The Boston Strangler (13 page)

The time of death was carefully established. At 11:30 Saturday morning, Mrs. John S. Johnson of Andover, who had befriended Joann when she first arrived, telephoned to invite her to dinner that night. She had accepted gratefully. At 12:30
P.M.
, George Privetera, her landlord, came by to collect the fifteen-dollar weekly rent. He held Joann in high regard. Before she took the apartment she had asked innumerable questions—“Is it respectable? Will I be safe here?”—and she had insisted that he tell her about the other tenants. She kept the place spotless—often he found her on her knees scrubbing the floor—and her blinds were always drawn because she once glimpsed a Peeping Tom training his binoculars on her windows from a neighboring building. As she paid her rent (she never allowed him to enter, but kept him standing in the hall), he noticed through the partly opened door that she had done her breakfast dishes and had been studying a religious tract on her kitchen table. Later her fountain pen was found under it, as if her murderer might have surprised her as she made notes for next day's Sunday School class.

At 3:25 on the floor above her apartment, Kenneth Rowe, a twenty-two-year-old engineering student at Northeastern University, was alone, studying, when he heard footsteps outside in the hall. He would have paid no attention save that for two preceding nights his wife Sandra, twenty-one—now out at the neighborhood laundromat—had complained someone was “sneaking about” the halls. Rowe tiptoed to his door and listened.

The footsteps approached, and stopped. He heard someone knock on the door directly opposite theirs. Apparently no one was home: a moment later the knock sounded on his door. He opened it to see a man about twenty-seven with shiny pomaded hair, wearing a brown jacket, a dark shirt, and dark green slacks. “Does Joann Graff live here?” he asked. Rowe could not see his features clearly because the man's hand was rubbing his nose as he asked his question. He pronounced it “Joan,” not “Jo-ann,” as her friends did.

Rowe said, “No, she lives just below the apartment you were knocking on before.”

The man mumbled thanks and was already walking down the corridor. He vanished at the turn of the stairs. A moment later Rowe heard a door open and shut on the floor below. He assumed Joann had opened her door and let her visitor in.

At 3:30, Mrs. Johnson telephoned Joann to say her husband would pick her up at 4:30. There was no answer. The Johnsons, who attended the same church, had met Joann through the minister, the Reverend Kirstips Valters, after Joann asked his help in introducing her to people in the congregation.
*
Repeatedly at fifteen-minute intervals Mrs. Johnson called, without an answer. At 4:40, Mr. Johnson decided to drive to Lawrence anyway. He hurried into Joann's building and rapped loudly on her door. All was silence. He did not know it, but death had preceded him.

The morning before—Friday, November 22—a neighbor down the hall from Joann heard someone outside her door. Suddenly her attention was caught by a piece of white paper being slipped under her door, perhaps two inches. Now it was slowly being moved from side to side. There was no voice. Was it a prank, or someone seeking to tantalize her into opening her door? Too terrified to move, she remained rooted where she stood, watching the paper move back and forth, like a person hypnotized, for what seemed an unendurable time. Suddenly it was withdrawn. She heard footsteps move away. Then, silence.

Had it really happened? Was it a delusion?

No one at 54 Essex Street knew more until the discovery Sunday of Joann Graff's body as she had been left murdered in her apartment that Saturday afternoon, November 23, 1963.

That the Strangler had struck at such an hour and at such a time when the entire world was in a state of shock at President Kennedy's assassination and its aftermath, was later characterized by one psychiatrist as the greatest act of megalomania in the history of modern crime.

What mind could conceive and carry this out, as if to proclaim “However shocked the world, I will shock it still more!”

Christmas 1963 came. People did their best to forget. It seemed there was a slow fading away of some of the horror in the excitement of the holiday season. Shortly after noon on New Year's Day 1964, nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan, a gay, friendly girl who loved music and had once worked as a nurse's aide in a Cape Cod hospital, moved into a third-floor apartment at 44A Charles Street, on Beacon Hill. Recently arrived from Hyannis, she was delighted to have found Pamela Parker, eighteen, and Patricia Delmore, nineteen, who worked at Filene's and had been looking for a roommate to replace a girl who had left to be married two weeks before.

