Search for the Strangler (2 page)

Mary’s mother, Florry, was startled awake by a voice outside her window. The clock read
2:00 A.M
. “Jack, do you hear anything?” she asked her slumbering husband. Then, not waiting for his response, she got out of bed,
put on her housecoat, and walked toward the boys’ bedroom. There John and his younger brother, David, were both sleeping soundly.
She then opened the door to the girls’ room. Peeking inside, she found both Helen and Diane fast asleep, but Mary was gone.
Florry ran into the kitchen, where she saw the screen door swinging slightly with the wind. A deep anxiety growing over her,
she hugged herself against the cold and ran outside. “Mary . . . Mary!” she called out into the darkness. There was no answer.
Suddenly, a flash of Mary’s white pajama top appeared along the tree line and then disappeared again. Florry chased after
her, screaming Mary’s name as loud as she could, but again her daughter did not respond. Finally, entering the woods, she
found Mary standing still, the large trees looming over her. “I saw her again, Mommy!” Mary declared, pointing with her finger
into the darkness. Florry reached down, scooped up her little girl, and hugged her tightly. Both were soaking wet from the
rain. “Who did you see, darling?” Florry asked, alarmed, her eyes darting in every direction, looking for signs of a stranger.
“The Blessed Mother,” Mary replied.

“She told me to come with her.” Florry asked her daughter where the Blessed Mother wanted her to go. “To Heaven,” said Mary,
not with fear but with a sense of awe in her voice. Florry squeezed the six-year-old as if she were trying to keep an invisible
force from taking Mary away. Then she looked the child in the eyes and said, “You mustn’t come out here at night, honey.”
Little Mary was confused but nodded her assent.

This wasn’t the first time Florry had gone after her daughter in the darkness. What was pulling Mary outside night after night?
Was it her imagination? Or was it something unexplainable? These questions raced through Florry’s mind as she led her daughter
back inside, tucked the girl into bed, and walked into the small, darkened living room, where she knelt before a large portrait
of Jesus hanging over the mantel and began praying for her child. “O heart of Jesus, I trust in Thee, although each joy of
life may flee. Though darkness comes, no light is found, and bonds of fear my soul have bound. So when throbs pain or sorrow
deep, when heart aweary knows not sleep, my Lord, my Love, I cling to thee. O heart of Jesus, I trust in Thee.”

M
ary Sullivan could not wait to get a jump on this new day. Even though it was Saturday and she did not have to work, she was
up by
7:30 A.M.
After a cup of coffee, she’d retrieve her record player and prized Johnny Mathis record collection from her car, which was
parked on the street. She had been living in her new apartment for four days now and was getting along wonderfully with the
two roommates she once had worked with at Filene’s department store. Mary would begin her new job at the bank on Monday, but
today she would finish moving her belongings into her new home. Granted, accommodations were cramped. There was only one bedroom,
which could fit two beds, and since Mary had been the last one to move in, she had to sleep on the living room couch. But
Mary was used to cramped quarters, having grown up with three sisters and two brothers.

Mary’s high spirits were not dampened that Saturday by the fact that she was spending it alone. Her roommates, Pat Delmore
and Pam Parker, had been called into work at Filene’s to help handle the mad rush of holiday returns, but she had promised
to have dinner with them that evening. Forecasters predicted the temperature would be in the upper forties: it would be a
good day for Mary to explore her new neighborhood. Her apartment was on the top floor of the three-story building at 44A Charles
Street in Boston, just down the street from her favorite pub, The Sevens, a small, lively joint with a long bar that seated
about twenty-five people comfortably but on a good night often packed close to fifty.

Charles Street was and remains a bustling area. With its antiques shops and small tucked-away cafés, it is one of the few
places in the city where Boston Brahmins connect with the lower-income and college crowds. Cutting through the heart of the
Beacon Hill neighborhood, Charles Street is just one block from the Boston Common and three blocks from the golden dome of
the statehouse. The neighborhood of roughly ten thousand residents is steeped in history. Before the American Revolution,
Beacon Hill was a pastureland for cattle. Then builders constructed elegant row houses along the south slope of the hill,
which attracted Boston’s finest families. The Cabots and the Lodges made their homes here. Then, in the late nineteenth century,
European immigrants, sailors, poets, and former slaves flooded the north slope of Beacon Hill, adding a touch of bohemia to
the blue-blooded neighborhood.

