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  The Boston Strangler

  Gerold Frank

  A Note to the Reader

  This book, which has taken on a shape and a direction I could not anticipate when I began, has been an extraordinary experience for me. I have lived it as well as written it.

  I first became interested in what was taking place in Boston in the late summer of 1963. At that time there had been a series of murders of single women, most of whom were middle-aged, under circumstances as baffling as any in fiction. Each woman had been strangled in her apartment. There were no signs of forcible entry. Around the necks of the victims were knotted nylon stockings or other articles of their apparel. Each woman had been sexually molested or assaulted. No clues were found; nothing had been stolen; there was no discernible motive. The victims were, so far as could be determined, modest, inconspicuous, almost anonymous women, leading blameless lives. Beyond the mystery of their deaths, there was something terribly sad and pathetic about these victims who apparently either knew or were unafraid of their murderer, and let him into their apartments and did not even put up a struggle before they were finished off. It was obvious that the murderer—or murderers—was insane. As a result, Boston was a city near panic.

  As a young reporter I had had my fill of crime. I had covered electrocutions in Sing Sing prison, and had never gotten over the sight of murderers in the electric chair, nor the sense that we, the spectators, were outraging decency by witnessing the last private moments of these men. Later, as a foreign correspondent, I had reported riots, revolutions, and political assassinations. Sudden death was not unknown to me and I was not particularly eager to explore the subject again. My interest, therefore, was not so much in writing a book about the Boston stranglings as it was to write about what happens to a great city when it is besieged by terror—terror stemming from a horrifying explosion of the violence that seems more and more a part of contemporary life. How do people behave in a climate of fear? What defenses do they put up? To what extremes are they driven? How does rationality cope with irrationality, common sense with hysteria?

  The city, then, was to be my subject—and the victims. For if these murders were, as it appeared, utterly senseless, why should these women have been chosen to die? What brought them to this place, at this moment in time, so that their lives met that of their assailant, moving about the city tortured by some private anguish of his own—Death incarnate?

  But it turned out that this was only the prologue. I could not know then that for the next three years I would be possessed—and obsessed—by this story as it grew and unfolded under my hand, as murder succeeded murder and new victims were strangled even while I was on the scene. I found myself, without having planned it, becoming the historian of a singular chapter in American social history: one of the world’s greatest multiple murders, one of the most exhaustive manhunts of modern times, and finally, what is surely the most extraordinary and sustained self-revelation yet made by a criminal.

  As the only writer completely involved with the case, I was given the fullest cooperation—not only in Boston but in the neighboring towns where the stranglings and other crimes also occurred. The result is that everything that is in this book is based on fact. In some instances the identities of certain persons have been disguised but these persons were and are real. What appears in the following pages comes not only from my research and from hundreds of hours of personal interviews with the principal actors in the drama, and with scores of other participants, but also from the actual documentation—the police and court records, the medical and psychiatric reports, the transcripts of interrogations (some under hypnosis and hypnotic drugs), and the letters, diaries, and other source papers.

  In short, the words and thoughts of the hunters and the hunted are not my invention but are, within the limits of human error, true. Unavoidably, errors will have crept in; mistakes in emphasis and interpretation will have been made; but in all instances I have done my best to mirror faithfully what went on in Boston in the time of the Boston Strangler.

  GEROLD FRANK

  New York, August, 1966

  The Dead

  JUNE 14, 1962

  Anna Slesers, fifty-Five 77 Gainsborough Street, Boston

  JUNE 30, 1962

  Nina Nichols, sixty-eight 1940 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

