The Boston Strangler (24 page)

Gordon had been back on the couch fifteen minutes when Miss Gruen arrived. She shook her head; she could not make a positive identification. She remained in the room with the others, listening.

Finally, it was over. The needle was removed from Gordon's arm. He slowly awoke. The group proceeded into Dr. Alexander's consultation room, where Gordon sat, yawning, until the influence of the drug wore off completely. Yes, he had had an interesting experience. How long had he been asleep? Six hours? “I'd never have thought it,” he said. What had he dreamed about during that time? he was asked. “I didn't dream anything,” he said. “They asked me questions and I told them what I thought.” He looked around. His eyes met those of Miss Gruen. For all he knew, she was another psychiatrist, for persons had been coming and going through the long day. Others thought Gordon's face went pale when he saw Miss Gruen; but Dr. Brancale, watching him closely, saw nothing like that.

Someone said, “You know, Paul, the Strangler almost got one girl last February. How'd he attack her and how did she get away?”

“I'll show you,” said Gordon. He was himself again. He walked up to Phil, suddenly circled behind him, whipped his arm around his neck, and struggled to trip him. “He grabs her this way, then she kicks him—he beats it because she screams and he's afraid of the people on the roof—he sees them through the window—”

Gordon should not have known that.

“What did she look like?” Jim Mellon asked.

Gordon, walking back to his chair, passed Gertrude Gruen. He pointed a finger at her. “Well—she looked a lot like this lady here,” he said.

Later, when they were alone, Bottomly spoke with the two psychiatrists. Dr. Brancale did not think Gordon was the Strangler, nor did he think Gordon possessed ESP. How to explain how Gordon knew details not publicly known? Presumably, said Dr. Brancale, Gordon, because of his compelling interest in the crimes, had unconsciously incorporated into his thinking every detail, every experience, he had heard and read about that broadened his knowledge of the cases. It had been going on for months. Gordon's attorney had had long discussions with the police, and then with Gordon about the crimes. This had undoubtedly helped Gordon to shape and correct his concepts of the stranglings as he went on. At the same time detectives and newspaper reporters, who knew far more than they could print, had also been questioning Gordon. In their very queries they might have dropped hints he seized upon without realizing it. Dr. Brancale did not doubt that Gordon genuinely believed he possessed unusual powers. Hence his readiness to be examined, his impatience and annoyance with anyone who doubted him. As to the question, Was he involved in the stranglings? Dr. Brancale believed he was not. This, however, the physician explained, was a “psychological impression,” and it might be well to keep an eye on Mr. Gordon.

Dr. Alexander also spoke cautiously.

“I am not a criminologist and this is speculation,” he prefaced his observation. But if no reference to a photograph of a little girl in a ballerina costume had appeared in the press, Gordon must be considered with care. No one could be so clairvoyant as to see a photograph on the floor and also know why it had been thrown there. To be sure, Gordon might have learned about the photograph from friends of Mrs. Irga or from the caretaker who had been in the apartment a few moments after his son discovered the body. On the other hand, attendants at Boston State Hospital had seen Paul Gordon talking to Arnold Wallace, persuasively, suggestively. Dr. Alexander recalled the famous John Christie case in London in the early 1950's. Christie strangled and raped seven women, hiding their dismembered bodies in the walls, flooring, and garden of his home. He managed to find a scapegoat for his crimes—Timothy Evans, the husband of one of his victims. Christie had so influenced the poor man, who was mentally retarded, that Evans finally confessed to murder. He was tried, found guilty, and hanged—Christie appearing as chief witness for the prosecution! Then, four years later, the bodies were found, Christie confessed, and ended on the gallows, too. But for a long time he had hoodwinked Scotland Yard, and some inspectors, to the end, doubted Evans' innocence.

There were precedents, then—

One more possibility complicated matters. Suppose Gordon were the Strangler but did not know it? There were precedents for that, too. In France, a fascinating case was on record in which a detective, after working for months on an extremely baffling murder, discovered to his horror that all the evidence his skill could uncover led directly to himself as the murderer! He was, in fact, the killer, but because he suffered from a dissociative personality, had no conscious knowledge of his crime.

