“Why was Arnold so angry at the ballerina?” Dr. Alexander asked.
“Because she wasn’t real. He wanted to dance with it, wanted to make it do what he tried to make the women do—but pictures can’t come to life.”
“Was that the doll he was looking for?”
“Yes.”
“What did he want to do with the doll? Put it in her vagina? So it could be born again?”
“You don’t understand,” said Gordon with some agitation.
Dr. Alexander’s experience with so-called ESP was that such phenomena were comparable to intuitive dreams in which nonessential details are never clear. Gordon’s anger because the ballerina was not real—that was not the material dreams are made of, it was the material recollection was made of. Was Gordon, then, not acting as a medium but as himself; not tuning in, as it were, on Arnold’s mind but simply remembering what he saw, and what he felt?
Dr. Alexander played a hunch. “Mr. Gordon, don’t you think the man who has done all this wants to be caught, so he can be relieved of this terrible burden he carries—”
“No,” said Gordon.
“—and show how wonderful he is, and be relieved of this terrible burden he carries?” Dr. Alexander repeated.
“I want to throw up,” Gordon said.
“Think how wonderful it would be, Mr. Gordon, he’d be relieved of everything, he could be cured—” Dr. Alexander went on relentlessly.
Gordon began to choke. “Now hold on,” he said thickly. Then: “Can I throw up?”
“There’s a bucket over there, Paul,” said Mellon. Dr. Alexander led the others out of the room so Gordon could be sick in privacy. To whom had his question struck home so sharply that it produced nausea? To Paul Gordon reliving the role of Arnold or to Paul Gordon as Paul Gordon? There was a real Arnold, but was the Strangler that Arnold—or was he “Arnold,” the other personality of this strange man now retching in the other room?
Later, they had coffee and sandwiches, all save Gordon, who slept. Then he was roused by an injection of Methedrine, which acted as a stimulant, and the questioning resumed. Now Gordon appeared to go into a mild automatic state in which he became the strangler of Sophie Clark, and actually carried on a soliloquy with his terrified victim before him; then he became the victim herself, all but paralyzed before her murderer, trying to speak in a gasping whisper …
That was set off when DiNatale asked how the killer got into Sophie’s apartment.
“He was there all day, Phil,” said Gordon. “He had a fight with another girl the night before … This stuff is beginning to wear off. I want to reach another level, Dr. Alexander. We’re really getting somewhere!”
The dose was adjusted; Gordon smiled, and lying on his back, waved his hands gently to and fro as one dreamily conducting a symphony.
“How did you know about the Chesterfield butts behind the door in the cellar?” Phil asked.
“I saw them in my mind.”
“What made Sophie come to the door and open it?”
“Ohhh … He’s knocking on the wrong door. It doesn’t open. She goes back into the living room, tense, nervous. She says to herself, ‘I wonder if I should have answered it.’ Bang, bang, bang! God damn it, open the door!” Gordon writhed on the couch, he spoke sharply, dramatically. “He didn’t say this but this is what went through her mind and this was the way she felt. Pom! Pom! Boom! Boom! Boom! He rapped, she opened the door, she can’t close it because he has his foot in the doorway. As soon as she let him in she knew it was wrong … He’s moving from one chair to another.” Now, in a girl’s terrified whisper: “Oh, they won’t be home for a while yet, what’ll I do, where’ll I go, I’m scared … What’ll I make for him?… Well, anyway, she thinks, I haven’t eaten yet, I got to eat. She starts to fiddle around in the kitchen, mainly banging dishes to make him think she’s busy. Meanwhile he’s sitting out there, not planning, just thinking, God damn it, she’s a nice girl. Her hips impressed him—”
Phil realized that Gordon was now telling in dramatic detail what he had told him when they first met, months before.
“Then what happened?”
“The phone rang. She couldn’t answer it—he grabbed her …” Gordon’s voice became Sophie’s anguished voice again: “I want to jab him but I don’t dare, elbow him out of the way so I can get to the phone … Oh, if I could only get to it, tell them to come home early because I’m scared … If he’d only relax. He’s not unattractive … But all he thinks about is himself, about sex …” Barnett, thought Phil, Lew Barnett, the Negro Don Juan … Gordon’s voice was strong: now he was relating the story again. “He hit her on the jaw, under the ear, the broad part of the jaw, a sharp, quick jab, a lot of weight behind it.”
