The Boston Stranglers (39 page)

Pennington—or Lundy, to use his circus name—wanted to die. He was quoted as saying, “I am definitely going to the gas chamber even if I have to kill a guard.”

On Thursday, March 18, 1965, Pennington was being interrogated by a police captain in Indio, California. In the middle of the questioning, Pennington passed the captain a slip of paper. “Check this out,” he said.

The captain looked at what was written on the paper. It read: “In apartment—Mary—Charles St., Boston—strangled her, young, white, January 3 or 4, 1964.”

On February 21, 1965, Pennington had informed the same police official that he had had “an operation preventing his production of spermatozoa.”

Pennington would not elaborate on the contents of the note.

On March 19, 1965, he was sentenced to one year to life on the child molestation charge. He was sent to an institution similar to Bridgewater; the state of California was positive it had the evidence needed to convict him for at least two of the murders of which he had been accused.

Incarcerated, Pennington talked no further—except to vow that if he had to kill again in order to be executed, he would do so.

 

 

On July 7, 1964, Beacon Hill resident Sims Murray was hypnotized and questioned about what he had noticed at noon on a day very early in January when he had taken his dog for a walk on Charles Street:

The only problem was, Murray couldn't remember if this event had occurred on January 1 or January 4. Thinking it wasn't important, he did not report the incident to the police until the very end of the month, after he'd seen Mary's photo in the paper and decided she was the young woman who had been carrying the bundle of records.

Sims Murray, shown a photograph of Albert DeSalvo, did not recognize it. What he had probably seen was Pam Parker's father helping her unpack her car on January 1.

 

 

William Robert Evans, Patricia Delmore's principal boyfriend, assured a member of the Strangler Task Force several times that he would do whatever he could to help it in its investigation.

 

 

After Mary's death, a Boston University student claimed that not only had he known her, but that he was the Strangler. (He also claimed to know who had committed the Plymouth mail robbery.) His friends and acquaintances thought him an “oddball,” “a leech as well as a liar,” a manipulator who was always seeking sympathy. He was a kleptomaniac. He also had a criminal record: a conviction for breaking and entering.

He had worked on Cape Cod in the summer of 1963. Employed by the Cotuit Cemetery, he had been fired for breaking into the storage house, stealing a bag of fertilizer, and dumping it into a mailbox.

The Boston police had received an anonymous call from a man who claimed to be the Strangler. For a number of reasons, they thought the caller might be this BU student, trying to draw attention to himself.

In 1964, he sued the Boston Police Department for false arrest—not, however, on any murder charge. The suit was, his friends thought, just another one of the illicit money-making schemes he was forever devising.

No evidence appeared to exist to link him further with Mary Sullivan.

Meanwhile, the authorities were growing more and more interested in the ever-helpful and cooperative William Robert Evans. At the end of November 1964, they asked him to take a polygraph examination. The relevant question here would be the whereabouts of Pam Parker's apartment key, the one that had vanished during Evans's visit to 44A Charles Street on January 2, 1964. Whoever had killed Mary had not broken into the apartment—he had either been admitted to it or unlocked the door.

Evans was, according to case records, a rather troubled person: a product of a broken home who fought violently with his mother. He had never had any sexual experience. He knew of Mary's checkered past, although he claimed to find her unappealing. It was his belief that the killer had really been after his girlfriend Pat, whom Evans considered gorgeous and sexy.

The polygraph results were not favorable to Evans.

A little before noon on December 4, 1964, exactly eleven months after the murder of Mary Sullivan, Pam Parker received a phone call at the home of her parents in Malden.

She picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

There was a brief silence. Then a male voice said, “Who's this, Pamela?”

“Who is this calling?” she replied.

The person on the other end of the line didn't identify himself. Instead, he said, “I'm going to do the same thing to you that I did to Mary. I'm going to take that broom and shove it right up your cunt.”

The caller was breathing heavily. His voice was deep, nervous, and vibrant with hatred. He sounded as if he meant every word of his dreadful threat.

“Who is this?” Pam said. “Who is this?”

“I'm even going to take your underwear off, even your underpants, I'll use those,” the caller continued. “How would you like that, how would you like that? I'll get you sooner or later like I got Mary. Would you like that, would you really like that? Well, you won't have to wait. Would you like that?”

He broke the connection.

Aghast, Pam dialed the number of the Malden bridal shop where her mother worked. Mrs. Parker immediately called the police.

There was one other peculiarity about the caller's voice, Pam told the detectives. He stuttered. Did she know anyone who did? the investigators asked. Yes, Pam answered, two people.

One of them was William Robert Evans.

That very afternoon, Evans was scheduled to take another polygraph examination. These were its results:

On December 22, 1964, John Bottomly requested from Edward Brooke permission to seek a court order to tap Evans's mother's home telephone. Said Bottomly's memo, “He has ‘failed' two polygraph tests. These is considerable circumstantial evidence which places him in the position of No. 1 suspect. Among other things his statement suggested the possibility that he may have an accomplice or be an accomplice to the murder.”

