What did he mean?
“Well, you see, he’d like to approach a girl, to go to bed with her, but he can go just so far and then everything happens to him. His unconscious memory is triggered to produce the same sensations he went through while watching this little girl in the backyard.” For Arnold, then, the photograph of the ballerina reminded him of the doll, and the doll reminded him of the event in his boyhood.
“You see this in the Ida Irga apartment,” said Dr. Rinkel. “What else do you see, Mr. Gordon?”
“After he killed her, somewhere near the kitchen there’s a chair and he sat in it looking out the window, so peaceful, so quiet, daydreaming …”
“Paul, that bothers me,” a detective said. “Have you any idea how he could be so relaxed, not worrying about someone coming in? Doesn’t that indicate that he must have known these people well?”
“No, that’s the way he was,” said Paul with spirit. “All I can say is, if I’d killed someone, I’d be out of there so fast … I can’t help it, I’m telling it as I see it. He just doesn’t care. He has no idea of escaping; no idea of covering his tracks. It’s all peaceful, calm, relaxed. He’s just drained of feeling and emotion. Now I can relax, he thinks, just go some place, curl up, and sleep.”
In the course of the long afternoon Gordon went over his story repeatedly. Finally, Dr. Rinkel asked two questions.
“Mr. Gordon, first, let me ask you: does he kill because he hates or because he likes? And two, a question which has never been answered. Did he rape this victim while she was alive or after she was dead?”
Gordon replied carefully. “Arnold,” he said, “feels responsible for his mother’s death, because he killed her. Now, he’s trying to re-create a feeling of communication between his mother and himself. He looked upon these women as mothers—but they do the same thing his mother did. They get away from him. They’re nervous, afraid of him. He tends to get a bit madder: ‘You’re just like my mother, you’re acting like my mother!’ He’s looking for a little bit of attention, and finally he says, ‘You’re just like my mother, I’m going to do to you what I did to her—kill her, shut her up!’ He wants to put them in a position where they’ve got to listen to him, to what he has to say. I don’t think he meant to kill them. He meant to shut them up, to make them sit still, to make them immobile so he could sit down and talk to them and they’d have to listen to him.” It was a reprise of what he had said before.
Then there was a silence for a moment as Gordon reached for what he saw, or knew, or fantasied. “Rape them while alive or dead? Neither. I don’t think he raped them. I think he’d like to have tried it but I don’t think he can. He’s incapable of it.”
Nothing was settled.
There was nothing to do but to probe even more deeply into the stranglings, to examine even more exhaustively every possible suspect, meanwhile keeping an eye—and an ear—on four men:
On Thomas O’Brien, at this moment behind the walls of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, who protested that he had nothing to tell anyone about anything;
On Arnold Wallace, at this moment behind the walls of the State Hospital at Bridgewater, who could not tell anyone anything;
On David Parker, at this moment behind the same walls, who would not tell anyone anything;
On Paul Gordon, free to go about Boston holding to himself whatever secrets he possessed beyond the reach of hypnotic drugs, yet ready to tell everyone everything.
* Here occurs another of the many extraordinary coincidences that were to plague police. Once when Arnold on a daylight visit rang the bell of the convent, the door was opened by Mrs. Margaret Davis, the woman derelict later strangled in a hotel room in downtown Boston on July 11, 1962. She was living there, trying to make herself useful, while fighting to overcome her alcoholic problem.
* For sixteen years, from 1913 to 1929, Kurtin murdered, committed sadistic acts, and dismembered women victims in the most perverted fashion in the Düsseldorf area of Germany. A married man, mild and courteous in manner, he seemed the least likely of all to have been the Monster of Düsseldorf. He confessed only when a victim whose life he had spared finally led police to him.
Part Three
12
Months before, John Bottomly had turned to Boston’s leading psychiatrists to ask if they could produce a psychiatric profile of the Strangler. Could they re-create the criminal from the crime? Give police an idea of the sort of man to look for? His age, appearance, personality, type of work? What drove him to his deeds? Where might he be found? And—if every man had the latent capability within himself—how pinpoint the target of the search?