On Saturday, January 4, Pam and Pat came home from work, unlocked the door to their three-room apartment, and a moment later walked dazedly into the dusk of crowded Charles Street.

Mary was dead, strangled, but the manner of her death was such that it multiplied all the horror of the ten strangulations that preceded hers. Under a Utrillo reproduction on the wall showing a snowy Paris street scene, Mary's body—in the words of the police stenographer's report—was “on bed in propped position, buttocks on pillow, back against headboard, head on right shoulder, knees up, eyes closed, viscous liquid (seminal?) dripping from mouth to right breast, breasts and lower extremities exposed, broomstick handle inserted in vagina, steak knife on bed near brown straw end.… Seminal stains on blanket …”

Knotted about her neck were: first, a charcoal-colored stocking; over that a pink silk scarf tied with a huge bow under the chin; and over that, tied loosely, almost rakishly, so that one could admit one's hand between it and her neck, a bright pink-and-white flowered scarf. A gaily colored New Year's card reading “Happy New Year!” had been placed against the toes of her left foot.

Now the public clamor could not be silenced. Two weeks later Attorney General Edward W. Brooke, Jr., announced that the Attorney General's Office of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the highest law enforcement agency of the state, was taking over the investigation of all the stranglings, in and out of Boston.

The crime against the people of the Commonwealth had reached a point that was intolerable.

*
Here one of the coincidences so often to appear in the search occurred: The Reverend Mr. Valters had been a displaced person from Latvia, like Anna Slesers. He had met Juris Slesers, her son, through the Talvija Club, a Latvian student group, and had accompanied Juris to his mother's funeral, although Mrs. Slesers attended another church.

Part Two

7

In the history of cities as well as that of peoples, one asks, What is the straw that breaks the camel's back? Why should the death of nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan—the eleventh unsolved strangling in an eighteen-month period—have brought about an action that was not brought about by the tenth or ninth?

The fact was that no other strangling struck the city with such impact. It was not only Mary's youth—the youngest of the eleven—but also that she so typically represented a vast segment of Boston's population. Everywhere in Boston, crowding the trolleys and buses, hurrying home from their jobs as typists, clerks, salesgirls, sitting four at a table chattering in the cafeterias at lunch and the midafternoon coffee break, one saw thousands of Mary Sullivans—girls of Irish-Catholic background and modest economic condition, young, pretty, gregarious, full of life, who sooner or later would give up their jobs, marry, and move to the suburbs to raise their large families and live out their days uneventfully. When Mary Sullivan was struck down, the shock that went through Boston was not only the shock of horror but the shock of recognition.

Even more important was the essential awfulness of the crime, and the fact that more of its terrible details filtered through to the public than in any of the others. There had been veiled references in the newspapers and magazines to “molestation” and “assault by a foreign object.” There had been carefully worded phrases such as “satisfying his unnatural sexual appetite” and “the victim had experienced the supreme intimacy.” It was difficult in family publications to tell what one knew, even if dissemination of these details might lead one of the millions of readers to come up with a clue. A bottle had been found next to Nina Nichols' body. A broom had been found in a closet of Jane Sullivan's apartment—obviously placed there after her death. In Mary's case one almost saw the Strangler thinking, This time there'll be no doubt: I'll spell it out; then, like a demented stage designer, setting up his mad, maniacal production for everyone to see, adding a final, contemptuous taunt to the police—the card reading “Happy New Year!” There was no word to describe it but fiendish. And when detectives went over the apartment with every kind of microscopic and chemical test, they found a tiny sliver of tinfoil like that used to wrap film, suggesting that the Strangler, before departing, carefully photographed the scene to record his artistry.

What had been going on, as Attorney General Brooke characterized it, had reached beyond the point of endurance.

Now matters moved swiftly.

Even as Lieutenant Donovan and his men worked around the clock on the Mary Sullivan case, within forty-eight hours of Brooke's announcement, his new coordinating office—the Special Division of Crime Research and Detection—had begun work on the second floor of the gold-domed State House on Beacon Hill. Its powers would go far beyond that of any police department in the country.

