Search for the Strangler (4 page)

At fifty-six, Anna E. Slesers had witnessed enough horror in her life. She had watched helplessly as loved ones died when
Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fought over her native Latvia in World War II. Anna Slesers did not know how she had managed
to survive, and she would never forget those who died for her small country. Vowing that her son and daughter would never
be subjected to the same fate, she escaped Eastern Europe with them shortly after the war and immigrated to Boston, which
had a small but vibrant Latvian community.

Slesers, an attractive divorcée, found work as a seamstress. By 1962, her children grown, she lived alone in a small apartment
at 77 Gainsborough Street, two blocks from Boston’s Symphony Hall. Her quiet neighborhood catered to lower income families
and college students from nearby Northeastern University.

On the evening of June 14, 1962, Anna Slesers was getting ready for a bath. Later, she was to accompany her son to a memorial
service for Latvia’s war dead. She had taken off her clothes and wrapped her robe tightly around her small body. Slesers placed
a record on the turntable and walked toward her bathroom to turn on the water. As the steam started to rise, the sounds of
Tristan und Isolde
echoed through the apartment. In the next few minutes, Anna Slesers would be dead.

Juris Slesers, Anna’s twenty-five-year-old son, told police he had arrived at his mother’s apartment just before seven o’clock
that night. He knocked on the door of apartment 3-F, but there was no answer. He then returned to the building’s foyer and
waited for his mother there, believing she might have gone to the store. Several minutes passed. Finally, the son returned
to the apartment and forced his way in. The music was still playing. He found the body of his mother lying in the hallway,
her bathrobe open, revealing her breasts and stomach. The cord of her robe was wrapped around her neck.

That night, Jim Mellon had been cruising in his squad car on nearby Huntington Avenue, so he was one of the first police officers
at the murder scene. He found Juris Slesers sitting on his mother’s couch. Looking around the immaculate apartment, Mellon
noticed that the drawers of Anna Slesers’s bedroom dresser had been pulled out in arithmetic progression. The top drawer was
open a quarter inch, the middle drawer was open a half inch, and the bottom drawer was open three-quarters of an inch. But
nothing appeared to be missing. Juris Slesers led Mellon over to his mother’s body, telling Mellon he believed his mother
had committed suicide. According to Juris’s theory, she had tried to hang herself from a hook on the bathroom door, but her
body had fallen to the floor. There was no panic in his voice as he gave this explanation. “It’s as if I were a plumber and
he was describing a broken pipe,” Mellon recalls now. Maybe he’s just in shock, the officer thought at the time. The son had
made no attempt to cover his mother’s naked body, which Mellon also found odd. Kneeling down closer to the dead woman, he
noticed that Slesers’s neck was scratched and that blood was trickling out of her vagina. This was no suicide. Anna Slesers
had been sexually assaulted.

Phil DiNatale was Mellon’s partner. Fellow cops kidded DiNatale about his resemblance to the retired heavyweight champion
Rocky Marciano. The likeness worked well when he interrogated suspects. Mellon and his stocky partner went door to door that
night, interviewing Slesers’s neighbors. No one remembered seeing the woman, though they recalled that a painting crew had
been working outside the apartment that day. Mellon hoped that maybe someone on the crew had seen something.

Two days after Slesers’s murder, Dana Kuhn, a chemist at the Boston Police Department, called Mellon into his office. An analysis
of the fibers vacuumed from the runner in the victim’s apartment showed three African American hairs, as well as three canine
hairs, most likely from a small terrier. Anna Slesers was not known to have had any black friends, and she did not own a dog.

While Mellon and DiNatale were still chasing leads in the Anna Slesers murder, another woman was strangled in Boston. This
time, the victim was Nina Nichols, a retired physiotherapist. The sixty-eight-year-old Nichols was discovered on the bedroom
floor of her apartment at 1940 Commonwealth Avenue, in the city’s Brighton section, just beyond Boston University. Nichols
was wearing a pink bathrobe, which was open. Her bra was pushed up above her breasts, and two nylon stockings were tied around
her neck. At first, police thought the crime was a burglary that ended in murder because the victim’s apartment had been ransacked,
with every drawer pulled open, the contents strewn across the floor. On the other hand, a set of sterling silverware, an expensive
camera, and the victim’s watch had been left untouched. There was also money in the woman’s purse. The medical examiner later
determined that Nina Nichols had been raped.

