A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger
her jewelry, her small gold watch, and the few dollars she had in her purse. Officer Mellon was annoyed by the fact that Juris had not covered up his mother’s body before calling the police and decided that he was the one who had killed her. The theory did not advance very far. The police ultimately concluded that a burglar must have broken into the apartment, surprised Mrs. Slesers as she prepared to take a bath, and simply been overcome by “lust.” He sexually assaulted her and then killed her to prevent being identified. There was roughly a murder a week in Boston, and the explanation for Mrs. Slesers’s killing might have remained unquestioned if it hadn’t happened again.
The next one came two weeks later: Nina Nichols, a sixty-eight-year-old widow who had just retired from a high-level hospital job, was found dead in her small Boston apartment on the evening of June 30. Her pink housecoat and slip had been yanked up to her waist, and she had been garroted with her own stockings, which the killer had then tied in a decorative bow. Like Anna Slesers, she had been sexually assaulted with an object, and the apartment had been thoroughly ransacked, though nothing—including a three-hundred-dollar camera—seemed to have been taken. There were also no signs of forced entry, and Nina Nichols’s sister told the police that while they were speaking on the phone late that afternoon, her sister’s doorbell had rung and Nichols had hung up in order to answer it. She never called back.
Nichols had been killed late in the day, and police detectives theorized that the murderer had rung doorbells randomly and decided to attack Mrs. Nichols because she was alone in the apartment. The Boston Globe noted that the killing was similar to that of Anna Slesers two weeks earlier, and quoted Lt. John Donovan, head of Boston Homicide, as saying that there was a “possibility” the same man had committed both murders. First thing Monday morning, Boston police commissioner Ed McNamara called a meeting of all department heads to discuss the murders.
By evening the people of Boston had little reason to doubt that it would be a long, murder-filled summer. Sixty-five-year-old Helen Blake was found strangled by her own stockings in the working-class town of Lynn, and the manner of her death was by now sickeningly familiar, ANOTHER SILK STOCKING MURDER, THE Boston Globe headlines shrieked on Tuesday morning. “A Lynn nurse was found strangled in her apartment under circumstances almost identical with the slaying of a Brighton woman 48 hours earlier.” Helen Blake was a stout, modest woman who until recently had worked as a nurse at a local hospital. She was found facedown in her bed with two stockings and a bra wrapped tightly around her neck. The bra had been arranged in the cheerful bow that by now the police recognized as a signature of the killer. According to the autopsy, she was killed on the morning of June 30, the same day as Nina Nichols. Blake appeared to have been strangled in the kitchen and then carried to her bed and sexually assaulted with an object. She weighed 165 pounds, and police investigators concluded that only a powerful man could have picked her up and put her on the bed. The killer had also lugged a strongbox from under the bed to an armchair and tried pick the lock with a knife, but the tip of the blade had broken off in the keyhole.
The front door had a chain, a bolt, and a Yale lock, none of which had been tampered with, so Blake must have opened the door to her killer. Two bottles of fresh milk were found on top of her refrigerator, already gone sour in the summer heat. They had been delivered to her doorstep the morning of the murder, but if Blake had brought them in, she would have put them straight into the refrigerator. Could the killer have knocked on the door, presented her with the milk bottles, and then talked his way into the apartment? Would he have put them on top of the refrigerator before attacking her? Would he have then gone on to kill Nina Nichols in Boston later in the day, or was there another killer who had decided to imitate what he’d read in the papers about Anna Slesers?
“Since robbery is not the motive, we are dealing with a demented man,” Dr. Richard Ford, head of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University declared to the press. Ford was also the Suffolk County medical examiner, and he had called various law enforcement agencies together to try to solve what was quickly becoming a law enforcement crisis in Boston. “There is nothing to tie these crimes together, no single proof,” he added. “The more such things happen, the more they are likely to happen because—and you can quote me—because the world is full of screwballs.”
After Helen Blake there was a pause in the killings, and then in late August, an elderly Boston woman named Ida Irga was found in her apartment by the thirteen-year-old son of the building superintendent. The boy had gone in to check on her and had opened the door to find Mrs. Irga obscenely propped open on the living room floor. The date was Sunday, August 19, which meant that three out of four women had been killed on weekends. Did that mean that the killer had a weekday job? Ida Irga had a pillowcase knotted tightly around her throat and a foot wedged between the rungs of two separate chairs. It was, as one journalist explained it, a “grotesque parody” of a gynecological exam.
The similarities between the murdered women were startling. They were all elderly and lived alone on modest incomes. Most were affiliated with local hospitals in some way and listened to classical music. Without excaption they were described by friends as well-groomed and punctual and led quiet, unexciting lives that were beyond moral reproach. They were all killed in a similar way and seemed to have let their murderer into their apartments voluntarily. Whoever the killer was, police thought that he had to be relatively benign looking and a very smooth talker, STRANGLER OF TWO A MOTHER-HATER? the Boston Globe headlines asked readers after the Nichols murder. “A paranoid killer, obsessed with a mother-hate complex, was sought last night for the sex-crime strangulations of two women,” the article explained. “All division commanders were ordered to compile a list of men … released from mental hospitals in the past year.”
In the face of a horror that the police seemed unable to stop, a neat psychological explanation for why someone would want to rape and strangle old women must have reassured the public briefly. What many people did not realize, however, was that a diagnosis of the man’s problems wouldn’t be of much help if the suspect hadn’t already gone through the system, and it wouldn’t help at all if there were multiple killers whose violent impulses had finally been triggered by the Slesers murder. Then, just before the start of the Labor Day weekend, sixty-seven-year-old Jane Sullivan was found on her knees in a half-full bathtub, strangled with her own stockings.
The autopsy determined that Sullivan had been killed within twenty-four hours of Ida Irga, which meant that out of a total of five stranglings that summer, four had been committed within a day of one another. They came in pairs, in other words. Would several madmen, acting independently of one another, show any pattern to their killings? Probably not, unless they were reading about one another’s crimes in the paper and then going out to copy them. In that case, however, the murders would be grouped within days of one another, not hours. The police were reluctant to acknowledge it, but the killings had started to look like the work of a lone madman who could not be stopped.
BOSTON PASSED THE fall of 1962 with plenty of murders but no more stranglings, and the police started to wonder whether the killer had been arrested for something else or had left the area or had simply stopped. The mechanism that starts people killing is a mysterious one that even the killers themselves don’t fully understand, and it is capable of switching off as suddenly as it switches on. Maybe this particular person had killed enough women to satisfy whatever domination fantasy he’d been acting out. Maybe he’d hanged himself in his basement. Maybe he’d taken a break from his crimes in order to think up new, worse ones. There was no way to know.
Meanwhile the police were working furiously to follow up even the most outlandish leads. A special phone number was set up, DE 8-1212, to receive tips from the public. The unrelated strangling of a sixty-year-old white woman, found in a South Boston hotel room, further confused and terrified the public. (A man who had checked in to the room with her the night before was later convicted of the murder.) Within days of the murder of Helen Blake, every detective in Boston was ordered to work directly under the homicide bureau, and every robbery, vice, and narcotics inspector in the city was ordered to report to Lt. John Donovan. Known sex offenders were dragged into their local police station to be interrogated by three-man teams of detectives. Anyone discharged from a mental hospital in the past two years was similarly scrutinized. Police Commissioner Ed McNamara—brought in to straighten out a police department that had been thoroughly