The Boston Strangler (3 page)

Whatever the case, it seemed obvious the motive was not to be found in her own background. Her days were bounded by her work, her church, her music, and her son and daughter. The husband she had divorced two decades ago in Latvia had remarried long since and now lived in Canada. She had no known men friends. At work she was described as a conscientious woman who kept to herself and did not associate with other employees. No one there knew anything of her friends or her social life.

The information Juris supplied about her past in Latvia was equally unrewarding. His mother had graduated from a university as an agronomist, worked as a bookkeeper; then the war came and tossed them about until they found themselves in a displaced persons' camp in Germany. She worked there as a kitchen helper until they came to the United States and settled in Michigan, where relatives lived. Mrs. Slesers had worked to send Juris through the University of Maryland. After his sister Maija married two years before, he and his mother had lived together until a month ago, when Juris had taken his room in Lexington. On June 1 Mrs. Slesers had moved into Apartment 3F.

Housebreaking—with complications. The complications privately troubled the police. Had the apartment really been ransacked? Or had it been made to appear so? The bedroom dresser drawers had all been pulled open, their contents disturbed, but they had not been pushed completely shut again: instead, they had been left to describe a pyramid, the lowest drawer two inches out, that above it an inch and a half, that above it one inch … A case of color slides had been carefully placed on the bedroom floor—certainly not dropped. This was no hasty search. The record player was still on, though it was silent. Mrs. Slesers could not have turned it off because Juris had fixed the master switch inside the player itself. Whoever had turned it off had actually turned off only the amplifier. Someone had taken time to do this, and to set a scene of apparent robbery—perhaps. A small gold watch was left untouched on a shelf above the tub; other modest pieces of jewelry remained in a jewel box on the dresser. If robbery had been the motive, why weren't these taken?

The Anna Slesers file was kept open. In the Homicide Division on the second floor of Police Headquarters Lieutenant Donovan and Lieutenant Sherry, though busy with other homicides—fights, drunken shootings, and the like—studied the photographs taken in Apartment 3F and the reports still filtering in. Although 90 percent of murders are solved, experience has shown that unless a murderer is caught in the first two weeks it is unlikely that he will ever be caught. There were no clues here. The life of an inoffensive woman had been suddenly and violently snuffed out and only because of the manner of her death would more than a handful of people know that she had ever existed.

One week, two weeks, passed.

Late Saturday afternoon, June 30, Nina Nichols, an energetic woman who with her gray bobbed hair and blue tennis sneakers looked younger than her sixty-eight years, hurried into the elevator of 1940 Commonwealth Avenue, bags in both hands. She had just spent three days with friends out of town and was due that evening—it was now just after five o'clock—for dinner and an overnight visit at the home of her sister, Mrs. Chester Steadman, in nearby Wellesley Hills.

It was a swelteringly hot day. Even at five, the thermometer showed nearly ninety degrees. Mrs. Nichols, once inside her fourth-floor apartment, took only enough time to throw open the windows, pull off her dress and replace it with a comfortably thin housecoat before telephoning her sister to say she was back in town and would be there around six o'clock.

As they talked, Mrs. Nichols suddenly interrupted herself. “Excuse me, Marguerite, there's my buzzer. I'll call you right back.” At the other end Mrs. Steadman, too, had heard it: someone buzzing Nina from the lobby. She hung up and went about her dinner preparations.

But Nina did not call back. Six o'clock came and went. Chester Steadman, an attorney who was also president of the Boston Bar Association, dialed his sister-in-law's number. There was no answer. She must have decided not to call back and was on her way, delayed by weekend traffic.

When she did not arrive by seven-thirty, Steadman telephoned the apartment house and asked the janitor, sixty-five-year-old Thomas Bruce, if he'd look out the window and see if Mrs. Nichols' car was still in the parking lot behind the building. When Bruce said it was, Steadman asked if he would please go up and check her apartment and see if she was all right. Maybe she'd been taken ill. Bruce went upstairs, rapped loudly on the door, finally opened it with his master key, stared for a shocked moment, hurriedly slammed it shut, and ran back to his telephone.

