The Boston Strangler (26 page)

First, then, he stalked and killed Anna Slesers. She must have resembled his mother: elderly, gray-haired, wearing metal-rimmed glasses. After killing her, however, he discovered to his surprise and rage that he was still impotent. At this, furious, like the character Popeye in Faulkner's novel
Sanctuary
, he assaulted her sexually with a substitute—a bottle, broom, anything that was on hand.

Then he strangled his second mother-image, Helen Blake, who looked much like the first. Again, he discovered no change in himself; again, enraged at his helplessness, he assaulted his victim. So with Nina Nichols, Ida Irga, and Jane Sullivan.
*

Then, for whatever reason, he attacked twenty-year-old Sophie Clark. Here, for the first time, he found a change in himself. He was potent. Witness the seminal stain on the rug next to Sophie's body. Thereafter, he attacked only younger women—the Girls. In each instance, unmistakable signs of a man's virility were found by police, and in the most recent strangling, that of nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan, spectacularly so.

Why had there been no stranglings since?

Because, suggested Dr. Brussel, the Strangler had achieved his goal: he had found his potency. He was “cured.” The use of the word was grotesque, to be sure, but so far as it reflected the fact that he was psychosexually maturing, that he was progressing to more heterosexual activity—however sadistic—it was relevant.

And “cured”—so the psychiatrist suggested with chilling calmness—he might be found in everyday society going about his business, mingling with the crowds in the streets, in the trolley cars, in the movies, at parties at people's homes—with no one the wiser.

“I know I'm sticking my neck out,” said Dr. Brussel. His theory, though medically possible, was put down as a minority report.

In late 1964, had one stood in busy Park Square of an evening, not far from the Statler-Hilton Hotel, one might have observed men strolling by, jotting down the license numbers of automobiles parked in front of a number of cafés, bars, and nightclubs. To the police the Square was known as Homosexual Row. Boston was dotted with small communities of sexual deviates, but this area was the largest.

The search had entered another phase.

It had been suggested by Detective Lieutenant Andrew Tuney of the Massachusetts State Police, a smiling, unassuming, forty-year-old ex-Marine whose reputation had led Bottomly to appoint him to direct his investigative squad and to act, as well, as liaison with all police authorities. There were a number of reasons for Bottomly's choice. As a member of the State Police, Lieutenant Tuney had authority to move into any area in Massachusetts. Because he was a trained police officer, his presence in the Attorney General's office would help assuage the resentment still felt by Boston police at Brooke's entry into the investigations. At the same time the manhunt had become so massive and demanding that Bottomly, still saddled with the Eminent Domain Division, could make good use of a skilled deputy, and one on good terms with all parties.

Lieutenant Tuney took on his new assignment grimly. Like Donovan and DiNatale, Tuney was the son of a police officer: his interest in the legal aspects of crime detection had led him to take three years of criminal law courses at Suffolk Law School, but he had been too busy to complete his studies. He had been involved in many of the strangling investigations, often on his own time. He had taken the murders in his stride until Mary Sullivan. He had been outraged by the others, but when he saw what had been done to nineteen-year-old Mary—a year older than his own daughter—“I wanted to smash him. I wanted to hit him.” In the beginning he had been inclined to write off the murderer as one more psychopath who would be quickly captured, but as the search continued and no lead came to fruition, he confided to a fellow officer, “My biggest fear is that he'll turn out to be someone we could have picked up long ago—but we haven't been adding the right facts together.”

Tuney moved into action on three fronts. When he was appointed on July 20, he at once held a full-scale review of everything done so far—a meeting lasting long after midnight, attended by all high police officials from Boston and the suburbs in which the stranglings had occurred, as well as by detectives from the Cape Cod area where Mary Sullivan had grown up. Also present were technicians—police photographers, stenographers, fingerprint experts, artists, chemists—who had been on the murders or worked on the evidence. Perhaps one of these men might have observed a clue, however insignificant; perhaps he nurtured an idea, a way to proceed, that he had hesitated to suggest because protocol restricted these matters to the detectives themselves. Here was his opportunity to unburden himself, to bring out the notes and memos he might have made.

