The Boston Strangler (30 page)

Luigi turned. It was not Luigi. It was the man whose photograph Stephen Delaney held before him.

On Saturday, January 4, 1964, Mary Sullivan was murdered in her apartment at 44A Charles Street. Delaney checked on Virtanen's whereabouts that day. Carl Virtanen had been washing dishes in a restaurant—one block away from 44A Charles Street. Delaney went over his information again and again. There was no doubt of it. Virtanen had gotten into a violent argument with the assistant manager on Thursday, January second, called in sick on Friday, the third, but reported for work early Saturday, the fourth. He was free to leave when he washed the batch of dishes awaiting him. At any time he could go out for a smoke, and remain out for a considerable length of time until another batch of soiled dishes accumulated. Number 44A Charles Street was four minutes—Delaney paced it off—from the kitchen entrance of the restaurant.

Twice Delaney called on Virtanen in his rooming house and tried to question him. Virtanen said he knew nothing, and would say nothing. The second time he ordered Delaney out of his room, and Delaney had to leave.

He decided to check again with the manager of the men's hotel from which Virtanen had been forced to move. The manager said, “That man has more hatred for people stored up in him than anyone I ever met.” He told of watching Virtanen's glances at others, his demeanor, the silent fury in his eyes. “I don't know if he's the Strangler or not,” he said, “but by God sooner or later he will be.”

Steve Delaney, walking away, felt absolutely frustrated. How perfectly Virtanen fitted the Strangler! Sooner or later, Steve was convinced, the murderer would be found in some desolate, depressing area of the city—a loner with a grudge against the world, enduring a lonely existence in a rooming house with strangers, sharing a bathroom with the others yet having nothing in common, seeing in his fellow roomers mirrors of his own empty, meaningless days. Delaney thought, How such a man must feel when vacation and holiday time comes around—students packing, happy, expectant, everyone having somewhere to go, and he remaining where he is, going nowhere. How he must resent it, and how he must want to lash out against the world … And at just such times, many of the stranglings did take place.

Delaney had two solaces. One was the opinion of psychiatrists, after reading Virtanen's medical record, that the man was probably too disturbed to have been able to carry out the stranglings without calling attention to himself. They emphasized that this was an opinion only. The man could not be eliminated. The other was promotion to Bottomly's special investigative staff in recognition of his zeal and devotion to duty.

But as for Virtanen himself—Delaney had no proof. No physical evidence to warrant an arrest, none to link Virtanen with any of the stranglings, as there was none to link anyone else. Who was to say that these suspicious crossings of Carl Virtanen's path with those of the Strangler's victims were not coincidence? Chance? Chance beyond the roll of the dice, but chance just the same?

*
Whatever parallels existed here with Arnold Wallace and his mother, Delaney was unaware of. The detailed biographical data of suspects was known only to a few at the very heart of the search.

15

Jim Mellon, hand to forehead, sat reading the Mary Sullivan casebook. Across the table from him, in the large offices of Eminent Domain given over to the investigations, sat Phil DiNatale, as deeply immersed in the Sophie Clark book; to one side, Steve Delaney, lost in the reports, interviews, statements of friends, schoolmates, neighbors, that added up to the tragic story of Beverly Samans.

Each morning when the three men came to work to follow new leads in the ceaseless probing into the life and death of the Strangler's victims, they pored over the casebooks in an effort to absorb new material, to spot discrepancies in testimony missed at a first, second, or tenth reading, to analyze facts thought unimportant originally but meaningful now in view of succeeding murders.

Jim Mellon devoted himself at this stage to Mary Sullivan, because she had been the most recent, the last of the series of stranglings so far. All that Donovan's men had learned in the preceding ten investigations stood them in stead here, and they had gone about the business of collecting information as swiftly as possible. Mary Sullivan's casebook was almost twice as thick as any of the others. Each morning when Jim took it out of the vault, he opened it with a silent plea, “Come on, Mary, let's go! Tell me more!”

