by Susan Kelly
At 12:30 P.M., Flora telephoned Eaton’s Drug Store across the street to find out if Evelyn had been in to pick up her Sunday paper. She hadn’t.
Evelyn was supposed to join Flora and her forty-one-year-old son, Robert, for dinner that day. Robert had left for his office at 9:00 to attend to a backlog of paperwork.
Flora hung up from her phone call to the druggist and went to the apartment of another neighbor, Marie L’Horty. Had Marie seen Evelyn? Marie hadn’t.
Now extremely worried, Flora decided to go into Evelyn’s apartment and check for herself. She asked Marie to accompany her.
Using the key Evelyn had given her (Evelyn had a key to Flora’s place), Flora unlocked her friend’s front door and opened it. Uneasily, she peered inside the apartment.
Then she shrieked, “My God, she’s been attacked.”
“I’m going to call the police,” Marie L’Horty said.
At that moment, Robert Manchester, who had been having an affair with Evelyn, arrived home from work. He went into his lover’s apartment. Just last night they had been on a date to Revere Beach, a waterfront amusement park.
A few moments later Robert emerged from the apartment, his hands to his face. “She’s gone,” he said to his mother.
Evelyn was indeed gone. Her body lay faceup on a disordered bed, its lower half completely exposed. There were two stockings knotted around her neck and one around her left ankle—her feet may have been tied together by her attacker, who cut the bond before he left the apartment.
She was wearing white ankle socks, a torn nightgown, and a housecoat from which three buttons were missing.
There was blood in both her ears and semen in her mouth.
The bed and floor were littered with crumpled lipstick and semen-stained tissues. A pair of underpants, lipstick-stained just above the crotch, lay at the foot of the bed. They had been used to gag Evelyn; Robert had yanked them from her mouth in a frantic but futile effort to resuscitate her.
The blond divorcee, who everyone thought had looked twenty years younger than her true age, had performed, or been forced to perform, oral sex before being strangled.
Evelyn, whose marriage had broken up three decades earlier, had worked for Sylvania Electric as a lamp assembler. She had moved to 224 Lafayette Street in 1959, after the death of her mother. She was known as a quiet and pleasant woman who, despite her friendliness, was somewhat timorous. She would never admit a strange man to her apartment—especially not if she were clad only in a nightgown and bathrobe.
She had written a letter to a relative—never finished and never mailed—in which she spoke of her dream that she and Robert Manchester would be married in the spring of 1964. Robert, like his mother, was apparently unaware that his fiancee was seventeen years older than he.
And there was one other secret Evelyn kept from Manchester: While she was involved with him, she was also seeing another man.
May 7, 1992, was a gorgeous day, sunny and far warmer than the weather forecasters had predicted. John Moran, ten years retired from the Salem Police Department, spent it taking a visitor on a guided tour of the murder scene of Evelyn Corbin.
He remembers the day of Evelyn’s death well. He was one of the first to arrive at 224 Lafayette Street in response to Marie L’Horty’s phone call.
Moran believes that he knows who killed Evelyn Corbin, and that person was not Albert DeSalvo. “It was just impractical for DeSalvo to come down and pick out a house on a foggy Sunday morning in Salem.”
Another factor had always niggled at Moran: In his confession to Evelyn’s murder, Albert said that he’d gotten her to admit him to the apartment because the “super” (superintendent) of the building wanted him to check a leak.
The handyman who took care of such matters at 224 Lafayette Street did not refer to himself by this term. It isn’t one that is used in Salem, according to Moran. In any case, Evelyn knew the handyman and also knew that he didn’t work Sundays. And there were no emergencies in the building—certainly not in Evelyn’s apartment—that would have caused him to disrupt his normal schedule.
Albert DeSalvo told Bottomly that he had come to Evelyn’s front door.
Moran knew exactly how Evelyn’s killer had entered her apartment: He had climbed the fire escape and crawled in through a window.
He had left evidence of his presence on the fire escape.
