The Boston Strangler (8 page)

He hung up, thinking, This woman and her husband have to go through all this because of some son-of-a-bitch who might as easily write my name or anyone else's name in an anonymous letter …

Lieutenant Sherry had come to be surprised at little in his job, particularly during those terrible days. Many of the wives and mothers he had spoken to had been weeping. But on the other hand, more than one anonymous letter identifying a specific man as the Strangler had turned out to come from the man's own wife, wanting to punish him for having an affair. She knew he was not the Strangler, of course, but a session or two with the police would give him a bad few days and serve him right. People, Lieutenant Sherry thought, are complicated creatures.

Now he sat back and tried to make sense of the material on his desk. For six months homicide detectives armed with mimeographed questionnaires had gone from house to house, street to street, interrogating women, moving in ever widening circles outward from each strangling scene. “Did you know the deceased? Did you see anyone suspicious in this neighborhood at the time of the crime? Have any friends told you anything out of the ordinary? Have you had any unusual incidents while living here?”

On his desk lay the completed questionnaires. Nothing to seize upon save the response to the last question. At least half a dozen women had reported that a Dr. Jonathan Logan—in some cases, Dr. John Logan—had telephoned them in the evening. The stories were similar.

In each case, Dr. Logan said over the phone that he had met the woman some time before at a cocktail party “on the Hill”; he had been struck not only by her appearance but by how intelligently she expressed herself—he had made a mental note to look her up soon. Now—he hoped she would forgive this unorthodox approach—he was taking the liberty of calling her to say he'd love to pick up their conversation where they'd left off. What was she doing right now? Might he drop by for a drink?

None of the women could remember having met a Dr. Logan. Yet, it was possible. What girl hadn't at one time or another gone to a party on Beacon Hill? The Hill was like one vast sorority house. Thousands of students, secretaries, and career girls lived in the small apartments made over from the great town houses, and the social activity was intense. Although some of the women he telephoned had cut him short, many had allowed Dr. Logan to “drop by.” They were embarrassed to admit it—the information came reluctantly and only after repeated questioning—but he turned out to be a
most
charming gentleman, and.… In six months, Sherry estimated in some awe, the mysterious Dr. Logan must have met and bedded forty to fifty women. Once he achieved a conquest, the girl never saw him again. Nor had any of them been able to find his name in the telephone book or in any medical directory. Only this curious fact led them to disclose so personal an experience.…

Lieutenant Sherry could only marvel at human nature—that these sophisticated career girls could allow a stranger to walk into their apartment and make love to them when an entire city lay paralyzed with fear of a sex-mad strangler known for his ability to talk his way into the homes of his victims.… Sherry determined to set a trap for the extraordinary Dr. Logan. He had little hope of coming up with the Strangler himself—none of Dr. Logan's conquests had complained of odd or psychotic sexual behavior on his part. But how
could
this happen, now, in these tense days, in Boston?

Indeed, how was one to cope with it all—the grotesque, the comic and awful, the appalling varieties of human behavior coming to light? For even while Dr. Logan was plying his art, young girls recently arrived from Ireland in search of domestic jobs were receiving telephone calls from a man who identified himself as a doctor on the staff of the United States Immigration Service, taking them to task for failing to report for their “three-year physical.”

Three-year physical?

The doctor would explain, with some annoyance, that United States laws required all immigrants to have a physical examination every three years.

Oh, she hadn't known, the girl would say apologetically. When might she make an appointment to come down?

“You're too late for that now, we'll just have to do it over the phone,” the voice would reply briskly. “Remove your dress and brassiere, please.” As she disrobed, he asked her to report each step to him; then, to test her reflexes; and then, to her dismay, to follow other instructions he gave her. Standing at the telephone, one girl had stripped herself nude and on the verge of tears was carrying out his orders when her mother walked in on her, managed to slam the receiver on its hook, and called the police.