  JUNE 30, 1962

  Helen Blake, sixty-five 73 Newhall Street, Lynn

  AUGUST 19, 1962

  Ida Irga, seventy-five 7 Grove Street, Boston

  AUGUST 20, 1962

  Jane Sullivan, sixty-seven 435 Columbia Road, Boston

  DECEMBER 5, 1962

  Sophie Clark, twenty 315 Huntington Avenue, Boston

  DECEMBER 3 1, 1962

  Patricia Bissette, twenty-three 515 Park Drive, Boston

  MAY 6, 1963

  Beverly Samans, twenty-three 4 University Road, Cambridge

  SEPTEMBER 8, 1963

  Evelyn Gorbin, fifty-eight 224 Lafayette Street, Salem

  NOVEMBER 23, 1963

  Joann Graff, twenty-three 54 Essex Street, Lawrence

  JANUARY 4, 1964

  Mary Sullivan, nineteen 44A Charles Street, Boston

  AND

  JUNE 28, 1962

  Mary Mullen, eighty-five 1435 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

  MARCH 9, 1963

  Mary Brown, sixty-nine 319 Park Avenue, Lawrence

  Dates are the original police estimates.

  Part One

  1

  This is a story about Boston. It is a true story, about the people in it, what happened to them, and the strange and implausible events that took place there in a time which is today and—man being the creature he is—may again be tomorrow.

  It begins on Thursday, June 14, 1962.

  That day, under a sky that threatened rain but never carried out its threat, Bostonians went about their business—concerned with their private or public affairs, legal or illicit, generous or self-serving, history-making or utterly unimportant. Yet if we hold a microscope to it it becomes something of a special day.

  In Cambridge, across the Charles River, Harvard University was holding its 311th Commencement, and in the Yard thousands of students, alumni, and guests were gathering about the buffet tables set up under canvas, heavy with the traditional chicken salad and beer. At 4:15 P.M., the sun came out from behind the clouds: since Boston had known only rain these last few days—it had forced cancellation of the Harvard-Yale baseball game the day before—that was a signal for everyone to break out in a mighty song, “Fair Harvard.” The ancient bells of Memorial Church chimed in, echoing across the campus.

  At that time, through the Back Bay and downtown districts of the city itself, some 100,000 Bostonians lined the streets cheering Commander Alan B. Shepard, Jr., the nation’s first astronaut. The man who had ridden the nose of a rocket more than a hundred miles above the earth a year before had come to his hometown, nearby Derry, New Hampshire, to receive a New England Aero Club award and be guest of honor on that day—Flag Day—at ceremonies on Boston Common. He stood in the back of a convertible, a shining, handsome man, and as he rode by the applause rippled up the street.

  That was a cheerful scene. A stone’s throw away in State Street—Boston’s Wall Street—the scene was anything but cheerful. The stock market had fallen violently for the fourth consecutive day. This time the Dow-Jones averages, made up of thirty blue-chip stocks, had plunged below the floor set two weeks earlier on May 28—Black Monday—which had seen the sharpest one-day drop since the crash of 1929. Something close to panic was in the air. Although the marke
t closed at 3:30 P.M. as usual, the tape was late and it wasn’t until some time later that statisticians could announce that American industry was then worth 5.6 billion dollars less than when the market had opened at 10 A.M. that morning.

  By six o’clock, however, all this was history. Then the microscope held to the city would have revealed a curious process under way. Boston is a town whose population swells and decreases by half every twenty-four hours. At 8 A.M., as workers pour into the city from the surrounding suburbs, it becomes a metropolis of 1,500,000; but at dusk as they flow back to their homes, it shrinks to a town half as populated, tenanted only by those who live there.

  Among these was Mrs. Anna E. Slesers, fifty-five, a divorcée for more than twenty years, who had come to this country with her son and daughter in 1950 as a displaced person from Latvia. As dusk fell over the city, Mrs. Slesers was preparing her bath in her small, third-floor apartment at 77 Gainsborough Street, in the Back Bay area of Boston. Gainsborough Street is an old-fashioned, tree-lined, lamplit street of identical bay-windowed, four-story red brick homes, each with its cement stoop and low picket fence guarding a miniature lawn. Once these buildings, each a town house, had a certain elegance; now, remodeled into small apartments, they housed mainly students, transients, and elderly couples living on modest pensions.

