Search for the Strangler

by Casey Sherman

  As soon as they returned to their Cape Cod home, Diane got on the phone with the Boston police. She told a detective about the incident at the church and asked what was being done to find Mary’s killer. The detective later learned that the priest who had given Mary her last rites had left the church for the Assumption Friary in Woodbridge, New Jersey, where he took a vow of silence.

  Silence would be exactly what the family got from the Boston Police Department, too. The phone calls from detectives came less frequently. In the days following Mary’s murder, investigators called Mary’s parents at least twice a week. But more recently, the Sullivans were lucky if they heard from the police twice a month. And soon after Diane and Florry’s trip to Boston, the family was getting no updates at all on the murder investigation. “I remember thinking, ‘God, I hope they know what they’re doing,’” Diane recalls. Growing desperate, Florry wrote a letter to the psychic Jeane Dixon asking for help. Dixon claimed to have predicted the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The letter went unanswered.

  The weeks and months after Mary’s murder were the most difficult of Diane’s life. She went back to class at Barnstable High School, where she was a senior, and tried to regain some sort of normalcy. Diane’s close friends applauded her strength, but the pain in her heart would not go away. “On those snowy winter nights,” she says, “I remember waking up out of a sound sleep and thinking, ‘Mary must be so cold, so cold. I even grabbed a blanket out of the linen closet and almost drove to the cemetery before I realized what I was doing.”

  2 : The Killing Season

  The murder of Mary Sullivan struck a particularly emotional chord with the general public. Mary’s photo was on the front page of virtually every major newspaper in the nation. Her smiling eyes and auburn hair reminded readers of their own daughters, their own sisters, and the girl next door. Letters from terrified citizens poured into the Boston Police Department and the Massachusetts attorney general’s office. The message was clear: Find the Boston Strangler before he strikes again.

  But Bostonians did not put their complete faith in the authorities. Frightened women dramatically changed their everyday routines. Some began to vary their route home from work. Others purchased attack dogs. Hardware stores ran out of door locks. Women even began to carry knives. Responding to the intense public pressure, Attorney General Edward Brooke created the Boston Strangler Task Force. The goal of this elite unit made up of Boston and state police was to consolidate evidence from each strangling to separate the serial killer from the copycats. The Boston Strangler Task Force would answer only to Brooke himself.

  FEBRUARY 1964

  Special officer Jim Mellon of the Boston Police Department rubbed his tired blue eyes and lit a cigarette. He exhaled a small plume of smoke and stared at the ceiling. Mellon was brainstorming. The forty-year-old cop, who had been working on the Boston Strangler case from the beginning, was one of the first investigators chosen for the Boston Strangler Task Force. Mellon kept reviewing Mary Sullivan’s case file inside the task force office under the golden dome of the statehouse. The office was filled with bulging filing cabinets containing thousands of documents on the Boston Strangler case. Mary Sullivan’s murder was not yet a month old, but because of the media attention, her file was already double the size of any of those concerning the other ten slayings.

  Mellon racked his brain to find a common element in Mary Sullivan’s murder and the previous killings. Yes, the women all had been strangled, and most of the victims were found with multiple ligatures wrapped tightly around their necks. But the killer or killers of the later victims could have taken this cue from the city’s two major newspapers, the Boston Globe and the Record American, which had recounted the crimes in graphic detail.

  If you hated a woman and wanted her dead, you could strangle her and the blame would be pinned on the perpetrator of the earlier killings. Mellon went over this theory in his mind. The detective could not get past the many discrepancies in the crime scenes. The newspapers were calling the murders sex crimes; yet only a few of the women had been raped. The wide range of the victims’ ages also troubled Mellon. The psychiatrists he consulted said serial killers selected their victims based on a particular profile. They hunted old women or young women, but usually not both. Thus, Mellon believed these murders were not the act of a single crazed man. But to prove his theory, he would have to go back to the very beginning. The detective closed Mary Sullivan’s case file and picked up another manila envelope from the large stack on his desk. The cover read: Anna Slesers.