Three weeks after Sophie Clark's killing, on Monday morning, December 31, the last day of that terrible year of 1962, Patricia Bissette, twenty-three, was found dead in her locked apartment at 515 Park Drive. It was the same Back Bay area, that of Anna Slesers and Sophie Clark. Patricia, dark-eyed and capable, was a secretary at Engineering Systems, Incorporated, across the street from the famous Lahey Medical Clinic. In her living room a Christmas tree stood, still glittering with the decorations she had hung on it. In the adjoining bedroom Patricia lay face up on the bed, a white coverlet drawn up snugly to her chin. She lay peacefully, her eyes closed, her head turned a little to the right as if she had just lain down for a moment's nap.

When Dr. Michael Luongo, the medical examiner, removed the coverings he saw the nylon stockings tightly twisted about her neck. There were three of them—Patricia's own stockings—knotted and intertwined with her white silk blouse. She wore only the tops of her imitation leopard-skin pajamas, and these had been pushed up to her shoulders. She was naked from the breasts down. There was evidence of recent sexual intercourse. Her apartment had been searched. There was no sign to show how her killer had gained entrance.

The last time Patricia had been seen was 3:30
P.M.
Saturday. She had taken her wash down to the laundry room of the adjoining building, No. 509. Superintendent Christian Von Olst had passed by as she was pouring in the soap powder. She was humming to herself, gave him a cheery smile, turned on the washer, and hurried out. At 4:30
P.M.
Von Olst passed through the laundry room again. The machine was empty. Patricia had evidently returned and picked up her wash.

Curious, thought Dr. Luongo as he made his notes. Patricia was not only covered, but her arms had been placed neatly along her sides, her legs placed together, almost as if her killer had tenderly arranged her body and as tenderly drawn up the covers to hide her nakedness. Dr. Luongo, who at forty-six had conducted several thousand autopsies, had seen this “compassionate” setting before. One usually came upon it when a man killed his wife or mistress and, already remorseful a moment after his act, painstakingly rearranged her clothes, and cleaned up the room before turning himself in to the police.

The police wondered, too. Patricia, they learned, had been having an affair. This might explain the signs of recent intercourse and the fact, soon determined, that Patricia was one month pregnant. Could her lover have killed her?

Another possibility occurred to them. The Strangler could have been hidden in the closet while Patricia and her lover were together, and waited for the lover to leave before carrying out his insane compulsion, now intensified by a God-like wrath. In this case he might have slipped into the apartment when Patricia was in the basement picking up her wash. She might have left the door ajar to avoid the bother of unlocking it with her arms full of laundry.

Whatever the case, the fact was that twenty-three-year-old Patricia Bissette had been strangled and sexually assaulted, and decorated in the Strangler's fashion, in her locked apartment, in the Strangler's area, at the Strangler's time.

What was one to say to the people of Boston?

Until now elderly women living alone had met this awful death. Now the Strangler, if there were a Strangler (and could one actually believe there were two or three such insane men on the loose in Boston, each imitating the other), now the Strangler had begun to choose young women, career girls; and age no longer mattered.

On this final day of the year of 1962, after six appallingly similar sex stranglings, not a single sound clue had been found by a force of nearly twenty-six hundred men working twelve and fourteen hours a day. Not only that, but in the midst of this search, the greatest manhunt in history, a seventh strangling had taken place.

All that could be said now was, no woman in Boston, young or old, living alone or with others, was safe.

4

The morning after Patricia Bissette's murder, Jack McLean, the mild-looking but energetic city editor of
The Boston Record American
, Boston's large circulation morning tabloid, called two reporters to his desk. Both were women, in their early thirties, married, with young children. He wanted them to drop everything they were doing and, working together as a team, retrace the steps of the Strangler—or stranglers.

One of the two was Jean Cole, thirty-four, who had won several awards for her ability and resourcefulness as an investigator. The other was Loretta McLaughlin, thirty-three, who, like Jean, had earned recognition, and frequently worked on medical stories. At that time, Jean was in the midst of an exposé of Massachusetts nursing homes, a
Record American
campaign that Managing Editor Edward Holland had begun some years before. Jean, dressed in a nurse's uniform and posing as a nurse's aide, had managed to get employment in several nursing institutions, and had worked in each one long enough to emerge with firsthand reports of fire hazards, primitive facilities, and lack of proper nursing help. Her stories caused a furore.