Was that the case with Paul Gordon?

Considerable public pressure now bore upon the Attorney General's office. It would not have been too difficult for John Bottomly to seize upon Gordon. But though he had wanted to get at the heart of this puzzling episode, he knew he had not yet done so.

One other factor influenced him. He was aware how powerfully certain drugs could stimulate the imagination: how much was Gordon fantasying? Once Bottomly had suffered an illness which required morphine to kill the pain. He discovered that under morphine, half awake, half asleep, he dreamed the most marvelous dreams, marvelous in their content but marvelous, too, in their reality. In one he found himself in Versailles, standing at the side of Louis XIV of France reviewing the entire French army in technicolor. It was extraordinary, he had told a friend, “as though I were really on the spot, not dreaming and knowing it was a dream, but experiencing it as absolute reality.”

Bottomly moved very circumspectly.

Three weeks later, Gordon was asked if he would allow himself to be interviewed again, this time by Dr. Max Rinkel, a Germanborn psychiatrist noted for his work in helping elicit confessions from Peter Kurtin, the notorious hatchet murderer of Düsseldorf.
*
Dr. Rinkel had been present during part of Gordon's interrogation in Dr. Alexander's office.

Gordon agreed, but at the last moment refused to be put under the influence of drugs. He was belligerent. Why, he demanded, were the police questioning and requestioning him? “God damn it, I resent it!” he exclaimed. “I explained my position. I've got nothing to do with it and I don't care about it. They've got their murder victims, they've got their pictures, they've got everything they could possibly want—and what the hell they want me to keep going over and over again explaining something to them they already know, I don't know.” The only possible reason he could think of, he said angrily, “they must think maybe I was there, I must have done it, I killed those women, they're going to get me to tell how I did it and all that sort of thing—well, for Christ's sake they're all crazy.

“If you want me to confess being the Strangler, to say I did it—” He grew angrier by the moment. “If this makes anybody happy, if this is what they have to have, then I'm going to tell you there's going to be a lot of unhappy people in this world because you're not going to prove something that doesn't exist.” They would get nowhere if they approached him with the idea of “settling a problem for Mr. Bottomly or the Police Commissioner.”

Dr. Rinkel interrupted him. “Mr. Gordon, I am a doctor, a scientist, I am not a police officer.” His task was to help determine if Paul Gordon possessed extrasensory perception, as he claimed. Now, would he explain how he knew about the photograph of the ballerina in the apartment of Ida Irga?

“I don't know how I knew it,” said Gordon, “I don't know if there was such a picture at all. All I know is that when I was under sodium pentothal in Dr. Alexander's office, somebody asked me about such a picture and that's what I saw and how I felt. Maybe it's all imagination. I don't know—”

A detective spoke up. “There was a picture, Paul.”

“Then I feel better,” he said. He came back to the ballerina. “When Arnold saw it, the way it was dressed, it reminded him of the day he saw the little girl attacked in the backyard.” He explained that when Arnold was a boy he looked through a knothole in a wooden fence near his home one day and saw a man rape a small girl. “He was at an age where he'd heard about such things but he'd never experienced them,” Gordon intoned. “It was so fascinating to him that he just became immobile: everything stopped, but inside of his emotions—why, rapes all over the place. He didn't know what was happening to him. I think he experienced some sort of a sexual climax then … I think this is the underlying cause of Arnold's sexual impulses today.”

What did he mean?

“Well, you see, he'd like to approach a girl, to go to bed with her, but he can go just so far and then everything happens to him. His unconscious memory is triggered to produce the same sensations he went through while watching this little girl in the backyard.” For Arnold, then, the photograph of the ballerina reminded him of the doll, and the doll reminded him of the event in his boyhood.

“You see this in the Ida Irga apartment,” said Dr. Rinkel. “What else do you see, Mr. Gordon?”