  JUNE 14, 1962

  At fifty-six, Anna E. Slesers had witnessed enough horror in her life. She had watched helplessly as loved ones died when Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fought over her native Latvia in World War II. Anna Slesers did not know how she had managed to survive, and she would never forget those who died for her small country. Vowing that her son and daughter would never be subjected to the same fate, she escaped Eastern Europe with them shortly after the war and immigrated to Boston, which had a small but vibrant Latvian community.

  Slesers, an attractive divorcée, found work as a seamstress. By 1962, her children grown, she lived alone in a small apartment at 77 Gainsborough Street, two blocks from Boston’s Symphony Hall. Her quiet neighborhood catered to lower income families and college students from nearby Northeastern University.

  On the evening of June 14, 1962, Anna Slesers was getting ready for a bath. Later, she was to accompany her son to a memorial service for Latvia’s war dead. She had taken off her clothes and wrapped her robe tightly around her small body. Slesers placed a record on the turntable and walked toward her bathroom to turn on the water. As the steam started to rise, the sounds of Tristan und Isolde echoed through the apartment. In the next few minutes, Anna Slesers would be dead.

  Juris Slesers, Anna’s twenty-five-year-old son, told police he had arrived at his mother’s apartment just before seven o’clock that night. He knocked on the door of apartment 3-F, but there was no answer. He then returned to the building’s foyer and waited for his mother there, believing she might have gone to the store. Several minutes passed. Finally, the son returned to the apartment and forced his way in. The music was still playing. He found the body of his mother lying in the hallway, her bathrobe open, revealing her breasts and stomach. The cord of her robe was wrapped around her neck.

  That night, Jim Mellon had been cruising in his squad car on nearby Huntington Avenue, so he was one of the first police officers at the murder scene. He found Juris Slesers sitting on his mother’s couch. Looking around the immaculate apartment, Mellon noticed that the drawers of Anna Slesers’s bedroom dresser had been pulled out in arithmetic progression. The top drawer was open a quarter inch, the middle drawer was open a half inch, and the bottom drawer was open three-quarters of an inch. But nothing appeared to be missing. Juris Slesers led Mellon over to his mother’s body, telling Mellon he believed his mother had committed suicide. According to Juris’s theory, she had tried to hang herself from a hook on the bathroom door, but her body had fallen to the floor. There was no panic in his voice as he gave this explanation. “It’s as if I were a plumber and he was describing a broken pipe,” Mellon recalls now. Maybe he’s just in shock, the officer thought at the time. The son had made no attempt to cover his mother’s naked body, which Mellon also found odd. Kneeling down closer to the dead woman, he noticed that Slesers’s neck was scratched and that blood was trickling out of her vagina. This was no suicide. Anna Slesers had been sexually assaulted.

  Phil DiNatale was Mellon’s partner. Fellow cops kidded DiNatale about his resemblance to the retired heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano. The likeness worked well when he interrogated suspects. Mellon and his stocky partner went door to door that night, interviewing Slesers’s neighbors. No one remembered seeing the woman, though they recalled that a painting crew had been working outside the apartment that day. Mellon hoped that maybe someone on the crew had seen something.

  Tw
o days after Slesers’s murder, Dana Kuhn, a chemist at the Boston Police Department, called Mellon into his office. An analysis of the fibers vacuumed from the runner in the victim’s apartment showed three African American hairs, as well as three canine hairs, most likely from a small terrier. Anna Slesers was not known to have had any black friends, and she did not own a dog.