“How did he stop her from screaming?”
“He had something in his hand, a rolled-up cloth, it’s dirty, he put it into her mouth …”
Sophie Clark had been gagged, but this fact had appeared in the papers. Now Gordon, as the murderer, was whispering to Sophie: “I don’t want any noise to come out of this, understand? I’ve got you right now and you can do any God damn thing you want to but I don’t have to listen to it. You’re captured. I’ve captured you.” He giggled. “I fixed you. See what it’s like to be imprisoned? You’re like me. You can’t get out. Hahahahaha! Like to suffer? See, I’ll come back. You just go ahead and sit there. Think it over for a while. Go through what I went through for a while.”
During these surrealistic hours, Gordon appeared to undergo another metamorphosis: he was Arnold Wallace’s mother, crooning endearments to her son; then, as Gordon himself, he engaged in a sharp dialogue with Arnold; then he became Arnold following his mother secretly one day to see where she went, only to discover to his horror that she was a prostitute, and in his fury, seek to kill her …
His voice came, a woman’s voice, warm, caressing, motherly: “No, you don’t want a girl like that, Arnold, you want a girl like old Mama, someone that really understands you. Mother knows. Sure, she knows …” Suddenly, sternly, in his own voice: “You shouldn’t say that! You shouldn’t say such things about your mother! No, that’s not right, Arnold, you can’t talk that way about your mother … Oh …”—sigh—“What will I do with that boy?” Now he had become Arnold’s mother again. “They just don’t understand that boy at all. You see how beautifully he does things … look at his beautiful hands. Ohhh, and he can be sweet. Arnold is such a good boy …” Suddenly: “Oh, Arnold, don’t tell me that. Oh, don’t tell me that, I’ll cry, Arnold, don’t do that”; Sharply, angrily: “Don’t you do that, Arnold, don’t do that!” He groaned. “Ahhhh … Ahhhh, no …”
“What’s Arnold doing, Paul?” Jim Mellon asked.
“Oh, why did he do that to me! He shouldn’t have! Oh, no!”—groan—“No, well they should have kept him there. Oh, poor boy—”
“What did he do, Paul? Did he do something bad?”
“Oh, God!” Still in a woman’s voice, Gordon began to cry, chokingly, with tremendous emotion, almost seeming to break apart. Then unexpectedly, a piercing cry of anguish that almost brought everyone in the room to his feet. “It hurts!” He groaned, as one suffering excruciating pain.
Dr. Alexander asked gently, “What hurts, Paul?”
Had Arnold at this moment flung the word “Whore!” at his mother? Did this explain the Strangler’s violent hatred of women, his desire to punish them—this awful vengeance he took against women brought on by this dreadful early experience of observing his mother as a prostitute?
But who was actually speaking? Arnold? Gordon interpreting Arnold? Gordon fantasizing how the Strangler might feel, and creating in his fantasy the scene between the mother and the son?
Again Dr. Alexander asked, “Paul, what hurts?”
Gordon’s answer, out of nowhere, only added confusion to confusion. “You people are so mixed up … Take it easy. Don’t get carried away. Did you ever die?” Then, “Wherever I was, she died … Arnold, that poor kid …
”
“She died …” Did this mean that Arnold was killing his mother? Had the piercing cry of anguish been the cry Arnold’s mother gave before she expired on the floor of her hospital room where the nurses found her? Or was this the cry out of Gordon’s fantasies, stimulated by the drug?
One’s mind swam.
At this point Gordon, who was woozy now, was helped to the bathroom, leaving the others pondering.
