Search for the Strangler (6 page)

While discussing the case with the Lawrence police, Jim Mellon uncovered a particularly disturbing fact. Graff’s neighbor
Kenneth Rowe had previously lived at 84 Gainsborough Street in Boston, across the street from Anna Slesers, the first victim.
During interrogations by both Mellon and the Lawrence police officers, Rowe said he had lived on Gainsborough Street while
attending Northeastern University and had recently moved to Lawrence for an engineering job. He also claimed he had never
met Anna Slesers and barely knew Joann Graff. He did tell police that a man had been knocking on doors looking for Graff’s
apartment the day before her murder. Jim Mellon put Rowe’s name on the expanding list of possible suspects.

By this time Mellon had been working full-time on the Boston Strangler case for eighteen months; nevertheless, no arrests
had been made. Mellon believed he knew who some of the killers were, and he felt he had enough hard evidence to get arrest
warrants in at least six of the cases, but his superiors did not agree. “What the hell more do they want?” he wondered.

The amount of paperwork collected in the Boston Strangler case was awesome. By the time the investigation ended, there were
37,500 pages. When the sheer volume finally became too much for detectives to sift through, the information gathered from
various police departments was processed and fed into a computer. But the new technology was of little interest to Jim Mellon.
He felt a personal connection each time he touched a file and looked at a victim’s picture.

One evening after the Sullivan murder, Mellon sat in his office, reading through the case files. Before he knew it, the time
was
1:30 A.M.
Dropping Joann Graff’s file and opening Mary Sullivan’s, he stared at the young woman’s picture and wondered, “When will
the killing stop?”

Mellon closed the manila folder and hugged it to his chest, put his feet up on his desk, and went to sleep. He was awakened
at 7:30 the next morning, when Phil DiNatale threw a copy of the
Record American
at his feet. “Look who wants to up the reward,” DiNatale said. Mellon rubbed his eyes and grabbed the paper. Attorney General
Edward Brooke had announced that he would ask the governor to double the reward, from $5,000 to $10,000, for information leading
to the arrest of the strangler or stranglers. “Apparently, our boss doesn’t think we can do the job,” DiNatale said. Maybe
he’s right, Mellon thought to himself.

So far, authorities had questioned more than 3,000 people in connection with the Boston Strangler case. Jim Mellon and his
task force comrades had read through the case histories of 2,300 known sex offenders and had brought in more than 400 suspects
for interrogation. Along with the task force, the state had also established a medical-psychiatric committee to profile the
perpetrator or perpetrators. Asked to consider whether the stranglings were all the work of one man, they came to a consensus
that the older women had been victims of a single killer and that copycats had killed the younger victims, men who committed
murder using various Boston Strangler techniques they had read about in the newspaper.

Attorney General Brooke also believed there were several killers at large. In an interview with United Press International
on August 19, 1964, Brooke theorized that Mary Sullivan was not a victim of the so-called “mad strangler.” In fact, Brooke
told reporters that he believed the real strangler had not struck since the murder of Jane Sullivan in 1962 and that he doubted
the “mad strangler” was still on the streets. Perhaps the killer had taken his own life, Brooke said, or he could now be an
inmate of a mental hospital or prison. As for the other six murders, Brooke said suspicion centered on “unstable individuals
in the homosexual community of our society.”

Jim Mellon knew this was not true and was angered that Brooke was talking to the press as if he were an expert on the case.
The attorney general had never been involved in a murder investigation before, and the man he had chosen to lead the task
force was a bow-tied real estate lawyer named John Bottomly, a longtime friend and former classmate of Brooke at Boston University
School of Law.

Though he had never argued a criminal case, Bottomly, like Brooke, was active in Republican politics. Unlike the charismatic
Brooke, however, the introverted Bottomly had not found political success as a Republican in the Democratic stronghold of
Massachusetts, having lost his only campaign, a bid for the state senate, in the 1950s. Brooke told the press he had not chosen
his friend for his investigative skills but because he was a great administrator, and that Bottomly’s job was to coordinate
information from the various police departments working on the strangler case.

Jim Mellon thought Brooke and Bottomly were using the Boston Strangler case for political ends. It was no secret that Brooke,
the nation’s only African American attorney general, was eyeing a seat in the United States Senate, where no black man had
served since Reconstruction. If Brooke succeeded, his good friend John Bottomly might have a shot at the attorney general’s
office.

