The Boston Strangler (7 page)

Dr. Robert W. Hyde, Assistant State Commissioner of Mental Health, agreed that the Strangler might look like any other person on the streets of Boston. Neither his manner nor his habits would call attention to him. He probably had a routine nine-to-five job. That would explain why many stranglings occurred just before dusk—he probably committed them on the way home from work. No absence from his job during the day, no absence from his home during the night, to give fellow employees or neighbors reason to suspect him. That would also explain his “phantom” quality—he
was
invisible because he melted into the sea of faces in which everyone lived and moved without causing a second glance.

At the Homicide Division on the second floor of police headquarters, concealed behind a screen in a small room, rested a perforated wooden board. A length of rope had been brought through each hole and a knot tied in it. If the board were turned about, one saw that name tags had been attached to each knot: Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, Jane Sullivan.

Each was a replica of the knot found in the ligatures about the women's necks. But whether housecoat cord, nylon stocking, or pillowcase, the knot was the same: a granny knot, a square knot with a double half hitch. Lieutenant Sherry, sick at heart, stared at them. He had not seen the body of Anna Slesers because the crime took place on his day off; nor that of Helen Blake, because it occurred in Lynn, outside his jurisdiction. When he saw Nina Nichols' body, he had shaken his head; the lack of pattern in the drunken Margaret Davis killing had first planted the idea that it might be one man; when he saw the body of Ida Irga he had thought, What a terrible death for an old woman; at the sight of Jane Sullivan, stripped of all human dignity, he had turned away.

He stared at the knots, wondering whether this type of knot was peculiar to any one occupation, whether it pointed to a sailor, a surgeon, a warehouse packer, a stock clerk, a grocery clerk, a newspaper wrapper, a shoe salesman. And he checked these ideas against the suspects, with no definite results.

New suspects were rounded up daily; some were men whose names had been sent in by anonymous informants, others were part of a pathetic cache of souls brought in by the police net—loiterers, Peeping Toms, housebreakers who stole only women's undergarments, alcoholics who turned themselves in fearing they might have strangled women during their blackouts.

In an adjoining room on the second floor three men spent their days examining thousands of handwritten records turned in daily over the past two years by Boston's six thousand cabdrivers, checking for pickups and drops made at the five addresses, then eliminating all but the five victims, seeking to determine to what destinations they went, from what addresses they returned, whom they knew unknown to their friends and relatives.

At the Massachusetts Bureau of Identification, at 1010 Commonwealth Avenue, headed by Robert Roth, compilators worked on lists of bank and stockbrokers' statements, names on checkstubs, medical, dental, and legal bills, laundry and dry-cleaning marks, department store bills, clothing labels, exterminators, mailmen, delivery truck drivers, building up a file of establishments to check, names of clerks, tellers, salesmen, and other employees to interrogate.

Each day plainclothesmen rode the buses and subways used by the five women at the hour they used them, watching the people who got on and off, studying the faces of passengers, trying to read answers from the very buildings passing by, searching, searching, searching …

Wednesday, December 5, 1962, was a wet and nasty day. On Tuesday night it had snowed. Wednesday it rained, and the rain transformed the dirty snow into mud-colored slush, making walking difficult. At 12:30
P.M.
Sophie Clark, an attractive Negro student of twenty, left the Carnegie Institute of Medical Technology for her apartment, which she shared with two other girls, Audri Adams and Gloria Todd, both hospital technicians. The apartment was on the fourth floor of 315 Huntington Avenue, a crowded, commercial street in the Back Bay area. Two blocks away was Gainsborough Street, where Anna Slesers had lived.

Sophie, a popular but reserved girl, was to have waited at school until two o'clock for a class photograph. No one knew why she left earlier.

