Strangled

by Brian McGrory

  So livid that he pounded his fist on the desk, then picked up a pile of papers and tossed them on the floor beside him. His face was beet red, his eyes contorted. Normally a handsome man with silvery hair and a fit frame, he looked like a tired, angry pensioner who had just found out that his Social Security COLA was frozen in the halls of Congress.

  Harrison had personally called me the moment I got back to my desk from the Lauren Hutchens murder scene, saying he needed to see me, Mongillo, and preferably the editor of the paper on an urgent matter. I thought he might be prepared to confide information in this investigation. Apparently I thought wrong.

  “No sir,” I replied. “We didn’t ask for these letters. We didn’t seek them out. As soon as we received them, we not only alerted your detectives, but we handed over the original copies —”

  “As soon as you received them? As soon as you fucking received them?” That was the commissioner again, his voice rising to a whole new level of anger. “When my men arrived at the fucking murder scene this morning, the two of you were already standing outside the fucking door. And you’re saying you called us as soon as you received them.”

  He picked up another pile of papers and flung them on the floor. I’ve never quite understood the mentality of executives — or, for that matter, of anybody else — who feel the need to rant and throw objects. But I guess that wasn’t really the point here. The point was that, well, he kind of had a point. We had waited to call, maybe wrongly so.

  I said, “I received the note and driver’s license this morning. We called on the way over. We arrived at the victim’s doorway at roughly the same time as the police.”

  Harrison stared at me for a long moment, like he didn’t believe what I had just said, his hands first on his cheeks and then sliding absently through his hair. They came to rest on the back of his neck, and he bowed his face in apparent thought. Mongillo and Martin remained quiet on either side of me — or as quiet as can be, in Mongillo’s case. I could hear him breathing out of his nose, the sound like wind gushing through trees.

  Finally, Harrison looked up, directed his gaze at me, Mongillo, and then at Martin, and said, “You’re not going to report this.”

  We sat there in silence for another moment until I said, “Not report what?”

  “This. For starters, those damned letters. And you’re not going to report whatever it is that you saw in the Hutchens apartment this morning.”

  Mongillo piped in, “Why not?” He sounded sincerely surprised, taken aback.

  Harrison directed his gaze at him and said, “Because you’ll fuck up this entire investigation. You’ve got absolutely no idea what you have. You have no idea the meaning of what you saw. You’ll send this city into mass hysteria, and you’ll get in the way of us trying to do our jobs.”

  The three of us sat in collective silence again. This time it was Martin who broke it.

  “Commissioner,” he said, respectfully but firmly, “we regard this as a significant story, and are fully aware of the conflicting interests. Should the public know about the possibility of a serial killer? Will our reportage in any way compromise the integrity of the investigation? We’re very prepared to give this some serious thought, keeping in mind at all times that our ultimate responsibility is to our readers.”

  I first looked at Martin out of the corner of my eye, and as he spoke, I turned my head fully to watch him. When did he grow a pair of brass balls? Actually, I say that in jest. As aggravating as Peter Martin can be to work for, I’ve never known another newsman who has his ability to reach the right decision for all the right reasons, story after story after story.

  Apparently, Harrison wasn’t thinking the same thing. He looked at Martin incredulously and all but yelled, “This isn’t a fucking journalism ethics class, Mr. Martin. This is real life, and in this case, real death. Debate this all you want. Just don’t print it. If you have to, write that a thirty-two-year-old woman named Lauren Hutchens was found dead, and police are investigating the cause.”

  “Given what we know, that would be a lie,” Martin said.

  “You don’t know that. You don’t know if these notes are a fraud. You can’t even be sure of what you saw today. You caught one quick glimpse through a half-open door. You know nothing.”

  Maybe, maybe not. But we knew, like he knew, that these notes weren’t likely a fraud. The first one could have been. The second one led us to a woman’s body. And through that open doorway we saw a crime scene that was pretty damned horrific, and we saw it long enough, well enough, to record in our heads, and later on notepads, the gory details of a young woman’s death.