Evelyn, a nervous woman, had called the police on a number of occasions before her death to report prowlers in the neighborhood or outside her building. She may have imagined some of these menacing presences, mistaking the rustle of leaves or the creak of a tree branch in the wind for the sound of someone trying to break into her home. Then again, she may not have. In the days before her murder, other people in nearby buildings had complained of men acting suspiciously in the area.
On the morning of Evelyn’s murder, a tall, gray-haired man in a dark suit was observed loitering inside as well as outside 224 Lafayette Street.
The previous evening, at 9:00, a man who lived at 233 Lafayette Street answered a knock on his door. A tall gray-haired man, a stranger, asked to see the man’s wife. She wasn’t in, the apartment dweller replied. The stranger said that he’d heard that the woman was looking for a new job, and that he had a lead on one for her. He promised to return when the wife was home. He never did.
The woman in question did not recognize the description her husband gave of the visitor. Nor was she looking for different work.
At around 11:00 in the morning on September 7, someone had rung the doorbell of Yvonne Michaud, who also lived at 233 Lafayette Street.
That address would shortly assume enormous importance in the investigation of Evelyn’s murder.
On Monday, September 9, 1963, a man who lived on Dunlap Street in Salem reported to the police that his sixteen-year-old daughter had run off with a twenty-five-year-old married man from Lynn. Moran, who would spend the next three weeks, day and night without interruption, probing Evelyn’s murder, took the complaint.
Moran knew who the Lynn man was, and what he knew he didn’t like. The man was a thief. And he was a psychotic. His name was Robert Cambell, and he had been thrown out of his own home by his wife after she had witnessed him kicking their toddler daughter in the face. The child had wandered into a room Cambell was painting and disturbed him at his labors.
He had gone thereafter to live in a boardinghouse in Lynn, from which he was expelled for nonpayment of rent.
On his uppers, he sought refuge in Salem. On the Saturday night before Evelyn’s murder, Cambell and the acquaintance he bunked with at 233 Lafayette Street bought a box of doughnuts for their Sunday breakfast. That morning, Cambell woke up, put some of the doughnuts in his pockets, and left 233 Lafayette—about an hour and a half before Evelyn’s death.
Later that day, Salem police found a doughnut on the fire escape outside Evelyn’s window. She did not eat doughnuts, nor was she in the habit of tossing stale baked goods out her window to feed the birds.
Cambell and his teenage companion left Salem during the early afternoon on September 8. Cambell was adamant about not listening to the radio as he drove; he did not want to hear any news reports.
He told the girl with him that he had five or six dollars. That amount was missing from Evelyn’s handbag.
Cambell and his partner in flight had picked up a stray puppy before leaving Salem. After their car broke down, they holed up in a small town in New York State. The girl deserted Cambell after he abused the dog so badly it required veterinary treatment. She went to Hudson, New York, with another man. Cambell followed her in a stolen car and was arrested for auto theft.
A few months later, having served a short prison sentence, he was back in Salem. He moved in with a woman who shortly ejected him from her house because of his violent behavior and nonstop demands for oral sex. Cambell’s wife had made a similar complaint.
Evelyn had fellated her killer, probably under extreme duress.
On the corner of Roslyn and La
fayette streets one night, Cambell assaulted a fifty-two-year-old woman. He had rape in mind: He punched his victim, gouged at her eyes, and shoved his fingers down her throat to gag her. He left her bleeding and semiconscious on the sidewalk.
He had done exactly the same thing to another woman in Peabody, a town adjacent to Salem, the previous night.
Both victims positively identified Cambell as their attacker. Charged with the assaults, he was tried, convicted, and imprisoned for eight years.
His whereabouts today are unknown.
When Albert DeSalvo began confessing to the stranglings, Moran asked his chief, City Marshal John Tully, to seek permission from the attorney general’s office to interview DeSalvo. Moran had some very specific questions he wanted to ask about the murder of Evelyn Corbin.
Tully made the request several times. It was never granted. It was never even acknowledged.