Somewhere within these nearly two thousand pages must lie the answer. Somewhere in these photographs of the apartment at 44A Charles Street, of the building itself, of Mary in life and in death, of her roommates Pat and Pam, in her autopsy report, her employment record, the interviews with everyone who knew her back to her Sunday School classmates in Hyannis (it was incredible how many people one person in one short lifetime could meet, talk with, and confide in!), in the statements by teachers, parents, family physician, and priest, in the letters she wrote and those written to her, in the names in her address book, the telephone numbers jotted down on scraps of paper in her purse, the three sticks of Beechnut spearmint chewing gum, the matchbook from Whitman's Savings Bank, the parking ticket, the gasoline coupons, the department store receipts—somewhere here must lie the clue to Mary Sullivan's death. And perhaps to the others.

Was Mary's death, as Dr. Brussel theorized, the Strangler's climactic deed? As Dr. Robey put it, the icing on the cake, the most elaborate creation of all?

Four clues had been found. The first was the red ascot Pam Parker had bought as a Christmas present for a friend and hadn't yet given him that had been found slashed into three parts and flushed down the toilet. It had caught in a bend of the drainpipe, and some days later, been pulled out.

The second was the three Salem cigarette butts found in an ash tray not far from Mary's body. The three girls smoked only Marlboros.

The third was a small metal-alloy washer, found on the bed under Mary's body. No appliance in the apartment had a washer missing. Jim Mellon had had it examined chemically and microscopically. It was the kind stamped out by the millions in Japan. It might not be a washer at all but the backing of a button. He now carried it around with him in a small test tube and brought it out half a dozen times a day to study it. “People think I'm becoming a nut,” he told friends.

The fourth clue—the most important and most frustrating—was a tiny charred piece of paper, the size of one's thumbnail, with a few lines of print barely legible, found on the bathroom floor behind the toilet. The police laboratory identified this as the top inner corner of pages 307–308—Treg to Tucker, Tucker to Tuiler—of the 1963 Boston Suburban Telephone Directory. The girls had no telephone. Someone had brought the page there. Had it been Mary—or her murderer—who went to such pains to destroy it? Her roommates knew nothing about it.

The slashing of the ascot—the act of a jealous homosexual?—was puzzling enough, but Jim believed he could explain the telephone page. Mary, at some time in some telephone booth, must have looked up a number, could not reach it, wanted to jot it down and try later, found herself without a pencil—she was not too well organized—and simply ripped out the page, folded it, and tucked it into her purse. There the Strangler found it. Because it bore his name or a number that might betray him he had taken it to the bathroom, lit a match to it, held it until it burned down almost to his fingers, then dropped the charred fragment into the bowl to be flushed away. Unaccountably, he failed to see it flutter to one side and fall behind the toilet.

For weeks Jim had been checking the listings in the inside column on either side of the page, as the result of an experiment he conducted with thirty persons. Because it had been an inside top corner, he assumed a full page had been torn out. His experiments had proved to him that most persons tear out a full page if the number they want appears in the inner column. Otherwise they rip out only the portion containing the number. Even limiting his investigation to one column on either side meant an endless task. Each commercial listing could represent hundreds of employees, any one of whom might be Mary Sullivan's mysterious friend—and murderer.

Doggedly, Jim went ahead with it.

What complicated matters was Mary's enormous acquaintanceship. She had only to meet someone in a bar or drugstore to jot down his name in her address book. She constantly sent off postcards and letters. When, a year before, she worked as a long-distance operator in the Hyannis telephone exchange, she was in her element, calling friends all over the country. If she accepted strangers so readily, she might have placed herself in many dangerous situations. The question rose, what kind of a girl was she?

