A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger
Slesers, and she’d been clubbed on the back of the head and then strangled with the belt from her blue taffeta housecoat. No one knew that her murder would be the first of many, so her story merited only a few paragraphs in the Boston Globe. “An attractive divorcee was found strangled in her third-floor apartment at 77 Gainsboro Street [sic],” the article began. “Her son found Mrs. Anna Slesers, 55, on the kitchen floor when he came to take her to church. A cord was tightly knotted around her neck.”
A dozen years earlier, Anna Slesers had fled with her two children to the United States from Latvia, where she had survived World War II in a camp for displaced people. She now lived on her own in a picturesque section of Boston known as Back Bay and worked as a factory seamstress for sixty dollars a week. She lived quietly and had virtually no social life; her primary interests were her children, her church, and classical music. On the evening of June 14 her son, Juris, had planned to take her to the Latvian Lutheran Church in Roxbury, where services were held every year to mourn the day that the Soviet Army overran their country. Juris had showed up at seven o’clock, as they’d agreed, knocked on the apartment door, waited, pounded on it, waited some more, and then walked down to the street to check her mailbox. The mailbox was full, and he pulled the letters out of it and walked back upstairs. Forty-five minutes after he arrived, Juris put his thin shoulder to the door and broke it down with a couple of strong shoves.
He found his mother on the floor near the kitchen, grotesquely presented to whoever walked in next. A bathtub full of water was waiting for her, and an opera record, Tristan und Isolde, was turning silently on the phonograph. The first police officers to arrive thought that the death was a suicide, which prompted Juris to call his sister in Maryland with the bad news. For a divorced Latvian exile, the country’s national day of mourning might be an appropriate day to decide you don’t want to continue living. One of the officers who showed up later, however, immediately saw murder in the position of the body. Detective Jim Mellon of Boston Homicide guessed that Mrs. Slesers had been attacked in the bathroom and then dragged into the hallway on a small rug. There she had been strangled and probably raped. (The medical examiner later determined that in fact she’d been sexually assaulted with an object.)
Whoever had killed her had also taken great pains to pull open all the drawers in her bedroom dresser, as if looking for valuables, but had pointedly ignored 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 exception 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