Moran says he never received back from the Strangler Bureau the information he submitted to it on the Corbin killing—although he had been wise enough to keep copies of the files for himself.
There is an echo here of the Beverly Samans case. John Grainger, captain of detectives for the Cambridge Police Department, had prepared a list of questions relevant to the Samans murder and submitted it to the Strangler Bureau. Those questions were never asked of DeSalvo, a former Cambridge detective maintains today.
Moran interviewed Robert Cambell concerning his whereabouts on the morning of Evelyn’s death. Cambell lied, demonstrably so, in saying that he had left 233 Lafayette Street at 11:00 A.M., when it was known that he had departed there at least an hour and a half earlier. “He went into tantrums and had rages,” Moran says, adding with considerable understatement, “he was a pretty unstable character.”
Moran, convinced that Cambell had slain Evelyn when she interrupted him burglarizing her apartment, forcing her to fellate him before killing her, was never able to collect the one final piece of evidence that would justify Cambell’s arrest on a homicide charge.
Thirty years later, Moran is philosophical about the situation. “There are,” he says, “a lot more murderers walking the streets than there are behind bars.”
Attorney General Edward Brooke’s 1964 report on the coordination of the stranglings characterized Joann Graff, who was raped and strangled in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the weekend of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as “an inhibited, obsessively neat, and insular personality.” After her death, some newspaper reports described her as “a statuesque blonde,” a phrase that bestowed on her a creamy aura of Marilyn Monroe-like sensuality. The truth, at it usually does, probably lay somewhere in the middle.
Twenty-three-year-old Joann Graff had graduated from the University of Chicago Downtown in June of 1963. There she had been a member of the Art League Paper and the Zion Lutheran Senior Choir and Concert Orchestra. She had attended the Chicago Art Institute and, prior to that, the Chicago Vocational School.
She had come to Lawrence in the summer of her graduation year; she had taken a job as an industrial designer for Bolta Products. For a short while she lived at the YWCA. What she wanted, ideally, was to board with a nice family in the Lawrence area. She even asked the pastor of her church if he could help her locate one within reasonable commuting distance of her job. He couldn’t. On July 23, she moved into a second-floor apartment at 54 Essex Street in Lawrence, although not without trepidation. She wanted assurance from her landlord that the neighborhood was safe. He told her it was.
Exactly four months later she would die there, in considerable pain and terror.
Before that point, however, she had decided that she liked the independence of living alone. And perhaps also the peace and quiet and privacy; she had grown up in a large family.
People who spoke publicly about her after her death described her as a retiring, though pleasant, young woman. Elsie Hartung of Methuen, the town next door to Lawrence, who often had Joann to dinner, told reporter Richard Remmes of the Boston Herald that Joann “had no boyfriends and would not even wear a flashy print dress. She was a member of the Missouri Synod which is much stricter [than the mainstream Lutheran church].”
She was certainly a devout practitioner of Lutheranism. Evidence found in her apartment after her murder suggests that her killer had interrupted her while she was reading and making notes on a religious tract. This may have been in preparation for the Sunday school class she was to teach the following morning.
She kept her small apartment, with its linoleum floors and heavy, depressing furniture, impeccably clean. She was a fanatic about staying within the limits of the weekly budget she had set for herself, skipping a meal if she felt she had overspent in some other area.
Her pastor referred to her as “a quiet girl with few friends.”
Other reports suggested that she was not quite as prim and repressed as she appeared to be. She was not averse to taking a drink at a party, and after she had, she could giggle and flirt quite charmingly with an attractive male guest. She even developed a crush on a man, one who was unavailable to her for the simple reason that he was gay. She may have been too naive to realize this.
She did socialize with some of the men at Bolta Products. Police administered lie detector tests to thirty-five of the company’s employees. Six days after her death, the Herald reported that at least fifty men had been questioned or given polygraphs in connection with it.