What is known is that a few minutes before 2:30
P.M.
she was in her apartment writing a letter to her fiancé in Englewood, New Jersey, her home town. He was to visit her the following weekend. She wrote:

My Dearest Chuck:

May this letter find the man I love well. How is that cold of yours? I feel fine, especially after you called me last night—you're the kind of medicine I need—you can make a person feel well without putting forth any effort. What would you like to have next weekend? Naturally I thought of chicken, but perhaps you're tired of that. Do you have any suggestions? That's the least I can do for you, darling, and I want you to have a good meal while you're here …

Today is a nasty day. I do hope the weather is better next week for our sakes. Audri just called from work. It's going on 2:30 now. I'll start my homework when I finish this letter, then I'll shift over to the kitchen and cook supper. We're going to have liver tonight cooked in onions and gravy along with mashed potatoes and a vegetable, I guess. Maybe this weekend I'll get around to making some pizza … Darling, I hope you don't take this long to write again. You know how I get when I don't hear from you. I …

Here the letter stopped.

At 5:30
P.M.
when Audri came home, she found Sophie lying dead on the living room rug. She had been strangled with three nylon stockings—her stockings—twisted together so tightly about her neck that they were almost lost in her flesh. They were knotted under her chin. Her killer had twisted her white slip and a white elastic belt about her neck, too. A gag had been stuffed into her mouth. She lay nude on her back, in the middle of the room, her blue bathrobe flung open in front. Her legs, in black stockings neatly held up by a garter belt, were extended and spread wide apart. She still wore her black loafers; her bra had been torn off with great violence, her glasses broken; both lay near her. She had been sexually assaulted. There was evidence of a struggle. The bureau drawers had been searched, their contents left in disorder. The killer had even gone through her collection of classical records in a corner of the living room.

To enter the apartment that afternoon Audri had to unlock the double lock on the door. After the Strangler first appeared in Boston, Sophie had insisted on a second lock. She never opened the door, even to friends, until she was certain who they were. She was so cautious that if she still doubted a voice, she would ask, “What kind of car do you drive?” Yet there were no signs of forcible entry. Sophie herself must have opened the door to her murderer.

There were some differences between this crime and the earlier stranglings. Sophie was twenty; the other victims had been elderly women. She was a Negro, and she did not live alone. But most of the elements of the crime were only too familiar. There was one new fact: when the chemical analysis came back from the police laboratory, it bore the notation: “Seminal stains found on rug next to body.” The Strangler had not left such a calling card before.

There were other puzzling aspects of the crime. That morning, at coffee with a classmate in the school cafeteria, Sophie had said, “I'm so afraid of the Strangler.” The remark stuck in the friend's mind. After all, three months had passed since a strangling, and in any event the Strangler chose only elderly women. Why should Sophie have said this? And on this day?

Meanwhile, police questioned neighbors, among them Mrs. Marcella Lulka, twenty-nine, who lived in Apartment 2B on the second floor of the building adjoining Sophie's, which shared her entrance lobby. Mrs. Lulka told them that about 2:20 that afternoon, she had answered a knock on her door. A man stood there, about twenty-five or thirty, of average height, with honey-colored hair, in a dark waist-length jacket and dark green slacks. “My name's Thompson,” he said. “The super sent me to see about painting your apartment.”

Mrs. Lulka said uncertainly, “We're not due for a painting,” but the man walked by her, looked about the living room, walked into the bathroom—he seemed to know how the apartment was laid out—and returned to her. “We'll have to fix that bathroom ceiling,” he said. Then, unexpectedly, “You know, you have a beautiful figure. Have you ever thought of modeling? With your form—”

Thinking quickly, Mrs. Lulka put her finger warningly to her lips.

Mr. Thompson grew angry. “What's that for?” he asked roughly.

She whispered, lying, “My husband is sleeping in the bedroom.”

The man completely changed character. “Maybe I have the wrong apartment—perhaps it's the one down the hall.” He left hurriedly, almost colliding with her five-year-old son who was running in the door.

Was it the Strangler?

While police pondered the question, their investigation of the Clark case continued along other lines as well. They studied the victim's personal life, as they had done in the earlier cases.

Sophie Clark, very much in love, rarely dated anyone in Boston. She was a girl of regular habits. School until 1
P.M.
, then back to the apartment where she drew the shades, turned on the lights, exchanged her laboratory gown for a housecoat, and studied. About four o'clock she would begin to prepare supper for herself and her two roommates. Audri had called her that afternoon; and at 4:40, Gloria, too, telephoned her, to ask if a letter she expected had arrived and the telephone had not been answered.

