Search for the Strangler Page 4
One of her roommates, a twenty-year-old African American woman named Sophie Clark, was lying dead on the living room floor, a half-slip and nylon stocking intertwined around her neck and a gag stuffed in her mouth. Clark’s ripped bra and bloodstained underwear were several feet away. The young woman had been menstruating, and the killer had pulled off her sanitary napkin and left it on the floor. A semen stain was discovered on the rug near her body.
There had likely been a struggle inside the apartment. There was broken glass lying near Clark’s feet, a table leg was broken, and an ashtray filled with cigarette butts had been knocked over and its contents strewn on the floor. In addition, the killer had rummaged through some bedroom drawers, and the contents of a purse were spilled on the couch.
There were no signs of forced entry into Sophie Clark’s apartment. Clark had seen to the installation of a second lock on the front door, and her two roommates told police that she always questioned anyone who knocked and would never have let a stranger into the apartment. Yet whom would she have let in? She did not lead an active social life in Boston. She had a serious boyfriend back home in Englewood, New Jersey, and had been in the middle of writing him a letter that afternoon. It began with the words “My Dearest Chuck” and ended abruptly two paragraphs down, after she had written, “It’s going on about 2:30 now.” Investigators believe Clark’s letter-writing had been interrupted by her killer.
Clark had been strangled just one block away from the scene of the first murder, that of Anna Slesers. Jim Mellon interviewed all the residents in Clark’s building. Three remembered seeing a black man walking toward the victim’s front door roughly an hour before her murder. The suspect was well known in the area and also to the police. Discovering that the man had fled to New York City shortly after Clark’s murder, Mellon called colleagues in the New York City Police Department, who were able to track the suspect to a friend’s house in Brooklyn. That same evening, Mellon drove to New York to confront the man about the murder of Sophie Clark.
He admitted to Mellon that he had been in the apartment building the day Clark was killed, but he claimed he was there to see his girlfriend and that he had left the building when no one answered her front door. The suspect could not provide a name of the girlfriend and no one living in the building knew who he was. His alibi collapsed. When asked why he had fled to New York City, the suspect said he felt Clark’s murder showed that Boston was not safe for blacks. Mellon was not buying it. “Hook him up to a lie detector. We’ll see if his story holds up,” he suggested. Investigators gave the suspect two polygraph tests. He failed both. “This is our guy,” Jim Mellon declared.
A forensic psychologist was next to interview the suspect. After only one hour, the psychologist concluded that the suspect was a pathological liar and that his polygraph results were meaningless. Mellon was outraged. “Those headshrinkers always look to put the blame elsewhere,” he said. “What they don’t realize is that some people are just born bad.” But the psychologist’s findings were enough for the Boston authorities. Mellon was told by his superiors to look elsewhere for Sophie Clark’s killer.
Mellon’s frustration mounted to the point where his wife began to worry about his health. His diet now consisted of black coffee and cigarettes, and he spent barely any time with his baby daughter. What Mellon’s wife did not realize was that, unlike the hundreds of other cases he had worked on in his ten-year career, the hunt for the Boston Strangler totally consumed him. The case controlled his waking hours and invaded his dreams.
With Sophie Clark’s murder, the Boston Strangler case moved into new territory. Clark was the first African American and the youngest woman to be killed thus far, and unlike the previous victims, she had not lived alone. Until now, many young women had been unconcerned with the strangler case because they did not consider themselves likely targets. But Sophie was a college student, and Boston was home to more college students than virtually any other place in the world. If anything positive could be taken from this heinous crime, Mellon hoped the murder of Sophie Clark would wake up young women across the city.
NEW YEAR’S EVE 1962
When Boston residents picked up their morning newspaper on New Year’s Day 1963, they were jarred by a front-page story about a secretary strangled in the shadow of Fenway Park. Twenty-three-year-old Patricia Bissette had grown up in the small college town of Middlebury, Vermont. After finishing high school, she attended the University of Vermont for one year, but she yearned to breathe life outside northern New England and left Vermont for New York City and a job with American Airlines at Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport. In New York Bissette began dating a co-worker, and a few months later they were engaged. But the fast-paced romance was too much too soon, and Patricia broke the engagement off and moved back to New England, where she found work as a secretary at a Boston firm called Engineering Systems.
