The Boston Stranglers (3 page)

The young woman lay in bed, the sheet and blankets pulled to her chin. She looked peacefully asleep, according to one of the forensic investigators called to the scene. She was not asleep; she was dead. Around her neck, concealed by the bedclothes, had been tightly knotted a white blouse, a single stocking, and two other stockings wound together. All were tied in front, extremely tightly.

She had had sexual intercourse very shortly before her death, and there was some injury to her rectum.

She was not married, nor ever had been. She lived alone, although she had previously shared apartments elsewhere in Boston and New York. The owner of 515 Park Drive sometimes used Pat's living room to conduct rental business.

At the time of her death, she was one month pregnant.

Lawrence, Massachusetts, lies twenty-five miles northwest of Boston. A mill and factory city incorporated in the mid-nineteenth century, its principal enterprises today are arson and the sale of illegal drugs. For a city of seventy thousand, it has a very high rate of violent crime. Thirty years ago, however, it was a far safer place in which to live or work.

Unless you were Mary Brown. At 8:15
P.M
. on March 6, 1963, she was found dead in the living room of her apartment at 319 Park Street. She was white, sixty-eight years old, and lived alone.

She had been bludgeoned over the head, stabbed, and strangled. It was the beating that caused her death.

The abundance of partially degenerated spermatozoa in her vagina indicated that she had also been raped. What the Lawrence Police Department found when some of its members entered her apartment was a “body on the floor with her head about a foot from the south wall of the room and the rest of her body facing in a direct northerly direction. She was nude and her girdle was pulled down to her left foot. Her rubber overshoes and stockings were still on and a black dress and other articles of clothing were pulled up over her head. Her throat was badly bruised and the floor in the vicinity of her head was covered with blood. What appeared to be a knife or a fork was stuck in her left breast up to the handle.”

C
AMBRIDGE
G
IRL
, 26, S
TRANGLED
read the headline of the May 9, 1963, editions of Boston's tabloid
Record American.

In fact, Beverly Samans had been stabbed to death—seventeen times in and around the left breast, according to the autopsy report. Her neck bore four horizontal incised wounds, two on the right side, two on the left, almost like parallel gill slits.

Although the body was nude, the victim had neither been raped nor sexually assaulted by means of an object. No injuries were found to her genitalia, nor were any spermatozoa found in either her vagina or rectum.

Beverly was found dead by a friend, Oliver Chamberlain, at 7:00
P.M
. on May 8. She lay on her back on a studio bed. A white scarf had been tied around her neck. Beneath this were two nylon stockings. Her hands were bound behind her back with a multicolored scarf. Each wrist was individually tied. There were no ligature marks on her neck.

Beverly had been an accomplished singer, a part-time counselor to the mentally disturbed, and a graduate student at Boston University. Among her possessions the Cambridge police found a wirebound notebook she used for her course in educational research. The last entry in the book was dated May 4. Above the notes she had taken on that day's lecture, Beverly printed her exasperated reaction to what was evidently a colossally boring professorial discourse. The comment read: “What sins in my life did I ever commit to deserve this?”

Evelyn Corbin, who was fifty-one years old according to the Essex County Medical Examiner and fifty-eight years old according to the Massachusetts State Police, lived northeast of Boston in Salem. Whatever her true age was—and it was most likely fifty-eight, given the chronology of her life—she seemed to have been remarkably youthful in appearance and manner. Or so those who knew her in life reported. Salem Police Inspector John Moran, who knew Evelyn only in death, said, “She looked about 110 to me. But death will do that to you.”

The last time anyone except her killer saw Evelyn alive was at 10:30 on the morning of September 8, 1963.

A few hours later one of her neighbors in the apartment building at 225 Lafayette Street, Flora Manchester, grew concerned that she hadn't heard from Evelyn, who was supposed to have Sunday dinner with Mrs. Manchester and her son Robert. A little after 1:00
P.M
., Mrs. Manchester used the key given her by Evelyn to unlock the Corbin apartment door. What she saw within made her scream, “My God, she's been attacked.” Another neighbor, Marie L'Horty, went to call the police.

Robert Manchester went into Evelyn's apartment. A few minutes later he emerged, his hands to his head, saying, “She's gone.”

The forty-one-year-old Manchester and Evelyn had been lovers.

Evelyn lay faceup on her bed, her left leg hanging toward the floor. The upper left corner of the spread covered her trunk. There was blood in both her ears, and a bloodstain on the bed cover beneath her head. Her right hand and forearm were beneath her body.

