The Boston Strangler (25 page)

Covering most of one wall were photographs of the scenes of the stranglings—from the apartment house exteriors to the victims' bodies. On a projection stand stood a case with hundreds of color slides made on the scene by the medical examiners. On another wall hung charts, prepared under Dr. Kenefick's direction: location of crime, type of building, date, time of day, weather, age and background of victim, nature of sexual injury, type of ligature, details of the autopsy.

As of that moment, committee opinion ranged from the belief of Dr. James A. Brussel, of New York's “Mad Bomber” fame, that one man might have committed all eleven stranglings, to the belief that there might be any number of murderers.

A major question the committee had wrestled with was this:

Would the Strangler, driven to kill five elderly women because each represented in his madness the mother he hated/loved, also be driven to kill Sophie Clark, aged twenty, and a Negro; Patricia Bissette, twenty-three; Beverly Samans, also twenty-three; Evelyn Corbin, fifty-eight (but appearing far younger); Joann Graff, twenty-three, and Mary Sullivan, nineteen?

Or might these younger women have been killed by someone else, and for other reasons? Might not one man have strangled the five older women and others have been responsible for the six murders that followed—murders in which scarflike decorations and bizarre stage effects had been deliberately added to make them appear the Strangler's work?

The committee was increasingly coming to this conclusion. It would appear far more logical to separate the victims into two groups—in Dr. Kenefick's words, the Old Women, and the Girls.

As Dr. Kenefick put it in a report issued later, the majority of the committee agreed that one man probably had killed the Old Women. He would be “Mr. S.”—the Strangler. As to the others—the Girls—they probably were not slain by Mr. S. but by one or more men, likely to be found in the circle of the Girls' acquaintances, most probably “unstable members of the homosexual community” who had tried to make their acts resemble the stranglings of the Old Women as reported in the newspapers. The more one considered this theory, the more persuasive it seemed.

The Back Bay in which Sophie Clark and Patricia Bissette lived, and Beacon Hill where Mary Sullivan lived, were neighborhoods frequented by homosexuals. Charles Street—Mary's street—was the most Bohemian of all Boston's Bohemian West End. Every night was a Mardi Gras. With each change of semester new friends descended. It was colorful, bizarre, offbeat. “If a two-headed man walked down Charles Street nobody'd turn to look at him,” one of the detectives liked to say.

For whatever it meant, before Mary Sullivan moved to Boston, she had roomed in a Hyannis motel; among her neighbors were the owners of one of Boston's most popular homosexual gathering places. Sophie Clark lived on Huntington Avenue, a seedy area marked by a weird mixture of artistic, Bohemian, and academic people because of its proximity to art schools, colleges, and music conservatories. A short distance away was Boston's notorious “Hot Corner”—the intersection of Massachusetts and Columbus Avenues—an area spotted with barber shops catering to homosexuals and at night the hunting ground of fifteen-dollar prostitutes.

Evelyn Corbin's apartment house in Salem was in a quiet residential section, but not far away were slums. Beverly Samans lived in Cambridge, a block from Harvard Square, which had more than its proportion of avant-garde coffee shops, sexual deviates, beatniks, and oddball characters. Beverly, moreover, was writing a thesis on homosexuality, one of her friends had escorted her to one of the better-known homosexual clubs, and many of her callers were, as Dr. Kenefick put it in his summarizing report to Bottomly, “uncertainly sexed young men.” Even Joann Graff, murdered in Lawrence, an almost pathetically inhibited farm girl from Illinois, who with her frugality
*
was the most spinsterlike of the Girls, had such associates. Many of the men she met in the course of her work were homosexuals.