  JUNE 30, 1962

  While Mellon and DiNatale were still chasing leads in the Anna Slesers murder, another woman was strangled in Boston. This time, the victim was Nina Nichols, a retired physiotherapist. The sixty-eight-year-old Nichols was discovered on the bedroom floor of her apartment at 1940 Commonwealth Avenue, in the city’s Brighton section, just beyond Boston University. Nichols was wearing a pink bathrobe, which was open. Her bra was pushed up above her breasts, and two nylon stockings were tied around her neck. At first, police thought the crime was a burglary that ended in murder because the victim’s apartment had been ransacked, with every drawer pulled open, the contents strewn across the floor. On the other hand, a set of sterling silverware, an expensive camera, and the victim’s watch had been left untouched. There was also money in the woman’s purse. The medical examiner later determined that Nina Nichols had been raped.

  The Boston Police Department was now facing an unprecedented situation. Two older women had been strangled and sexually assaulted within two weeks of each other. The newly appointed police commissioner, Edmund McNamara, found himself in a difficult position. Mayor John Collins had appointed him on April 5, 1962, after a gambling scandal had rocked the department. McNamara knew that if he did not solve the murders quickly, he would be in danger of losing his job. To make sure that his department heads knew about the two crimes and their possible connection, he rounded up the police brass on July 2 and went through each detail of the murders. Before the meeting had ended, a detective interrupted the new commissioner and whispered something in his ear.

  That day, ten miles north of Boston in the city of Lynn, a third woman had been killed. Mellon was sent to the crime scene, an apartment house at 73 Newell Street, to see if there were similarities between the first two murders and the latest one. The victim, sixty-five-year-old Helen Blake, had not been answering her phone, and neighbors feared she might have suffered a fall inside her apartment. The building custodian was finally called to check on her at approximately 6:00 P.M. Like Nichols’s apartment, Blake’s had been ransacked. The custodian found her lying on her bed, clad in a pink pajama top. Her killer had wrapped a pair of nylons around her neck, placing one above the other and knotting them separately in the back. The killer had also used a third ligature, a brassiere knotted tightly below Blake’s chin. Bloodstains were on both the top and bottom bedsheets. The woman’s vagina and anus were lacerated, but the medical examiner found no trace of semen on or inside Blake’s body. Investigators later theorized that she had been murdered between eight and ten o’clock in the morning because the autopsy revealed no food in her stomach.

  Despite some dissimilarities, Jim Mellon discovered one notable connection between the murders of Anna Slesers and Helen Blake. After noticing a painting scaffold outside Blake’s building, Mellon learned that the same painting crew that had worked on Slesers’s apartment building the day she was murdered was now painting Blake’s. Mellon raced to the MacDaniels Painting Company’s office in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. “What took you so long?” asked Pat MacDaniels, the owner. “It seems women die in every building we work on.” MacDaniels, who had had run-ins with the law, was anything but cooperative, but he grudgingly allowed Mellon to look through the company’s employee records. But the search was unlikely to be of much use, since MacDaniels paid most of his men under the table.

  After talking with MacDaniels, Mellon spoke with the company’s two full-time painters, both Caucasian. The men swore they had nothing to do with the murders and said they had not worked with any African Americans on the buildings Slesers and Blake lived in. Mellon sensed they were lying, but proving it would be difficult. The killers had left no fingerprints or traces of paint at any of the crime scenes.

  That summer, there would be no reprieve from the terror in Boston. Soon, the newspapers were linking the crimes under the heading “The Silk Stocking Murders,” an inaccurate description since only Helen Blake had been strangled with stockings.

  Nevertheless, the media and a frightened public now believed there was a serial killer stalking the streets. Single women tried to avoid walking alone. Many kept makeshift weapons by their beds—a pair of scissors, a kitchen knife, or even a ski pole could be used to fend off an attacker. Traveling salesmen saw their business plummet because women would no longer open their doors to strangers. In a 1963 Life magazine article, Margery Byers described the effect the case was having not only on women but on men as well. A husband went out to buy groceries after cautioning his wife never to open their apartment door to strangers. Upon his return, he realized he had forgotten his key and rang the doorbell. When the wife let him in, he screamed at her for not first checking his identity.