Mary Sullivan’s Charles Street neighborhood, with its cobblestone walks and gas lamps, was the Boston pictured in postcards,
not a place where one would expect a gruesome murder. Mary certainly thought it was safe.

That same day, Diane Sullivan received a letter from her sister in the mail. Not waiting until she got inside, she opened
the letter right there at the mailbox. Mary wrote that she was enjoying her new life in Boston and invited Diane up to stay.
Diane immediately started thinking about the fun they would have in the big city. Of the six Sullivan children, seventeen-year-old
Diane and nineteen-year-old Mary were the closest in age and in character, and the two were best friends. Diane raced inside
the house and handed the letter to Florry, who looked at the address and sighed. “44A Charles Street! That’s dangerous. We’re
going up to get her as soon as your father comes home,” Florry pledged. Diane was confused. Charles Street was considered
one of the nicest places to live in Boston. Why was Florry so afraid?

After a frantic day at Filene’s, Mary’s roommates returned to their Charles Street apartment at approximately
6:00 P.M
. The temperature had dipped below freezing, and a light snow had begun to fall. After climbing the long flight of stairs,
Pat Delmore pulled her key chain out of the pocket of her wool coat, only to realize that her apartment key was no longer
on the chain. Something else disturbed her. It appeared that Mary had forgotten to lock the door. “Mary’s gonna have to be
more careful. I need to have a chat with her about keeping this door locked,” Delmore thought.

She and Pam Parker entered the apartment. The hall light was on, but otherwise the flat was dark. Then the roommates noticed
that their bedroom door was open. “I could see Mary lying on the bed in the dark,” Pat recalls. “I knew something was wrong.”

Parker slowly walked into the bedroom. She could make out Mary’s shape, almost in a sitting position near the headboard. “Wake
up, Mary, we’re home. We’re about to put dinner on,” Parker said softly. When there was no reply, she called out again. Silence.
“I could see Mary’s eyes [were] open,” Parker recalls. “She was looking right at me. I didn’t know why she wasn’t responding.”

Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw when she flicked on the bedroom light. Mary’s breasts were exposed. Three
ligatures were wrapped tightly around her neck. A broom handle had been lodged in her vagina. There was also a greeting card
sitting on the bed by her left foot. It read, “Happy New Year.”

Parker ran out of the bedroom screaming, “I think she’s dead. I think she’s dead!” Pat Delmore stood in the kitchen, frozen.
“Pam grabbed my elbow, and we ran down the stairs. We didn’t have a phone, so we had to run across the street to a drugstore,”
Delmore remembers. “I was so crazed, I spent five minutes looking through the yellow pages for the police department’s phone
number.” Finally she and Parker reached a dispatcher at Boston Police headquarters, who told them to wait outside the apartment
building for help to arrive.

Beacon Hill should have been the safest neighborhood in Boston that night. Twelve police officers had been canvassing the
area, interviewing residents for a census report. A few moments after Mary’s roommates crossed back to their side of Charles
Street, motorcycle officer John Vadeboncour pulled up outside their building and ushered Parker back up to the apartment.
His words echoed the thoughts of Mary’s roommates: “O my God!”

The official autopsy report provided the following information:

The body of the deceased was on one of two twin beds, the one nearer the door leading to the kitchen of the apartment. The
body was in a sitting position at the head of the bed, leaning against the headboard. The thighs and knees were flexed, and
spread apart. The neck is flexed, the chin resting on the upper chest. The head is leaning toward the right. The body is nude
except for the partial cover of the shoulders by a blouse and bra. The breasts are bare. The mouth contains mucoid sticky
secretions, a dried strand of this extending from the mouth towards a dried streak of similar material on the skin of the
right breast, and on the anterior chest wall. A broom handle is present in the vagina [to the extent of three inches], the
whole broom is extending out flat on the bed in front of the body. About the neck are tied three ligatures consisting of (A)
a charcoal colored nylon stocking, (B) a pink silk scarf, and (C) a pink and white scarf of floral design. The only clothing
present, and this is about the shoulders, is a white bra and a yellow and beige striped blouse. [The first ligature] is extremely
tight causing a deeply depressed furrow, completely encircling the neck. [There are] acute traumatic injuries to both breasts.

