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The moment he opened the door, she lay directly in
front of him on a sofa bed, her legs spread apart. Her hands had
been tied behind her with one of her scarves. A nylon stocking and
two handkerchiefs tied together were tied and knotted around her
neck. Over her mouth a cloth had been placed. Under it, a second
cloth had been stuffed into her mouth.
While it appeared that Beverly had been strangled,
she had, in fact, been killed by the four stabwounds to her throat.
She had sustained twenty-two stab wounds in all -- eighteen of which
were in a bull’s eye design on her left breast. The ligature
around her neck was "decorative" and not tied tightly
enough to strangle her. The bloody knife was found in her kitchen
sink. She had not been raped by man or object, nor was there any
spermatozoa present in her body. It was estimated that she had been
dead approximately 48-72 hours and had probably been killed between
late Sunday evening or Monday morning.
She was studying to be an opera singer and had planned to try out
for the Met in New York that year. Police speculated that because of
her singing she had developed very strong throat muscles that may
have made strangulation more difficult and resulted in her stabbing.
The police were getting desperate. Someone had put them in touch
with an ad copywriter named Paul Gordon who supposedly had special
ESP qualities, who claimed that he knew who the Strangler was and
what he looked like. The police were more than normally receptive to
this untraditional approach. Paul began his description of the man
who killed Anna Slesers:
I picture him as fairly tall, bony hands, pale white skin, red,
bony knuckles, his eyes hollow-set. I was particularly struck by
his eyes. His hair disturbed me a little because he has a habit of
pushing back a little curl of hair that falls on his forehead. He’s
got a tooth missing in the upper right front of his mouth. He’s
in a hospital…or some kind of home. He’s not confined, I know
that, because I see him walking across a wide expanse of lawn. He
can walk about, and he does a lot of sitting on a bench on the
grounds.
He has many problems. He used to beat up his mother cruelly –she
was an idiotic, domineering woman—and his two sisters live
unhappy lives. The family comes from Maine or Vermont. He’s
terribly lonely – when he’s in the city I see him sleeping in
cellars, but he likes to wander about the street watching women,
wanting to get as close as possible to them. You see, the poor
fellow is in a continual search for his mother, but he can’t
find her because she’s dead.
One of the detectives brought out a number of photos of men who
had been caught mugging or breaking and entering into buildings in
the Back Bay area. Gordon identified one of them, an Arnold Wallace,
as the Strangler, who matched the description that Gordon had given
earlier.
Wallace was a 26-year-old mental patient at Boston State Hospital
who had "ground privileges". A few days earlier he had
wandered away and was sleeping in the basement of apartment houses.
He was violent and had beaten his mother on occasion.
Then Gordon switched to the murder of Sophie Clark, correctly
describing her apartment in minute detail as though he had been
there. The killer, Gordon said, was a large, husky black man who
Sophie knew. The detectives were flabbergasted by the detail in
which he described the apartment. Not only that, Lewis Barnett, who
fit Gordon’s description, was a suspect in Sophie’s murder. He
had dated her once and it was possible that she would have let him
in her apartment.
Gordon said that the Strangler would identify himself soon and
confess. "And when this fellow confesses, it’s going to be
like a big carpet rolled out in front of you and all the answers
will be so simple you’ll kick yourself for months at a time that
you couldn’t see it."
When the police went to check on Arnold Wallace they found out
that he had escaped the hospital five or six times, which happened
to coincide with the strangling deaths. Gordon also went to the
hospital so that he could see Arnold Wallace in the flesh. "He’s
the man," Gordon told them positively.
The police decided to look into Gordon’s activities before they
went any further with Arnold Wallace. Gordon had been to the
hospital before he had talked to the police, so he could have seen
Arnold on the grounds. Maybe the whole thing was a hoax. Maybe
Gordon was the Strangler.
Arnold, whose IQ was between 60-70, was given a lie detector
test. His low intelligence and his inability to distinguish between
fantasy and reality made communication difficult. The test was
inconclusive. He was taken back to the hospital, while police tried
to check out all of the circumstantial evidence.
There was another quiet period during the summer of 1963. June,
July and August passed without another strangling. Then on September
8, 1963, in Salem, Evelyn Corbin, a pretty fifty-eight-year-old
divorcee, who passed herself off as more than a decade younger, was
found murdered.
She had been strangled with two of her nylon stockings. She lay
across the bed face up and nude. Her underpants had been stuffed
into her mouth as a gag. Around the bed were lipstick-marked tissues
that had traces of semen as well. Spermatozoa were found in her
mouth, but not in her vagina.
Her locked apartment had been searched, but apparently nothing
was stolen. A tray of jewelry had been put on the floor and her
purse had been emptied onto the sofa. One strange clue could not be
explained. Outside her window on the fire escape was a fresh
doughnut, which was not deposited or thrown there by anyone in the
building.
On November 25, the Boston area was still grieving for the loss
of their beloved President John F. Kennedy who had been assassinated
three days earlier. While most American stayed numbly glued to their
television sets, Joann Graff was raped and murdered in her ransacked
Lawrence apartment.
The very conservative and religious twenty-three-year-old
industrial designer had died shortly before the President. Two nylon
stockings had been tied in an elaborate bow around her neck. There
were teeth marks on her breast. The outside of her vagina was bloody
and lacerated.
At 3:25 P.M., the student that lived above her heard footsteps in
the hall. His wife had been concerned that someone had been sneaking
around in the hallways, so he went to the door and listened. When he
heard a knock on the door of the apartment opposite his, the student
opened his door to find a man of about twenty-seven with pomaded
hair, dressed in dark green slacks and a dark shirt and jacket.
"Does Joan Graff live here?" He asked, mispronouncing
Joann’s name.
The student told him that Joann lived on the floor below the
apartment at which he was knocking. Moments later, he heard the door
open and shut on the floor beneath him and assumed that Joann had
let the man in her apartment. Ten minutes later, a friend telephoned
Joann, but there was no answer.
The morning before Joann’s death, in the apartment down the
hall from Joann’s, a woman heard someone outside her door. Then
she saw a piece of paper being slipped under her door. She watched,
mesmerized, as it was being moved from side to side soundlessly.
Then, suddenly, the paper vanished and she heard footsteps.
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| Mary Sullivan (CORBIS) |
A little over a month later on January 4, 1964, two young women came
home after work to their apartment at 44A Charles Street. They were
stunned to find their new roommate, nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan
murdered in the most grotesque and shocking fashion.
Like the other victims, she had been strangled: first with a dark
stocking; over the stocking a pink silk scarf tied with a huge bow
under her chin; and over that, another pink and white flowered
scarf. A bright "Happy New Year’s" card had been placed
against her feet.
It got worse: she was in a sitting position on the bed, with her
back against the headboard. Thick liquid that looked like semen was
dripping from her mouth onto her exposed breasts. A broomstick
handle had been rammed three and a half inches into her vagina.
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