The Boston Stranglers

by Susan Kelly

  Carnegie was one of a chain of schools owned and operated by a lawyer named E. L. Koenemann of Cleveland, Ohio. In addition, Koenemann ran a lending service to which the students at his schools could apply for tuition loans. (The tuition at the Boston branch of the school was twelve hundred dollars, steep for the early 1960s. A decade later, an institution such as Boston College would still be charging only a little over two thousand dollars.) Koenemann was also the founder and director of an accrediting agency. Its purpose was to award accreditation to his own schools, since nobody else would.

  Lawsuits were pending against the various Carnegie schools not only in Boston but in Washington, D.C., and Cleveland.

  Carnegie purported to graduate expert X-ray technicians, laboratory technicians, and dieticians. Yet its curriculum offered courses in poise, wardrobe, and elocution—hardly essential skills, one would think, for a career amid test tubes and slides. Carnegie also gave a course in the maintenance of “a live [presumably a misprint for ”lithe“] well-proportioned body,” again not a credential a health care worker might be expected to list at the top of her resume.

  Carnegie did not require its entering students to have good scholastic records. It apparently didn’t even require grade transcripts. Its campus recruiters were salesmen who received a $125 commission for each student who enrolled and paid the tuition. The commission itself came out of a $150 application fee tendered by the student.

  Among the Carnegie faculty was a radiation therapist who had been dismissed from a Pennsylvania college for running a phony cancer cure business on the side. Another was an alcoholic sexual pervert who had once operated his own “School of X-Ray Technology” under the Carnegie aegis. Yet another was a narcotics-addicted doctor whom Carnegie actually fired for being unfit, which says a lot given the caliber of the employees the school retained.

  The shadiest member of this retinue of undesirables, however, was its dean, an habitue of Boston’s sex-for-sale Combat Zone who had managed to rack up an impressive series of arrests for open and gross lewdness, unnatural acts, and suspicion of grand larceny of an automobile. His name was William Russell Keany. Those who knew him described him as a very intelligent and highly cynical opportunist with a mean streak that never stayed very well hidden. One acquaintance said of him: “He is like the man Oscar Wilde described—one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

  On the day of her death, Sophie left Carnegie at 12:30 P.M. She and her classmates had been scheduled that afternoon to have their pictures taken for the house organ of a laundry company. The photographer wasn’t able to make it to the school to do the shoot, however, because his truck wouldn’t start. At 1:00 P.M., Keany announced to the students that the picture session had been canceled.

  He had apparently informed Sophie (and her alone) of the cancellation at least a half-hour earlier. That was why she had gone home. The normal ending time for day classes at Carnegie was 2:00 P.M.

  Keany’s rancid reputation, coupled with his knowledge of Sophie’s whereabouts the afternoon of her murder, drew the attention of some investigators. Competing for their interest, however, were two other outstanding suspects. One was the young “honey-haired” man who, giving his name as Thompson, had come to the door of Sophie’s neighbor Marcella Lulka and made suggestive remarks to her. Over two years later Mrs. Lulka would tell police that George Nassar was identical to “Thompson” but for his hair color.

  The other suspect was the twenty-two-year-old son of a Cambridge minister. His name was Albert Williams.

  At 4:30 P.M. on December 5, Eartis Riley, the wife of Anthony Riley, the nurse who’d attempted to resuscitate Sophie, heard a knock on the door of the apartment she shared with her husband at 315 Huntington Avenue. It was Al Williams. He said he was there to collect a book Tony Riley had promised to lend him. Eartis noticed immediately that Al was sweating profusely and seemed extremely agitated. He explained that he’d just come up five flights of stairs, and furthermore that it was hot in the building. It wasn’t. Eartis got rid of him.

  Just before 6:00 that evening, Al visited another acquaintance, Antoinette Grace, who lived nearby on Symphony Road. She let him into her apartment; he asked her if he could sleep there that night.

  Antoinette had been listening to the radio when Williams showed up on her doorstep. A few minutes after she admitted him to the apartment, a news bulletin interrupted the regularly scheduled program. It was announced that a young woman had been found murdered at 315 Huntington Avenue.

  “I’m going over,” Antoinette said.

  “I’m not going near that place,” Williams replied. Then he left the apartment.

  Antoinette described Williams to the police as being an “oddball.” She also told them that he had been “sort of forcing his attentions on her.”

  Where Williams spent the night is unclear. He couldn’t go to his parents’ home in Cambridge—his father had kicked him out of it six months previously and hadn’t seen him since. He did pay a brief visit to his grandparents at their Boston home on West Canton Street, where he wasn’t particularly welcome either. When police interviewed the grandparents later that evening they claimed to have no idea where Williams was now. Nor were they especially cooperative with the authorities.

  Williams was the possessor of a medical discharge from the army as well as a long criminal record. The police had been looking for him anyway in connection with breaking and entering and larceny and assault charges.

  He had also once worked as a laboratory technician, which of course was what Sophie had been studying to be.

  The killer did not ransack the apartment, but he did search it, rifling through photographs, examining the contents of bureau drawers, and scattering several packages of cigarettes on the floor. He left behind virtually no physical evidence of his presence70—not even wet footprints on the carpet, despite the fact that it had been raining heavily that afternoon.