  Some local merchants saw their business grow as fear gripped the city. Locksmiths sold more chains, window locks, and door bolts. Nervous women stood in line outside the animal shelter, trying to adopt a stray. The Boston Police Department set up a twenty-four-hour hot line number, DE8-1212, which was published in every metropolitan newspaper and aired repeatedly on local radio broadcasts. As a result, the switchboard at the Boston Police Department was flooded with calls from women who saw strange men in their buildings or even shadows moving inside their apartments.

  Eventually, the police department diverted nearly all of its resources to the strangler case. A new unit consisting of fifty men patrolled the streets by night, all specially trained in the martial arts and quick-draw shooting. Jim Mellon now was working as many as eighteen hours each day, going home only to sleep. He ate his meals at his desk or while out exploring new leads. The work was grueling for Mellon, who had a wife and six young children at home, but it would be time well spent if he could help get the killer or killers off the streets.

  AUGUST 21, 1962

  In late summer, police added a fourth name to list of victims. The body of a seventy-five-year-old widow, Ida Irga, was found by her brother, Harry Halpern, inside her apartment at 7 Grove Street in Boston’s West End. When two patrolmen reached the fifth floor apartment, they found Irga lying on her back in the middle of the living room floor. She was wearing a brown nightdress, which was torn, completely exposing her body. Instead of a silk stocking, her killer had wrapped a white pillowcase tightly around her neck. Each of Irga’s legs was propped up on chairs spread four to five feet apart, and a bed pillow was placed under her buttocks, a display that her killer had apparently set up to mock the investigators. Dried blood covered the victim’s head, mouth, and ears, and a blood trail indicated that Irga had been violently attacked in the bedroom, then carried or dragged out into the living area of the four-room flat.

  There was no evidence that Irga had been raped. The Suffolk County medical examiner, Dr. Michael Luongo, found no trace of sperm in the elderly woman’s vagina or anus. On the basis of a fracture to the woman’s hyoid bone, a fragile neck bone that is cracked in most cases of manual strangulation, he also concluded that Ida Irga had been strangled manually before the pillowcase was applied.

  AUGUST 30, 1962

  Sixty-seven-year-old Jane Sullivan (no relation to Mary) would be the strangler’s next victim. Sullivan, who had emigrated from Ireland in 1926, worked as a night-shift nurse at Longwood Hospital. Her body was discovered by her nephew, Dennis Mahoney, inside her tidy apartment at 435 Columbia Road at approximately 4:00 P.M. on August 30, 1962. The heavyset woman had been strangled with two stockings and left facedown in her bathtub. She was still wearing a bathrobe, but her underwear had been pulled down to her knees. Maggots had begun to nest in the moist areas of her badly decomposed body. Police found no sign of a sexual attack. They believed that Jane Sullivan’s killer might
have attacked her as she was getting into the tub. Nothing had been stolen from the apartment. The victim had been left in this distorted pose seemingly on purpose. Her buttocks were propped up, and her head was partially submerged in six inches of water. Jane Sullivan was five feet, four inches tall and weighed about 170 pounds. The killer must have needed great strength to pull this one off, Jim Mellon thought.

  Shortly after Jane Sullivan’s murder, task force members attended a special seminar in Boston given by the FBI sex crimes unit. The FBI specialists went over the behavioral patterns of ritualistic killers. Because all the victims in the Boston Strangler case had been older women, psychiatrists believed that the killer had a deep hatred of his mother and might be taking that hatred out on his victims. Soon events would call that theory into question.

  DECEMBER 5, 1962

  Rain-soaked, Gloria Todd was returning to her apartment at 315 Huntington Avenue after a day of classes at the Carnegie Institute of Medical Technology. Having taken the trolley back from the opposite end of the city in the midst of a terrible storm, she could not wait to kick off her shoes and unwind in a nice hot shower. But when she opened the door to her apartment, Todd gasped in horror.