Philadelphia and New York. Horse-drawn carriages transported members of the Continental Congress along it in pre-Revolutionary days. The Jolly Post Inn served as a popular way station. George Washington is said to have slept there and legend has it that it was at the Jolly Post that the founding fathers decided to let Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence. Later Frankford became the home of the local mill-owners. It had its own symphony orchestras and a football team—the Frankford Yellowjackets, which eventually became the Philadelphia Eagles. And travelling circuses wintered there.
Then in 1922, the elevated railway—the El—arrived, turning Frankford into a suburb. At first this only served to increase the area’s prosperity, but by the 1970s, Frankford had become the run-down, crime-ridden inner-city area chosen by Sylvester Stallone as the backdrop for his 1976 movie
The story began on 19 August 1985, when 52-year-old Helen Patent was last seen by her ex-husband Kermit when she left the house they still shared 12 miles from Frankford in Parkland, in neighbouring Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A well-known habitue of Frankford, few people knew that she lived outside town.
A week later the body of a middle-aged woman turned up in the rail yard of the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. Railway workers found the dead woman around 8.30 a.m. on 26 August 1985. She was naked from the waist down. Her legs were opened so her genitalia were exposed and her blouse was pulled up to show off her breasts. She had been stabbed in the head, chest and right arm numerous times. There was also a deep gash across her abdomen, exposing her internal organs. Her body was identified the following day by her ex- husband. A post mortem revealed that she had been sexually assaulted, but she had been stabbed so many times it was impossible to discover which wound had actually killed her. The motive for her murder was not immediately obvious. A regular in local bars and, the newspapers later speculated, possibly a casual prostitute, she might easily have been picked up by a stranger who raped and murdered her.
On 3 January 1986, 68-year-old Anna Carroll was found dead in her apartment in the 1400 block of Ritner Street. It was a cold winter’s day, but the door to her apartment was found open. She had been stabbed six times in the back and was left lying on the floor of the bedroom with the kitchen knife still in her. The body was naked from the waist down and there was a gaping Jack-the-Ripper-style gash from her groin to her breastbone made after death, as if the killer intended to eviscerate the corpse.
Although Anna Carroll’s apartment was ten miles from the rail yard where Helen Patent’s body had found, they were both regulars in bars in the Frankford area—particularly the Golden Bar, known to one and all as “Goldie’s”, near the El station on the 5200 block of Frankford Avenue, as King’s Highway had become known. Both murders seem to have happened at night. Both involved numerous stab wounds. Both women were naked from the waist down and both corpses were opened with a post mortem gash. This lead the authorities to believe that they had both been struck down by the same killer—whom the newspapers would soon dub the Frankford Slasher.
The next victim was 64-year-old Susan Olszef, who was also found in her apartment. She lived on Richmond Street, just three miles from the SEPTA rail yard. She, too, had been stabbed six times in the back. And she was also a regular at Goldie’s.
The problem was that Frankford was an area teeming with nightlife. It was full of strangers who turned up during the hours of darkness and were, perhaps, never seen again. It was an area where it was hard to track witnesses and where it was easy to commit an anonymous murder. The police came up with no positive lead and, as the murders had all occurred in different parts of the city, they began to doubt that they were related.
Then at 7.30 a.m. on 8 January 1987, the body of 28-year-old Jeanne Durkin was found by a restaurant employee under a fruit and vegetable stall on a Pratt Street lot west of Frankford Avenue, just a block from the rail yard where Helen Patent had been found. In and out of mental institutions, Durkin was homeless and lived on the streets, sheltering most nights in the doorway of an abandoned bakery just two doors from Goldie’s, even dropping in for a little warmth on a cold night. Found lying in a pool of her own blood, which had been splattered up the side of the fruit stand and a nearby fence, she had been stabbed 74 times in the chest, back and buttocks. Her body was naked from the waist down and her legs spread. The post mortem showed that she had been sexually assaulted.
