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Authors: Sebastian Junger

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Andy raised the thousand-dollar bond to get Roy released, and Roy made an appointment with JWT Falkner to represent him in court. The office was above a barbershop on the town square and was rigged with a water hose to disperse loiterers from the front steps. When Roy walked in he would have found himself standing in front of a simple wood desk with tooled hardwood legs on iron casters. JWT faced him across the desk in a straight-backed slatted swivel chair that was also on casters. The office had old hardwood floors and dented steel filing cabinets and a stamped tin ceiling with magnesium lights and two floor-to-ceiling windows that filtered the daylight through cheap louvered blinds. Falkner probably told Roy that his not-guilty plea didn't have a chance in hell and that the most he, Falkner, could do for him was to minimize his prison time. By prison he would have meant Parchman Farm, a notorious state-run plantation a hundred miles west in the Mississippi Delta. That service would have cost Roy about five hundred dollars, which would have been money well spent. Parchman Farm operated at a profit, in part because it was known for—quite literally—working its inmates to death.

It took almost a year for Roy's case to be heard by Judge Taylor McElroy. An article in the
Oxford Eagle
on March 23, 1950, com
mented that justice had been served at the circuit court that week despite the fact that not a single jury had been convened and not a single witness had been put on the stand. “Just about every defendant pled guilty without a trial,” the newspaper gloated, “and are now at Parchman serving their sentence.” Twenty-three men—ranging from James Lester, who got eighteen months for operating a whiskey still, to Eugene Chatham, who got natural life for killing his wife on the streets of Oxford—decided not to annoy Judge McElroy by insisting on a trial. Guilty pleas were common in Mississippi courts, by innocent and guilty alike, but clearing an entire slate was remarkable even by the standards of the time. “Roy Smith, colored,” the
Eagle
noted in the very last court entry, identifying his race, as was customary. “Burglary, six months.”

Roy was now an inmate of the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm.

FOUR

T
HE BELMONT POLICE
had never investigated a murder before—their notes were typed on forms that read “Traffic Bureau Report” at the top—so three additional detectives were sent by the state police. They arrived within an hour of the discovery of Bessie Goldberg's body and immediately began assembling evidence that Roy Smith had committed the crime. Unlike most murders involving strangers, the fact that Smith had been at the Goldbergs' that day wasn't enough to convict him; Smith was supposed to have been there. The very thing that made him a suspect also explained his presence adequately. The detectives needed either a plausible motive for Smith to kill, or they needed physical evidence linking him to the dead body.

At ten-thirty that night—after the murder scene had been photographed, dusted for fingerprints, and sketched and Bessie Goldberg's body had been removed for autopsy—a Belmont police officer named Alfred King interviewed the stricken Israel Goldberg. With King were state police lieutenant John Cahalane and Sgt. Leo
McNulty. Israel Goldberg, of course, was both a witness and—theoretically, anyway—a suspect, though it must have been clear to all of the detectives that this frail sixty-eight-year-old man could not possibly have murdered his wife in the two-minute period between his entering the house and rushing back outside in a panic. Goldberg stated that their regular cleaning man could not come that day, so his wife had called the Massachusetts Employment Security office, and they had sent Roy Smith over. Israel said he had left a ten-dollar bill and five singles with his wife to pay for the work, but none of that money had been found in the house, and neither had the little snap purse that Bessie would have kept it in. The most that Bessie would have paid Smith was six dollars for the work that he had done, plus a little more for bus fare. That meant that eight dollars or so—and a purse—were unaccounted for. If the police could place the purse in Smith's hands, or somehow show that he had more money than he should, a senseless crime would have an obvious logic that any jury could understand. Roy Smith had killed someone for eight dollars and change.