Investigators also made an unusual discovery in Mary’s bathroom. A red plaid ascot had been cut up and stuffed into the toilet.

The oldest of the Sullivan children, twenty-four-year-old Helen, was working as a nurse and living with her new husband in
the Boston suburb of Arlington. Authorities called them that night for the grim task of identifying Mary’s body. The medical
examiner was holding Mary’s body in the basement of the mortuary. From the top of the stairs, Helen could see Mary’s lifeless
body on a table, her feet sticking out from under a white sheet. Helen’s knees buckled. She could not bring herself to go
downstairs. In her place her husband, Arthur, walked down the basement steps and told the examiner that the dead woman was
Mary Sullivan. Meanwhile a large crowd gathered outside 44A Charles Street as detectives marched in and out of the building.
The whispers spread. The killer had struck again. One neighbor told police she had seen an older man helping a woman who looked
like Mary bring boxes into her apartment building earlier that day, several hours before the murder. Had this witness caught
a glimpse of Mary’s killer? Another neighbor, living directly across the street, had a clear view into Mary’s apartment. At
approximately
5:00 P.M.
, the time investigators believed Mary was killed, the neighbor claimed to have seen a man standing in Mary’s bathroom. She
said the man had red hair.

One man fitting that description was Pat Delmore’s fiancé, a Boston University student named Joseph Preston Moss (not his
real name). Moss was among the dozens of people watching detectives rush in and out of 44A Charles Street that night. He had
come to take Delmore out for a date. Sharply dressed in a camel hair coat, Moss stood out in the throng of people gathered
along the sidewalk outside the apartment. He was talking to Delmore when a cop called him over and took him up to the apartment.
Upstairs, Moss told police the roommates had seen someone on the fire escape outside the apartment just two days before. He
also said the women were worried about a defective kitchen window. There were no signs of forced entry into Mary’s apartment.
How had the killer gotten in? Through the window, perhaps? Or had Mary let him in? Was she comfortable with him, comfortable
enough to let her guard down?

An aspiring photographer named Joe Butera lived a few blocks away and followed the police sirens to Charles Street. He was
snapping pictures of the scene when he saw Moss, his former classmate, walk out of the building with the police. Noticing
Butera, Moss motioned him over. “They . . . They think I did it,” Moss whispered.

At around seven o’clock that evening, Florry and Jack Sullivan were relaxing in their living room in Hyannis, Massachusetts.
Jack had gotten home late from his new job as a maintenance mechanic at Cape Cod’s Otis Air Force Base. He had been working
on jeep motors, and he had just finished washing the grease from his sore and callused hands. Because he was exhausted, Florry
did not mention her worry over Mary’s letter. Then the phone rang. It was not the police, but rather a reporter at the
Boston Globe.
“Mister Sullivan, do you have a daughter named Mary Ellen?” the reporter asked. “No, sir. My daughter’s name is Mary Ann,”
Jack replied, having forgotten she had changed her middle name at confirmation. As Jack listened on the phone, Florry looked
into her husband’s eyes and sensed something was wrong. She arose from the chair and instinctively grabbed Mary’s high school
graduation photo from the mantel. “What hospital is she in?” she asked. Jack did not answer. He just shook his head and wept.

Diane says she also had an uneasy feeling that day. “It was a beautiful, unusually warm winter day on Cape Cod, and I remember
thinking to myself, why do I feel so sad?” Diane was on a date with Donny Sherman, her future husband. She remembers going
to a Yarmouth diner called Bill & Thelma’s for a bite to eat around nine o’clock that evening. Bill & Thelma’s was a traditional
sock hop restaurant where the local teens danced and the music always played. But there was no music playing on this night.

“It was a very surreal experience,” Diane recalls. “I walked into the restaurant and felt a hundred eyes on me. My friends
and even people I didn’t know were staring at us and whispering. I knew something was wrong.” Diane and Donny chose a table
in the back of the restaurant. Finally a classmate of Diane’s got up the courage to come to their table. “You have to go home,”
the classmate said, her face ashen. When Diane asked her why, the girl would not answer but only repeated, “You just have
to go home.” Diane says it came to her immediately. “I looked up at Donny and said, ‘Oh, no! Mary’s been strangled in Boston!’”