Of the eleven official Boston strangling victims, six were between the ages of 55 and 75. Two possible additional victims
were 85 and 69 years of age. The remaining five victims were
considerably younger, ranging in age from 19 to 23.
Not that 55 years of age is really old. Not these days and not
really in 1962. And certainly not for Anna E. Slesers, a petite
divorcee who looked years younger than her age. More than a decade
earlier, she had fled Latvia with her son and daughter and settled
in her small apartment in a quiet old-fashioned neighborhood in the
Back Bay area.
Anna Slesers (CORBIS)
77 Gainsborough Street is one of many brick town houses that had
been subdivided into small apartments to meet the needs of people
with limited incomes, both students and retired people. Anna Slesers,
a seamstress making $60 a week, lived on the third floor.
On the evening of June 14, 1962, she had finished dinner and just
had enough time to take a quick bath before her son Juris was to
pick her up for the Latvian memorial services that were being held
in her church that night. In her robe, she went into the bathroom
and turned on the water, listening to the inspiring strains of the
opera Tristan und Isolde.
Just before seven o’clock, Juris knocked at his mother’s
door. No answer and the door was locked. He was annoyed. He hadn’t
wanted to take his mother to the services in the first place. Juris
pounded on the door and – then he began to get worried. Was she
sick, perhaps lying helpless on the floor inside? Maybe even worse,
she had sounded so depressed on the phone when he spoke to her the
night before. He threw his weight against the door twice and it flew
open.
His worst fears were confirmed when he saw her lying in the
bathroom with the cord from her robe around her neck. He telephoned
the police and his sister in Maryland to tell her about the tragic
"suicide." Gerold Frank in The Boston Strangler
describes how Homicide Detectives James Mellon and John Driscoll
found her:
Mellon was always to remember his first sight of Anna Slesers’
body, its sheer, startling nudity, and the shockingly exposed
position in which it had been left. She lay outstretched, a
fragile-appearing woman with brown bobbed hair and thin mouth,
lying on her back on a gray runner. She wore a blue taffeta
housecoat with a red lining, but it had been spread completely
apart in front, so that from shoulders down she was nude. She lay
grotesquely, her head a few feet from the open bathroom door, her
left leg stretched straight toward him, the other flung wide,
almost at right angles, and bent at the knee so that she was
grossly exposed. The blue cloth cord of her housecoat had been
knotted tightly about her neck, its ends turned up so that it
might have been a bow, tied little-girl fashion under her chin.
The apartment was made to look as though it had been ransacked.
Anna’s purse was lying open with its contents partially strewn on
the floor. A wastebasket in the kitchen had been rummaged through
with some of the trash on the floor around it. Drawers had been left
open in the bedroom dresser, their contents moved about. A case of
color slides had been carefully placed – not dropped – on the
bedroom floor. The record player was on, but the amplifier had been
turned off. But despite this attempt to make the scene look like a
robbery, a gold watch and other pieces of jewelry were left
untouched.
Anna had been strangled with the cord of her robe which had been
tied around her neck tightly into a bow. Her vagina showed evidence
of sexual assault with some unknown object.
A detailed investigation into her life revealed a woman
completely involved in her church, her children, her work and her
love of classical music. She kept to herself and had very few
friends. There were no men in her life aside from her son.
Police assumed that the crime had started out as a burglary. When
the burglar saw the woman in her robe he was overcome by an
uncontrollable urge to molest her, killing her afterwards to avoid
being recognized.
A couple of weeks later on June 30, sixty-eight-year-old Nina
Nichols was murdered in her apartment at 1940 Commonwealth Avenue in
the Brighton area of Boston. The apartment looked like it had been
burglarized: every drawer had been pulled open, possessions lay
scattered around wildly on the floor as though a tornado had ripped
through it. But, oddly enough, one open drawer revealed a set of
sterling silver that had been untouched, as were the few dollars in
her purse, her expensive camera and the watch on her wrist. The
killer had gone through her address book and her mail for some
unknown reason. Later it was determined that nothing had been taken.
The chaos of disorder, the ransacking was for nothing.
She was found with her legs spread, her housecoat and slip pulled
up to her waist. Tied tightly around her neck were two of her own
nylon stockings with the ends tied ludicrously in a bow. She too had
been sexually assaulted. Blood had been found in the vagina. The
time of death was estimated to be around 5 o’clock in the
afternoon.
The retired physiotherapist led a very quiet and modest life. She
had been widowed for two decades and had no male friends except for
her brother-in-law.
Helen Blake (CORBIS)
That very same day, some fifteen miles north of Boston in the suburb
of Lynn, Helen Blake met a similar death sometime between 8 and 10
A.M. The sixty-five-year-old divorcee had been strangled with one of
her nylons. Her brassiere had been looped around her neck over the
stockings and tied in a bow. Both her vagina and anus had been
lacerated, but there was no trace of spermatozoa. She was found
lying face down nude on her bed with her legs spread apart.
Her apartment had also been thoroughly ransacked. It appeared as
though the two diamond rings that Helen wore had been pulled from
her fingers and taken. The killer had tried unsuccessfully to open a
metal strongbox and a footlocker.
Police Commissioner Edmund McNamara was very alarmed. A warning
went out to women in the Boston area to lock all of their doors and
be wary of strangers. He cancelled all police vacations and
transferred all detectives to work for Homicide. A thorough
investigation began of all known sex
offenders and violent former mental patients. They were looking for
a madman, one that probably attacked older women because of some
hatred of his mother. A former FBI man, McNamara called on the
Bureau to hold a seminar on sex crimes for his fifty best detectives.
Ida Irga (CORBIS)
On August 19, seventy-five-year-old Ida Irga, a very
shy and retiring widow fell victim to the Strangler. She was found
two days later in her apartment at 7 Grove Avenue in the Boston’s
West End. As in the other deaths, there was no sign of forced entry.
Whoever killed her, she had probably let in voluntarily.
Police Sergeant James McDonald described how he
found her: "Upon entering the apartment the officers observed
the body of Ida Irga lying on her back on the living room floor
wearing a light brown nightdress which was torn, completely exposing
her body. There was a white pillowcase knotted tightly around her
neck. Her legs were spread approximately four to five feet from heel
to heel and her feet were propped up on individual chairs and a
standard bed pillow, less the cover, was placed under her
buttocks." It was an alarming parody of an obstetrical
position, which faced the front door of the apartment and was the
first thing anyone saw when coming through the entrance. Most of
these details were withheld from the press.
She had died from manual strangulation. Dried blood covered her
head, mouth and ears. She, too, had been sexually tampered with
although no spermatozoa were present.
Jane Sullivan (CORBIS)
Within twenty-four hours of Ida Irga’s murder, a
sixty-seven-year-old nurse named Jane Sullivan was killed in her
apartment at 435 Columbia Road in Dorchester, across town from where
Ida lived. She had been dead for some ten days before she was found.
Police found her on her knees in her bathtub with her feet up
over the back of the tub and head underneath the faucet. She, too,
had been strangled by her own nylons, probably in the kitchen,
bedroom or hall where blood was found on the floors. She may have
been sexually assaulted, but the corpse was so badly decomposed that
it could not be determined. However, there were bloodstains on the
handle of a broom. There was no sign of forcible entry, nor was the
apartment ransacked, even though Jane’s purse was found open.
Woman places bottles in front of
a door as an early warning device (Art Rickerby/TIMEPIX)