  For Mrs. Slesers, a small woman with a petite face and large dark eyes who looked much younger than her age, this Thursday had been leisurely. Little of the excitement elsewhere in the city had touched her. Trade had been slack at Decorator Fabrics, Incorporated, where she worked as a sixty-dollar-a-week seamstress. She had been sent home at 1 P.M. the day before and told not to report again until Monday. A long weekend stretched before her. On Thursday she had shopped until nearly five o’clock, and then returned to cook a frugal dinner for herself and await her son Juris, twenty-five. He was to come by at seven o’clock to drive her to memorial services at the Latvian Lutheran Church in nearby Roxbury. For Latvians, June fourteenth is a national day of mourning for thousands of their countrymen, deported to Siberia when the Russians overran Latvia in World War II.

  Mrs. Slesers took her time moving about the neat little apartment. She baked a pan of muffins for Juris, and put them to cool on the kitchen table. Then, at a small desk in the living room, she made out a few checks—gas, telephone, electricity. From where she sat she could see the heavy ropes supporting a scaffolding just below her front window. Men had been working there, painting and pointing up the brick exterior. But because of the constant rain and because today, too, threatened rain, the scaffolding had hung empty and deserted for days. Mrs. Slesers sealed the envelopes and left them on her desk. Then she undressed in her bedroom and, in robe and slippers, entered the bathroom and turned on the taps. From the living room a high fidelity set, an FM radio-record-player assembly put together by Juris, who was expert in such matters, filled the apartment with the strains of Tristan und Isolde. Music was one of Mrs. Slesers’ chief joys. As a matter of fact, after Juris had suggested a few weeks before that maybe they should take separate apartments because they were beginning to get on each other’s nerves (her daughter Maija had married a few years before and lived in Maryland), she had chosen 77 Gainsborough Street because she could walk to Symphony Hall around the corner on Huntington Avenue. The music swelled; in the bathroom the water poured into the tub. If there was any noise attendant upon what took place in Apartment 3F in the next half hour or so, it is quite possible that the music and running water drowned it out.

  A few minutes before seven o’clock Juris, a slight, bespectacled young man with a crew cut, a research engineer at the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratories in suburban Lexington, drove up and parked. He climbed to the third floor and rapped on the door of his mother’s apartment. Juris had been up early that morning because each Thursday before driving to his job he spent the hour from 7 A.M. to 8 A.M. with his psychiatrist* in Cambridge. After work he’d been busy, taking a pair of shoes to be repaired, returning a library book, cooking dinner for himself in the room he’d taken in Lexington. Then it was time for the half-hour drive to Boston to pick up his mother. He was a little tired.

  Juris knocked again. He pressed his ear to the metal door: all was quiet within. Could she have gone out for a last minute’s shopping? He descended the narrow stairs to the street, sat on the cement stoop, and waited, annoyed. He hadn’t really wanted to take her to the services. When she telephoned him the night before, he had agreed to drive her to a public memorial gathering at 8:15 P.M. But then she had called him back to say she had been on the telephone with her pastor who said a church service would be held at 7:30, preceding the meeting. Would Juris pick her up earlier so she could make that, too? “I don’t particularly want to go to both,” he had said, but she had pleaded and he finally agreed. Now he had come earlier, he was waiting—he’d even brought her a little Latvian flag—it was already 7:15, and no sign of her. Maybe she’d been in the bathroom and hadn’t heard him, he thought; he went up again and this time knocked even louder. Still no answer. He tried the door; it was locked.

  Impatient, he went down into the street again and as he passed through the dark little vestibule with its dull, cream-colored wainscoting, he noticed the white gleam of mail in his mother’s box. She must have forgotten to take it up. He waited on the sidewalk, pacing back and forth, expecting her to appear any minute; then he went up again. This time he pounded. Still no answer. The thought that she might have done something to herself flashed through his mind. She had sounded depressed on the phone. She had said, when he finally agreed, speaking in her sad, mother’s voice, “Now, you’re sure I won’t be imposing on you—”

  “No, no, it’s quite all right,” he had said, guiltily.