The cold wintry twilight fell. At that hour—the Strangler's hour—fifty handpicked men, members of Commissioner McNamara's newly created, specially trained Tactical Patrol Force, were spread out through the Back Bay, combing the very streets through which the killer must have made his way to and from Sophie's apartment.

Early next morning her two roommates moved away, telling no one their destination. Amid Sophie's possessions handled by her murderer—left flung open on the floor—was a photo album with a snapshot of a pajama party clearly showing Gloria and Audri, standing arm in arm with Sophie. That terrified them, and that was not the only thing. Suppose it had not really been Sophie who had been marked for death, but one of them? It had been Sophie's fate to return early, and thus she was in the apartment when the sun began to go down that wintry day, and twilight came, and out of the growing darkness, the Strangler … They dared not spend another day—or dusk—at 315 Huntington Avenue.

Mrs. Margaret Callahan, keeping close watch on her neighbor, Dr. Lawrence Shaw, could hardly contain herself. For the past two weeks he had been in one of his “states.” One afternoon, visiting her—through it all, Mrs. Callahan had maintained neighborly relations—his attention had been caught by a print of a young Negro girl on her wall. Dr. Shaw had been absolutely fascinated by it; he sat staring almost as if in a trance. Once or twice Mrs. Callahan spoke to him. He did not hear her. After he left she telephoned a friend who taught high school psychology. “Something's going to happen,” Mrs. Callahan predicted, “You watch, Mary—there's going to be a murder of a Negro girl.”

Now, Sophie Clark's strangling! Mrs. Callahan spent days trying to get Lieutenant Donovan himself on the telephone. Finally, on December 13, two men from Homicide, Detective William McCarthy and Sergeant Thomas Gavin, agreed to see her. Taking the utmost precautions, Mrs. Callahan and her niece met them in a private room at the Hotel Vendome in downtown Boston. Mrs. Callahan told all she knew. She had done more than watch and listen. On August 30—was this not the day Jane Sullivan's body had been discovered?—she had followed Dr. Shaw to Cambridge. He had walked into a bookstore in Harvard Square and bought a copy of
The Scientific Study of Crime
. Once, she recalled, he had recommended a book to her and had loaned it to her from his library: all the erotic passages—and there were shockingly many—had been underlined in red ink. She had checked further on her neighbor. Sophie Clark lived at 315 Huntington Avenue. And Dr. Shaw's office, to which he had recently moved, was also on Huntington Avenue, only a ten-minute walk away!

Detective McCarthy and Sergeant Gavin listened courteously, but it seemed obvious to her that they were not particularly impressed.

Mrs. Callahan began assembling witnesses. She hired a lawyer. Her dossier on Dr. Shaw grew, page by page.

In his office Lieutenant Sherry was talking soothingly over the telephone. “Now, you thought it was in connection with the Strangler—right away you thought of the worst.… All I can tell you is that someone wrote us a letter about your husband and we questioned him about information in the letter … We're simply checking it. We don't know if it's someone's idea of a joke, or something done in spite, or what … Now, now, there's no need to be so upset.” He spoke very gently to the weeping woman on the other end. “Just because the police question someone doesn't mean he's guilty. If he's not involved he's got nothing to worry about. No, this won't get into the papers—that only happens on TV. Please don't be upset. I told your husband to call me in two days and I hope we'll have it all cleared up by then …”

He listened for a moment. “I don't feel you need a lawyer—why pay lawyer's bills? We haven't done anything to abuse your husband. No, he's not under arrest—we have to decide if whoever wrote that letter is worthy of belief … Believe me, your husband isn't the first man we've talked to. I could show you drawers filled with names—do you know how many people are writing us? And we must check them all out—” He continued to speak reassuringly. “I know it's just a routine investigation to us and it's a heartache for you, but please don't be upset—if you are, give me a ring, will you? Sure, sure, you can leave the house—of course you and your husband can go to a movie tonight …”