A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger Read Free Book Online

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.
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    BOSTON PASSED THE fall of 1962 with plenty of murders but no more stranglings, and the police started to wonder whether thekiller 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 embarrassed by a CBS documentary called “Biography of a Bookie Joint”—issued advice to women who lived alone. He recommended that they double-lock their doors, lock their windows, and refuse entrance to anyone who did not identify himself on their doorstep. (The flaw in that advice, he soon realized, was that women would immediately open the door to anyone who identified himself as a police officer.) He alsoencouraged people in Boston to report any suspicious behavior to the Strangler hotline.
    Police departments in Boston and outlying towns were predictably deluged with calls. A young woman reported that her boyfriend had tried to strangle her during a dispute, but a quick police investigation determined that the man couldn’t have committed any of the murders. An older woman called a suburban police department to say that she was frightened and wanted a police officer sent over to keep her company; the police declined. One woman reported that her phone rang, and when she picked it up, a voice said, “This is the Strangler, you’re next.” A neighbor of Nina Nichols, who was