  Perhaps at this very moment she was lying sick inside—

  It was 7:45. He would break the door down. He put his shoulder to it once, backed up, rammed it hard a second time—it sprang open. The apartment was quite dark, but there was a faint light in the kitchen. Nevertheless he almost stumbled over a chair directly before him. The door must have struck against it, placed unaccountably in the very middle of the hallway. His mother was not in the living room; he hurried into the bedroom. She was not in there, but the dresser drawers had been left open, which was not like her. Then he retraced his steps down the hallway, past the curiously placed chair, toward the kitchen …

  It was 7:49 P.M. when Officers Benson and Joyce, cruising in Police Car fifteen a few blocks away, heard the dispatcher’s rasping voice: “Fifteen A—go to Seventy-seven Gainsborough Street, report of an alleged suicide.” Three minutes later Juris, who had waited for them outside the building, led them upstairs. Shock seemed to have driven all emotion from him. His mother had committed suicide. She had been depressed. She had hanged herself on the corner of the bathroom door with the cord of her bathrobe; her body had fallen to the floor. She lay in the hall next to the bathroom. He had been about to touch her, but then he had realized she was dead, and instead he had telephoned the police and then called his married sister in Maryland.

  Almost automatically he had placed the little Latvian standard on his mother’s desk, and now he sat quietly on the sofa while the apartment filled with those assigned by society to take over in time of sudden death: the doctor who pronounced her dead, the medical examiner who ordered her body to the morgue for autopsy to determine the cause of death, the photographer to record what met the eye in every room, the artist to draw every object to scale, the fingerprint man dusting tables, doorjambs, and toilet seats, the men from Homicide, who live with murder, to examine and question, and the police stenographer to take down statements.

  Cruising on Commonwealth Avenue, Special Officer James Mellon and Sergeant John Driscoll of Homicide heard the dispatcher’s message over their radio. Mellon swung the car around. “They’ll want us over there anyway, may as well go now.” A moment later the order came sending them to 77 Gainsborough Street, too. A few minutes after eight o’clock Officer Mellon walked
into Apartment 3F. As he came through the door he found himself in a tiny foyer; directly before him the living room desk with a lamp, a telephone, and the tiny Latvian flag. Mellon’s first impression was of neatness. The very floor gleamed. A policeman was seated near the desk making out his report. Mellon glanced automatically to the left, toward the rear, bedroom section of the apartment. “Where’s the body?” he asked.

  The other gestured in the opposite direction, toward the kitchen. “Nothing to it—suicide,” he said.

  Mellon turned to the right and found himself staring directly at the body of a woman. He was always to remember his first sight of Anna Slesers’ body, its sheer, startling nudity, the shockingly exposed position in which it had been left. She lay outstretched, a fragile-appearing woman with brown bobbed hair and thin mouth, lying on her back on a gray runner. She wore a blue taffeta housecoat with a red lining, but it had been spread completely apart in front, so that from shoulders down she was nude. She lay grotesquely, her head a few feet from the open bathroom door, her left leg stretched straight toward him, the other flung wide, almost at right angles, and bent at the knee so that she was grossly exposed. The blue cloth cord of her housecoat had been knotted tightly about her neck, its ends turned up so that it might have been a bow, tied little-girl fashion under her chin. There was a spot of blood under her head.

  The tub, he saw, was one-third full of water; next to it, her gray knitted slippers, left neatly as she had stepped out of them. In that first swift glance Mellon saw a pair of dentures soaking in a glass of water on the pantry shelf, a kettle on the four-burner stove, a pan of muffins on the kitchen table, next to it a change purse partly open, and a pair of steel-rimmed glasses; near the body, on the runner, a white pocketbook open, some of its contents beside it—Kleenex, cigarettes, matchbook, comb. Near the threshold of the kitchen stood a wastebasket in which someone had rummaged, for odds and ends of trash were strewn on the floor about it.