The Boston Strangler (5 page)

In a kind of desperation McNamara turned to the FBI and asked for a specialist in sex crimes to conduct a seminar as soon as possible—preferably within the next month—to which he would send fifty chosen detectives. They would attend lectures from 9
A.M.
to 4
P.M.
and, after completing their course, he would assign them to the stranglings.

At this point, early July, a measure of relief unexpectedly came from two directions. Two brooches and a necklace were found missing from Anna Slesers' apartment. Sketches drawn of them by Juris were sent to all police departments in the state. Every pawnshop in a fifty-mile radius was checked. If the missing jewelry meant anything, it supported robbery as a motive—which took a great deal of the fearful mystery out of Anna Slesers' slaying. Shortly after, police seized a dazed man, his face scratched, who had been seen leaving the Hotel Roosevelt a few hours before Margaret Davis's body was found. It appeared likely that her strangling stood on its own and was not linked to the others.

Sooner or later the Slesers, Nichols, and Blake crimes might fall into a saner perspective. Police reluctance to accept the idea of a Strangler was understandable—“All those cops and they can't catch one man!”—but behind it lay a far more serious fear. A city is quick to panic: forgetting the public image and the anguish of Chambers of Commerce, the fact remained that the spectacle of a homicidal maniac on the loose, preying on women living alone, could utterly demoralize a city like Boston, having a large concentration of single women and women living alone.

The police exhibited caution. When Anna Slesers' missing jewelry turned out to have been in her apartment all the time, thus eliminating robbery and returning her to the pattern, they kept this depressing news to themselves. The public was apprehensive enough: telephone calls and letters conveying tips, suspicions, and alarms deluged police headquarters. Truth or fantasy, each had to be checked out. One of the first calls to DE 8-1212 came from Mrs. Helen Bigelow who lived in Apartment 25 on the fourth floor of 1940 Commonwealth Avenue, down the hall from the tragic Nina Nichols. There was something she had been keeping to herself. Looking out her window onto the small parking lot, Mrs. Bigelow had noticed on three successive days—Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, June 28, 29, and 30, ending on the Saturday Miss Nichols was killed—a man, about forty, in a white sportshirt, sitting from 10
A.M.
to noon each day in the front seat of a gray sedan, staring up at the windows of the apartment house. Nina Nichols' windows? Mrs. Bigelow hadn't thought it important then, but now …

At eleven o'clock the next night police rushed to an apartment house on Charlesgate East, not far from Anna Slesers'. A twenty-two-year-old girl sat huddled in a chair, crying hysterically. Walking home from a movie a little while before, she had heard footsteps behind her: she walked faster; the footsteps kept pace; she began to run until she reached her apartment house. Fumbling desperately for her key, she felt a presence and turned in time to see a tall man silently looping a piece of wire about her neck. She screamed, ducked out of his arms, and broke away. Someone at that moment emerged from the apartment house; she fled inside, the man vanished. Imagination? Hallucination? Police found a four-foot length of telephone wire on the sidewalk. A few minutes later they seized a man lurking nearby. He denied everything. Unfortunately the girl could not identify him.

At the Golden Nugget in downtown Boston a forty-five-year-old woman met a young man who said he was an ex-Marine. After the bar closed he invited her to his apartment where they could continue drinking. Instead, he forced her into the basement, seized her by the throat, raped her, and whispered, “I like to choke older women.”

A sixty-year-old widow of a physician was watching television about 9
P.M.
when a knock sounded on her front door. She opened it. A man stood there, his features indistinct in the gloom of the porch. “Your husband, the doctor, told me to look you up,” he said. The woman's scalp prickled: her husband had been dead ten years. The man's voice, boyish, pleasant, persuasive, went on, “He was telling me—” She slammed the door which locked automatically, called DE 8-1212 and waited, trembling, for the police. Not far away at the YWCA on the busy corner of Stuart and Clarendon Streets, the manager of the cafeteria reported a strange young man who repeatedly tried to strike up friendships with elderly ladies eating alone. What upset the manager was that on six different occasions, after the young man had finished his meal and left, the bus girl found razor blades folded in his napkin.