No one in the Sullivan family ever really recovered from Mary's death, perhaps because for all of them the case was never closed, the mystery never solved. Casey Sherman, Diane Dodd's son, attributes his uncle David's premature death in early 1995 to an anguish that never faded and essentially crippled his existence.

Nor was there ever any surcease for Mrs. John Sullivan, who died in 1994. At the time of her death, she had in her possession some of Mary's personal effects. They now belong to Mrs. Dodd, who refers to them as “artifacts.”

Like all of Mary's survivors, Mrs. Dodd believes that the killer was never caught. It galls her that he is quite probably still alive and very likely free, enjoying the life of which he so brutally deprived Mary.

And what are her feelings about the man who confessed to Mary's murder? “What would I say to Albert DeSalvo if he were still alive?” Diane Dodd repeats the question and ponders it. Then she sighs, “I would say to him: You didn't do it. You're a creep, but you didn't do it.”

That many of the Boston stranglings were copycat crimes is beyond doubt. Starting with the death of Anna Slesers on June 14, 1962, the circumstances of the killings were so thoroughly and so well documented in the newspapers that anyone who wanted to rid himself of an inconvenient woman, or kill one for the thrill of it, or for any other reason, had a blueprint to do so. The killer could also be assured that the press—particularly the
Record American
—would attribute the crime to the Phantom Fiend, as would public opinion, which then, as now, was shaped by the media.

The police always knew better.

The press contention was that the murders were identical in method. They were not: No similarity whatever exists between the relatively delicate killing of Patricia Bissette, whose murderer tucked her into bed, and the ghastly homicidal violation inflicted on Mary Sullivan, whose killer's intent was not just to degrade his victim by shoving a broom handle into her vagina but to taunt the discoverer of her corpse by placing a greeting card against her foot. Beverly Samans was stabbed but not sexually assaulted; Joann Graff was raped vaginally and strangled. Evelyn Corbin had performed—probably under duress—oral sex on her killer. Jane Sullivan was dumped facedown to rot in a bathtub. Ida Irga was left in the living room with her legs spread out and propped up on a chair.

These are hardly identical modi operandi.

Nor does the fact that the women who died by strangulation were garroted by articles of their own clothing point to a single killer. Virtually every adult woman owns hosiery, brassieres, blouses, scarves, or bathrobes with tie belts. All of these provide excellent and readily available ligatures for a killer—particularly one who doesn't wish to be observed carrying a murder weapon to the crime scene.

The copycat factor is vividly demonstrated in the case of Mabel St. Clair, an elderly woman who was found dead in the bathroom of her Lynn apartment on the afternoon of October 27, 1964. She had been strangled to death; the murder weapon was the stocking found around her neck. The immediate suspect in the case was the young Boston woman who was found standing in the hall outside Mrs. St. Clair's apartment shrieking hysterically.

The name of this young woman, a long-term mental patient, had cropped up in police files in the days after the murder of Patricia Bissette. An anonymous phone caller had informed police that this young woman had attempted to strangle a nurse while a patient at Boston State Hospital; she therefore might well be the Phantom Fiend.

After being taken into custody, this suspect was briefly questioned by Andrew Tuney of the Strangler Task Force. He reported to John Bottomly, who in turn wrote to Edward Brooke: “She was asked about the possibility of complicity in the other stranglings. She denied any connection with them. She recognizes that having confessed to this murder [of Mabel St. Clair] it would make little difference to her to admit involvement in other murders. She offered the opinion that the publicity about the Strangler probably influenced the method by which Mabel St. Clair was murdered.”

The same publicity—and the template for homicide provided by the
Record American's
“Strangle Worksheet” —no doubt influenced others as well, including the person who murdered Effie MacDonald in Bangor, Maine, in March of 1965.

Serial killers tend to stick to a certain type of victim: Ted Bundy murdered young, white, very attractive college women who wore their hair long and parted in the center; John Wayne Gacy and Dean Corll murdered young white boys; Anthony Jackson chose young white female hitchhikers. Wayne Williams murdered young black males. Even Jack the Ripper confined himself to prostitutes. A serial killer still at large
⁷⁸
in Tennessee victimizes only redheaded women.

The Boston strangling victims were young, middle-aged, old, white, black, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. The only similarity between them was that most had some connection, however tenuous, with the medical world, either as patient or practitioners. And virtually everyone falls into one category or the other—mostly the former—at some point in life.

 

 

Did Albert DeSalvo kill anyone? Possibly Mary Mullen, a name that does not appear on the roster of strangling victims but to whose murder he confessed anyway. DeSalvo told Bottomly that the eighty-five-year-old woman had admitted him to her apartment at 1435 Commonwealth Avenue in Brighton on June 28, 1962 after he explained he had been sent to do some work there.

Albert was not quite sure how it happened, but suddenly his arm was around her neck—prior to that they had been chatting quite pleasantly—and then Mrs. Mullen was dead. He hadn't choked her (and indeed there were no marks of violence on her body); she had simply expired of heart failure.

Her death was attributed to natural causes.

When Virginia Thorner testified at Albert's 1967 Green Man trial, she claimed that he had stated to her in 1964 that he had killed an elderly woman, but that the authorities weren't aware of it.