Dr. Alexander rose and went to the telephone. He had suddenly thought of someone who might be able to help them. He had himself been treating a girl believed to have been the only victim to have been attacked by the Strangler and escaped with her life. This was a twenty-nine-year-old German-born waitress who worked nights, and who will be called Gertrude Gruen. Shortly after noon on February 18, 1963, during a long period when the Strangler had not struck, a man knocked on the door of her apartment on Melrose Street. Gertrude, who had been ill with a virus, was in bed; she had taken a sleeping pill, and she rose, still not quite fully awake, threw a coat over her nightgown, and opened the door. The man, wearing a waist-length dark jacket and green slacks, said he had to fix a bathroom leak. She let him in: he would have to wait a few minutes, he said, until fellow workmen on the roof signaled him to turn off the water. Gertrude paid little attention to him, listening and answering him almost automatically; she turned her back, he suddenly leaped on her, caught her throat in the crook of his arm, and tripped her to the floor. A strong, husky girl, she fought wildly for her life, kicking, biting, trying to disable him. She sank her teeth so deeply into his finger that he loosened his hold for a moment. She screamed, the workmen appeared at the edge of the roof, looking about, and he fled. She was too distraught to recall his appearance except vaguely: a dark face, black hair, about thirty to thirty-five, five feet nine or ten, weighing about 175 pounds. The experience had been so harrowing that Dr. Alexander had been seeing her. On the telephone he asked her to come down immediately and see if she could identify Gordon as her assailant.
Gordon had been back on the couch fifteen minutes when Miss Gruen arrived. She shook her head; she could not make a positive identification. She remained in the room with the others, listening.
Finally, it was over. The needle was removed from Gordon’s arm. He slowly awoke. The group proceeded into Dr. Alexander’s consultation room, where Gordon sat, yawning, until the influence of the drug wore off completely. Yes, he had had an interesting experience. How long had he been asleep? Six hours? “I’d never have thought it,” he said. What had he dreamed about during that time? he was asked. “I didn’t dream anything,” he said. “They asked me questions and I told them what I thought.” He looked around. His eyes met those of Miss Gruen. For all he knew, she was another psychiatrist, for persons had been coming and going through the long day. Others thought Gordon’s face went pale when he saw Miss Gruen; but Dr. Brancale, watching him closely, saw nothing like that.
Someone said, “You know, Paul, the Strangler almost got one girl last February. How’d he attack her and how did she get away?”
“I’ll show you,” said Gordon. He was himself again. He walked up to Phil, suddenly circled behind him, whipped his arm around his neck, and struggled to trip him. “He grabs her this way, then she kicks him—he beats it because she screams and he’s afraid of the people on the roof—he sees them through the window—”
Gordon should not have known that.
“What did she look like?” Jim Mellon asked.
Gordon, walking back to his chair, passed Gertrude Gruen. He pointed a finger at her. “Well—she looked a lot like this lady here,” he said.
Later, when they were alone, Bottomly spoke with the two psychiatrists. Dr. Brancale did not think Gordon was the Strangler, nor did he think Gordon possessed ESP. How to explain how Gordon knew details not publicly known? Presumably, said Dr. Brancale, Gordon, because of his compelling interest in the crimes, had unconsciously incorporated into his thinking every detail, every experience, he had heard and read about that broadened his knowledge of the cases. It had been going on for months. Gordon’s attorney had had long discussions with the police, and then with Gordon about the crimes. This had undoubtedly helped Gordon to shape and correct his concepts of the stranglings as he went on. At the same time detectives and newspaper reporters, who knew far more than they could print, had also been questioning Gordon. In their very queries they might have dropped hints he seized upon without realizing it. Dr. Brancale did not doubt that Gordon genuinely believed he possessed unusual powers. Hence his readiness to be examined, his impatience and annoyance with anyone who doubted him. As to the question, Was he involved in the stranglings? Dr. Brancale believed he was not. This, however, the physician explained, was a “psychological impression,” and it might be well to keep an eye on Mr. Gordon.
Dr. Alexander also spoke cautiously.
“I am not a criminologist and this is speculation,” he prefaced his observation. But if no reference to a photograph of a little girl in a ballerina costume had appeared in the press, Gordon must be considered with care. No one could be so clairvoyant as to see a photograph on the floor and also know why it had been thrown there. To be sure, Gordon might have learned about the photograph from friends of Mrs. Irga or from the caretaker who had been in the apartment a few moments after his son discovered the body. On the other hand, attendants at Boston State Hospital had seen Paul Gordon talking to Arnold Wallace, persuasively, suggestively. Dr. Alexander recalled the famous John Christie case in London in the early 1950’s. Christie strangled and raped seven women, hiding their dismembered bodies in the walls, flooring, and garden of his home. He managed to find a scapegoat for his crimes—Timothy Evans, the husband of one of his victims. Christie had so influenced the poor man, who was mentally retarded, that Evans finally confessed to murder. He was tried, found guilty, and hanged—Christie appearing as chief witness for the prosecution! Then, four years later, the bodies were found, Christie confessed, and ended on the gallows, too. But for a long time he had hoodwinked Scotland Yard, and some inspectors, to the end, doubted Evans’ innocence.