The Boston Police Department was now facing an unprecedented situation. Two older women had been strangled and sexually assaulted
within two weeks of each other. The newly appointed police commissioner, Edmund McNamara, found himself in a difficult position.
Mayor John Collins had appointed him on April 5, 1962, after a gambling scandal had rocked the department. McNamara knew that
if he did not solve the murders quickly, he would be in danger of losing his job. To make sure that his department heads knew
about the two crimes and their possible connection, he rounded up the police brass on July 2 and went through each detail
of the murders. Before the meeting had ended, a detective interrupted the new commissioner and whispered something in his
ear.

That day, ten miles north of Boston in the city of Lynn, a third woman had been killed. Mellon was sent to the crime scene,
an apartment house at 73 Newell Street, to see if there were similarities between the first two murders and the latest one.
The victim, sixty-five-year-old Helen Blake, had not been answering her phone, and neighbors feared she might have suffered
a fall inside her apartment. The building custodian was finally called to check on her at approximately
6:00 P.M.
Like Nichols’s apartment, Blake’s had been ransacked. The custodian found her lying on her bed, clad in a pink pajama top.
Her killer had wrapped a pair of nylons around her neck, placing one above the other and knotting them separately in the back.
The killer had also used a third ligature, a brassiere knotted tightly below Blake’s chin. Bloodstains were on both the top
and bottom bedsheets. The woman’s vagina and anus were lacerated, but the medical examiner found no trace of semen on or inside
Blake’s body. Investigators later theorized that she had been murdered between eight and ten o’clock in the morning because
the autopsy revealed no food in her stomach.

Despite some dissimilarities, Jim Mellon discovered one notable connection between the murders of Anna Slesers and Helen Blake.
After noticing a painting scaffold outside Blake’s building, Mellon learned that the same painting crew that had worked on
Slesers’s apartment building the day she was murdered was now painting Blake’s. Mellon raced to the MacDaniels Painting Company’s
office in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. “What took you so long?” asked Pat MacDaniels, the owner. “It seems women die in
every building we work on.” MacDaniels, who had had run-ins with the law, was anything but cooperative, but he grudgingly
allowed Mellon to look through the company’s employee records. But the search was unlikely to be of much use, since MacDaniels
paid most of his men under the table.

After talking with MacDaniels, Mellon spoke with the company’s two full-time painters, both Caucasian. The men swore they
had nothing to do with the murders and said they had not worked with any African Americans on the buildings Slesers and Blake
lived in. Mellon sensed they were lying, but proving it would be difficult. The killers had left no fingerprints or traces
of paint at any of the crime scenes.

That summer, there would be no reprieve from the terror in Boston. Soon, the newspapers were linking the crimes under the
heading “The Silk Stocking Murders,” an inaccurate description since only Helen Blake had been strangled with stockings.

Nevertheless, the media and a frightened public now believed there was a serial killer stalking the streets. Single women
tried to avoid walking alone. Many kept makeshift weapons by their beds—a pair of scissors, a kitchen knife, or even a ski
pole could be used to fend off an attacker. Traveling salesmen saw their business plummet because women would no longer open
their doors to strangers. In a 1963
Life
magazine article, Margery Byers described the effect the case was having not only on women but on men as well. A husband
went out to buy groceries after cautioning his wife never to open their apartment door to strangers. Upon his return, he realized
he had forgotten his key and rang the doorbell. When the wife let him in, he screamed at her for not first checking his identity.

Some local merchants saw their business grow as fear gripped the city. Locksmiths sold more chains, window locks, and door
bolts. Nervous women stood in line outside the animal shelter, trying to adopt a stray. The Boston Police Department set up
a twenty-four-hour hot line number, DE8-1212, which was published in every metropolitan newspaper and aired repeatedly on
local radio broadcasts. As a result, the switchboard at the Boston Police Department was flooded with calls from women who
saw strange men in their buildings or even shadows moving inside their apartments.