It was now clear that a serial killer was at large in Philadelphia and the newspapers began demanding that the police catch the Frankford Slasher. Unfortunately, the Slasher’s murders were quickly upstaged. On 24 March 1987, a young black prostitute named Josefina Rivera turned up at a Philadelphia police station, claiming that she had escaped from a filthy basement on North Marshall Street owned by Gary Heidnik, where he had kept her and a number of other women as sex slaves. He had already killed two of them by maltreatment. The police obtained a search warrant, released the women and arrested Heidnik, who was convicted of the two murders in 1988. He died by lethal injection in 1999.
Then, on a hot August day in 1987, Harrison “Marty” Graham was evicted from his north Philadelphia apartment because of the terrible smell coming from it. Before leaving he nailed the door to one of the rooms shut. The landlord’s son looked through the keyhole and called the police, who found the decomposing corpses of six women, along with parts of a seventh. Graham was also convicted, but was found to be mentally incompetent, so could not be executed.
Despite having other work to do, officers canvassed the Frankford Avenue neighbourhood for clues. A barmaid at Goldie’s told them that she had seen all the women in the bar. She believed that they had been murdered by a man who had dropped in and picked them up. She even pointed out a suspect, but could provide no evidence to substantiate her suspicions.
The police came to believe that the victims had known their killer. Jean Durkin had been homeless for five years. She was strong and streetwise. Once, when six policemen had tried to arrest Durkin, she put up such a fight that they gave up. She could not be overwhelmed easily so her killer must used have cunning, rather than strength, to put her in a vulnerable position. Helen Patent was also independent and savvy. People who knew her did not believe that she would have gone into the rail yard with a stranger. But that took the police little further.
The neighbourhood held a candlelight vigil for the dead woman and a task force was formed. Meanwhile, the killer seemed to lie low for over a year, then he struck again. On 11 November 1988, 66-year-old Margaret Vaughan was found lying in the entranceway of an apartment block in the 4900 block of Penn Street, just three blocks from where Jean Durkin had been found. Vaughan had lived in the building, but had been evicted that day for not paying the rent. She had been stabbed 29 times.
A bartender reported that Vaughan had drinking with a middle-aged white man the evening before her death. He had a round face, wore glasses and walked with an obvious limp. A police artist drew a sketch, which was circulated. But no one came forward to identify him.
On the evening of 19 January 1989, 30-year-old Theresa Sciortino was found dead in her apartment, where she lived alone, on Arrott Street, three blocks from where Margaret Vaughan had been found and a block and a half from Frankford Avenue. Lying face up in a pool of blood in the kitchen, she was naked except for a pair of white socks. The attacker had used a sharp knife to slash her 25 times in the face, arms, and chest. He left the bloodstained weapon leaning against the sink and a bloody footprint on the floor. He had also used a three-foot piece of wood to sexually assault her. The attack seems to have happened the night before. It was then that a neighbour had heard a struggle, followed by a loud thump as if a large object had been thrown to the floor. Indeed Sciortino had put up quite a struggle. All the rooms in the apartment showed signs of the disturbance and blood was spattered everywhere.
Like Durkin, Sciortino had been an inmate of several psychiatric institutions and was currently an outpatient under treatment. Like the other victims, she was seen regularly along the Frankford Avenue strip, often with male companions. One neighbour said she enjoyed “a lot of company”. She had last been seen alive at 6 p.m. in the Jolly Post at the corner of Griscom and Arrott Streets in the company of a middle-aged white man. This was shortly before her neighbour heard the scuffle in her apartment.
The medical examiner Paul Hoyer dismissed the idea that a serial killer was on the prowl, on the erroneous grounds that serial killers kill much more frequently. But detectives were convinced. All of the victims were white women. Though their ages differed dramatically, they lived similar lifestyles. They all frequented the same area and drank in the same places. All had been viciously stabbed. In each case, the killer had left little evidence and there were no witnesses. Miraculously, no one had ever noticed the killer fleeing the scene, even though he must have been covered with blood after inflicting multiple stab wounds.
Consequently, the detectives looked back in their files to see if they could find any other unsolved murders that could have been perpetrated by the same killer. They came across the case of 29-year-old Catherine Jones,