Dr. Donald P. Kenefick and his Medical-Psychiatric Committee* had been working on the problem. At intervals through the spring and summer of 1964 they had met at Boston University’s School of Legal Medicine, studying details of the stranglings. Other meetings had been held with police.
Now one of these was in progress. Seated about a rectangular table with Dr. Kenefick in the chair were the distinguished psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, and pathologists. Elsewhere in the room were Lieutenants Donovan and Sherry, Bottomly and his staff, and chiefs of homicides in the suburbs where stranglings had occurred.
Covering most of one wall were photographs of the scenes of the stranglings—from the apartment house exteriors to the victims’ bodies. On a projection stand stood a case with hundreds of color slides made on the scene by the medical examiners. On another wall hung charts, prepared under Dr. Kenefick’s direction: location of crime, type of building, date, time of day, weather, age and background of victim, nature of sexual injury, type of ligature, details of the autopsy.
As of that moment, committee opinion ranged from the belief of Dr. James A. Brussel, of New York’s “Mad Bomber” fame, that one man might have committed all eleven stranglings, to the belief that there might be any number of murderers.
A major question the committee had wrestled with was this:
Would the Strangler, driven to kill five elderly women because each represented in his madness the mother he hated/loved, also be driven to kill Sophie Clark, aged twenty, and a Negro; Patricia Bissette, twenty-three; Beverly Samans, also twenty-three; Evelyn Corbin, fifty-eight (but appearing far younger); Joann Graff, twenty-three, and Mary Sullivan, nineteen?
Or might these younger women have been killed by someone else, and for other reasons? Might not one man have strangled the five older women and others have been responsible for the six murders that followed—murders in which scarflike decorations and bizarre stage effects had been deliberately added to make them appear the Strangler’s work?
The committee was increasingly coming to this conclusion. It would appear far more logical to separate the victims into two groups—in Dr. Kenefick’s words, the Old Women, and the Girls.
As Dr. Kenefick put it in a report issued later, the majority of the committee agreed that one man probably had killed the Old Women. He would be “Mr. S.”—the Strangler. As to the others—the Girls—they probably were not slain by Mr. S. but by one or more men, likely to be found in the circle of the Girls’ acquaintances, most probably “unstable members of the homosexual community” who had tried to make their acts resemble the stranglings of the Old Women as reported in the newspapers. The more one considered this theory, the more persuasive it seemed.
The Back Bay in which Sophie Clark and Patricia Bissette lived, and Beacon Hill where Mary Sullivan lived, were neighborhoods frequented by homosexuals. Charles Street—Mary’s street—was the most Bohemian of all Boston’s Bohemian West End. Every night was a Mardi Gras. With each change of semester new friends descended. It was colorful, bizarre, offbeat. “If a two-headed man walked down Charles Street nobody’d turn to look at him,” one of the detectives liked to say.
For whatever it meant, before Mary Sullivan moved to Boston, she had roomed in a Hyannis motel; among her neighbors were the owners of one of Boston’s most popular homosexual gathering places. Soph
ie Clark lived on Huntington Avenue, a seedy area marked by a weird mixture of artistic, Bohemian, and academic people because of its proximity to art schools, colleges, and music conservatories. A short distance away was Boston’s notorious “Hot Corner”—the intersection of Massachusetts and Columbus Avenues—an area spotted with barber shops catering to homosexuals and at night the hunting ground of fifteen-dollar prostitutes.
