The Boston Strangler (14 page)

John Bottomly had built an enviable reputation as chief of the forty-four attorneys in Eminent Domain. That department dealt with the condemnation of private property for public use—the taking over by the Commonwealth of land needed for highways, bridges, parks, and the like—and with the enormously complex litigation growing out of the subsequent damage claims. In little more than a year Bottomly had disposed of nearly a thousand cases that had cluttered the docket for almost a decade. He was chiefly an administrator, a man who could size up a chaotic situation, streamline it, and resolve it. He had made an equally fine record as Assistant United States Secretary to the Allied Control Authority set up in Berlin to rule Germany immediately after World War II. Here numerous committees funneled through him and he had managed to deal with explosive personalities and to keep order, channel information, and coordinate complicated data that might otherwise have overwhelmed the American, British, French, and Soviet generals in charge.

His task in his new position was clear. First, to assemble information on every strangling, every victim, every suspect, every piece of data obtained in each case in Boston, Cambridge, Lynn, Lawrence, and Salem; second, to organize it, which meant overcoming resistance from various quarters reluctant to give him what he wanted; and third, to analyze it. He was aware that in some Democratic circles—especially the police—there had been charges that Attorney General Brooke had leaped into the situation for political purposes. These rumors depicted Brooke as a Republican making a bid for power in Democratically controlled Boston, and trying to reap as much publicity out of it as possible. Interest in the Boston Strangler was worldwide: Mary Sullivan's death had received bigger headlines in London and Cape Town than it had in Boston.

Bottomly immediately pressed into service Michael Cullinane, the shrewd, fifty-eight-year-old acting Captain of State Detectives, to act as his liaison with police. Later Detective Phillip DiNatale, Special Officer Jim Mellon and Metropolitan Police Officer Stephen Delaney—men who had distinguished themselves by working on their own time on the various strangling cases—would join his investigative staff and concentrate full time on the search. In addition to a “Hot Line” telephone, he established a post office box to which everyone was urged to forward any leads of any kind: suspicions, suggestions, names of persons who might know more than they had told, with the assurance that the informants would be protected. (That was tantamount to inviting a correspondence with every eccentric in New England, but one had no idea where a valuable lead might come from.) He ordered copies made of every report on the stranglings in the files of every police force—some 37,500 pages. By the end of January these made a stack of paper ten feet high. That meant the hundreds of questionnaires detectives had filled out in the last eighteen months in Boston and its suburbs; every interview; every letter, telephone call, tip, complaint; all testimony given by every friend, neighbor, relative, fellow employee.

As additional material came in, as persons only mentioned in passing earlier were interviewed and in turn gave additional names who were in turn interviewed, these reports would grow until some—dealing with one strangling alone—added up to more than two thousand pages. Each of these became a loose-leaf casebook—eleven in all. Five copies were made of each one: a master one for Bottomly's safe; a second for his staff and investigators; a third for Donovan's Homicide Bureau; a fourth for Robert Roth's State Identification Bureau, involved on the computer program; and a fifth for Bottomly's newest creation, a Medical-Psychiatric Committee.

The last was composed of a gynecologist, a psychiatrist with a background in sex crimes, an internist, the medical examiners who had done autopsies on the eleven victims, and a physician with experience in clinical anthropology. Later other psychiatrists, a chemist, and a graphologist would be added as consultants.

The committee was headed by Dr. Donald P. Kenefick of the Law-Medicine Research Institute of Boston University. Its task was to evaluate the information in the casebooks, analyze evidence as it developed, and attempt to produce a “psychiatric profile”—a character-personality sketch—of the killer or killers. It was a job, Dr. Kenefick remarked, comparable to “trying to reconstruct a dinosaur.”

Had the women been murdered because they happened to be on the scene when the assailant arrived? That had been the hope—if hope is the word—in the Anna Slesers case, the very first. But in view of the later stranglings, this hypothesis had come increasingly into question. Was it not plausible that each woman, whether young or old, had been chosen? Chosen to be assaulted? Chosen to be killed? Chosen to be left on display?