Eventually, the police department diverted nearly all of its resources to the strangler case. A new unit consisting of fifty
men patrolled the streets by night, all specially trained in the martial arts and quick-draw shooting. Jim Mellon now was
working as many as eighteen hours each day, going home only to sleep. He ate his meals at his desk or while out exploring
new leads. The work was grueling for Mellon, who had a wife and six young children at home, but it would be time well spent
if he could help get the killer or killers off the streets.

In late summer, police added a fourth name to list of victims. The body of a seventy-five-year-old widow, Ida Irga, was found
by her brother, Harry Halpern, inside her apartment at 7 Grove Street in Boston’s West End. When two patrolmen reached the
fifth floor apartment, they found Irga lying on her back in the middle of the living room floor. She was wearing a brown nightdress,
which was torn, completely exposing her body. Instead of a silk stocking, her killer had wrapped a white pillowcase tightly
around her neck. Each of Irga’s legs was propped up on chairs spread four to five feet apart, and a bed pillow was placed
under her buttocks, a display that her killer had apparently set up to mock the investigators. Dried blood covered the victim’s
head, mouth, and ears, and a blood trail indicated that Irga had been violently attacked in the bedroom, then carried or dragged
out into the living area of the four-room flat.

There was no evidence that Irga had been raped. The Suffolk County medical examiner, Dr. Michael Luongo, found no trace of
sperm in the elderly woman’s vagina or anus. On the basis of a fracture to the woman’s hyoid bone, a fragile neck bone that
is cracked in most cases of manual strangulation, he also concluded that Ida Irga had been strangled manually before the pillowcase
was applied.

Sixty-seven-year-old Jane Sullivan (no relation to Mary) would be the strangler’s next victim. Sullivan, who had emigrated
from Ireland in 1926, worked as a night-shift nurse at Longwood Hospital. Her body was discovered by her nephew, Dennis Mahoney,
inside her tidy apartment at 435 Columbia Road at approximately
4:00 P.M.
on August 30, 1962. The heavyset woman had been strangled with two stockings and left facedown in her bathtub. She was still
wearing a bathrobe, but her underwear had been pulled down to her knees. Maggots had begun to nest in the moist areas of her
badly decomposed body. Police found no sign of a sexual attack. They believed that Jane Sullivan’s killer might have attacked
her as she was getting into the tub. Nothing had been stolen from the apartment. The victim had been left in this distorted
pose seemingly on purpose. Her buttocks were propped up, and her head was partially submerged in six inches of water. Jane
Sullivan was five feet, four inches tall and weighed about 170 pounds. The killer must have needed great strength to pull
this one off, Jim Mellon thought.

Shortly after Jane Sullivan’s murder, task force members attended a special seminar in Boston given by the FBI sex crimes
unit. The FBI specialists went over the behavioral patterns of ritualistic killers. Because all the victims in the Boston
Strangler case had been older women, psychiatrists believed that the killer had a deep hatred of his mother and might be taking
that hatred out on his victims. Soon events would call that theory into question.

Rain-soaked, Gloria Todd was returning to her apartment at 315 Huntington Avenue after a day of classes at the Carnegie Institute
of Medical Technology. Having taken the trolley back from the opposite end of the city in the midst of a terrible storm, she
could not wait to kick off her shoes and unwind in a nice hot shower. But when she opened the door to her apartment, Todd
gasped in horror.

One of her roommates, a twenty-year-old African American woman named Sophie Clark, was lying dead on the living room floor,
a half-slip and nylon stocking intertwined around her neck and a gag stuffed in her mouth. Clark’s ripped bra and bloodstained
underwear were several feet away. The young woman had been menstruating, and the killer had pulled off her sanitary napkin
and left it on the floor. A semen stain was discovered on the rug near her body.

There had likely been a struggle inside the apartment. There was broken glass lying near Clark’s feet, a table leg was broken,
and an ashtray filled with cigarette butts had been knocked over and its contents strewn on the floor. In addition, the killer
had rummaged through some bedroom drawers, and the contents of a purse were spilled on the couch.