“After he killed her, somewhere near the kitchen there's a chair and he sat in it looking out the window, so peaceful, so quiet, daydreaming …”

“Paul, that bothers me,” a detective said. “Have you any idea how he could be so relaxed, not worrying about someone coming in? Doesn't that indicate that he must have known these people well?”

“No, that's the way he was,” said Paul with spirit. “All I can say is, if I'd killed someone, I'd be out of there so fast … I can't help it, I'm telling it as I see it. He just doesn't care. He has no idea of escaping; no idea of covering his tracks. It's all peaceful, calm, relaxed. He's just drained of feeling and emotion. Now I can relax, he thinks, just go some place, curl up, and sleep.”

In the course of the long afternoon Gordon went over his story repeatedly. Finally, Dr. Rinkel asked two questions.

“Mr. Gordon, first, let me ask you: does he kill because he hates or because he likes? And two, a question which has never been answered. Did he rape this victim while she was alive or after she was dead?”

Gordon replied carefully. “Arnold,” he said, “feels responsible for his mother's death, because he killed her. Now, he's trying to re-create a feeling of communication between his mother and himself. He looked upon these women as mothers—but they do the same thing his mother did. They get away from him. They're nervous, afraid of him. He tends to get a bit madder: ‘You're just like my mother, you're acting like my mother!' He's looking for a little bit of attention, and finally he says, ‘You're just like my mother, I'm going to do to you what I did to her—kill her, shut her up!' He wants to put them in a position where they've got to listen to him, to what he has to say. I don't think he meant to kill them. He meant to shut them up, to make them sit still, to make them immobile so he could sit down and talk to them and they'd have to listen to him.” It was a reprise of what he had said before.

Then there was a silence for a moment as Gordon reached for what he saw, or knew, or fantasied. “Rape them while alive or dead? Neither. I don't think he raped them. I think he'd like to have tried it but I don't think he can. He's incapable of it.”

Nothing was settled.

There was nothing to do but to probe even more deeply into the stranglings, to examine even more exhaustively every possible suspect, meanwhile keeping an eye—and an ear—on four men:

On Thomas O'Brien, at this moment behind the walls of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, who protested that he had nothing to tell anyone about anything;

On Arnold Wallace, at this moment behind the walls of the State Hospital at Bridgewater, who could not tell anyone anything;

On David Parker, at this moment behind the same walls, who would not tell anyone anything;

On Paul Gordon, free to go about Boston holding to himself whatever secrets he possessed beyond the reach of hypnotic drugs, yet ready to tell everyone everything.

*
Here occurs another of the many extraordinary coincidences that were to plague police. Once when Arnold on a daylight visit rang the bell of the convent, the door was opened by Mrs. Margaret Davis, the woman derelict later strangled in a hotel room in downtown Boston on July 11, 1962. She was living there, trying to make herself useful, while fighting to overcome her alcoholic problem.

*
For sixteen years, from 1913 to 1929, Kurtin murdered, committed sadistic acts, and dismembered women victims in the most perverted fashion in the Düsseldorf area of Germany. A married man, mild and courteous in manner, he seemed the least likely of all to have been the Monster of Düsseldorf. He confessed only when a victim whose life he had spared finally led police to him.

Part Three

12

Months before, John Bottomly had turned to Boston's leading psychiatrists to ask if they could produce a psychiatric profile of the Strangler. Could they re-create the criminal from the crime? Give police an idea of the sort of man to look for? His age, appearance, personality, type of work? What drove him to his deeds? Where might he be found? And—if every man had the latent capability within himself—how pinpoint the target of the search?

Dr. Donald P. Kenefick and his Medical-Psychiatric Committee
*
had been working on the problem. At intervals through the spring and summer of 1964 they had met at Boston University's School of Legal Medicine, studying details of the stranglings. Other meetings had been held with police.

Now one of these was in progress. Seated about a rectangular table with Dr. Kenefick in the chair were the distinguished psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, and pathologists. Elsewhere in the room were Lieutenants Donovan and Sherry, Bottomly and his staff, and chiefs of homicides in the suburbs where stranglings had occurred.