The Boston Strangler (2 page)

Mrs. Slesers took her time moving about the neat little apartment. She baked a pan of muffins for Juris, and put them to cool on the kitchen table. Then, at a small desk in the living room, she made out a few checks—gas, telephone, electricity. From where she sat she could see the heavy ropes supporting a scaffolding just below her front window. Men had been working there, painting and pointing up the brick exterior. But because of the constant rain and because today, too, threatened rain, the scaffolding had hung empty and deserted for days. Mrs. Slesers sealed the envelopes and left them on her desk. Then she undressed in her bedroom and, in robe and slippers, entered the bathroom and turned on the taps. From the living room a high fidelity set, an FM radio-record-player assembly put together by Juris, who was expert in such matters, filled the apartment with the strains of
Tristan und Isolde
. Music was one of Mrs. Slesers' chief joys. As a matter of fact, after Juris had suggested a few weeks before that maybe they should take separate apartments because they were beginning to get on each other's nerves (her daughter Maija had married a few years before and lived in Maryland), she had chosen 77 Gainsborough Street because she could walk to Symphony Hall around the corner on Huntington Avenue. The music swelled; in the bathroom the water poured into the tub. If there was any noise attendant upon what took place in Apartment 3F in the next half hour or so, it is quite possible that the music and running water drowned it out.

A few minutes before seven o'clock Juris, a slight, bespectacled young man with a crew cut, a research engineer at the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratories in suburban Lexington, drove up and parked. He climbed to the third floor and rapped on the door of his mother's apartment. Juris had been up early that morning because each Thursday before driving to his job he spent the hour from 7
A.M.
to 8
A.M.
with his psychiatrist
*
in Cambridge. After work he'd been busy, taking a pair of shoes to be repaired, returning a library book, cooking dinner for himself in the room he'd taken in Lexington. Then it was time for the half-hour drive to Boston to pick up his mother. He was a little tired.

Juris knocked again. He pressed his ear to the metal door: all was quiet within. Could she have gone out for a last minute's shopping? He descended the narrow stairs to the street, sat on the cement stoop, and waited, annoyed. He hadn't really wanted to take her to the services. When she telephoned him the night before, he had agreed to drive her to a public memorial gathering at 8:15
P.M.
But then she had called him back to say she had been on the telephone with her pastor who said a church service would be held at 7:30, preceding the meeting. Would Juris pick her up earlier so she could make that, too? “I don't particularly want to go to both,” he had said, but she had pleaded and he finally agreed. Now he had come earlier, he was waiting—he'd even brought her a little Latvian flag—it was already 7:15, and no sign of her. Maybe she'd been in the bathroom and hadn't heard him, he thought; he went up again and this time knocked even louder. Still no answer. He tried the door; it was locked.

Impatient, he went down into the street again and as he passed through the dark little vestibule with its dull, cream-colored wainscoting, he noticed the white gleam of mail in his mother's box. She must have forgotten to take it up. He waited on the sidewalk, pacing back and forth, expecting her to appear any minute; then he went up again. This time he pounded. Still no answer. The thought that she might have done something to herself flashed through his mind. She had sounded depressed on the phone. She had said, when he finally agreed, speaking in her sad, mother's voice, “Now, you're sure I won't be imposing on you—”

“No, no, it's quite all right,” he had said, guiltily.

Perhaps at this very moment she was lying sick inside—

It was 7:45. He would break the door down. He put his shoulder to it once, backed up, rammed it hard a second time—it sprang open. The apartment was quite dark, but there was a faint light in the kitchen. Nevertheless he almost stumbled over a chair directly before him. The door must have struck against it, placed unaccountably in the very middle of the hallway. His mother was not in the living room; he hurried into the bedroom. She was not in there, but the dresser drawers had been left open, which was not like her. Then he retraced his steps down the hallway, past the curiously placed chair, toward the kitchen …

It was 7:49
P.M.
when Officers Benson and Joyce, cruising in Police Car fifteen a few blocks away, heard the dispatcher's rasping voice: “Fifteen A—go to Seventy-seven Gainsborough Street, report of an alleged suicide.” Three minutes later Juris, who had waited for them outside the building, led them upstairs. Shock seemed to have driven all emotion from him. His mother had committed suicide. She had been depressed. She had hanged herself on the corner of the bathroom door with the cord of her bathrobe; her body had fallen to the floor. She lay in the hall next to the bathroom. He had been about to touch her, but then he had realized she was dead, and instead he had telephoned the police and then called his married sister in Maryland.