Boston homicide received a telephone call: a twenty-one-year-old girl had just reported that the man, about thirty-two, with whom she had been living, had tried to strangle her six months before. “He's in Lynn and Boston often,” she said. “He gets vicious and then blacks out. One night he smashed up all our furniture and next day didn't remember a thing. Once he grabbed me around the throat and shouted, ‘I'll choke you until your eyes pop out!'” She thought it only a bad joke then. Now she slept with a butcher knife under her pillow.

When the FBI Sex Seminar got under way in early August, FBI Agent Walter G. McLaughlin of Philadelphia lectured his class of fifty on the varieties of sexual perversion (some astonishing even to veteran detectives), their relationship to different categories of sex crimes, the personalities of sex criminals, and the symptoms of their illness, the deep compulsions that could drive them, often despite themselves, to such acts. Lieutenant Sherry, a methodical man, took more than ninety pages of notes which he mimeographed for others in the department. Much as he knew, he had learned a great deal more. He hadn't realized that many sex crimes are progressive, that for example, the man who began by exposing himself to children might later, needing more and more stimulation (like a drug addict) ultimately go on to rape and then murder. The fifty detectives emerged from the lecture room shaken, but with one certainty: never trust appearances, never overlook the kindly old man living next door; anyone,
anyone—including yourself
—could be the one. The evil lay in every man. God help him in whom it got out of control. One detective, father of a teen-age daughter and himself a Catholic, walked from the final lecture thinking wildly,
we are all suspects; the day the Pope left Rome, he became a suspect
.

The fifty were assigned to check released sex offenders and ex-mental patients, to question neighbors and friends, to go over records; now, with their specialized knowledge, a detail dropped about a neighbor, a visitor, a stranger, would alert them. For Lieutenant Donovan and Lieutenant Sherry, for Special Officer Mellon and Detective Phil DiNatale, who cruised the Back Bay area with Mellon, and for scores of other detectives, these were busy days, nights, weekends. Sergeant John P. Harrington, specialist in administering lie detector tests, spent hours as suspects were taken out of a parade of protesting men brought in, examined, freed—and watched thereafter.

Then on August 21, Ida Irga, a quiet, inoffensive woman of seventy-five, so retiring as to be all but invisible to any outside her immediate family, was found strangled in her locked apartment.

She lived on the top floor of 7 Grove Street, a five-story brick apartment house in Boston's West End, an area fashionable thirty-five years ago when she first moved there with her husband. Now it was the wrong side of Beacon Hill; run-down and shabby, it had become a Bohemian district frequented by students, artists, and homosexuals.

Mrs. Irga had been dead about two days. She had been strangled by human hands; then one of her own pillow cases had been tightly tied about her neck. She had been sexually molested. A short, stocky woman with iron-gray hair, widowed for more than thirty years, she lived quietly and cautiously. She shopped daily for her small needs and had been making weekly visits for a skin ailment to Massachusetts Memorial Hospital. She rarely went out after dark except to walk to a concert in the nearby Esplanade. Her three-room apartment had been searched, but her purse, containing money, was untouched on a bookcase, as were a gold watch and pin. Save for the disorder in the drawers and closets, the apartment was spotlessly clean. There were no signs of forcible entry.

She had last been seen Sunday—two days before—taking the sun with a woman friend on Boston Common. Just before dusk she had left—“I want to get home before dark,” she had said—and returned to her apartment. At 1
P.M.
Sunday, she had telephoned her sister, Mrs. Ronya Brooks of Dorchester, to say she would give her part of a chicken she'd prepared so Ronya wouldn't have to cook in such hot weather. Ronya, however, heard nothing from her on Monday. When she telephoned Ida early Tuesday evening and got no answer, she called the caretaker of the building. He sent his thirteen-year-old son with a passkey—and the boy had come back to stammer out what he had found.