  It emerged that Williams had not only known Sophie but had dated her at least once—about three and a half weeks before her murder, he’d taken her to the movies. Audri and Gloria said that he’d visited the apartment on two or three other occasions.

  Those who knew Williams often used the word “neurotic” when referring to him. He sometimes suffered blackouts, the result of a head injury sustained in adolescence. He had always been a braggart and a troublemaker.

  Williams was a bisexual who had been kept by men as well as women, necessary because he was unable to hold even menial jobs. He was also a sadist; he enjoyed inflicting pain and punishment on his female sexual partners.

  The police finally tracked him down and questioned him. They had to release him; there was no physical evidence left at the crime scene sufficient to press charges against him. After that he vanished again—and wasn’t found again until May of 1964. At that time, he was staying in a hotel in Harlem.

  He agreed to take a lie detector test, and one was given him in New York. The polygraph operator asked the key question: Had Williams been in Sophie’s apartment the afternoon of her death? He answered no.

  According to the test results, he was lying.

  The polygraph was readministered. The operator asked the same questions. Again, the machine indicated that Williams was lying.

  This was still not enough to charge Williams with homicide. He was free to go. Police could only hope that given Williams’s tendency to boast of his sexual exploits, he might one day slip and incriminate himself to a friend or acquaintance, who might then turn state’s witness.

  Unfortunately he never slipped—or if he did, no one bothered to inform the authorities.

  27

  The Murder of Patricia Bissette, I

  If the wintertime murder of Sophie Clark—young, attractive, black, and sharing an apartment with two friends—was a deviation from the pattern set in the summer of 1962, in which all of the strangling victims had been white, late middle-aged to elderly, and living alone, the slaying of Patricia Bissette ju
st before the end of that year fell into neither category. It borrowed from both: The victim was young, she was white, and she was the sole occupant of her apartment on Park Drive. And there was a new dimension. Patricia’s killer had not degraded her corpse. He had instead left her tucked in bed, almost as a mother would her child. Or a lover his mistress.

  Patricia Bissette, twenty-three at the time of her death, was raised in Middlebury, Vermont, by her adoptive mother, Hazel, and her aunt, Ruby Rogers, who ran a gift shop on Main Street. She attended local schools and sang in the choir of the Middlebury Methodist Church. At the high school she was an editor of the student newspaper and of the senior class yearbook. She served as a delegate to the model United Nations assembly held one year at Plymouth State Teachers College in New Hampshire. She was a member of the school chorus and the glee club, and played basketball after school. She was said to be gifted in math, science, and physics, and to have a flair for foreign languages.

  After graduation from high school, she attended the University of Vermont for one year, but dropped out in search of wider horizons. She followed her star to airline school in Missouri, and thereafter to New York to work in communications for American Airlines at Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport.

  Her stay in New York was not altogether pleasant. She became engaged to a man who worked as a meteorologist at the airport. The engagement was a short one, and ended at Patricia’s behest. She nevertheless continued to date the meteorologist even after their breakup; she felt sorry for him even though he was “a pest,” or so she confided to a friend. In late April of 1961 she was involved in an automobile accident in Queens that required brief hospital treatment. It was perhaps this last incident that sealed Patricia’s disenchantment with New York. At any rate, she packed up and moved to Boston, a much smaller and ostensibly more manageable city.

  In the late fall of 1961 she took a job as secretary and receptionist with an engineering firm on Commonwealth Avenue. For a while she shared an apartment on Newbury Street with another young woman. The July before her death, she moved into 515 Park Drive. The rent for her three-room first-floor apartment was normally $130; Patricia was allowed to pay only $75 in exchange for letting the building’s owner, Ada Kotock, and maintenance man Harry Martin use it to conduct rental business.

  “Very pleasant and punctual,” her coworkers described her. “A very friendly, very happy girl,” high school friends would recall, “a very thoughtful and intelligent girl.” “Very kind,” Harry Martin said. On January 18, 1963, Hazel Bissette, understandably pained and angered by other, less generous assessments of Patricia’s character, would write to Boston Police Detective Lieutenant Edward Sherry: “It is hard for you to believe that she was—Sweet, trusting, gullible, high morals, never would hurt anyone, give her last penny to someone with a hard luck story.”

  Dorothy Rancourt, who had worked with Patricia in New York, called her “a sucker for a sob story.”

  Patricia was all of those things, and more. It was the more that killed her.

  At 10:00 on Saturday morning, December 29, Patricia went to work for a while at Engineering Systems, Incorporated. Her boss, company vice-president Jules Rothman, lent her his car so she could do some shopping. At 1:30 that afternoon, he went to Patricia’s apartment to retrieve the station wagon. He joined his secretary for a cup of coffee.

  Sometime between 3:00 and 5:00 P.M., Patricia left her apartment with a sack of dirty clothes. She ran into Christian Van Olst, the janitor for her building and 509 Park Drive. He asked her where she was going. She told him she was going to do her laundry, and inquired whether all the machines in the basement of 509 were busy. Van Olst watched her walk down the alley between the two buildings and enter the basement of 509.