Almost automatically he had placed the little Latvian standard on his mother's desk, and now he sat quietly on the sofa while the apartment filled with those assigned by society to take over in time of sudden death: the doctor who pronounced her dead, the medical examiner who ordered her body to the morgue for autopsy to determine the cause of death, the photographer to record what met the eye in every room, the artist to draw every object to scale, the fingerprint man dusting tables, doorjambs, and toilet seats, the men from Homicide, who live with murder, to examine and question, and the police stenographer to take down statements.

Cruising on Commonwealth Avenue, Special Officer James Mellon and Sergeant John Driscoll of Homicide heard the dispatcher's message over their radio. Mellon swung the car around. “They'll want us over there anyway, may as well go now.” A moment later the order came sending them to 77 Gainsborough Street, too. A few minutes after eight o'clock Officer Mellon walked into Apartment 3F. As he came through the door he found himself in a tiny foyer; directly before him the living room desk with a lamp, a telephone, and the tiny Latvian flag. Mellon's first impression was of neatness. The very floor gleamed. A policeman was seated near the desk making out his report. Mellon glanced automatically to the left, toward the rear, bedroom section of the apartment. “Where's the body?” he asked.

The other gestured in the opposite direction, toward the kitchen. “Nothing to it—suicide,” he said.

Mellon turned to the right and found himself staring directly at the body of a woman. He was always to remember his first sight of Anna Slesers' body, its sheer, startling nudity, the shockingly exposed position in which it had been left. She lay outstretched, a fragile-appearing woman with brown bobbed hair and thin mouth, lying on her back on a gray runner. She wore a blue taffeta housecoat with a red lining, but it had been spread completely apart in front, so that from shoulders down she was nude. She lay grotesquely, her head a few feet from the open bathroom door, her left leg stretched straight toward him, the other flung wide, almost at right angles, and bent at the knee so that she was grossly exposed. The blue cloth cord of her housecoat had been knotted tightly about her neck, its ends turned up so that it might have been a bow, tied little-girl fashion under her chin. There was a spot of blood under her head.

The tub, he saw, was one-third full of water; next to it, her gray knitted slippers, left neatly as she had stepped out of them. In that first swift glance Mellon saw a pair of dentures soaking in a glass of water on the pantry shelf, a kettle on the four-burner stove, a pan of muffins on the kitchen table, next to it a change purse partly open, and a pair of steel-rimmed glasses; near the body, on the runner, a white pocketbook open, some of its contents beside it—Kleenex, cigarettes, matchbook, comb. Near the threshold of the kitchen stood a wastebasket in which someone had rummaged, for odds and ends of trash were strewn on the floor about it.

Mellon was a tall, blond man of thirty-four. Thoughtful, resourceful (for the last half dozen years he had eked out his limited policeman's salary by working after hours as a housing contractor), he was a man unafraid of facts. Holy Christ, he thought, how can you call this a suicide? Obviously the woman had been hit over the head in the tiny bathroom, placed upon the runner, dragged into the hall, probably raped, then strangled.

He walked back into the living room. “Did you look at the body?” he asked the policeman. Juris, sitting immobile on the sofa, seemed almost invisible, half-melted into the background.

The policeman nodded.

“You call that a suicide?” demanded Mellon, angry despite himself. He could not forgive Juris for not covering the body with a sheet.

“I'll bet you five dollars it's suicide,” said the other, still working on his report.

“I'll be stealing your money, but you've got a bet,” said Mellon. “I say it's definitely murder.”

He sat down next to Juris and had him repeat what he had told the policemen. “I'll have to take you to Homicide and take a statement from you,” Mellon told him. “We'll want your fingerprints, too, for purposes of elimination.” By this time Detective Lieutenant John Donovan, Chief of Boston's Homicide Division, had arrived with other men and it was Mellon's duty to join in a door-to-door questioning of tenants. But before he left the apartment, he could not help asking, “Juris, how come you can walk into a situation like this, see your mother in that position, and not cover her body?