  Harrison bowed his head again. When he spoke, it was in a lower voice, with a calmer tone, as if he was trying to regroup. He said, “Look, there are three potential scenarios that could unfold if you print a half-cocked story. One, whoever sent you these notes will kill again very soon, because he’s obviously seeking publicity. The publicity you give him will fuel a desire for more. Two, antithetically speaking, it could cause the killer to not send you any more notes, stunting an opportunity for additional clues. Three, you may prompt copycat killings in the city, which serial killings often do. In other words, frustrated husbands and boyfriends will off their women under the guise of this Phantom Fiend.”

  He added, almost politely now, “Does this make any sense to you?”

  Martin, rising now from his chair, said, “It does, Commissioner, it does. But there’s a fourth scenario as well, and that is, if we print the story, we warn people to take proper precautions against a serial killer, and we potentially save lives. Like I said, we’re going to give this some very serious thought. We appreciate your time.”

  I reflexively got up right after Martin, mesmerized by his performance. I’d follow this guy into battle, and actually, I think I just had. Mongillo stood after me and completed the procession.

  When you’re the commissioner of a major police department, you’re accustomed to giving orders, not merely making requests. You’re used to people doing precisely as you say, not tabling your demands for further consideration. Poor Hal Harrison. I don’t think he knew what had hit him. He was undoubtedly thinking about his mayoral campaign, about a city gripped by fear as the police commissioner tried to make the leap into city hall. What was taking place all around him was not a formula for electoral success.

  As the door swung shut behind us, I heard Harrison holler into his phone, “Get me Mac Foley — immediately!” I think I also heard Martin clank a little bit while he walked. The question remained, though: What the hell were we going to do now?

  9

  I sat at my computer doing exactly as Martin had told me: writing what I knew. Vinny Mongillo stood over my left shoulder, loudly crunching on a large bag of Cheetos.

  “Eating helps me think,” Vinny said defensively when I first shot him a withering look about the noise. If that had really been the case, he’d be the most thoughtful human being on the planet. I didn’t say that to him, but I wanted to.

  On my screen, I described the murder scene. I wrote of the two notes that the Phantom Fiend had sent me. I asked Mongillo for more background on the Boston Strangler and included some of that as well. We had other reporters working the story who would be calling in soon from the field, including Jennifer Day, who was pressing Lauren Hutchens’s family for information and reaction, and our crime and grime reporter, Benny Simms, who was trolling his sources at Boston PD for any new nuggets.

  “It’s not art, but it’ll do,” Mongillo said, now drinking a can of Diet Coke. Someone tell me how that makes any sense: a guy who just polished off a veritable burlap sack filled with processed cheese snacks was now drinking a sugar-free soda.

  He added, “Get up for a minute, Fair Hair. Let the master sit down and write.”

  I stared at his fingertips, which were orange from his Cheetos, and said, “Keep your goddamned mitts away from my keyboard.”

  “Tough crowd in here,” he replied, wiping his pal
ms across his plaid shirt.

  At that moment, Martin materialized at my desk the way he always does, right out of thin air. He had a somber look on his face, which I initially attributed to him crashing from the high of standing up to the police commissioner. But he said in a tight voice, “We need to gather in my office. Justine’s got some concerns.”

  Justine, for the record, is Justine Steele, the former editor in chief of the Boston Record, now the publisher, meaning she is the paper’s chief executive officer, the one who answers to the board of directors and the stockholders, who may or may not understand that good journalism is necessary for good profits. We’d probably find that out very soon.

  “The mayor called,” she said, as the four of us sat around Martin’s table.

  I wanted to correct her and say acting mayor, but for the second time in a matter of minutes, I contained myself. By the way, the office probably still seemed comfortably familiar to Steele, given that Martin hadn’t changed one single thing about it since moving in after her. If Steele had left her family pictures on the desk, Martin would have kept them there as well.