Secondly Lieutenant Tuney brought about a closer relationship with the Dan Sullivan Agency, a private Boston detective organization that had been quietly assisting in the search. Such an agency had the capacity and the resources to move in fields in which Bottomly and his investigative squad were limited. Its operatives could use highly sophisticated electronic devices to tap wires, “bug” rooms, tape-record conversations in offices or even in the street without the participants' knowledge, take infrared photographs in darkness; they could intercept mail, rent apartments adjacent to suspects, pose as physicians, census-takers, house-movers, make use of stool pigeons, informers, and hundreds of underworld contacts they had developed through the years—in short, could avail themselves of numerous methods of detection that the Attorney General's office, as the chief law enforcement agency of the Commonwealth, could not employ.

Although laymen are generally unaware of it, federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies constantly work closely with private investigative agencies, thus doubling and tripling their effectiveness. Most ironic is the fact that crime, by virtue of illicit money, often has far greater financial resources than police or sheriff's offices, limited as they are by city and county budgets. The underworld with these funds at their disposal, were constantly ferreting out and thwarting traditional detection methods.

A private detective agency had every right to carry on its own search for the Strangler, in its own fashion, at its own expense. If successful, it would not only render a valuable service to a harassed community, but stood to be well paid for its pains. It would be eligible for rewards ranging from $10,000 to a possible total of $110,000 for all eleven. The agency's only obligation was to turn over important evidence to the proper police authorities. Meanwhile, additional skilled investigators had been brought into the search.

Finally, Tuney considered the emphasis put upon the homosexual community by the psychiatrists. (Dr. Kenefick had discussed their deliberations in his report, cautiously entitled “Preliminary Notes for the Project to Establish a ‘Psychiatric Profile' of the Boston Strangler.”) Although the homosexual aspect had come up repeatedly it now deserved more attention, particularly since links seemed to exist not only in the case of the Girls but also with respect to some of the Old Women. Sometimes these were as tenuous as the report that Helen Blake in Lynn had to pass a notorious café to and from work each day. She might have dropped in there for a beer without knowing its clientele. Who was to say that her killer had not followed her home and learned her routine well enough to know when he could attack? That might be true of others, too. Dr. Ames Robey's speculation that the Strangler's victims might have aroused him by some nonverbal sign was recalled. There had also been vague rumors that certain of the Old Women, some of whom had had nothing to do with men for decades, were associated with Lesbians. How much of that was true, and how much pure nonsense, no one knew.

Even more important was the growing discovery that the homosexual community in and about Boston appeared to be linked together, might even have an overall directorate—a syndicate—similar to organized crime. Although little written about, sexual deviation and the money derived from it, the growing numbers of homosexuals of both sexes gathering openly in luxurious clubs and resorts—all that, not excepting such collateral enterprises as blackmail—was becoming Big Business. Big Business hand in hand with crime could mean severe punishment for those who wittingly or unwittingly caused trouble … If some of the Strangler's victims were enmeshed in this community, who knew what error might have been committed by one of them that led to murder? Perhaps some had not met their death at the hands of a madman, but only appeared to have done so.

It was all bafflingly vague but there was something there worth searching for.

Until now no important lead had been produced by Bottomly's computer program. The machines had been working week in, week out, on victims, friends, and suspects. Lieutenant Tuney thought, Let's try a new run on the computers, this time concentrating on homosexual data. On the assumption that the floater or derelict homosexual was not likely to be involved in murder for cause, this meant checking out patrons of the better homosexual haunts. Granted, not everyone whose car was parked in the vicinity of homosexual clubs and bars belonged to this society, but certainly the owner's identity should be learned, his name checked against those in the victims' address books, shown to friends and family to see if it was familiar. His telephone number, social security number, place of employment, restaurants in which he ate, resorts in which he vacationed—all would be fed into the computer to be matched with data from the victims. If he turned out to be a member of the homosexual hierarchy, his telephone calls should be monitored day and night. Some day he might utter a name associated, however vaguely, with one of the victims.