If this was the case, what made the killer select these women? Was it to be found in the women themselves? Or was it something that the murderer, in his insanity, fancied he saw in them?

One fact stood out startlingly. All but two stranglings took place on weekends. Anna Slesers' occurred on June 14, a Thursday. But June 14 was Flag Day, observed as a holiday in many states. Sophie Clark had been strangled on December 5—a Wednesday. However one might explain the date of Sophie's death, the murderer might be someone who came to the Boston area only on weekends and holidays—perhaps a student, who would be free at such times.

Bottomly knew the sharp cleavage between the two public points of view, one represented by Jean Cole and Loretta McLaughlin, that the stranglings were the work of one man—the other, by Lieutenant Donovan, Chief of Homicide, the hard-nosed professional police view that, until proved otherwise, these were separate murders with elements of imitation because of so much publicity, and should be treated as unrelated crimes even while police remained alert for similarities.

Donovan, a police official with twenty-three years' experience and himself the son of a police officer who had spent forty years on the Boston force, was a huge, taciturn man of forty-seven whose pale blue eyes rarely changed expression even when he smiled. He spoke out of knowledge of some three hundred homicide investigations. Of course, he asserted, the women were mainly living alone, because women living alone were the easiest prey. Of course there had been no screams, because the man who strangled them used the simplest, most universal method—the arm choke, or garrote, seizing them from behind about the neck in the crook of his arm.
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Of course stockings, brassieres, and the like had been used, undoubtedly after the women had been rendered unconscious, because these natural ligatures were always available on the scene. As for gaining entry into locked apartments—in some cases the locks were faulty (Juris Slesers had forced open his mother's door with a shove of his shoulder), in others the assailant might have used a celluloid or plastic strip to slip the lock, and in still others, the women themselves might have opened their doors expecting a delivery boy or repairman. And police knew only too well, Lieutenant Donovan added, how surprisingly many women, if they are rung from the vestibule below, simply press their buzzer to open the door and wait expectantly for whoever it might be.

What Bottomly had in mind, after discussion with police experts, was a reversal of usual detective practice. Generally, given a crime, police look for persons capable of committing it, persons who use a particular “M.O.,” or method of operation. Criminals hold pretty much to their own specialties. The breakers-and-enterers—the “B and E” men—are burglars. They break into houses and shops. Some work only shops; some work only the first floor of houses; some work only second stories; some concentrate on apartments, specializing in entering via fire escapes and through roof trapdoors; some use keys, made by impression, or manage in other ways to force open locks; but however they operate, they restrict their activities to “B and E.”

Similarly, purse snatchers and pickpockets hew to their own line. This explains why the victim of a pickpocket frequently finds his wallet returned a few days later, discovered by some passerby in the alley or ashcan where it had been tossed. The cash is gone, of course, but the valuable credit cards, personal blank checks and keys to car, office, and home have not been taken. The criminal has no interest in forgery, car theft, or burglary. He is a pickpocket.

Such certainties help immensely in crime detection for they enable police to concentrate their search.

But what was one to do about the Strangler?

A check showed that nearly five hundred sex offenders capable of such murders had been released in Massachusetts alone within the last year. Thousands more, certainly, had been freed in other states. Some idea of the scope of the sex offender problem could be gained by FBI figures issued only the year before: a sexual assault of one kind or another took place every twenty-eight minutes, day and night. Since in the Strangler murders one was dealing with a demented man, who might have no record as a sex criminal or might never have been arrested, the field was limitless. And as he obviously worked alone, and belonged to no criminal ring or gang, one could not turn to stool pigeons, disgruntled associates or confidants who might in a drunken moment reveal information to a bartender who in turn could tip off the police.

In short, the usual procedures seemed to hold little hope.