So far, all too familiar. But the manner in which Ida Irga's body was left pointed with awful emphasis to the pattern, now even more bizarre. Police Sergeant James McDonald, first on the scene, began his report in this manner: “… Upon entering the apartment the officers observed the body of Ida Irga lying on her back on the living room floor wearing a light brown nightdress which was torn, completely exposing her body. There was a white pillowcase knotted tightly around her neck. Her legs were spread approximately four to five feet from heel to heel and her feet were propped up on individual chairs and a standard bed pillow, less the cover, was placed under her buttocks …” He did not write that the ankles were locked into position between the vertical wooden rungs of the backs of two dining room chairs and that the body had been so placed, in this grotesque parody of the obstetrical position, feet facing the entrance of the apartment; that this was the sight that struck one brutally, almost like an assault on one's eyes, that one could not escape seeing the moment one opened the door.

These appalling details were not made public: only that she had been strangled and criminally attacked. The rest was withheld. Not only was it too shocking to print, but the police desperately wanted to be in possession of facts known only to themselves and the killer. It gave them something to watch for, a slip of the tongue, a detail dropped that only the guilty man could know. The impact of Ida Irga's strangling—now the fourth such murder—struck Boston with accumulative force.

Wild stories began to circulate, whispered by one woman to another, told authoritatively by cabdrivers to curious out-of-town passengers, stories which vaguely approximated the truth: that the bodies were left exhibited in obscene positions, that the killer did not rape his victims—this was frightful enough—but assaulted them with a “foreign object,” attacking them in death or as they lay dying … Chilling reports appeared in the press. The Strangler was a man “of animal strength in his hands and arms” (a heavy belt, such as that used on suitcases, had been found almost torn in two next to Nina Nichols' body), who “scaled the apartment house walls to reach open windows.” His great strength might explain why no victim had ever been heard to scream—he worked so quickly, garroting them with his hands or the crook of his arm so powerfully that he rendered them unconscious instantly.

Women all but barricaded themselves in their apartments.

Donovan's men had to question Ida Irga's neighbors on Grove Street through closed doors. Even their badges handed through the gap between door and jamb, open only as much as a safety chain would allow, would not admit them. Gas meter readers, telephone installers, delivery boys were frustrated; Avon and Fuller Brush sales plummeted; political candidates for state senate and house, canvassing for votes, were brusquely turned away. There were runs on door locks and locksmiths; the demand for watchdogs, for dogs of any kind, cleaned out the Animal Rescue League pound minutes after it opened each morning. Elderly widows living alone arranged for their married children to phone them three times a day. With the frightening stories of what the Strangler actually did to his victims came reports of weird experiences throughout the city: a nurse who telephoned the police about a prowler received a doll in her mail a week later with a miniature nylon stocking twisted about its neck, and a scrawled note, THE POLICE CAN'T WATCH YOU FOREVER. Women, many in tears, called the policeto complain of obscene calls: men murmuring unprintable suggestions over the phone, or simply breathing heavily on the other end, and then hanging up without a word.
*

Other women were receiving calls from a physician unknown to them saying, “I want to check your heart,” and demanding, almost imperiously, “When is the best time for me to call?” One woman, in near hysteria, reported that she had seen a man, rouged and lipsticked but clearly a man, wearing women's clothes and high heels, dressed all in brown with long white kid gloves, riding up and down a self-service elevator in her apartment house, not far from where Nina Nichols had lived.

Amid the panic came intense speculation. One strangler—or more? If one, what kind of a man and how could he, as the police put it, “cajole his victims into inviting him into their apartments?” Did they know him? Did he choose them? Was he a homosexual? Someone like the strange, demented young man played by Tony Perkins in the Hitchcock horror film
Psycho
, who suffered from a mother complex and a murderous hatred of women? A man outwardly normal, inwardly psychotic, deranged, hallucinating? Perhaps—and this might explain how the killer got doors to open—perhaps a
woman?

Among those caught up in speculation was a forty-three-year-old free-lance advertising copywriter who shall be called Paul M. Gordon, who in his spare time bred tropical fish, practiced weight lifting, and dabbled in hypnotism and psychic phenomena. He had satisfied himself and his wife that he possessed ESP—extrasensory perception. He had been in correspondence with Dr. J. B. Rhine at Duke University, foremost authority on the subject, but had declined Dr. Rhine's invitation to come to Duke for testing, on the ground that he was not a performer and had no need to prove his gift to anyone.