Meanwhile, Loretta had become deeply interested in the stranglings. She had been particularly unable to get Ida Irga out of her mind: a seventy-five-year-old woman killed so senselessly. She had gone up to McLean the day after Mrs. Irga's body had been found. “Look,” she had said. “I'd like to write a series of articles on the stranglings. Try to pull them together, to put them in perspective—”

At that time, McLean had been unenthusiastic. “What are you going to build a story on? Their names mean absolutely nothing—they're nobodies. Who'd be interested in them?”

“That's just it,” Loretta said. “Why should four nobodies be murdered? Every woman in the city can identify with a woman in no way set apart from another. I couldn't identify with them if they were celebrities, but if they're like the rest of us they're sisters under the skin to every woman who reads the paper.”

It was the dog days of August, many people were away on vacation, the editorial rooms were hot and uncomfortable. What better way was there to deal with a restless reporter? McLean shrugged his shoulders. “Okay,” he said.

Loretta had written a series of four articles emphasizing the common links of music and hospital association, the fact that each of the four women was retiring, methodical, fastidious, frugal. She had interviewed doctors and psychiatrists and tried to learn what she could from the police. The police had been tight-lipped, which she thought understandable, even though she did not know that a basic tenet laid down during the FBI Seminar on Sex Crimes had been: Gentlemen, your No. 1 enemy is the newspaper reporter, because you may reveal something to him that will tip over your case.

But that had been before young career girls were numbered among the victims. Now that new possibilities had appeared in the Strangler's crimes, McLean thought it time for a new series. He had discussed the idea with Executive Editor Win Brooks and Managing Editor Holland. Both men were in their fifties, both were fathers of daughters, and both were native Bostonians who had come to the
Record American
nearly thirty years before. They had watched the stranglings mount with increasing concern. These, as Holland put it, were not the usual riffraff murders, the violent, suddenly fatal quarrels of the slums, squalid killings that went all but unnoticed because they were part of a sociological problem common to all large cities, and had little impact upon the community. These stranglings, however unhappy the police felt about publicity, could not be cursorily dismissed. The two editors tried not to overplay the story, but they would not ignore news that Bostonians were legitimately entitled to know—for their own protection, among other reasons.

Something ought to be done. Brooks and Holland immediately approved the idea. Jean and Loretta were assigned to “go out and do some old-fashioned newspaper work and see what you come up with.”

In the midst of their investigation came the strangling of sixteen-year-old Daniela Maria Saunders, whose body was found in an alleyway on January 5. It was to be solved two weeks later when a fifteen-year-old boy living nearby admitted killing her because she refused him a kiss, but the discovery of her body, only five days after Patricia Bissette's, led to the loudest public outcry so far. A beleaguered Commissioner McNamara met the press in his office seventy-two hours later. “The responsibility is mine,” he said. “If there is any onus attached to an individual because the murders remain unsolved, it should fall on me.” It was difficult, he went on, to imagine what else the police could do. He cited statistics. They had checked over five thousand Massachusetts sex offenders, screened every inmate at the Center for The Treatment of Sexually Dangerous Persons at Bridgewater State Hospital, interviewed thousands of persons, questioned four hundred suspects—which meant investigating every detail of their alibis, an almost endless task—they had checked out hundreds of written and telephoned tips, letters and suggestions coming from as far away as Australia. The heel of a hand print had been found on the door frame of Ida Irga's apartment. Whether it was her killer's, no one knew, but they had so far examined over half a million prints without matching it.

Governor Peabody had announced a five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the apprehension of the murderer or murderers, but the outcry continued. “If this rampant crime keeps up, the Mayor will fire McNamara as quickly as anyone else,” a city councilman declared. In the House of Representatives, with memories of the bookie-police scandal months before, there were demands for an investigation of the police department as well as its methods of crime detection.