Nevertheless, Mellon discussed his theories about the Boston Strangler case with Bottomly on several occasions. Mellon believed
an African American man working on the MacDaniels painting crew could have killed Anna Slesers and possibly Helen Blake. He
also believed that a black man had strangled Sophie Clark. Mellon claims that Bottomly told him to keep those thoughts to
himself. It would look very bad for Ed Brooke if the killers were black, Bottomly reportedly told Mellon. Bottomly suggested
to Mellon that he did not want to complicate Brooke’s political career by adding race as an issue in the strangler case. Mellon
concluded that the case had become a political circus.

The political circus would soon become a full-blown carnival. John Bottomly came under harsh criticism from the task force
when he added a psychic, Peter Hurkos, to the strangler team. A native of Holland, the fifty-two-year-old Hurkos was a former
housepainter who claimed to have gained his psychic abilities after falling thirty-five feet from a ladder and fracturing
his skull. When he regained consciousness three days later, Hurkos claimed, he pleaded with his doctor not to travel, but
the doctor didn’t heed the warning and died soon thereafter during a trip abroad. Hurkos first came to the United States in
the 1950s, to help police in Miami catch a double murderer. He called himself “the psychic detective” and took credit for
solving twenty-seven murders in seventeen countries.

Hurkos was in Los Angeles trying to close a deal for film rights to his life story when he was summoned to Boston. On the
night of January 29, 1964, the Dutch psychic, accompanied by his six-foot, five-inch bodyguard, landed at the Providence,
Rhode Island, airport, where he was met by John Bottomly. Attorney General Brooke had not wanted Hurkos to fly into Boston’s
Logan Airport because he was worried about the publicity that might result from the psychic’s involvement in the strangler
case. Reporters might raise a fuss if they knew a self-professed mystic was being hired to help find the killers. Just to
be safe, Brooke called a secret meeting with the Boston media, asking the reporters not to run stories about Hurkos’s involvement
unless it generated a break in the case. Such a request would be scoffed at today, but the reporters grudgingly agreed.

The day after the psychic arrived in town, investigators took boxes of evidence to Hurkos’s room at the Battle Green Inn in
Lexington, the site of “the shot heard round the world,” which began the Revolutionary War. Hurkos, who checked in under a
fake name, claimed he could see into a killer’s mind by touching an object the killer had come in contact with. A handful
of crime scene photographs lay face down in neat piles on the bed. Hurkos slowly ran his pudgy fingers over them. Soon he
focused his attention on one stack. “This one, the top one. Show dead woman. Legs apart. I see her. Here, I show you.” Hurkos,
a tall and overweight man, fell to the carpet and demonstrated the position in which the victim had been left. A detective
flipped the picture over and saw Anna Slesers lying on the floor with her legs spread apart in exactly the fashion that Hurkos
had demonstrated.

Next, the detective pulled out several nylon stockings and scarves and placed them on the bed in front of the psychic. Hurkos
once again ran his hands through the evidence. He claimed he saw a stick being stuffed inside a young woman’s vagina. It was
clear to the police officers in the room that Hurkos was talking about Mary Sullivan. “I see . . . I see a priest!” Hurkos
shouted to the stunned detectives. The psychic then corrected himself and said the killer was not a priest but dressed like
one and had spent time with many real priests. Hurkos was convinced that the killer once had worked in a seminary and now
sold shoes door to door. A job like that would certainly give someone easy access to his victims’ apartments.

Apparently investigators took these words to heart. According to Sidney Kirkpatrick (who wrote about this episode for the
Los Angeles Times Magazine
), they began to keep a close eye on fifty-six-year-old Daniel Moran, a shoe salesman. In his article titled “The Psychic,
the Shoe Salesman, and the Boston Strangler,” Kirkpatrick reports that Moran’s family tried unsuccessfully to get him committed
to a mental institution. Moran’s own physician reportedly told police Moran was beset by the fear that he had become the strangler
during mental blackouts. The shoe salesman lived in the shadow of Symphony Hall, a few blocks from where Anna Slesers and
Sophie Clark had been strangled. Kirkpatrick also writes that Moran spent a brief period studying at St. John’s Seminary after
graduating from college. But besides a psychic’s vision, the police had no evidence against the man. Daniel Moran never was
charged with any of the strangler murders and died in 2001 in a Massachusetts mental hospital. As for Hurkos, he left Boston
as quietly as he had arrived.