She was dressed in a housecoat, nightgown, and white ankle socks. Three buttons were missing from the robe, and the nightgown was torn. Her pubic area was partly exposed.

One stocking was tied around her left ankle. Two were tied around her neck. On the bedroom floor lay a pair of women's underpants, blood- and lipstick-stained above the crotch. The bed and floor were littered with crumpled tissues similarly lipstick-smeared. They were later found to bear traces of dried semen as well.

The autopsy revealed spermatozoa in the victim's mouth, although not in her vagina. The newspapers would say that the killer had indulged “an unnatural appetite.” The euphemism was transparent to any adult reader.

On November 25, 1963, Massachusetts was still reeling from the shock of the assassination of its favorite son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. How many people on that Monday attended to an article on the very last page of the
Boston Herald,
the one entitled L
AWRENCE
W
OMAN
F
OUND
S
TRANGLED
?

Twenty-three-year-old Joann Graff, a University of Chicago graduate and an industrial designer for Bolta Products in Lawrence, had been murdered just over twenty-four hours after the president of the United States had been pronounced dead of a gunshot wound to the head at Parkland Hospital, Dallas. Of the two killings, Kennedy's was the quicker and more merciful.

Joann's body was found at noon on Sunday by her landlord, Sebastian Corzo, and a Lawrence police officer, F.T. O'Connor. They had gone to Joann's apartment at the request of Mr. and Mrs. John Johnson, friends who had been trying unsuccessfully to get in touch with the young woman since the previous afternoon. Joann had accepted their dinner invitation for Saturday evening, but had failed to come to her apartment door when Mr. Johnson arrived to pick her up at 4:30
P.M.
that day. Nor did she appear at the Lutheran Redeemer Church the following morning to teach her Sunday school class, a sin of omission this devoutly religious young woman would seem to be incapable of committing. The Johnsons were very worried.

Their worst fears were realized when Corzo and O'Connor walked into Joann's place at 54 Essex Street. “Oh, my God,” Corzo exclaimed.

Joann lay diagonally supine on the bed, her right leg dangling down over the side. Her left foot rested near the pillow. Her arms were crooked, and her right hand, lying on her midriff, was curled into a loose fist, as if in death she was still trying to fend off her assailant.

She was naked but for an opened blouse and the three ligatures around her neck: two brown nylon stockings and the leg of a black leotard. The latter was tied with a square knot with an extra turn. One stocking had a granny knot with an additional turn, the other a bowed surgeon's knot.

Her external vaginal area was lacerated and bloody; there were two half-moon contusions below her right nipple and two abrasions above and to the left of it. Her right thigh was contused. The autopsy would show that she had been raped.

Beneath her body was a torn and bloody white bra. Her slacks and underpants, inside out, had been dropped or thrown to the floor. Her eyeglasses lay beside her head, one earpiece beneath her neck. The bedspread, like the bra, was bloodstained.

On New Year's Day, 1964, nineteen-year-old Patricia Delmore and eighteen-year-old Pamela Parker of 44A Charles Street in Boston acquired a roommate to share their three-room apartment. Her name was Mary Sullivan,
³
and her twentieth birthday was upcoming that month. She didn't live to celebrate it.

On January 4, at 6:20
P.M
., Boston police officers arrived at 44A Charles Street. They had been summoned there by a stunned and hysterical Patricia and Pamela, who had come home from work only twenty minutes earlier. They had found Mary in the bedroom.

She was in a sitting position on the bed, her back against the headboard, a pillow beneath her buttocks. Although her bra had not been removed, it had been loosened to bare her breasts. Over her shoulders she wore an opened yellow-and-beige-striped blouse. Around her neck she wore a triple ligature consisting of a charcoal nylon stocking, a pink silk scarf, and a pink-and-white scarf with a floral design.

Mary's knees were flexed and her thighs were spread apart. A broom handle had been pushed three and a half inches into her vagina. Both breasts were mauled. A trail of a sticky substance resembling semen had dripped from her mouth to her right chest.

Propped up against her left foot was a greeting card that read “Happy New Year!”

The period beginning with the death of Anna Slesers and ending with that of Mary Sullivan was not a good time for the Boston Police Department and its brand-new commissioner, Edmund McNamara. For despite the best efforts of McNamara and his detectives, not a single one of the nine homicides committed within their jurisdiction could be solved.

“If this rampant crime wave keeps up, the mayor [John Collins] will fire McNamara as quickly as he'd fire anyone else,” thundered Boston City Councilor William J. Foley.