On the morning of December 31, 1962, Bissette’s boss, Jules Rothman, told the police, he drove to her apartment at 515 Park Drive to pick her up for work. He knocked on her apartment door at around 8:00 A.M., and when she did not answer, he waited several minutes and then left for work. But he was worried. Repeated phone calls to her apartment that day went unanswered. It was not like Bissette to miss work and not check in.
In the middle of the workday Rothman left his office and returned to Bissette’s apartment. He and the building custodian tried unsuccessfully to open her door. Bissette’s boss then climbed through her living room window. He found Bissette in bed with the sheet tucked under her chin. Several ligatures consisting of a white blouse and three stockings were knotted tightly around Bissette’s neck. Her body was clothed only in a blue and red housecoat, which was pushed up above her breasts.
The medical examiner later determined that Bissette had had sexual intercourse shortly before her death. The examiner also discovered that Bissette was one month pregnant. A neighbor told police that she had heard screams coming from Bissette’s apartment between three and four P.M. the day before her body was found. One of the items taken as evidence from the crime scene was an Easter card from Bissette’s boss that read, “To Patsy . . . Love Jules.” The man’s assertion that the relationship was merely professional did not ring true. It soon became clear that Rothman was not only Patricia Bissette’s boss; he also was her lover.
This detail would not have disturbed investigators if the boss had not already been married. In addition, Bissette’s photo album had been stolen from her apartment, but the killer had left $125 on her dresser. Suspicion began to focus on Rothman. Was he the father of her unborn child? And had he killed her to cover up their affair? He was given a polygraph examination. The official report said, “Reactions exhibited on this chart indicate that he is not telling the truth.” Bissette’s boss had motive, and he had opportunity. Yet for reasons unknown, he was not arrested for the murder of his young lover. Following Bissette’s murder, two reporters, Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole, wrote a four-part series on the case for the Record American. McLaughlin and Cole were convinced the murders had been committed by one man, whom they dubbed the “Boston Strangler.”
MAY 9, 1963
After the Bissette killing Boston got a four-month reprieve from the strangler case. Spring was in full bloom. The baseball bats were swinging at Fenway Park, and Bostonians were enjoying walks through the Public Garden and Harvard Square. Winter had come and gone, but detective Jim Mellon had barely noticed. His mind was still focused on catching the killer or killers of the strangled women.
Then, on May 9, 1963, the body of twenty-six-year-old Beverly Samans was found inside her apartment on University Road in Cambridge. The tabloid Record American carried the headline “Cambridge Girl, 26, Strangled.” But Beverly Samans had not only been strangled; she had also been stabbed seventeen times. The killer had plunged a knife into her left breast and slit her throat. In addition, a white scarf was knotted together with two nylon stockings and tied around her neck, and her hands were tied behind
her back.
Beverly Samans was a graduate student at Boston University and an accomplished singer whose ultimate goal had been to sing mezzo-soprano at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Friends said she had received obscene phone calls after her picture appeared in a local newspaper after one of her concerts. Samans, who worked part-time as a counselor for the mentally challenged at the nearby Fernald School, allowed some young Fernald residents inside her home, a fact that disturbed the police, who believed that many Fernald residents were potentially violent.
Shortly after Samans’s murder, Daniel Pennachio, a former resident at Fernald, was arrested on a charge of lewd and lascivious behavior. While being interrogated for allegedly exposing himself in public, the twenty-eight-year-old Cambridge man startled police by confessing to Samans’s murder, telling investigators he had stabbed the victim more than a dozen times. He also said he had put a gag in her mouth and a cloth over her head, details that had not been printed in the newspapers. According to Pennachio, Samans had invited him into her home, and they talked while she worked on a college thesis. Investigators remembered that page six of Samans’s thesis had been in the carriage of her typewriter at the murder scene.
Despite his incriminating account of Beverly Samans’s murder, police believed that Daniel Pennachio was delusional and not telling the truth. Thus, instead of being arrested for murder, he was fined for lewd behavior and released from jail. Weeks later, Pennachio was killed while diving with friends in the waters off South Boston. His death was ruled accidental, and no one has ever been charged with the murder of Beverly Samans.