Juris thought for a long moment. “I saw she was dead,” he said dully.

Mellon looked at him, then turned away and went down to the first floor. For nearly a decade Mellon had been assigned to night duty, from 4
P.M.
to 2
A.M.
, covering on foot and by car an area of ten square miles of the Back Bay area, and he knew this neighborhood and the people in it. In the building lived a man well known to the police. He made a practice of corresponding with women belonging to a Lonely Hearts Club, inviting them to come to Boston and stay with him on pretext of marriage. After a week or so he would announce he'd changed his mind and send them home. Perhaps a dozen women had been involved, but only two or three had complained to the police, and all had been too embarrassed to prosecute. Now he swore he knew nothing of what had happened in Apartment 3F, but his name was put down for further checking.

In the apartment directly below Anna Slesers' apartment lived an interior decorator. He had come home just before six o'clock and lain down for a nap. Suddenly he was awakened by a loud
bump! bump! bump!
overhead. He looked at his watch—he had no idea how long he'd dozed off—it was 6:10. Only ten minutes. The noise, he said, sounded like someone was moving furniture—or perhaps dancing. He had stared up at the ceiling, thinking angrily, “What do I have living upstairs now, a dancer?” A lady had moved in only two weeks ago and he knew nothing about her. The noise had subsided and then it seemed to him—he explained that his bedroom was immediately next to the stairwell—that he didn't so much hear as
feel
that someone was sneaking down the stairs. No creaking of the steps: he could only say he “felt” it. After a few minutes he heard someone mounting the stairs, heavy footsteps, and a loud knocking at the door of the Slesers apartment. Then, footsteps descending again. He had rolled off his bed and looked out the window onto Gainsborough Street. He saw a thin young man in glasses and crew haircut pacing back and forth, then reentering the building; he heard him go up the stairs once more and knock again on the door.

In Apartment 4F, just above the Slesers apartment, the tenant turned out to be a forty-two-year-old student at Boston University. He, too, had heard the knocking. “Someone was pounding on that door like he was trying to wake the dead,” he said.

Mellon said, “That's what he was trying to do—it was his mother and she was strangled.”

The other said, shocked, “You're kidding me!”

“It's not part of our job to kid people,” said Mellon, and returned to the Slesers apartment and took Juris in his police car to headquarters to learn a little more about Anna Slesers and who would have wanted to kill her, and why.

He was still troubled by Juris. Sitting next to him in the car, he said slowly, watching the other in the dashboard mirror, “Whoever did this will be living with it the rest of his life. He'll be doing it over and over again in his dreams as long as he lives.” Juris's face disclosed nothing; he said nothing.

When they entered police headquarters, Mellon let Juris mount the stairs ahead of him, and listened carefully. Was his tread light or heavy? It seemed to Mellon that it was light. If so, why did Juris make so much noise going up and down the stairs at 77 Gainsborough Street? Or was he imagining things—as perhaps the interior decorator in the apartment below had been imagining things?

Boston has some fifty murders each year, and so the death of Anna Slesers became one more statistic. Few of the details of the scene or the manner of her dying were made public. Two days later Lieutenant Donovan, through his right-hand man, Detective Lieutenant Edward Sherry, announced that more than sixty persons had been questioned—neighbors, friends, fellow employees, building maintenance men, the painters, the contractors who had hired them, the mailmen, delivery men, and the like—without yielding any clue as to the identity of the assailant or how he got into the apartment. Would Mrs. Slesers, shy and retiring, open her door to a stranger or even to a friend while in her robe and without her dentures?

The ransacking indicated that burglary might be the motive. Mrs. Slesers had suffered head injuries, either from a blow or a fall, but she had been strangled, no doubt of that. And though there was no evidence of rape, she had been sexually assaulted. As one detective put it, a routine housebreaking—with complications. Presumably, the assailant broke into the apartment to rob, came upon Mrs. Slesers disrobing for her bath—a woman appearing much younger than her age—was seized by an uncontrollable urge, and then strangled her fearing she might recognize him in the future.