There were precedents, then—
One more possibility complicated matters. Suppose Gordon were the Strangler but did not know it? There were precedents for that, too. In France, a fascinating case was on record in which a detective, after working for months on an extremely baffling murder, discovered to his horror that all the evidence his skill could uncover led directly to himself as the murderer! He was, in fact, the killer, but because he suffered from a dissociative personality, had no conscious knowledge of his crime.
Was that the case with Paul Gordon?
Considerable public pressure now bore upon the Attorney General’s office. It would not have been too difficult for John Bottomly to seize upon Gordon. But though he had wanted to get at the heart of this puzzling episode, he knew he had not yet done so.
One other factor influenced him. He was aware how powerfully certain drugs could stimulate the imagination: how much was Gordon fantasying? Once Bottomly had suffered an illness which required morphine to kill the pain. He discovered that under morphine, half awake, half asleep, he dreamed the most marvelous dreams, marvelous in their content but marvelous, too, in their reality. In one he found himself in Versailles, standing at the side of Louis XIV of France reviewing the entire French army in technicolor. It was extraordinary, he had told a friend, “as though I were really on the spot, not dreaming and knowing it was a dream, but experiencing it as absolute reality.”
Bottomly moved very circumspectly.
Three weeks later, Gordon was asked if he would allow himself to be interviewed again, this time by Dr. Max Rinkel, a Germanborn psychiatrist noted for his work in helping elicit confessions from Peter Kurtin, the notorious hatchet murderer of Düsseldorf.* Dr. Rinkel had been present during part of Gordon’s interrogation in Dr. Alexander’s office.
Gordon agreed, but at the last moment refused to be put under the influence of drugs. He
was belligerent. Why, he demanded, were the police questioning and requestioning him? “God damn it, I resent it!” he exclaimed. “I explained my position. I’ve got nothing to do with it and I don’t care about it. They’ve got their murder victims, they’ve got their pictures, they’ve got everything they could possibly want—and what the hell they want me to keep going over and over again explaining something to them they already know, I don’t know.” The only possible reason he could think of, he said angrily, “they must think maybe I was there, I must have done it, I killed those women, they’re going to get me to tell how I did it and all that sort of thing—well, for Christ’s sake they’re all crazy.
“If you want me to confess being the Strangler, to say I did it—” He grew angrier by the moment. “If this makes anybody happy, if this is what they have to have, then I’m going to tell you there’s going to be a lot of unhappy people in this world because you’re not going to prove something that doesn’t exist.” They would get nowhere if they approached him with the idea of “settling a problem for Mr. Bottomly or the Police Commissioner.”
Dr. Rinkel interrupted him. “Mr. Gordon, I am a doctor, a scientist, I am not a police officer.” His task was to help determine if Paul Gordon possessed extrasensory perception, as he claimed. Now, would he explain how he knew about the photograph of the ballerina in the apartment of Ida Irga?
“I don’t know how I knew it,” said Gordon, “I don’t know if there was such a picture at all. All I know is that when I was under sodium pentothal in Dr. Alexander’s office, somebody asked me about such a picture and that’s what I saw and how I felt. Maybe it’s all imagination. I don’t know—”
A detective spoke up. “There was a picture, Paul.”
“Then I feel better,” he said. He came back to the ballerina. “When Arnold saw it, the way it was dressed, it reminded him of the day he saw the little girl attacked in the backyard.” He explained that when Arnold was a boy he looked through a knothole in a wooden fence near his home one day and saw a man rape a small girl. “He was at an age where he’d heard about such things but he’d never experienced them,” Gordon intoned. “It was so fascinating to him that he just became immobile: everything stopped, but inside of his emotions—why, rapes all over the place. He didn’t know what was happening to him. I think he experienced some sort of a sexual climax then … I think this is the underlying cause of Arnold’s sexual impulses today.”
The Boston Strangler Page 18