Other than her killer, the last person to see Joann alive was one of her landlords, George Privitera, who came to collect the rent on Sunday, November 23, 1963. On that day Massachusetts was still staggering in the concussive wake of the murder of John F. Kennedy twenty-four hours earlier.
At 3:35 that afternoon, someone knocked on the door of Kenneth Rowe and his wife at 54 Essex Street. Rowe opened the door to a man in his mid to late twenties, with slicked-back hair, wearing a brown jacket, a dark shirt, and dark green pants. The man asked for “Joan” Graff. Rowe told him she lived upstairs.
Rowe’s wife had complained previously that for the past few days, someone had been wandering the halls of their building. The description she gave of this man differed from that her husband provided of the man who had come to their door Saturday afternoon.
Earlier in the day, Joann had been noticed chatting with a blond man outside the apartment building.
At 4:30, Joann was supposed to have dinner with her friends from the Lutheran church, Mr. and Mrs. John Johnson of Andover. Mrs. Johnson had begun telephoning her guest at 3:30. She called several times over the next hour and got no answer. Nonetheless, John Johnson drove over to Lawrence to pick up Joann at the appointed time. He knocked at her door and got no response, then went home.
At that very same time, an agitated and disheveled man entered Martin’s Tavern, a short walk from 54 Essex Street, glanced around nervously, used the men’s room, and left.
When he’d walked into the bar, he’d held the door open behind him and looked over his shoulder, as if trying to spot someone in pursuit.
At 9:30 on Sunday morning, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson drove to Joann’s apartment to pick her up for church. She didn’t answer her door. Nor did she show up to teach her Sunday school class. Alarmed, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson consulted with their pastor. Then they called the police.
At 11:35 A.M., Lawrence police officer F. T. O’Connor and Joann’s other landlord, Sebastian Corzo, entered the second-floor apartment at 54 Essex Street.
Joann lay on her back across her bed, nude except for an opened blouse. Her ripped bra was bloodstained, as was the bedspread beneath her. Her right breast had been bitten; her left jaw and neck were contused, as was her right thigh.
Two brown nylon stockings and the leg of a black leotard were drawn tightly around her neck.
There was a slight injury to her genitalia and her vagina was loaded with sperm.
Several odd facts and anomalies cropped up during the long investigation of Joann’s death.
It was discovered that Kenneth Rowe, the Northeas
tern University engineering student who had been Joann’s neighbor, had previously lived at 84 Gainsborough Street in Boston, just across from Anna Slesers.
Joann’s pastor was friendly with Juris Slesers, Anna’s son. A Latvian refugee like Mrs. Slesers, the pastor had attended her funeral.
Bradley Schereschewsky, a suspect in the deaths of Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, and Jane Sullivan, had been deinstitutionalized the weekend of Joann’s death. His parents lived in Andover, just three miles from the murder scene.
The man who had argued with Beverly Samans at the Second Unitarian Church Choir audition in September 1962 owned a cottage in Rockport. Joann and a male coworker had visited that picturesque seacoast town the evening before her death.
Albert DeSalvo, working for the Highland Construction Company, had been building a retaining wall in Andover on Friday, November 22, 1963.
Neither Jules Vens, the proprietor of Martin’s Tavern, nor Kenneth Rowe recognized DeSalvo’s photograph when shown it by authorities.
33
The Murder of Mary Sullivan
At 5:00 P.M. on January 4, 1964, twenty-five-year-old Christine Tracy and her sixteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, both of Belmont, were about to get into their car, which they had parked in the Boston Common Underground Garage off Charles Street. At that moment they were confronted by a young man wielding a knife.
“I’m desperate,” he said. “I’m wanted for murder. I gotta get out of Boston fast.”
He forced Christine and Elizabeth to drive him to Newton Highlands, about eight or nine miles southwest of Boston. There he robbed them of five dollars and fled.
At 6:00 P.M., Pamela Parker and Patricia Delmore returned home from a day’s work at Filene’s department store in downtown Boston where both were employed. The door to their three-room apartment at 44A Charles Street was locked, so they rang the bell. No one answered.