Foley's colleague Patrick F. McDonough, an ex-cop, weighed in with a further denunciation of the commissioner and his administration of the force, zeroing in on McNamara's recently announced plan to reduce the department's size.

And State Legislator Perlie Dyar Chase, who represented the Back Bay district in which Anna Slesers, Sophie Clark, and Patricia Bissette had been murdered, tossed a bombshell of his own onto the House floor: a demand that the Boston Police Department and its investigators be investigated themselves.

This political volcano of discontent with the force erupted just two weeks after the death of Patricia Bissette. In the intervening time, a sixteen-year-old high school girl named Daniela (Donna) Saunders had been dragged into an alley near her home, choked, and then thrown to the ice-slick pavement. Although she had not been raped, the brutality with which this pretty, intelligent member of the Jeremiah Burke High School glee and math clubs, active in Junior Achievement and Saint Hugh's Catholic Youth Organization, had been done to death sent shock waves not only through her Roxbury neighborhood but through Boston at large. And even though the police fairly quickly closed the books on Donna's murder—her killer turned out to be a boy whom she had refused to kiss—the volcano kept bubbling.

It would explode with the violence of Krakatoa in the aftermath of Mary Sullivan's slaying.

Edmund McNamara, the man standing hip-deep in the lava flow, was no career Boston cop risen from the ranks but an ex-FBI agent. A graduate of the College of the Holy Cross, where he had played football, he had given sixteen years' service to the Bureau. Fourteen of them were spent in the Boston area. At the time McNamara became commissioner of the BPD, the relationship between the city law enforcement agency and its federal counterpart was one of mutual loathing, a hostility dating back to the Brink's Robbery in 1950 when both departments had raced each other to crack the case.

The irony was that in April of 1962 McNamara had ridden into town like Shane. A man of impeccable personal and professional repute, he had been appointed to clean up corruption in the BPD. (A lethally embarrassing documentary showing members of the force taking bribes from bookies had been aired on CBS, resulting in the resignation of McNamara's predecessor.) Even more ironically, the ex-FBI man had been charged with trimming the fat from the department. Thus what he had been mandated to do in the late spring of 1962 he would be damned for attempting in the early winter of 1963.

Not only the politicians but the press were after McNamara and his police. The
Record American,
which had long since decreed that the murders in Brighton, Dorchester, Beacon Hill, Lawrence, Lynn, and the Back Bay were the work of the same person—“the Phantom Strangler”—immediately designated Donna Saunders as the Phantom's latest victim. That she was shortly proven not to have been anything of the sort did not noticeably abash the paper. “Cop Laxity Charged in Slain Girl Case,” the
Record
stated on January 9, 1963. R
AP
COPS AT
S
TRANGLE
P
ROTEST
blared the headline.

Nor was the
Globe,
the only one of the broadsheets of that era in existence today, any more circumspect. B.U. C
OED
S
LAIN BY
K
NIFE
F
IEND,
its front page proclaimed the day after the discovery of Beverly Samans's body. Even the
Herald,
the most conservative (in both senses of the word) daily, was not immune to the occasional bout of sensationalism, although its preeminent columnist, George Frazier, wrote a scathing commentary about the
Record
and its “sob sister” reportage of the murders.

Speaking today, Edmund McNamara offers a pungent assessment of the Fourth Estate of three decades past: “The papers sent all their drunks to cover the police department.”

Whether written by lushes or teetotalers, the news accounts of the murders had a punch and power that was undeniable. And they generated a whirlwind of hysteria, at least in certain segments of the population of eastern Massachusetts.

In
The Boston Strangler,
Gerold Frank wrote that “women all but barricaded themselves in their apartments.” He went on to describe the measures they took to prevent a home invasion by a homicidal sex pervert: “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,”
⁴

The newspapers published advice to women living by themselves, including tips from Commissioner McNamara himself:

These suggestions, made in the wake of Ida Irga's murder, were good counsel at any time, in any city. And thousands of urban women hastened to adopt them.

A retired metropolitan-area police detective, looking back on the eighteen bloody months between June 14, 1962, and January 4, 1964, says, “There was such a furor, such an uproar. Everybody was scared stiff.”

“Oh, my God,” recalls an eighty-year-old East Cambridge woman. “That was a terrible time. The priests were warning all the women not to leave their doors unlocked.” A Cape Cod resident remembers that her grandmother would hide all the stockings in the house before going to bed. Another local woman says flatly, “It was as if Jack the Ripper had come back from the dead to stalk Boston.”