Over the next several days police officers scoured local sewers and street gutters for the missing purse. They checked the Goldberg house as well as the garage of the house next door. They tracked down everyone who lived or worked in the immediate area and took statements from them, and as word of the murder spread, they started to receive calls at the police station from people who thought they could “shed some light” on the matter. Mrs. Lillian Cutliffe, who worked at the Laundromat on Pleasant Street, stated that “she saw a negro walk in front of the shop between 11:30 and 12:00 noon, wearing glasses.” Smith also caught the eye of Louis Pizzuto, who owned Gigi's Sub Shop, around 2:30 and 3:00 p.m. “The colored man was in his mid-twenties,” Pizzuto told the police,
“and wearing a long dark coat that hung below his knees…and walked continually looking back.” Smith had his hands in his coat pockets, so Pizzuto couldn't tell if he was carrying anything.

Unfortunately no one in the pharmacy saw Smith carrying a purse either, though Smith had bought a pack of Pall Malls for twenty-eight cents. The bus driver who picked Smith up didn't see him carrying a coin purse, and neither did the neighborhood children who passed him on their way home. The children all agreed that he had looked as if he was in a hurry, but their estimates varied on what time it had been. The later Smith left the house, the less time there would be for someone else plausibly to have committed the murder; a time of 3:30 would pretty much nail his case shut. Unfortunately for the police, adult witnesses placed the time around three o'clock, which left a substantial gap—fifty minutes—during which someone else could have killed Bessie Goldberg. It was unlikely, but it was possible, and any good defense attorney could turn a case upside down with the merely possible.

Meanwhile investigators were not getting much help from the body. State police detectives stated in their report that Bessie Goldberg was found on her back in the living room near a divan with a stocking wrapped tightly, but unknotted, around her neck. Her right arm was flung out straight from the shoulder, and her left arm lay across her chest in the same direction. She was fully clothed but for her left shoe, which was lying next to her, and for her left stocking, which was around her neck. Her blouse was pulled halfway open, apparently popping off a button that landed on the divan next to where she lay. Her skirt and underclothes were pulled up in the front, and, as the report put it delicately, “the central portion of her white pants appeared to have been torn out of them completely, exposing her person.” Her face was the plum blue of
death by strangulation, and there was a spot of blood on the right corner of her mouth. She was still wearing her eyeglasses.

An autopsy was performed several hours later by Dr. Edwin Hill of the Harvard School of Legal Medicine, with Middlesex County medical examiner David Dow looking on. Hill concluded that Bessie Goldberg “came to her death as a result of asphyxia by ligature.” Not only was her neck deeply furrowed by the stocking that had strangled her, but her skin and eyelids were covered with numerous pinpoint hemorrhages called petechiae, which are nearly always present in stranglings. Blood cannot drain from the head because of the pressure applied to the neck arteries, so the delicate capillaries near the surface of the tissue eventually burst. Dr. Hill, however, could not find any outward signs of injury to Bessie Goldberg's body. This was mildly unusual but not unheard of. According to a Swedish study, roughly half of strangulation victims have visible wounds on them, mostly bruises and fingernail imprints in the throat. Presumably the weaker—or older—the victim, the less force is necessary to kill them and the fewer injuries they have.

What was odd, though, was the complete lack of injury to Roy Smith. When he was picked up by the Cambridge police, Smith had a small amount of old blood on his pants but no wounds on either of his hands. According to the Swedish study, this is almost unheard of. The study focused on fourteen attacks on adults in which the victim was neither drunk, retarded, nor otherwise incapacitated, and in only one case out of fourteen did the victim fail to wound the attacker before dying. Most of these wounds were fingernail imprints in the forearms, fingers, and thumbs. “Against an attack with hands one defends oneself with hands,” the study explains. “The thumb grip is the strongest and most active part of the hand
even in the act of strangulation and is therefore often subject to self-defense injuries.”