His use of the singular here is important, because the deaths of six women over the age of fifty-five (counting the youthful-appearing Evelyn Corbin) were attributed to the Strangler. If Albert had killed them all, why cite just one—especially if his purpose in making this claim was to terrorize Mrs. Thorner into submission?

In the case of Mary Mullen, it seems most likely that Albert broke into her apartment with the intent to burglarize it, encountered Mrs. Mullen, and simply frightened her to death by his very presence. Overwhelmed by guilt—and Albert was prone to severe attacks of guilt
⁷⁹
—he set Mrs. Mullen's body on the couch and fled without removing any valuables from her apartment.

And why would a man who had treated with such savage disrespect the corpses of Ida Irga, Jane Sullivan, and Helen Blake be so delicate in his treatment of the body of Mary Mullen? There is a logic even to extreme pathology—often a very rigid one—that does not exist here.

Albert's feeling of responsibility for the death of Mary Mullen—and if he
did
break into her apartment and inadvertently frighten her to death, he was under Massachusetts law technically guilty of a homicide committed in the perpetration of a felony—may have been one of the factors that drove him eventually to confess to the stranglings.

 

 

Mary Brown, who was raped, stabbed, strangled, and beaten to death in Lawrence sometime on the evening of March 5 or during the day on March 6, 1963, was not on the Strangler Task Force's original list of victims—she had, in fact, specifically been discounted. Her name was put back on the roster when Albert mentioned it, although Bottomly was not very interested in taking his confession to that crime. This was possibly because Albert's confession was not a very good one—he got many of the salient details wrong.

A number of authorities believe that Albert was given sketchy information about the murder of Mary Brown from the Bridgewater inmate who had actually committed that crime.

Mary Brown lived on Park Street in Lawrence, where Domenic Kirmil, the man shot to death by George Nassar in 1948, kept his shop.

 

 

For some former high-ranking Boston Police Department officials, the prime suspect in the death of Anna Slesers was someone very close to her, an individual who had the motive, means, and opportunity to kill her.

Anna's son, who had discovered her body and told police that he thought she had committed suicide, stated that although his mother would have considered herself presentable clad in a bathrobe, she would never have admitted a stranger to her apartment when she wasn't wearing her dentures.

She was without them when her body was found.

There were odd codas to three other of the murders.

The agitated and disheveled man who had entered Martin's Tavern in Lawrence at 4:30 on the afternoon of Joann Graff's murder had visited the bar two and a half hours earlier. He had asked then for a “Lucky” beer. Jules Vens, the proprietor of the tavern, had never heard of that brand. The man remarked that it was sold on the West Coast.

Fourteen months later, while interviewing strangling suspect Peter Burton at Bridgewater State Hospital, Ames Robey asked his patient if he drank. Burton replied, “Yeah, you know, beer.” Robey asked him what his favorite brand was. Burton replied that it was Lucky Lager, sold only in California.

At the time of Joann's murder, Burton was living in New Hampshire. Lawrence is five miles from the state line.

On January 4, 1964, the day of Mary Sullivan's death, a young, light-haired man with a hysterical laugh walked into a bar on Charles Street, a few blocks down from the murder scene, and asked for a Lucky Lager.

On that same day, Peter Burton was getting married in Troy, New York.

On May 6, 1963, Arthur W. Barrows, a prime suspect in the murders of the elderly women, was freeloading in Harvard Square. A priest at Saint Paul's church recalls giving him $1.50 for food.

Beverly Samans, who took in waifs and strays and mental patients, had died only hours earlier.

 

 

An inmate of Bridgewater State Hospital, incarcerated there during the same period as were George Nassar, Albert DeSalvo, Peter Burton, and Arthur Barrows, states firmly that Albert DeSalvo was coached for his role as the Boston Strangler by another inmate who had actually committed the crimes, or some of them: “I was there when all of this was being put together,” the man claims. “I was there in the prison yard sitting next to a tree as DeSalvo and [the other inmate] would talk each day. They would come out to the prison yard and sit next to a tree and [the other inmate] would tell DeSalvo things, like how he had inserted a bottle in one of the victims, what color a room was, or how the victim looked, or how old she was ... Bottomly put two and two together and he knew then that [the other inmate] was his man. He wanted to save the public the money trying anyone, and what the hell, both [the other inmate] and DeSalvo were not going anyplace.”

 

 

Dan Doherty, DeSalvo's social worker during his Walpole incarceration, says today that Albert never showed the slightest sign of violence: “He was a delightful rogue. There's no way he could have killed a girl.” Doherty has had a lot of experience working with hard cases. “I had the Brink's guys and the wiseguys from the North End [members of the New England Mafia based in Boston] and Albert didn't fit in with them.”

Doherty remembers asking one of the imprisoned Cosa Nostra soldiers if
he
believed DeSalvo was the killer of eleven women.

The curt response: “The Strangler's not Italian.”

Doherty put the same question to another wiseguy and got the same answer.

The upper echelon of the Mafia held similar views. Speaking two years after Albert's death, Joseph “The Baron” Barboza commented disgustedly to an associate that some fool down at Walpole State Prison had taken the rap for being the Boston Strangler.