Here no two agreed. Some knew her as gregarious, yet quiet, unassuming, and behind the facade of her informality, extremely circumspect as far as boys were concerned. But others saw her going from one crush to another, driven to melt before any offer of friendship. The most troubling evidence came from nearly a dozen youths who had rented a cottage in Dennisport during the summer of 1962. Mary had been a guest there. They painted the picture of a promiscuous girl—one, however, who admitted, “I'm ashamed of the way I've been behaving,” and later would allow them no liberties of any kind. The detectives listened stolidly to this testimony. Many had daughters, some Mary's age; they found the subject unpleasant, but, true or not, they had to pursue it because, if true, Mary's murderer might have been someone she entertained so casually. What was done to her was conceived by a crazed mind, but it might also have represented—as with Jack the Ripper in London—a moral judgment passed by a madman.
*

Whatever Mary's problems, she was obviously looking for something. Her restlessness could be read in her letters. Repeatedly, she made plans with other girls to go to California, to Florida, to Europe. These never materialized. She wanted to be a woman of the world, but she also wanted to marry and rear a large family. Sometimes, when baby-sitting for a friend, she would hug the infant, and exclaim, “Oh, gee, I'll just die if I don't have a boy first thing I'm married.”

She had lived away from home during the two years following her graduation from Barnstable High School in Hyannis. She moved 150 yards down the street from her house to a motel, where she shared a room with another girl. In those two years she held four jobs: in Hyannis, then in suburban Whitman, then as temporary holiday help at Filene's. She had begun her fifth job, at the bank, the day before her death.

Perhaps a clue to her murder could be found in her movements during her three days at 44A Charles Street, or in what happened there during that time.

1. She had moved in at noon New Year's Day, Wednesday, January 1. She was discovered dead at 6:10
P.M.
Saturday, January 4. Could she have met her murderer in that interval? Or had he known her in Hyannis and followed her to Boston to kill her there? She must have let him into the apartment herself, that fatal Saturday. There were no signs of forcible entry. Of course, there were ways to trick even the most cautious woman into opening her door. No need to knock. For example, one had only to meow like a kitten. (One Boston girl had been so terrified when her boy friend told her this astonishingly simple ruse that she immediately reported him to the police.)

2. At 5:30 Friday, January 3, the day before her death, having finished her first day's work at the Boston Safe Deposit Company, Mary drove her blue Vauxhall, which she had bought five weeks earlier, to a Gulf station around the corner where an attendant replaced her 1963 license plate with a 1964 one.

3. About 7:30
P.M.
Friday, nineteen-year-old Christopher Reid (which is not his real name), a Boston University student who dated Pat Delmore, one of Mary's roommates, climbed the stairs of 44A to call on Pat. He had been there the night before with another friend of the girls, and met Mary then for the first time. Now, three or four steps below the third floor landing, he heard voices coming from the apartment—a man's voice, then Mary's. The man was chuckling, then Christopher made out one word “Yes.” At first he thought the voice came from the radio, but it stopped the moment he knocked. He heard footsteps coming toward him, and from the other side of the door Mary called out, “Who's there?”

“Christopher Reid,” he replied. He wanted to see Pat.

Pat had gone to visit her parents in Lowell, said Mary, through the door.

Wondering who the man might be, Christopher left. Voices interested him—he himself stuttered sometimes—and this voice was fairly low, and he got the mental image, as he told police later, of “someone tall and thin, about six feet tall, with a voice of such a frequency as caused by the Adam's apple—a nasal type.” He knew that was a surprisingly detailed description to be built up from a voice heard through a closed door, but that was his impression. His curiosity led him to check WMEX and WBZ, both broadcasting then. No voice resembling that he heard was to be found on either station.

4. At 7:45
P.M.
Friday—ten minutes after Christopher left, his friend, Bob Auld, a nineteen-year-old Emerson College student, knocked on the door of No. 2.

“Yes,” came Mary's voice.

“Is Pat home? This is Bob Auld.”

“No,” Mary replied, through the door.

“Is Chris there?”

“He was, but just left. Pat should be back around eleven o'clock.”

“O.K.,” said Bob. He heard no man's voice.

5. At 9:10
P.M.
, two other boys, friends of Pat's, walked into the vestibule of 44A and buzzed Apartment 2. After a moment, they heard Mary's voice shouting down the stairwell to them. She was leaning over the bannister, in her bathrobe. “Pat's gone home to Lowell,” she called down. They left.

6. About 11
P.M.
Pat and Pam, who had been visiting their parents—Pam's lived in suburban Malden—returned. They had met at the train terminal so they could come home together. Mary told them about the four boys but made no mention of the man whose voice Christopher Reid said he heard.