What the janitor saw from where he stood was an apartment that obviously had been burglarized: drawers pulled open, possessions strewn about the floor. The bottom drawer of the chifforobe was open showing, surprisingly enough, sterling silver neatly arrayed and apparently untouched. As he raised his eyes, he saw the open bedroom door and on the bedroom floor, directly in his line of vision, her feet toward him, the legs spread, the nude body of Nina Nichols. She lay dead, her eyes wide open, on a hooked rug. Her pink housecoat and white slip had been pulled up to her waist so she lay exposed; about her neck, twisted together like a rope, tied so tightly that they cut a groove into her flesh, were two nylon stockings knotted under her chin. The ends of the stockings had been arranged on the floor so they turned up on either side like a grotesque bow. Her watch was on her left wrist; on her feet were her blue sneakers.

Nina Nichols had been strangled with a pair of her own stockings, an act done in a frenzy from the look of it, and she had been criminally molested. The killer had apparently gone through the apartment in the same fury, searching, ransacking, pulling everything apart, tossing clothes and possessions wildly in all directions. Her bags had been torn open, their contents strewn about. There was her expensive camera, still in its leather case; an eight-by-ten photograph of a favorite dog; her opened black purse; a Pan American traveling bag and hatbox awry on a sofa. A photo album had been ripped apart, its leaves everywhere. A copy of that morning's Boston
Herald
with the headline
CIVIL RIGHTS STIR FIGHT
was half buried in the disorder on the sofa. Her dress lay across the bed, on it her steel-rimmed eyeglasses as she must have left them. At the foot of the bed, a leather attaché case and a blanket folded neatly. But everywhere else—even the small drawer in the telephone stand had been pulled out and ransacked. Her address book lay open, her correspondence had been gone through.

Why? Searching for what? Money? There was less than five dollars and change in her purse. She rarely had cash in the apartment; she was reputed to pay even her newsboy by check. And though 1940 Commonwealth Avenue was still impressive, still fashionable, it was not the address of affluence it had been many years before.

A quick run-through of Nina Nichols' background only added to the mystery. A widow for many years, she had been chief physiotherapist at Massachusetts Memorial Hospital until her sixty-fifth birthday three years ago. She had also been Secretary of the American Physiotherapy Association. Now semiretired, living on a modest income from stocks and insurance, she contributed two mornings a week to elderly charity patients at St. Patrick's Manor, and for the last few years had also been treating a private patient, a seventy-year-old man in Webster. Her hobbies were photography and music; she spent nearly every weekend either in Duxbury, where she'd been this last week, or with other friends, women of long acquaintance, in Nonquitt, Massachusetts. (She was also a guest in Florida each winter and Maine each summer.) Her husband had died twenty years ago. She was never seen with a man. Indeed, with the exception of her brother-in-law Chester Steadman, the only man ever known by neighbors to have set foot inside Mrs. Nichols' apartment was the painter who had worked in it when she moved in three years ago.

Until long after midnight Lieutenant Sherry and fellow detectives remained on the scene. Sherry, a gentle, gray-haired bachelor in his fifties, whose chief interest for the last twenty-three years had been his work, had been sitting down to dinner in his apartment a few streets away when the call came. He had hurriedly driven over and arrived just as Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Luongo completed his examination. What Sherry looked for most hopefully was evidence that something had been stolen—a valuable watch, a camera, a ring—that could be traced to a pawnshop. But it appeared that nothing had been taken. Her camera was worth at least three hundred dollars, and among the most easily pawned of all objects. Yet if not robbery, why the disorder?

The detectives went from door to door asking questions, but the only clue was the mysterious sound of the buzzer. According to Mrs. Steadman, it sounded in her sister's apartment at 5:10; when she hung up she'd glanced at the clock to gauge her dinner preparations. Had her sister let up whoever had buzzed her from below? Would she have been expecting him? There were no signs of forcible entry. “We don't know whether she admitted him or he used a master key,” said Sherry. “There is no indication that he broke in.” Would Nina Nichols, eminently respectable, living a life devoid of male friends, have allowed a strange man to enter her apartment while she was wearing only a thin flannel robe over her slip?

Although it was nearly 3
A.M.
Sunday before Sherry got to bed, he was at Homicide at 8
A.M.
that morning going over the Nichols and Slesers cases with Donovan. Sixteen days apart but in a five-mile-square area, two elderly women strangled and sexually molested, their apartments ransacked … Police Commissioner Edmund McNamara, whom Mayor Collins had appointed less than two months before to revitalize the city's police force, called a conference of department heads for the next day, Monday, July 2.

