10
It had begun in the summer of 1962. On June 14, a rainy Thursday evening, a fifty-six-year-old woman named Helena Jalakian was raped and murdered in her apartment near Symphony Hall. The case drew little attention. The newspapers reported that she had been strangled but no details were given. Boston averaged about a murder a week; there did not appear to be anything exceptional about this one. But the stranglings continued. Four more in the next four weeks. And by July, in the humid heat of summer, the panic was on. There was a lull from mid-July to mid-August-no murders. Then two in two days, August 19 and 21. There could be no doubt that the seven stranglings were all the work of one man. At first the newspapers did not know what to call him. They tried out Phantom and Fiend, even The Silk Stocking Murderer, before they finally settled on The Strangler. But they believed in him, they believed he had murdered all those women, and so did everyone else.
And why not? The cases were similar. The victims were all older white women. The youngest, Jalakian, was fifty-six; the oldest was seventy-five. All lived alone, quietly, in smaller apartment buildings, three to six stories high, mostly nineteenth-century structures of stone or brick with thick walls which, it was noted, were highly soundproof. The victims dressed neatly. They looked younger than their true ages. To some, they even resembled one another. With one exception, they had been killed midweek, Monday through Thursday; perhaps the Strangler prowled on his way to or from work. The killer left a signature, too: the garrotes, which were braided together from the victims’ own stockings and cords from their housecoats, were tied off in a big theatrical bow around their necks. The murder scenes were all bloody; the victims had been beaten and raped. Some of the corpses were mutilated. Some were arranged in obscene poses.
The police had no witnesses, no physical evidence of any real value, no sign of forced entry. The police commissioner, a former college football player and by-the-book FBI man named Edmund McNamara, could not do much more than order more and more overtime for detectives. Over and over, he admonished women to keep their doors locked and not open them to strangers, to buy a watchdog, and to call a special emergency phone number if they had any information-DE 8-1212. It became known as the “Strangler Number.” But no arrests.
It was the summer of the Strangler, the summer no one slept.
Then the Strangler went quiet. September passed without a murder, and October and November.
On December 5, he struck. The victim was a twenty-year-old colored girl, very pretty, a student, killed in the apartment she shared with two roommates. On New Year’s Eve, he killed another young girl, this one white, twenty-three, a lovely blond secretary. These two cases did not fit the Strangler pattern. The victims were young, one was a Negro. Both had been strangled, but neither had any external injuries, nor had they been raped. The secretary was found lying in bed, neatly tucked in. She looked like she was sleeping peacefully. To the city Homicide cops, it seemed unlikely that the Strangler had killed these girls. But the press and public instantly credited them to the Strangler. A lone villain in the classical mode made a neater story-easier for the newspapermen to write, easier for readers to grasp.
In 1963 the stranglings were erratic and widely spaced: in March, a sixty-eight-year-old woman in the city of Lawrence, a half-hour’s drive from Boston; in May, a young girl in Cambridge; nothing all summer, then another young girl in September, again outside the city. Through it all, the police and public retained their different views of the cases. The cops saw a dozen murder cases, perhaps related, perhaps not. The public saw only the Boston Strangler.
On November 22, hours after President Kennedy died, the Strangler struck one last time, killing Joanne Feeney in the West End. Another old woman, another obscenely posed corpse. It was a return to the form of those first killings in the summer of ’62, as if the Strangler was announcing, I’m still here.
11
The murder books. In each there was a photo of the victim as she had looked around the time of her murder. There was more, of course. A murder book was the repository of every scrap of paper the police had compiled about a homicide, and Michael dutifully slogged through all thirteen of the Strangler books-detectives’ reports, witness statements, field interrogation reports, autopsy and crime-lab reports, mug shots. But it was the snapshots of the victims’ faces that gave him a frisson of mortality. They were such ordinary women, stern-looking old ladies with outdated names, Eva, Helena, Lillian, Margaret, and smiling pretty young girls named Beverly and Judy and Patty.