SEPTEMBER 8, 1963
The city of Salem, famous for its seventeenth-century witch-hunts, lies fourteen miles north of Boston, along the state’s rocky North Shore. On most other Sunday mornings, one of the city’s residents, fifty-eight-year-old Marie Evelina Corbin, Evelyn to her friends, would have been attending mass, but that particular Sunday the mist off the ocean was so thick that Corbin thought it too risky to drive her car.
The night before, she and her beau, Robert Manchester, had shared a late dinner at Bianco’s pizza stand along nearby Revere Beach. The two had been introduced by Manchester’s mother and had been dating casually for a year and a half. Recently, Manchester had spoken of marriage, but Corbin was not interested. She had divorced in 1936 and rarely spoke of her former husband.
On the morning of September 8, 1963, Corbin had breakfast with Manchester’s mother, who lived in the same apartment building as Corbin, and they made plans to get together for an early dinner with Manchester later that afternoon.
Robert Manchester left work and arrived at Corbin’s apartment at approximately 1:15 P.M. that day. He rang her buzzer three times, but no one answered. He summoned his mother, who had a spare key, and the two entered the apartment, calling out Corbin’s name. When they still received no reply, Manchester approached the bedroom door but found the handle stuck. Backing up a few steps, he rammed his body into the door, splitting the wood and forcing the door open. He found Corbin lying face up across her bed on top of the bed cover. Her left leg was hanging off the side of the bed. One stocking was tied around her left ankle, two more around her neck. Each stocking had been knotted in the front, one at the midline and the other just to the left of it. Her nightgown was ripped open, exposing her pubic area.
Though the hyoid bone in her neck was not broken, an autopsy revealed Corbin had been tied up, raped, and probably forced to perform oral sex on the killer. Semen was discovered in her mouth, and semen-stained tissues littered the bedroom floor. The apartment had not been ransacked, but the killer had rifled the victim’s purse, scattering its contents across the floor.
Police believe the killer had entered Corbin’s apartment through a window with a broken lock next to the fire escape. No neighbors said they had seen the killer enter the apartment, but many told stories that would disturb detectives for years to come. For instance, Allen Richard Spanks, who lived nearby, told the authorities that a man had knocked on his door the night before Corbin’s murder and asked to see his wife, Betty. When Spanks told the man she was not home, the stranger said he had heard that Betty was looking for a new job and promised to return in a few hours to discuss a business opportunity. When Allen Spanks relayed the message to his wife, she was dumbfounded. She said she was very happy at work and had never told anyone she was looking for a new job. In any case, the stranger never returned. Spanks described the man as six feet tall, slim, with wavy, brown hair.
Another neighbor told investigators that on the morning of the murder, she had seen a man pacing back and forth outside Corbin’s building, looking up at the apartments. “He was tall with brown, wavy hair and walked with a limp,” she told the police.
A week after Corbin’s murder, yet another neighbor, Pauline Marmen, called the police to say a man had appeared at her front door and said he had been told she was having a baby. When Marmen said it was not true, the man seemed disappointed and walked away. Marmen described the man as tall with brown hair. Despite repeated efforts, investigators never found the brown-haired suspect.
NOVEMBER 24, 1963
New Englanders were still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The city of Boston was paralyzed, with residents glued to their television sets as events unfolded more than a thousand miles away in Dallas. In the days after the assassination the homicide bureau of the Boston Police Department had a respite from the flood of calls from women claiming to have seen “a suspicious man.” A silence had fallen over the city.
But not everyone was taking time out to grieve. Twenty-five miles north of Boston, in the gray mill town of Lawrence, investigators had another murder on their hands. The victim was Joann Graff, a twenty-three-year-old Sunday school teacher. Graff’s friends had been concerned about her after she failed to show up at a dinner party the night before. The next day, when she did not appear at Sunday school, either, her friends called the police. An officer went to Graff’s apartment at 54 Essex Street and found her there lying on her bed, her right leg dangling over the side and her right hand curled into a tight fist. The leg of her black leotard and two nylon stockings were tied in a knot around her neck. Her body had several bruises, and her bra, still in place, was soaked in blood. Joann Graff had also been raped, and her apartment had been torn apart, though an envelope with several dollars for a gas bill had been left on a counter. The landlord’s wife told police that someone had been wandering the halls of the apartment building over the last few days.
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 evenin
g 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.”