  At about 5:30 or 5:45, Patricia was back in her own apartment. Two of her neighbors, Linda Ladinsky and Charlene Adelman, spoke with her briefly when they returned a toaster Linda had borrowed.

  From that point on, Patricia’s movements became a little more difficult to trace.

  On Sunday morning, December 30, between 10:00 and 11:00, Harry Martin knocked on the door of Patricia’s apartment. When he got no response, he unlocked the door. The apartment was dark, so he switched on the light in the entry hall. He used the telephone to call Ada Kotock and discuss with her some business concerning another apartment building in Allston. They talked for perhaps five minutes. Then Martin went into the kitchen, again turning on the light, to see if Patricia had left any mail there for him or Mrs. Kotock. He noticed that the bedroom door was open, and also that one of the beds was piled with boxes. He later claimed not to have seen any sign of Patricia herself.

  That day a woman who lived at 500 Park Drive thought she heard screaming sometime between 3:00 and 4:00 P.M. She thought nothing of it until the following day when she learned that Patricia had been found murdered at 515 Park Drive.

  A waitress at the lunch counter of a local drugstore claimed that she’d seen Patricia having a snack at 4:30 on Sunday afternoon. She was accompanied by a dark-skinned man who spoke heavily accented English and whose manner toward the young woman was extremely possessive.

  At about 7:30 A.M. on Monday, December 31, Jules Rothman arrived at 515 Park Drive to pick up Patricia and drive her to work. He knocked at her door; she didn’t answer. After a few moments, he left. When he got to his office, he called Patricia. Her telephone went unanswered. An hour or so passed with no word from the secretary who was usually so reliable. Rothman, now very worried, returned to the apartment. With the help of Christian Van Olst, he climbed a stepladder to a front window, removed a screen, raised the unlocked window, and entered Patricia’s living room, knocking over the Christmas tree in the process. He found the young woman dead in her bed and called the police.

  The autopsy, performed by Michael Luongo, resulted in these findings:

  The body of the deceased lay flat in bed covered by bedding. About the neck was a ligature composed of several garments . . . The bedroom atmosphere was very cold. There was full rigor mortis. The body was clothed only in a blue and red print housecoat which was pushed up above the breasts together with an imitation leather [leopard?] skin pajama top which was also pushed up about the breasts. The right hand and wrist lay compressed under the right buttock ... In the mouth is a moderate amount of blood-tinged mucus and froth. Similar material is present in the nose . . . In the anterior surface of the right leg over the shin is a linear area of brownish-black soiling without injury, measuring six inches in length . . . There is no injury of the external genitalia. There is a moderate amount of mucoid secretion within the vagina. Several smears of this material [were] made and found to be loaded with spermatozoa ... The ligature, which tightly encircles the neck, is composed of four articles . . . 1) white blouse, knotted 3x anteriorly, 2) single stocking, 3) 2 nylon stockings.

  Although there was no injury to Patricia’s vagina, there was a slight one to her rectum. She was at least one month pregnant.

  One thing that became clear almost immediately on the last day of 1962 was that fifty-three-year-old Jules Rothman, married and the father of two grown sons, and twenty-three-year-old Patricia Bissette had been something considerably more intimate than employer and employee. The Boston cop who interrogated Rothman got right to the point:

  Q: How long have you been seeing her socially?

  A: Probably about, we were good friends, let’s see, for about March, since January she was my secretary.

  Q: How long has she been employed?

  A: A year and four months.

  Q: How long have you been lovers?

  A: We weren’t lovers, exactly, we were, let’s see, I would say January or February of this year.

  Q: Almost from the beginning?

  A: Yes.

  A: Have you stayed overnight at Newbury Street or on Park Drive with her?

  A: No.

  Q: You visited many times at her apartment?

  A: Just when she asked me to come over. She trusts people.<
br />
  Q: Do you know of any other man having intercourse with her?

  A: No.

  Q: How often did you go to her apartment?

  A: Maybe once a week or so.

  Q: Do you personally know any other fellows that were going with her or having intercourse with her?

  A: We never discussed it but there was a John, he is from Vermont but he is away for the weekend. I met him at the party. We were invited to a Christmas party and she told me about him and she may have had others but we never talked about people.

  The detective asked Rothman if Patricia had dated anyone else at Engineering Systems.

  A: She is friendly with Sheldon Kurtzer. She tells me she was out with him but never overnight.

  Once somebody took her home at 3 A.M., a salesman, and once she was out with Jim.

  Q: What is his last name?

  A: I don’t know his last name. This John is the one she has been going out with lately. She has been going out to Route One, in Dedham.

  The detective asked about Patricia’s attitude toward sex.

  Q: Was she an easy girl to have intercourse with?

  A: Yes, that is the trouble with her.

  Q: Was she a pushover?

  A: Yes, she was. She came from New York and she must have had some love affair. It wasn’t till she went to this apartment. [Rothman presumably was referring here to the onset of his involvement with Patricia.]

  Q: In other words, she didn’t say no?

  A: No, not to me.