In the murder-scene photos Michael searched for those same faces, as if the reality in the earlier photograph would continue until canceled; only a photograph could disprove another photograph. But he could not recognize the women’s faces on their dead bodies. In the wide shots, of bodies outstretched, or trussed, or tossed like rag dolls, the victims seemed to have no faces at all. A smudge, a stain, that was all he could make out. Even in the remorseless granular close-ups of the victims’ heads, he could not find the living women’s faces.
Soon, too soon, he decided he could not stare at the pictures anymore. Enough. It was morbid. The cycle of emotions stirred by violent images was similar to that stirred by pornographic ones: shock, fascination, monotony, finally revulsion. Worse, mortal questions-what did it mean, exactly, to die?-were yawning before him. He slipped the pictures back into their manila envelopes. Decided he would maintain from the outset a greater emotional distance from the whole business. He would reduce these thirteen murders to data. He would organize the essential facts of each case, chart it all in columns labeled Date, Location, V’s Age, Details of Attack, Other Evidence, Witnesses, Suspects. Patterns would naturally emerge.
“6/14/62…Back Bay…56…no semen…blood in vagina indicates rape with object…blood in right ear…laceration at rear scalp…neck scratched and bruised…contusion on chin…strangled with cord of light blue housecoat; cord found still tied around neck, in bow…no sign of struggle…Arthur Nast…” “6/20/62…Brighton…68…external genitalia lacerated…blood and mucus in vagina…blood in both ears…open wine bottle on kitchen counter…”
An image lit up in Michael’s mind, briefly, a strobe flash: a woman thrashing, arms flailing-shrieking, NO! -her face, grimaced, teeth clenched-dark hair-a scream-furniture clattering.
And then it was gone. He blinked away the memory of it. He had only the papers on his desk. And the clock ticking.
“8/19/62…Lawrence…53 y. o… supine on bed, R leg dangling, naked except for open blouse…3 ligatures on neck (2 stockings, 1 leg of brown leotard)…external vagina bruised, bloody…2 half-moon contusions below R nipple, 2 abrasions above and L of it…R thigh contused…raped…V a devout churchgoer…” “8/21/62…Columbia Rd., Dorchester…67…no forced entry to apt… blood on floors in kitchen, hall…bra on bathroom floor…V found in bathtub, on her knees, face down in 6 inches water, feet over back of tub, butt up in air…underpants tugged down but no trauma to vagina or anus…blood on R of scalp…two stockings around neck…R hyoid bone fractured…pocketbook open…”
The investigators had only Before and After. The living woman and the broken body. Not the moment of horror. Not the dying. The reality of murder had been excised, like an obscenity. But Michael’s imagination insistently re- created it. A woman thrashed before him. Her hands shoving-he felt it on his skin. Her scream vibrated his ear.
“12/5/62…Huntington Ave… 20, college student, Negro, engaged…wearing housecoat, menstrual harness, sanitary napkin…mouth gagged…no external injury to genitalia…no head trauma…no blood or menstrual discharge in vagina or rectum…strangulation by ligature…Salem cigarette in toilet…semen stain on rug near body…itinerant seen in stairwell…” “3/9/63…Lawrence…68, white…beaten, stabbed, strangled…cause of death: blunt force trauma…sperm in vagina: raped…body naked on floor, girdle pulled down to left foot…clothes still on, pulled over head…throat badly contused…head and surrounding floor covered with blood…knife or fork stuck in left breast to handle…” “5/7/63…Cambridge…26, nurse at Boston State Hospital, a mental facility…stabbed 17 times around left breast…2 parallel horizontal incisions on each side of throat…nude but no evid of rape or sex assault…no injuries to genitalia, no sperm in vagina, rectum or mouth…body supine on bed, hands tied behind her back with scarf… stockings and blouse around neck but no ligature marks…” “9/8/63…Salem…23…found on bed, lying on back, right arm under body, left leg dangling, torso covered with bedspread…bloodstain on bed under head…2 stockings tied