The lack of injuries to both parties, then, probably meant that Bessie Goldberg had lost consciousness too quickly to put up much resistance—or to require much force to subdue. Whoever killed Bessie Goldberg must first have incapacitated her and then gone on to the uglier business of rape and strangulation. There is one very easy way to do that. It is called, among other things, the carotid takedown. When a person dies by strangulation—either by hanging, ligature, or manual compression of the neck—they usually do not die because the air supply to their lungs has been cut off; they die because blood supply to their brain has been cut off. This is merciful; at any given moment there are a couple of minutes' worth of air in the lungs, and death by asphyxiation is a slow and desperate process that can leave both victim and attacker covered in lacerations.

There is far less oxygen in the brain, however, and death by cerebral hypoxia—lack of oxygen to the brain—is correspondingly fast. Oxygen-bearing blood reaches the brain via the carotid arteries in the neck and leaves primarily through the jugular veins. Only eleven pounds of pressure to the carotid arteries are necessary to stop blood flow to the brain, and once the blood flow has stopped, the person loses consciousness in an average of ten seconds. A person who has lost consciousness because of constricted carotid arteries will regain consciousness in another ten seconds or so if the pressure is released. If pressure is not released, however, the unconscious person dies within minutes. As a result people have killed themselves by strangulation in the most benign-looking circumstances. They have hanged themselves from a bedpost while lying next to their sleeping spouse. (The weight of the head against the noose is
enough to block the carotid artery.) They have hanged themselves while sitting on the floor. They have hanged themselves despite having a permanent tracheostomy—a breathing hole in their throat—that allowed a full supply of air to the lungs.

One can imagine that in order to tie a stocking around Bessie Goldberg's neck without sustaining wounds to his arms and face, the killer had to incapacitate her first, probably by cutting off blood flow in her carotid. He may have done this deliberately, or he may have done it unknowingly and been surprised by how quickly she lost consciousness. It takes considerable strength to crush someone's trachea, but it takes almost no effort to block their carotid arteries; the fact that Bessie Goldberg died with her glasses on suggests the latter. A small bone in her neck called the hyoid was also unbroken, which is extremely rare in elderly strangulation victims. In all likelihood, then, very little force was used to kill Bessie Goldberg. The killer almost certainly put her in a headlock from behind and squeezed her neck until she went limp.

The problem with the carotid takedown is that it works too well; numerous people have inadvertently been killed by police officers who were following proper procedure but didn't release their suspect in time. If Bessie Goldberg died in this way, it would have happened so quickly and silently that even someone in the next room might not have known. There is no history of sexual predation in Smith's past, and if he did indeed kill Bessie Goldberg, the experience may have been nearly as confusing to him as it was to her. Minutes earlier he was cleaning a white woman's house in suburban Belmont; now she was dead at his feet. His life as he knew it was over and another—undoubtedly worse—one was about to begin.

FIVE

T
HE FIRST ONE
was found dead in her small Boston apartment on the evening of June 14, 1962. Her name was Anna 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 strong-box 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 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.

 

BOSTON PASSED THE
fall of 1962 with plenty of murders but no more stranglings, and the police started to wonder whether the
killer 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 also
encouraged 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 killed in late June, reported having seen a white man sitting in a car and looking up at Nichols's apartment for three Saturdays in a row before the murder. Nothing came of it. A woman was raped by an ex-marine she met in a bar who told her, while raping her, that he liked to choke older women. A Brockton housewife opened her front door, expecting a friend, and was greeted by an unknown man. She fell dead of fright before he could explain that he was an encyclopedia salesman.

Police investigators went through every diary, notebook, and scrap of paper in the apartments of the dead women for names and phone numbers. Each one then had to be tracked down and investigated. Detectives took latent fingerprints from the crime scenes and then compared them to other crime scenes to see if anyone came up twice. They worked their way through routine checks of some six thousand people who knew the deceased or lived near the deceased or had simply attracted someone's attention near one of the crime scenes. Much was made of the fact that all the women were in some way associated with hospitals, until it was pointed out that health care and nursing were among the few professions easily
accessible to women, and moreover, that elderly people of both sexes would be likely to have links to hospitals.

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