The demonic tread of the Phantom Strangler fell only lightly, if not inaudibly, however, in the affluent suburbs. A woman living in Andover, barely three miles from the murder scenes of Joann Graff and Mary Brown, shrugs when asked for recollections of the period: “It was something that happened in Boston.”

The Andover woman's sentiments were shared even by some Bostonians. The granddaughter-in-law of a well-to-do and socially prominent Beacon Hill resident whose townhouse was only blocks from where Mary Sullivan and Ida Irga had been killed maintains that the dowager had no fear she might fall prey to a murderous intruder. And if the women of East Cambridge, a blue-collar ethnic community, were frightened, their white-collar and largely WASP sisters in West Cambridge and Harvard Square (where Beverly Samans died) harbored no such anxiety. “The hysteria passed over us,” the wife of a Harvard Business School professor remarks. Jack Reilly, bartender at the Casablanca in Harvard Square in the early sixties, adds, “People were too busy having fun to be scared.”

 

 

Edmund McNamara, now in his seventies and long retired from law enforcement work, still retains the imposing physical presence of the fullback he once was. He also retains a vivid memory of what it was like to be a cop in the line of fire during the strangling investigations. “Boston homicide was under tremendous pressure. They were being called stupid and incompetent every day. They were hugely frustrated.”

Two of the most frustrated of McNamara's detectives were Edward Sherry and John Donovan. Donovan, formerly chief of the homicide squad and later director of security at Holy Cross, says, “I lived with this thing night and day for four years.” According to sources outside as well as inside the BPD, he and Sherry (who died a number of years ago) ran the homicide unit very well. And despite the accusations by the press and politicians, the fact that by mid-January of 1964 the police had failed to solve the killings of Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Margaret Davis, Ida Irga, Jane Sullivan, Modeste Freeman, Sophie Clark, Patricia Bissette, and Mary Sullivan was in no way the result of carelessness or sloth. In any event, the BPD's colleagues in Cambridge, Lynn, Lawrence, and Salem weren't having any better luck tracking down the murderers of Beverly Samans, Helen Blake, Joann Graff, Mary Brown, and Evelyn Corbin.

Unlike the
Record American
, the BPD was sure it was looking for multiple killers rather than one single Phantom Fiend, a conviction again widely shared in the Cambridge, Lawrence, Lynn, and Salem departments. A number of very strong suspects were indeed identified. That none of them panned out was due mostly, says former Boston Detective Sergeant James McDonald, to an absence of physical evidence to link the suspects to the crimes. McNamara concurs: “In a premeditated murder, the murderer doesn't intend to leave evidence.” Thus, “premeditated murders are very rarely solved.”

This depressing reality was suspended for twenty-four hours in March of 1963, when two Cambridge police officers arrested Roy Smith of Boston on suspicion of homicide.

Shortly before 4:00
P.M
. on March 11, Israel Goldberg let himself into his home at 14 Scott Road, Belmont, a suburb about seven miles west of Boston. On the floor of the living room lay his sixty-two-year-old wife, Bessie. One of her stockings had been removed and used to strangle her. The rest of her clothing was in disarray; the position in which her body had been left suggested she had been raped. (This was later borne out by microscopic investigation.)

Most of the living room furniture had been pulled to the center of the room. The vacuum cleaner also stood in the middle of the floor. Ornaments and knickknacks from the living room had been placed on the dining room table.

Roy Smith, an itinerant handyman and ex-convict whom Mrs. Goldberg had hired to help her clean house that day, was the immediate suspect for her murder. Wanted posters bearing his likeness were circulated by the thousand through area law enforcement agencies.

The hunt for the alleged killer was a brief one. On March 12, the two Cambridge police officers, William Coughlin and Michael Giacoppo, ran Smith to ground at his girlfriend's house near Central Square in Cambridge.

That night Chet Huntley and David Brinkley reported that the Boston Strangler, in the person of Roy Smith, had been captured. And indeed Smith, with his history of violence against women, made an outstanding suspect for at least some of the Boston murders. Unfortunately, as the police shortly discovered, he had been incarcerated from April to September of 1962 and thus rendered incapable of murdering anyone outside the prison walls. Certainly he had not killed Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Margaret Davis, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, or Jane Sullivan.

But the address Smith called home at the time of his arrest was 175 Northampton in Boston, the same street on which Modeste Freeman had lived only a few blocks down. She had died the month after Smith's release from prison.

Roy Smith was tried and convicted of the murder of Bessie Goldberg. He was sentenced to life in prison.

The Phantom Fiend roamed free.