  “She’s not pleased, and I have to admit, she raised some valid points,” Steele said, sighing. “This story is going to trigger widespread panic. We’re essentially telling the public that there’s a serial killer on the loose, even though police aren’t confirming there’s a connection between these two killings. On top of that, it has the potential to hinder two murder investigations.”

  She paused and looked at each of us. “Are we one hundred percent sure what it is we have?”

  Maybe I should have deferred to Martin to answer, but I was comfortable enough with Justine to barge right in. I had worked with her when she was editor on some of the biggest stories this paper has ever broken. So I said, “We know we got these letters. We know that one of them led us to a victim that the police weren’t aware of yet. We know that victim was strangled to death. We know the writer of these notes uses a nickname that was also used for the Boston Strangler.”

  Here I paused, then added with a sigh of my own, “I’m not sure what more we need.”

  “What we need is to make sure we’re doing the right thing,” Steele replied coolly. “What would your lede be?”

  I said, “Right now, the lede is that a thirty-two-year-old woman was found strangled to death in her Fenway apartment yesterday morning after her driver’s license was delivered to a Boston Record reporter with a note saying, ‘More women will die.’ ”

  Okay, maybe Mongillo was right. It’s not art, but good newspaper writing rarely is, and it cut right to the bone-chilling point.

  I continued, “The second graph would point out that hers was the second death of a young woman in which the victim’s driver’s license was sent to the Record reporter, accompanied by a note. Both times, the note was signed ‘The Phantom Fiend’ — the same moniker that referred some forty years ago to a serial killer better known as the Boston Strangler.”

  As I talked this through, I was feeling a rush of adrenaline. In a perfect world, reporters aren’t supposed to be part of the story, though the mere fact that a reporter covers a story makes him or her an inherent part. People change their actions when they know there will be public awareness. Politicians preen. Lazy bureaucrats suddenly rush. Businessmen become uncharacteristically concerned about the consumers they’re supposed to serve.

  But if we printed this story, I wouldn’t merely be a part of it. I’d be dead center — pardon the term — especially given what happened on the Charles River the night before. A serial killer was communicating with the city he was terrorizing through a senior reporter at the largest newspaper in town. Sickening? Maybe. Intoxicating? Definitely. And this from someone who once found himself front and center in an international story when I was shot and wounded in what appeared to be a presidential assassination attempt. That’s an entirely different matter — though it does explain my fear of loud noises and presidents.

  Steele said, “We don’t know definitively that it was a strangling, right? The cops aren’t confirming the cause of death yet. There is no coroner’s report. Things aren’t always as they seem.”

  No, they’re not; she was right. But before I could reply, she said, “And the Boston Strangler — he’s dead. We know that for a fact.”

  Mongillo interjected, “No, we don’t know that for a fact. Albert DeSalvo is dead, but he was never charged or convicted in any of the stranglings. There are a lot of people who never believed that he was the Boston Strangler.”

  Mongillo said this with unusual intensity, much as when he corrected me on the same point the day before. His words were so heartfelt, I could even overlook the orange Cheetos crumbs that had taken residence on the side of his lips.

  Steele said to Mongillo, “You’re not suggesting that the same Boston Strangler from the sixties is killing these women now?”

  Mongillo shook his head slowly. A crumb fell from his face to his lap. He said, “I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no. I’m only saying that our job is to keep an open mind. Life is strange.”

  Life is strange. Tell me about it. I was supposed to be spending this day stretched out on a comfortable chaise lounge on a warm Hawaiian beach beside the woman I would love for the rest of my life — all the while with a paperback novel in one hand and a frozen strawberry concoction in the other, listening to the tranquil waves lap lazily against the Pacific shore. And here I was in Boston writing a story about a woman who apparently had been raped, then strangled in her Fenway apartment by a killer who had personally revealed his vile acts to me.