Evelyn Corbin’s apartment house in Salem was in a quiet residential section, but not far away were slums. Beverly Samans lived in Cambridge, a block from Harvard Square, which had more than its proportion of avant-garde coffee shops, sexual deviates, beatniks, and oddball characters. Beverly, moreover, was writing a thesis on homosexuality, one of her friends had escorted her to one of the better-known homosexual clubs, and many of her callers were, as Dr. Kenefick put it in his summarizing report to Bottomly, “uncertainly sexed young men.” Even Joann Graff, murdered in Lawrence, an almost pathetically inhibited farm girl from Illinois, who with her frugality* was the most spinsterlike of the Girls, had such associates. Many of the men she met in the course of her work were homosexuals.
As to the character of the man or men capable of the stranglings, Dr. Kenefick pointed out that he and his colleagues at most could only hazard a few guesses toward a “common profile.” Generally, he explained, the sex murderer contains within himself “an encapsulated core of rage” directed at an important figure in his early life—usually a dominant, overwhelming female. To cope with his rage he engages in powerful, sadistic fantasies in which he kills this figure. The sex murderer differs from other psychotic killers in his ability to keep his terrible daydreams to himself. He keeps quiet about them: he exhibits no odd behavior. Thus he is able to move among friends and fellow workers without calling attention to himself. Chances were that he might appear bland, pleasant, gentle, ingratiating—even compassionate. Because of the training given him by the hated female figure he would most likely be neat, punctual, polite—in brief, the personality often seen in confidence men, homosexuals “and in many normal lower middle class men.” No one would think of him as “crazy.”
What, then, would trigger his crime—cause him to kill?
Certain stresses that would bring about sadistic impulses too great for him to cope with. The loss of his mother, either by death or because she turned him out of the house; anything that contributed to a loss of self-esteem, such as being fired from a job; or anything that made him feel a loss of masculinity. That could result from a late marriage to a woman who expected him to function as an adult, although such a man would most likely find himself marrying a second mother.
Whatever the case, he would find himself in a deepening depression from which he was able to emerge only by a sudden explosion, a violent venting of his hate, frustration, impotence: in short, murder, the destruction of the terrifying female image, but murder in the special ritualistic, fetishist manner of his illness, both sadistic and loving. Because each murder solved nothing—the specter was not eliminated, it would rise again—he was doomed to repeat the crime again and again.
What kind of mother would he have? “A sweet, orderly, neat, compulsive, seductive, punitive, overwhelming woman. She might go about half-exposed in their apartment, but punish him severely for any sexual curiosity.” Chances were that he once lived with a woman possessing characteristics similar to those of his victims, and in a similar environment. His father had died or perhaps deserted the family before his son’s puberty. In any case, he was not close to him.
“The boy grew up to feel that women were a fearful mystery. He was inhibited heterosexually but the overwhelming respectability of his background probably kept him from much overt homosexuality,” Dr. Kenefick speculated. He might have attempted sexual relations with women but was successful only if he could imagine himself humiliating, beating, and torturing them.
Each time he murdered, the physician suggested, he was attempting to “reestablish a seductive scene, to carry out buried incestuous fantasies, and to exorcize certain fears by acting out a fantasy of degrading and controlling an overwhelming and fearsome mother.”
“Mr. S.” was probably not an exceptional man in appearance—not too tall, not too short, not too deformed—or someone would have noticed. He probably was admitted on some pretext, or entered by slipping the lock.
“It is an easy matter to strangle someone from behind, enough to induce unconsciousness, with a forearm grip.” Or he could clout them on the side of the neck with the edge of his hand. He would be at least thirty—perhaps older; strong enough to carry or pull heavy women (Blake, Jane Sullivan, Irga) about the room; neat and orderly (he left no fingerprints, probably wearing gloves at all times); probably single, separated, or divorced; a man “who knew how to kill efficiently, who was attracted by neat, pleasant old women with fair complexions and firm flesh … who felt a certain savage titillation in partially exposing women, who left them with a grotesque imitation of scarves, often elaborately tied around the necks; who contemptuously injured their sexual parts with a fantasy-phallus of glass or wood (whose firmness and bigness revealed his own wishes and fears), who looked for some small object—money? photographs?—in desks, closets, and bureau drawers.” He left his victims in such shocking positions not only to degrade and debase them, but also to make it appear that they tried to entice him—a tribute to the masculinity he desperately wished he possessed.