As to the character of the man or men capable of the stranglings, Dr. Kenefick pointed out that he and his colleagues at most could only hazard a few guesses toward a “common profile.” Generally, he explained, the sex murderer contains within himself “an encapsulated core of rage” directed at an important figure in his early life—usually a dominant, overwhelming female. To cope with his rage he engages in powerful, sadistic fantasies in which he kills this figure. The sex murderer differs from other psychotic killers in his ability to keep his terrible daydreams to himself. He keeps quiet about them: he exhibits no odd behavior. Thus he is able to move among friends and fellow workers without calling attention to himself. Chances were that he might appear bland, pleasant, gentle, ingratiating—even compassionate. Because of the training given him by the hated female figure he would most likely be neat, punctual, polite—in brief, the personality often seen in confidence men, homosexuals “and in many normal lower middle class men.” No one would think of him as “crazy.”

What, then, would trigger his crime—cause him to kill?

Certain stresses that would bring about sadistic impulses too great for him to cope with. The loss of his mother, either by death or because she turned him out of the house; anything that contributed to a loss of self-esteem, such as being fired from a job; or anything that made him feel a loss of masculinity. That could result from a late marriage to a woman who expected him to function as an adult, although such a man would most likely find himself marrying a second mother.

Whatever the case, he would find himself in a deepening depression from which he was able to emerge only by a sudden explosion, a violent venting of his hate, frustration, impotence: in short, murder, the destruction of the terrifying female image, but murder in the special ritualistic, fetishist manner of his illness, both sadistic and loving. Because each murder solved nothing—the specter was not eliminated, it would rise again—he was doomed to repeat the crime again and again.

What kind of mother would he have? “A sweet, orderly, neat, compulsive, seductive, punitive, overwhelming woman. She might go about half-exposed in their apartment, but punish him severely for any sexual curiosity.” Chances were that he once lived with a woman possessing characteristics similar to those of his victims, and in a similar environment. His father had died or perhaps deserted the family before his son's puberty. In any case, he was not close to him.

“The boy grew up to feel that women were a fearful mystery. He was inhibited heterosexually but the overwhelming respectability of his background probably kept him from much overt homosexuality,” Dr. Kenefick speculated. He might have attempted sexual relations with women but was successful only if he could imagine himself humiliating, beating, and torturing them.

Each time he murdered, the physician suggested, he was attempting to “reestablish a seductive scene, to carry out buried incestuous fantasies, and to exorcize certain fears by acting out a fantasy of degrading and controlling an overwhelming and fearsome mother.”

“Mr. S.” was probably not an exceptional man in appearance—not too tall, not too short, not too deformed—or someone would have noticed. He probably was admitted on some pretext, or entered by slipping the lock.

“It is an easy matter to strangle someone from behind, enough to induce unconsciousness, with a forearm grip.” Or he could clout them on the side of the neck with the edge of his hand. He would be at least thirty—perhaps older; strong enough to carry or pull heavy women (Blake, Jane Sullivan, Irga) about the room; neat and orderly (he left no fingerprints, probably wearing gloves at all times); probably single, separated, or divorced; a man “who knew how to kill efficiently, who was attracted by neat, pleasant old women with fair complexions and firm flesh … who felt a certain savage titillation in partially exposing women, who left them with a grotesque imitation of scarves, often elaborately tied around the necks; who contemptuously injured their sexual parts with a fantasy-phallus of glass or wood (whose firmness and bigness revealed his own wishes and fears), who looked for some small object—money? photographs?—in desks, closets, and bureau drawers.” He left his victims in such shocking positions not only to degrade and debase them, but also to make it appear that they tried to entice him—a tribute to the masculinity he desperately wished he possessed.

The police might do well to search for a man who had periods of idleness in summer, Christmas, and the holiday seasons, since most of the stranglings occurred then. At such times, Dr. Kenefick speculated, Mr. S. was left “face to face with his thoughts,” depression seized him, and he was driven to kill. He would probably be too busy at other times to be depressed. “What manner of man is relatively unoccupied during summer and holiday seasons?” One might think first of a school teacher or a college student; perhaps a charities collector. But it was difficult to think of other occupations which would be apt to be slack in the summer and winter holiday seasons.

Here Dr. Kenefick interposed an interesting observation. All this elaborate speculation would be eliminated “if it turned out that Mr. S. was a sneak thief who struck at someone who surprised him, thereby discovering, like an aged tiger who accidentally pounces on a villager, how easy humans are to kill.” The multiple dwellings in which virtually every victim lived were the haunt of sneak thieves, and perfectly suited for burglaries because of the thick walls and adjoining roofs—the latter allowing both a way of approach and retreat.