  Yes, Vinny, life is definitely strange.

  Steele said, “The thing that I have to keep in mind, that we have to keep in mind, is how do we do the most public good. Mayor Laird tells me that the police have made major progress in the investigation, and that publicity, and the resulting public outcry, could hamper the case.”

  Martin interjected, “Or do we do the most public good by warning readers there is a serial killer in their midst who has told the Boston Record, and I quote, that ‘more women will die.’ ”

  Steele shot him a look that wasn’t just cool but arctic. I mean, you could get freezer burn, that look was so cold. I had to wonder if the acting mayor had gotten to her. I’d read in the Traveler’s gossip column that the two were becoming buddies, seen together at a play one night, and in the Record luxury box at a Patriots game in December. I’ve never even sat in the Record’s damned luxury box. Did Steele leave her news judgment on the newsroom floor when she got promoted to the front office?

  Martin ignored her look, or maybe he wasn’t aware of it. He added, “We could actually save lives.”

  Steele replied, “Or the police could save lives by cracking the case faster without our interference.” Each word came out of her mouth with icicles hanging from them.

  Then she looked at me, even sterner now. “Jack, you guys write up what you have. I want to see it before we make up our minds on this thing. It’s not an easy decision. But it’s one that I feel I have to personally make.”

  Not easy? In the last thirty-six hours, I’ve had my fiancée flee the state on our wedding day. I’m on the friends-and-family list of a serial killer. And someone tried to drown me in the freezing, fetid water of the Charles River the night before. And she’s telling me that the decision she has to make in the comfortable confines of her fireplaced office is not an easy one? I made a mental note to land myself a job in management. It was starting to feel like the right time.

  Of course, what we didn’t know then was that it was about to become even less easy.

  I filed the story at 6:00 p.m., after taking feeds from reporters Jennifer Day and Benny Simms, neither of whom had a whole lot to offer, but just enough to help round things out. Just before I hit the Send button, Mongillo leaned over my desk, kissed the computer screen, and said, “I’ll see you in tomorrow’s paper. Please, story, please, get yourself into tomorrow’s paper.” And just like t
hat, it was out of our hands.

  I leaned back and thought about the voice mail I had received from the general manager of the Hawaiian resort that I should have been staying at that night but wasn’t. He expressed deep regret over my circumstances, and slightly less regret over the fact that there was nothing he could or would do about a refund on my significant deposit. I was, in a word, completely screwed — though I guess that’s two words.

  Right now, I just craved a steak — a fat, juicy, dry-aged sirloin sizzling in its own juices on a warm plate that would also carry some home fries and grilled asparagus.

  I was punchy. I was tired. I had precisely three hours of sleep the night before. And what I craved wasn’t what I needed, because what I needed was a crash course on the Boston Strangler and Albert DeSalvo, and why the latter was believed to be the former, and why it was that Vinny Mongillo didn’t think it was necessarily so. So I did something that no right-thinking reporter in any newsroom in America ever wants to do. I walked into the morgue, asked them to set me up at a table, and began my own exhaustive research.

  Soon enough, a nice man by the name of Chadwick — or maybe it was Chad Wick, I really don’t know — delivered to me about a dozen musty manila folders, all of them crammed full of the yellowed news clips of the Record’s coverage of the Boston Strangler killing spree and DeSalvo’s confession about a year later.

  Poring over the stories, I quickly learned this: There were eleven murders in all from the summer of 1962 through the very early winter of 1964; the first victims were women in their fifties and sixties who typically lived alone, the later victims women in their twenties and thirties; the killer often left semen on their bodies — in one case, on the victim’s chest, in another, around her mouth; sometimes the killer left garish looping bows around the victims’ necks, not unlike the one I saw earlier that day on Lauren Hutchens; sometimes the victims were ghoulishly positioned to greet investigators as they came onto the crime scenes. Again, see: Hutchens, Lauren. All of the women were strangled to death.