The police might do well to search for a man who had periods of idleness in summer, Christmas, and the holiday seasons, since most of the stranglings occurred then. At such times, Dr. Kenefick speculated, Mr. S. was left “face to face with his thoughts,” depression seized him, and he was driven to kill. He would probably be too busy at other times to be depressed. “What manner of man is relatively unoccupied during summer and holiday seasons?” One might think first of a school teacher or a college student; perhaps a charities collector. But it was difficult to think of other occupations which would be apt to be slack in the summer and winter holiday seasons.
Here Dr. Kenefick interposed an interesting observation. All this elaborate speculation would be eliminated “if it turned out that Mr. S. was a sneak thief who struck at someone who surprised him, thereby discovering, like an aged tiger who accidentally pounces on a villager, how easy humans are to kill.” The multiple dwellings in which virtually every victim lived were the haunt of sneak thieves, and perfectly suited for burglaries because of the thick walls and adjoining roofs—the latter allowing both a way of approach and retreat.
Observing that the murders took place in “mixed lace-curtain Irish, lower-drawer Yankee, student-type neighborhoods,” Dr. Kenefick noted that although one of the largest ethnic groups in Boston was the Italian, “no Italian name occurs among the victims.”
Why had the killer not struck since Mary Sullivan, January 4, 1964?
Some committee members believed he might have committed suicide. He might have been driven by a compulsion so overwhelming that in the end only his own destruction satisfied him. Or he might have been arrested for another crime, and might now be in prison, or in a mental institution. Perhaps he was one of those safe behind the walls of Bridgewater. Or, frightened off by the Attorney General’s manhunt launched immediately after Mary’s death, he might have taken cover and might be waiting for the search to subside before killing again.
One other possibility was presented—and that turned out to be the most alarming speculation of all. It came from Dr. Brussel, the New York psychiatrist who had already suggested that one man might be responsible. Now he advanced another theory to explain the halt in murders. Although virtually every member had his own conception of the Strangler, Dr. Brussel’s success in the Mad Bomber case led one to pay attention.
The Mad Bomber might have come from the pages of Sherlock Holmes. For nearly fourteen years New York had been terrorized by homemade bombs found in subways, bus terminals, and theaters, followed by taunting letters to the police. The bomber was obviously dem
ented but also cunning enough to leave no clues. In 1956, Dr. Brussel, Assistant Commissioner of Mental Hygiene of New York State, who had assisted the police in many cases dealing with psychopathic criminals, suggested that they should look for a man between forty and fifty, probably unmarried, sexually abnormal, a Roman Catholic of Central European stock, probably living with a sister or brother in Westchester County of New York or in southern Connecticut. As if this detailed description were not enough, he added that when police seized the man he most likely would be wearing a double-breasted suit. With all the buttons buttoned.
How did he arrive at these conclusions?
Dr. Brussel explained. The man was between forty and fifty because paranoia reaches its peak then and the crime was obviously that of a paranoiac. He was sexually abnormal, and so probably unmarried, because each bomb was shaped like a penis, and the W in his notes looked like a woman’s breasts, although he printed all other letters in block type. Roman Catholic of Central European descent living in Westchester or southern Connecticut because bombs are a traditional method of protest in Central Europe, most Central Europeans are Roman Catholics, and the largest concentrations of this ethnic group near New York City are in Westchester and southern Connecticut. Living with his family because close knit family life marks the people of Central Europe. Finally, the double-breasted suit: because the Bomber, as proved by the fact he left no clues, was extremely neat; his femininity, added to his neatness, would lead him to wear what is perhaps the neatest (especially when primly buttoned) and most protective of suits (if he knew the police were searching for him).
The Boston Strangler Page 19