July moved into August. At the State Identification Bureau Bob Roth's machines hummed. By September 1964, more than thirty-five thousand items had been run through the computers in this new attack on the mystery of the strangulation murders.

And still no key card dropped out.

*
The Committee's official membership, as announced by Brooke: Donald P. Kenefick, M.D., of the Law-Medicine Research Institute, Boston University; Michael A. Luongo, M.D., Medical Examiner, Suffolk County; James A. Brussel, M.D., Assistant Commissioner, Department of Mental Health, New York State; Arthur J. McBay, Ph.D., Massachusetts Department of Mental Health; Leo Alexander, M.D., Max Rinkel, M.D., psychiatrists in private practice; and several other physicians among them one whose specialty included clinical anthropology and who preferred to remain anonymous.

*
In many ways Joann resembled the Old Women. She kept a record of every penny she spent, tried to live on six dollars a week for food, and when she exceeded her budget, ate doughnuts and coffee. Even five cents spent for a chocolate bar was jotted down in her cashbook, and one came upon such notes to herself as: “For the rest of the week NO chocolate, NO dinners, NO movies.”

*
The physical resemblance among the Old Women had been remarked upon often. (It will be recalled that Ida Irga's son Joseph almost mistook Jane Sullivan, another victim, for his mother.) If the Strangler was killing a mother-image and if most men, as is contended, resemble their mothers, would the murderer be found to resemble his victims? This was one of the avenues explored by the medical anthropologist on the committee.

13

All that could honestly be said at this point was that no one was sure of anything. There was no orderly progression of events. Everything happened simultaneously. Donovan's men continued to work on the Boston cases even as they coped with other homicides, a new one almost every week. Bottomly's investigators checked out suspects—men suspected in a specific strangling, and general suspects, men who might have been involved in any or all. Lynn, Cambridge, Salem, and Lawrence detectives pushed deeper into their cases, filing report upon report that found their way to Bottomly's office to join those from other sources to be copied in quintuplet, collated, indexed, and added to the eleven casebooks by twenty-seven-year-old Sandra Irizarry, research assistant in charge of the files. Dr. Carola Blume, the graphologist, studied letters sent in by the public, seeking to separate those written by reasonably balanced citizens from those written by the emotionally disturbed.
*
The Medical-Psychiatric Committee studied the casebooks, the computers labored to match victim and victim, victim and suspect, suspect and suspect, and to provide, in seconds, information on any one of the twenty-three hundred persons whose names had come up, even remotely, in the investigation to date.

No one knew when a man might be seized for another crime, a tip phoned in, an admission made, that would send everyone off in a new direction. Virtually every person in the huge Attorney General's office on the second floor of the State House—Bottomly, his aide Bill Manning, Detective Lieutenant Tuney, and the investigators DiNatale, Mellon, Delaney; Sandra Irizarry and Bottomly's “Strangler Bureau” secretary, twenty-one-year-old Jane Downey, at one time or another had a favorite suspect. When a new fact emerged, or another letter arrived, or a jagged piece of a subsidiary jigsaw puzzle fell into place, one heard, “Do you like him better now?” Or “Oh, I
like
him!”—almost gleefully—“like” meaning to consider him a more plausible suspect. The horror had become secondary, eclipsed by the excitement of the chase.

For Sandra Irizarry and Jane Downey, the only women in the inner sanctum of the search, it was an extraordinary and moving experience. As one development succeeded another, the detectives used them as a touchstone to feminine reaction in Boston.

The younger victims of the Strangler—the Girls—were their contemporaries. Sandra had lived on Beacon Hill herself; often she had visited “The Sevens,” a crowded, steaming young people's hangout across the street from 44A Charles Street, Mary Sullivan's apartment house. She had more than once gone into the same beauty parlor and used the same pay telephone from which Mary's roommates, Pat and Pam, had called the police that dreadful dusk. Sandra and Jane knew the narrow streets, the drugstores and cafeterias of the Back Bay and Beacon Hill so familiar to the Strangler and his victims.