Brooke, handsome and capable, a man of immense personal charm, was the nation's first Negro attorney general. No Negro had ever been elected to so high a political post. After Brooke, a Republican, had won a resounding victory in a strongly Democratic state—the Democratic registration in Massachusetts is almost double that of the Republican—many predicted he would be the first Negro governor in the United States. He had a brilliant career before him. There was no doubt that he risked much by stepping into this hornet's nest, the more so since 1964 was an election year. “As a politician I know I can be criticized by both police and public,” he admitted. But he felt he had to do what had to be done. “This is an abnormal and unusual case and it demands abnormal and unusual procedures,” he declared. In charge of the entire operation he was appointing Assistant Attorney General John S. Bottomly, head of the Eminent Domain Division in the Attorney General's office.

No onus was to be placed on the Boston police. This was not a take-over. It was a coordination. Greater Boston is a crazy quilt of independent municipalities; the city itself is a concentrated core of business and industry, surrounded for some fifty miles by nearly eighty “bedroom” towns. This circumstance, and the fact that each of these suburbs had its own police department, made the situation absolutely chaotic. In the eleven stranglings that began with Anna Slesers' there were now six separate police departments and three district attorneys involved.

To add to the confusion not only were the police keeping the more lurid details from the public, but frequently police of one city kept details from other police departments. Some of that was prudence—the fewer who knew, the less chance for leaks. Some of it was competitiveness. Some of it was because some officials believed that the crimes were not related, and that to assume they were would only further confuse the situation. And some of it was a consequence of genuine difficulties in communication.

The Boston
Record American
had charged, in a story by Jean Cole, that whatever the cause, failure to exchange all data by Boston, Cambridge, Lynn, Lawrence, and Salem made it impossible to solve the stranglings, and that “to date there has not been a single organized … effort by officials involved to trap the mad killer.” Repeatedly the paper urged that a central “clearing house” be set up.

There were other problems. As things now stood, any detective could be pulled off work on the stranglings at any moment to deal with other crimes—murders, shootings, abortions, riot.
*
Brooke, in announcing his move, said he wanted skilled men to be assigned full time to the stranglings alone, and not only detectives. He would bring in pathologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, sociologists, even anthropologists, to concentrate their skills on the search. The best brains in the country would be pressed into service. The only authority in the Commonwealth with the money and power to do this—and with sufficient prestige to command the help of specialists anywhere in the world—was the Attorney General.

“We start now,” Brooke said.

In his green-walled office in the State House atop Beacon Hill, Assistant Attorney General John Bottomly, the man chosen to coordinate the search, sat studying the voluminous files before him. Outside it was dark: across Beacon Street, Boston Common and the adjoining Public Garden were still garlanded with Christmas lights, and, nearby, candles flickered in the high windows of the Park Street Church.

Where to begin—and how?

It did not escape Bottomly that from this command post he was much like an Army general directing a vast military operation—save that his enemy was invisible. Even worse: he was an enemy of whom nothing really was known—his weaknesses, his strengths, his deployment of forces—nothing. The only proof that he existed at all was the wake of death behind him.

For Bottomly it was one more challenge. The man whom Brooke had selected was no austere detective of fiction. He had no experience in criminology. He was forty-two, a native of Boston, a graduate of Deerfield, Harvard, and Boston University Law School—a six-foot-four bespectacled attorney who threw himself with gusto into any job he tackled. Independently wealthy, he had a wide range of interests: finance, mining, ship salvage, professional sports, and politics, and he had settled on the law only after contemplating, one time or another, careers in medicine, the ministry, teaching, and farming. Politics and reform movements particularly fascinated him. He came by this interest naturally. His father, Robert J. Bottomly, an attorney who died in 1948, had been one of Massachusetts' most influential Republican leaders. He had served as Executive Secretary of Boston's Good Government Association which in 1912 ousted “Honey Fitz” John Fitzgerald, President Kennedy's maternal grandfather, from the Mayor's seat and replaced him with a reform administration.