Observing that the murders took place in “mixed lace-curtain Irish, lower-drawer Yankee, student-type neighborhoods,” Dr. Kenefick noted that although one of the largest ethnic groups in Boston was the Italian, “no Italian name occurs among the victims.”

Why had the killer not struck since Mary Sullivan, January 4, 1964?

Some committee members believed he might have committed suicide. He might have been driven by a compulsion so overwhelming that in the end only his own destruction satisfied him. Or he might have been arrested for another crime, and might now be in prison, or in a mental institution. Perhaps he was one of those safe behind the walls of Bridgewater. Or, frightened off by the Attorney General's manhunt launched immediately after Mary's death, he might have taken cover and might be waiting for the search to subside before killing again.

One other possibility was presented—and that turned out to be the most alarming speculation of all. It came from Dr. Brussel, the New York psychiatrist who had already suggested that one man might be responsible. Now he advanced another theory to explain the halt in murders. Although virtually every member had his own conception of the Strangler, Dr. Brussel's success in the Mad Bomber case led one to pay attention.

The Mad Bomber might have come from the pages of Sherlock Holmes. For nearly fourteen years New York had been terrorized by homemade bombs found in subways, bus terminals, and theaters, followed by taunting letters to the police. The bomber was obviously demented but also cunning enough to leave no clues. In 1956, Dr. Brussel, Assistant Commissioner of Mental Hygiene of New York State, who had assisted the police in many cases dealing with psychopathic criminals, suggested that they should look for a man between forty and fifty, probably unmarried, sexually abnormal, a Roman Catholic of Central European stock, probably living with a sister or brother in Westchester County of New York or in southern Connecticut. As if this detailed description were not enough, he added that when police seized the man he most likely would be wearing a double-breasted suit.
With all the buttons buttoned
.

How did he arrive at these conclusions?

Dr. Brussel explained. The man was between forty and fifty because paranoia reaches its peak then and the crime was obviously that of a paranoiac. He was sexually abnormal, and so probably unmarried, because each bomb was shaped like a penis, and the
W
in his notes looked like a woman's breasts, although he printed all other letters in block type. Roman Catholic of Central European descent living in Westchester or southern Connecticut because bombs are a traditional method of protest in Central Europe, most Central Europeans are Roman Catholics, and the largest concentrations of this ethnic group near New York City are in Westchester and southern Connecticut. Living with his family because close knit family life marks the people of Central Europe. Finally, the double-breasted suit: because the Bomber, as proved by the fact he left no clues, was extremely neat; his femininity, added to his neatness, would lead him to wear what is perhaps the neatest (especially when primly buttoned) and most protective of suits (if he knew the police were searching for him).

With Dr. Brussel's help, an open letter to the Mad Bomber was drafted and published in the New York
Journal-American
. The idea was to tempt him into an overt act that might bring about his arrest. The strategy worked. The Mad Bomber replied, writing vaguely of a grudge against a utility company. A search of Consolidated Edison records led police to a former employee—fifty-three-year-old George Metesky, unmarried, a Roman Catholic of Central European stock living with two sisters in southern Connecticut, wearing a double-breasted suit with all the buttons buttoned. He had been setting bombs, he explained, “to get even” with the company.

Now in the case of the Boston Strangler, Dr. Brussell thought he would be in his early thirties or forties, perhaps of South European or Spanish stock because garroting was associated with such backgrounds.

Then he advanced his theory: that each killing was a psychotic act committed by a man searching for his potency. As he put it, here was the ancient story of the Oedipus complex, a man's unconscious sexual desire for his mother, an impulse he dares not yield to. Yet each time he approached another woman he found himself impotent, because his sex drive was fixed upon his mother. Since the man was demented he coped with his problem in a demented fashion: if he could destroy his mother's image, he would be free to direct his libido elsewhere—to be as other men.