The cover on the Hurkos experiment was blown a few days later, however, after the FBI arrested Hurkos in New York City for
having impersonated a federal agent. His involvement in the Boston Strangler case was revealed, and the media pounced on the
story. In response to the resulting furor, Attorney General Edward Brooke assured the public that Hurkos had been paid for
his cooperation not by the state but by two private citizens’ groups.

Meanwhile, Jim Mellon continued to focus on the Mary Sullivan murder. Mellon thought there were two strong suspects. One was
Mary’s former boyfriend, Nathan Ward. Mellon had traveled to Cape Cod several times in the weeks following Mary’s death. No
one there had a good thing to say about Ward. In addition, Mellon had retrieved three buttons from a man’s shirt that lay
next to the toilet where the killer had attempted to flush a red ascot. A local tailor told Mellon they were of Asian design
and probably came from Japan. Nathan Ward had been stationed in Japan while serving in the army.

Mellon was also disturbed by the fact that Ward married a woman he barely knew just three weeks after Mary Sullivan’s murder.
But what frustrated the investigator most was Ward’s alibi. He swore he had been working at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant
the night of the murder. Yet Mary Sullivan’s younger brother David claimed he had visited the restaurant twice that evening
and could not find Ward. And while Ward’s boss backed up the alibi, Mellon could not discount the fact that David had not
seen Ward at the restaurant that night. Mellon had a feeling the boss was lying.

Another likely suspect was nineteen-year-old Joseph Preston Moss, Delmore’s fiancé. Mellon felt the young man had been too
cooperative with the police and reporters in the weeks following the murder. Moss would constantly call the Boston Strangler
Task Force, asking for updates on the investigation. Moss also claimed to have visited the apartment the night of January
3, the night before the murder. He said when he knocked on the door and asked for Pat Delmore, Mary told him that she was
visiting her parents. Moss told police he also heard a man’s voice behind the door. Moss never saw the man, yet he described
him to investigators as being tall with a protruding Adam’s apple. In addition, Pat Delmore told the police that her apartment
key had disappeared from her key chain the night before the murder. Delmore had spent much of that day with Moss. During a
polygraph test requested by Mellon, the suspect denied having stolen his girlfriend’s apartment key. The polygraph suggested
he was lying. Mellon then asked Moss if he had anything to do with Mary Sullivan’s murder, and he denied that. But again,
the polygraph suggested he was lying. Moss’s lawyer claimed the young man had not understood the questions and demanded that
he be allowed to retake the polygraph test. Mellon granted the request, and Moss failed the test again. Besides his suspicious
eagerness to assist the investigation and the two failed polygraph tests, another piece of evidence could also point to Moss.
Two months after Sullivan’s murder, her former roommate Pam Parker received a frightening phone call at her parents’ home.
“Is, is this Pam?” the caller asked. “Yes, it is,” she answered. “I’m, I’m gonna do to you what I did to that Mary bitch,”
she was warned. The caller had a severe stutter. The only person Parker knew with such a speech impediment was Moss.

Of the two suspects, Nathan Ward seemed more likely. He certainly had a motive—jealousy—and had been verbally abusive toward
Mary Sullivan. He had a fiery temper and was skilled in karate. It would not have been difficult for Ward to overpower Mary
and choke her to death. The rare Japanese shirt buttons found at the crime scene also pointed to Nathan Ward, as did the ascot
that had been cut up and stuffed into the toilet. Mary Sullivan’s family and friends reported that she loved to buy Ward ascots
as gifts. Perhaps the cut-up ascot was meant as a symbol of their fractured relationship. Joseph Preston Moss, on the other
hand, had been interviewed outside Mary Sullivan’s apartment the night of the murder. A neighbor put a man matching his description
inside Mary’s bathroom around the time she was killed. And the results of the two polygraph tests could not be ignored. If
the killer was not Nathan Ward, then Mellon was sure it was Preston Moss.