly met at Bridgewater with Dr. Robey and Acting Captain Cullinane to discuss David Parker. Since David was scheduled to be returned the next day to Cambridge for trial, Dr. Robey had to make his recommendation at once.

  The coincidences, they agreed, were startling. To be sure, David had told Dr. Robey he had never visited Lynn, Salem, or Lawrence, the scenes of the Helen Blake, Evelyn Corbin, and Joann Graff stranglings, but he could be lying. Obviously he had to be checked out most carefully; his parents had to be interviewed, his employers questioned about when he was actually off the job, his Cambridge girl friend asked if he was in Boston on those fatal weekends, his former classmates interviewed in detail.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Robey and his associates expressed their opinion that David Parker was an “extremely good suspect” in the strangulation murders.

  On February 7, at Dr. Robey’s recommendation and at the request of John Bottomly, and after consultation with David’s attorney, the boy was committed to Bridgewater for a further period of observation. He was—no question of it—a dangerous person.

  Neither Dr. Robey nor Bottomly at that moment recalled, out of the thousands of words Peter Hurkos had uttered while in Boston, the ten words he spoke when, at one of his early sessions with the detectives, he had been asked the complexion of the Strangler. “Not a colored
man. White,” Peter had said. “But … he make it colored.”

  David Parker? Othello?

  * The bartender in Mary Sullivan’s neighborhood—his bar was on Charles Street, a few doors away—recalled the customer as a young man, light-complexioned, with blond hair, in his twenties, who laughed immoderately. In Lawrence the incident also took place in a bar a few doors from the murder building, but the description of the customer was vague.

  11

  In mid-March Leo Alexander, M.D., professor of psychiatry at Tufts Medical College, received an unusual telephone call just as he was finishing his usual lunch of Metrecal and black coffee at his desk.

  It came from Assistant Attorney General John S. Bottomly. Mr. Bottomly was in need at once of a private psychiatrist skilled in the use of the so-called truth serums to examine a Mr. Paul Gordon, who claimed to possess extrasensory perception and had a surprisingly detailed knowledge of the crimes.

  Dr. Alexander, his caller said, had been recommended to him by Dr. Donald Kenefick, who headed the Attorney General’s Medical-Psychiatric Committee, as one of the world’s leading experts in the field. Bottomly had also read of Dr. Alexander’s work as Consultant to the United States Secretary of War at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, and of how his skill helped elicit valuable information from high Nazi war criminals. This Paul Gordon, Bottomly went on, had been insisting for months that a mental patient named Arnold Wallace was the Strangler, and had been revealed to him as such through ESP. He felt the police did not believe him. He had therefore offered himself for examination. That would not only prove he was telling the truth, Mr. Gordon suggested, but since hypnotic drugs were said to stimulate ESP, he might be able to reveal even more about Arnold Wallace. Whatever the case, “Gordon just seems to know too much,” and Mr. Bottomly felt it his duty once and for all to get to the root of it.

  Bottomly was considerably perturbed. Suspects came and went but Arnold Wallace was a prime suspect in more ways than one. Even if David Parker made one’s flesh crawl by the neatness with which he appeared to fit the Strangler, the material collected on Arnold by Detective DiNatale and Mellon since their transfer to the Attorney General’s office added up to a powerful—but exasperating—indictment. How would one conceive that Arnold Wallace, with his I.Q. of seventy or less, possessed the skill, intelligence, and silent swiftness to carry off so many crimes without making a single misstep?

  Yet, when one reviewed what had now become known:

  Item: The two coeds who narrowly escaped being raped in the dark streets near Anna Slesers’ apartment by a tall, dirty man with a missing tooth, had all but identified Arnold as their assailant. (So Gordon, despite his melodramatic enactment when he raced up and down the alley that May evening, could be right.)

  Item: Five of Arnold’s absences without leave from Boston State Hospital coincided with stranglings. Captain Cullinane had determined that Arnold was missing from the hospital on the days Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, and Helen Blake met their deaths in June 1962. He was returned on August 13, 1962. Two days later, on August 15, he was missing again. Ida Irga was murdered on Sunday, August 19, and possibly on the same day, Jane Sullivan. Arnold was returned to the hospital the next day—August 20—after Phil DiNatale had seized him breaking into a teashop.

  Item: In his absences he often broke into the House of the Good Shepherd to see his sister, a retarded delinquent. Once he told Sister Alfreda, the Mother Superior, “You don’t have to worry about the Strangler. I’m the Strangler.” But later he insisted he had only been joking.*

  Item: At a church not far away from Anna Slesers’ a priest reported that Arnold often came there for meal tickets.

  Item: A boy saw Arnold, or someone resembling him, slipping into the Nina Nichols apartment house on the June thirtieth weekend of her death. In Cambridge, a priest in a church off Harvard Square said he gave him $1.50 for food—that was Monday, May 6; Beverly Samans had been murdered in Cambridge a block from the square sometime after 11 P.M. Sunday, May 5. Another clergyman not far from where Ida Irga lived saw Arnold wandering about the neighborhood the weekend of August 19, when Mrs. Irga was strangled. And still a fourth clergyman whose church was near Jane Sullivan’s apartment came forward to say Arnold had frequently asked him for food money.