For Mrs. Annie Winchell, seventy-five, and her next-door neighbor, Margaret Hamilton, seventy, of Lynn, Massachusetts, a town several miles north of Boston, Monday was a troubling day. Both lived on the second floor of 73 Newhall Street, a bay-windowed, red brick apartment house that had known better times. Mrs. Winchell lived in Apartment 8, Mrs. Hamilton in Apartment 10. Their neighbor across the hall in Apartment 9 was Helen Blake, sixty-five, a retired practical nurse. The morning really began for the women when they heard their mail dropped before their doors. Then, in their dressing gowns, they would open their doors, pick up the mail, and stand in their doorways exchanging gossip and news of the day. They looked forward to their morning meetings almost like young girls in a dormitory. But this Monday, though Annie and Margaret had collected their mail and talked together for nearly ten minutes, Helen had not appeared.

Come to think of it, they hadn't heard or seen her since early Saturday. They had been tenants a long time here; the sounds of their neighbors getting ready for the day were familiar to them. Helen's door had opened twice Saturday morning, that was certain: just before eight o'clock, when she'd gone down the hall taking rubbish to the incinerator—her businesslike footsteps sounded clearly coming and going on the linoleum-covered corridor—and then, some fifteen minutes later, when she took in the milk. A moment before they'd heard the milkman, Mr. Lennon, and the clank of the two bottles he put down before her door, and then his footsteps vanishing.

As Monday wore on they discussed Helen's absence, more and more worried, and finally confided in Mrs. Mabel O'Malley, who lived on the first floor just below Helen. No, Mrs. O'Malley had not heard or seen anything of her over the weekend. But she recalled that Helen had gone about her household duties Saturday morning with her usual vigor. No one looking at Helen Blake, sturdy, bob-haired, and energetic, would have taken her to be sixty-five. Mrs. O'Malley particularly remembered that Helen had flung open her bedroom window and shaken out a rug or two just above her own bedroom window—this just after 8
A.M.
And about 8:30 she heard the sound of Helen moving furniture about as she house-cleaned.

All that activity early Saturday—and nothing since …

By 5
P.M.
the two women could contain themselves no longer. They obtained a key from the super to Helen's apartment and opened the door. They peeked in to see a scene of disarray. Every drawer in the bureaus was open. This was not like Helen, the soul of neatness. Too frightened to go inside, they locked the door again.

When Lynn police arrived, and with them Detective Lieutenant Andrew Tuney, of the Essex District Attorney's Office, who lived in neighboring Georgetown, they found Helen Blake dead. She lay face down on her bed, her legs apart, nude save for the tops of her pajamas which had been pushed up over her shoulders. A nylon stocking had been twisted with ferocious strength around her neck and knotted just at the nape: her cotton brassiere had been looped under the stockings, and then its ends brought forward and tied in a flamboyant bow under her chin. She had been sexually assaulted.

Someone had searched the apartment thoroughly. A footlocker was found across the arms of an easy chair in the bedroom, a piece of kitchen knife broken in its lock: the killer apparently had attempted to pry it open and failed. The broken knife was found under the bed. The drawers in the bedroom had been rummaged through; the living room desk drawer had been placed on the floor, as if the killer had crouched there and carefully examined what it held; letters, stationery, rubber bands, a religious medal, and curiously enough, one of a pair of dice. In the kitchen, on top of the refrigerator, were two quart bottles of milk, quite sour.

Helen Blake had been of modest means, but she did own two small diamond rings. Marks on her fingers indicated that she might have been wearing them and the killer might have pulled them off. There was a rumor among neighbors, too, that she was about to inherit $45,000. Perhaps the killer knew that and thought she had already received it, for a metal strongbox she kept under her bed had been pulled out and someone had tried to pry it open. He must have been someone she knew, John P. Burke, Essex District Attorney, told reporters: it was difficult to imagine how anyone got into the apartment unless Miss Blake herself had admitted him since the door had a chain, a bolt, and a firm Yale lock on it. There was no sign of forced entry. With so many ears about, no one heard her voice raised or even sounds of a struggle. She was not the sort of woman who would have succumbed easily.