But if one assumed that the women were not accidental victims but had been chosen, the thing to do was to work from the victims outward as well as to look among criminals for the assailant. That meant examining each victim's life back to her birth until every knowable fact had been ascertained about her. Every suspect would have to be examined similarly, with the same thoroughness, to determine if he possessed the psychopathology required to commit such a grotesque crime. The answers must be found either in the lives of the victims, or in the lives of the suspects, or both.

As all this material flowed into the casebooks, and the casebooks grew, they would be studied continuously by the Medical-Psychiatric Committee to determine what the victims had in common, as well as to paint a personality portrait of the killer or killers.

Once every fact was gathered, how were they to be correlated? Sometimes Bottomly thought his dream verged on the fantastic. Yet it was practicality itself. The data already gathered, and the additional data produced as investigators probed deeper and deeper into each case, could be fed into a digital computer. This would include every important date in the victim's life: every name in her address book; every place of employment; every restaurant she frequented, every concert she attended, every hospital in which she had been a patient, or worked, or in which she had visited friends. It would include the schools she attended, the names of her classmates, the church in which she was confirmed, the names of her teachers, the names of every clerk who waited on her in shops and department stores, her physicians, dentists, lawyers, and professional men, even the accountants who made out her income tax—in short,
every human contact in her life
.

Then the police would feed into the machine similar material relating to every suspect, hoping that at some juncture two facts, two numbers, two pieces of data would coincide: suspect and victim would have been at the same place at the same time. Or have a friend in common. Or have been served by the same salesman.

At least it would be one clue, one tiny, usable clue!

Bottomly suited action to the word. A computing firm in Concord that was involved in the nation's space program volunteered its services to work with Robert Roth, Director of the Massachusetts Bureau of Identification. As new pages were added to the casebooks, the information was transferred to punch cards, and experts began preparing it for the electronic brain. It meant, as of January 1964, beginning to process information from ten thousand source documents figuring so far in the investigation. Roth established other categories for the computer: the victim's race, religion, occupation and hobbies, clothing worn at time of attack, date and time of death, day of the week, position of body when found, where in room, type of room, window blinds up or down—every physical variable.

A second project would be devoted to suspects alone, emphasizing each man's environment, his relationship with his mother and with women in general, his sex habits, and any abnormal facet of his behavior.

The offer came from a well-known Boston industrialist who wished to remain anonymous. Why not make use of Peter Hurkos, the famous Dutch mystic, who had reportedly helped solve twenty-seven murders in seventeen countries? He was now in the United States. Police in half a dozen American cities had already made use of him. If Hurkos would accept the assignment, Boston should jump at the chance. There would be no cost to the Commonwealth, for the writer of the letter was so convinced of Hurkos' abilities that he and a group of friends would pay Hurkos' fee—perhaps a thousand dollars or so—and expenses. For eighteen months the police had tried everything they knew—in vain. Since orthodox measures had failed, why not try unorthodox measures? What had one to lose?

Why not? thought Bottomly. But there was a problem. To be accused of taking seriously seers, psychics, and others with “supernatural” powers, to accept their evidence against a citizen, smacked of witchcraft. And in Boston, of all places, which had never forgotten the Salem witch trials of the 1690's. Bad enough for Bottomly to risk certain criticism but to place Brooke in this position seemed unfair.

On the other hand, Bottomly, a rational and realistic man who possessed a strong vein of skepticism, had witnessed phenomena which made him think twice before dismissing anything in human experience as nonsense. Once, at a party in wartime London, a gray-haired woman had been introduced to him. She was a psychic, his host said, with a smile. She had shaken hands pleasantly with Bottomly, asked for his wallet, and holding it between her palms, proceeded in a heavy Hungarian accent to tell him facts about his early childhood that not even friends at home knew. He and the woman had never met before, nor was there any likelihood that their paths could have crossed. She was a refugee just escaped from Budapest; they had no mutual acquaintances. In any event, much of what she told him he had all but forgotten himself.