  Item: Dr. Frank Parodi, a psychiatrist at Boston State Hospital, reported that Arnold once approached him saying, “I want to talk to you about the stranglings.” But Dr. Parodi was on an urgent medical call, and later attempts to persuade Arnold to talk about the subject were unsuccessful. Dr. Parodi believed that Arnold, despite his low I.Q., was capable of the stranglings; and so did Captain Cullinane, a man of enormous experience.

  Finally, the strong but unprovable suspicion that Arnold was involved in his mother’s death, supported by one additional fact, recently learned. Arnold Wallace had been the only one of her children to oppose an autopsy on his mother.

  All this Paul Gordon had been saying—or implying.

  Three weeks before, Bottomly had transferred Arnold from Boston State Hospital to Bridgewater, where escape was impossible. His mental condition was rapidly deteriorating. Months earlier DiNatale and Mellon could scarcely communicate with him. If he spoke, it was to deny everything: most of the time he simply dropped a curtain between himself and his questioner as if the latter did not exist. Now, at Bridgewater, Arnold was reported completely withdrawn. He spent most of his day sitting on a bench along the wall of his ward, speaking to no one, wanting nothing, interested in nothing—an acute paranoid schizophrenic. Dr. Robey and his staff could do little. It seemed highly unlikely that rational communication would ever again be achieved with him.

  What complicated matters now was Paul Gordon’s involvement-and Paul Gordon’s knowledge.

  Why was the man so deep in it all? There was always, of course, the reward. But more important, why was he so uncannily familiar with the murder apartments, and with details known presumably only to police and murderer? Bottomly had assigned a detective to read every newspaper and magazine story on the stranglings from the day Anna Slesers’ body was found. Gordon knew details that had not appeared in the press: actually, he knew some that had deliberately been kept out of police reports themselves. Which brought one back to the baffling and ever-present possibility that this man could himself be the Strangler.

  Would Dr. Alexander be prepared, Bottomly wanted to know, to administer the necessary drugs to Paul Gordon in his private consultation rooms in cooperation with Dr. Ralph Brancale? Dr. Brancale was the Director of the State Diagnostic Center of New Jersey; he had had long experience with psychopathic criminals. By giving their time to this project, the doctors would render a genuine service to the Commonwealth.

  Dr. Alexander was a precise, Viennese-born physician in his early sixties, with many titles, among them Consultant and Director of the Neurobiological Unit, Division of Psychiatric Research, at Boston State Hospital. He had read about the stranglings as they occurred. He was familiar with cruel, gruesome acts. In his practice he dealt with them constantly, acts imagined or actually carried out by patients. He liked to point out to his students that a mark of mental health was the ability to repress our knowledge of the world’s cruelty, to be able to live in peace though surrounded on all sides by horror, cruelty, and violent death.

  For example, he would say, take a meadow on a perfect summer’s day. You lie on the grass, the sun shines warmly, all is serenity and beauty. Yet under every blade of grass a battle rages as fierce, as bloody, as a world war—creatures busily ambushing each other, killing and tearing each other apart, devouring each other alive. We screen all this from our minds. We can do it as long as we are well. He often thought it ironic that if a depressed patient walked into his office and said the world was so grim that he could not face it, he had to treat him as a sick man. Actually, the patient was right. He saw the truth only too clearly. But he was sick, because he had lost certain basic defenses—or, if you will, he no longer had the normal
illusions that keep us sane.

  A man who claimed to possess ESP powers might have illusions of another kind. If, however, he knew a great deal about unsolved crimes and volunteered to be drugged and in this condition permit his mind and emotions to be probed—that was most interesting. Mr. Gordon, so eager to help, intrigued him. How often the culprit had turned out to be the fellow so ready to help the police, the arsonist who first sounded the fire alarm.

  Since 1940 Dr. Alexander had used sodium amytal in the treatment of disturbed patients, finding it helpful in the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Under it the subject reached a zone between conscious and subconscious, a state comparable to deep hypnosis. It had been discovered that in this condition, mute schizophrenics were enabled to express their feelings quite openly. Dr. William Sargant of St. Thomas Hospital, London, considered England’s leading psychiatrist, had used the hypnotic drugs with remarkable effect on British casualties after Dunkirk, during the Second World War. Many of these survivors were suffering shell shock—more accurately, a severe inhibitory neurosis. The horror, grief, and terror they had lived through had been too much for them to accept; they had lost the power to speak or to remember, and had become detached from reality. Under sodium pentothal and Dr. Sargant’s skillful ministrations, they could recall their experiences consciously, relate to them, and thus once more to reality.

  To call such drugs “truth serums,” however, Dr. Alexander would point out, was incorrect. Sodium pentothal—and sodium amytal, similar in effect—worked by suppressing the higher critical faculties of the brain so that one more easily revealed his feelings. Under it a man was less inhibited, more gross, more blunt, more tactless. Learned behavior went by the board; natural behavior came out. Natural behavior was not necessarily true or honest behavior. One could lie in a most fanciful manner, because the drug also released the imagination. Yet it did loosen one’s tongue, and an experienced practitioner could often catch a subject off guard. Though Dr. Alexander in principle did not approve of using the drug to elicit secrets, Mr. Gordon was clearly a special case. The problem here was to put him under chemical hypnosis and by skillful questioning lead him to reveal whatever there was to reveal.