Search for the Strangler (3 page)

On the drive home, images of childhood days with Mary played in Diane’s mind. If she lost Mary she would lose not only a sister
but also a best friend. All the plans the two had made could be dashed in an instant. Diane did not cry, however. The crying
would have to wait until later. Now she had to be strong for Mary. Upon arriving home, Diane rushed into the house and found
her parents weeping in their living room. Her father confirmed Diane’s premonition that her sister had been murdered. Diane
had one burning question: “Where is Nathan?” Nathan Ward was Mary’s aimless former boyfriend, whom she had met during the
summer of 1961. Ward was on leave from the army after spending three years stationed in Japan. Mary found Ward’s swagger irresistible.
He studied the martial arts and could break a board with one blow. But behind the macho posturing was an unfocused young man
prone to abusive behavior. He had a hair-trigger temper and would often shout obscenities at Mary in public for little things
like her hairdo or the color of the sweater she was wearing. Shortly before her move to Boston, she had finally broken off
the relationship.

Diane and Mary’s brother David, then fifteen years old, was working as an usher at the Hyannis Theater on Main Street, just
three blocks from Howard Johnson’s. Ward was scheduled to wait tables at the restaurant that night. David pedaled his bicycle
from the movie house to the restaurant to tell Nathan the shocking news. Ward was nowhere to be found, however. David would
return to Howard Johnson’s later that evening, but once again Nathan Ward was not there. This story would disturb investigators,
who were told by Ward’s boss that he had been working that night. They could not find any witnesses to corroborate the restaurant
manager’s story.

The next several days were a blur for the Sullivan family. Normally, Mary’s parents would have been planning her birthday
party on January 11. Now they were planning her funeral. It was a torturous time for Florry Sullivan. She spent hours sitting
in her living room, clutching Mary’s picture and whispering her daughter’s name over and over. Mary had been so young. Why
had the Blessed Mother taken her now, and in such a horrendous way? The Sullivan family had been robbed of its favorite daughter.
Mary had made everyone laugh and kept a watchful eye out for Diane and her younger siblings, and now she was gone.

Paying for the funeral was also difficult for Mary’s parents. Even after cashing in their life insurance policies, the Sullivans
were still short on funds, and despite the family’s active involvement at St. Francis Xavier Church, the parish did not offer
them any assistance. Then the local Protestant minister said he would take care of the funeral arrangements free of charge.
This offer infuriated the priests at St. Francis. The monsignor not only changed his mind, but also gave the Sullivans a family
burial plot at the church cemetery in nearby Centerville. “A Catholic girl should receive a Catholic burial,” he said.

Meanwhile, the murder was attracting global attention. There were calls from newspapers in Ireland asking if the Sullivans
still had family in their ancestral homeland. The media had attached themselves to the big story and would not let go even
if it meant violating the family’s privacy. Diane felt trapped inside her own home by the crowd of reporters camped outside.
“That’s when I gathered David and Phyllis (the youngest of the Sullivan children) and said, ‘Let’s go say good-bye to Mary.’”
The trio left the house as reporters swarmed around them. “Are you the ones?” a reporter shouted. Mary’s siblings did not
answer. Instead they held hands and pushed their way past the reporters out into the street.

They walked a quarter mile down the road to Sea Street Beach, Mary’s favorite spot. She had loved to look out at the mouth
of Lewis Bay and watch the waves crashing against the rugged jetty and the seagulls diving into the ocean for their next meal.
On Sea Street Beach, Mary would squish her toes in the warm sand while trying to spot JFK and Jackie sailing off the nearby
Kennedy Compound. As Diane held hands with David and Phyllis on that chilly beach, no one spoke. They just stared at the ocean
and said good-bye to Mary in their thoughts.

Later that day Diane told the family she would pick out the pallbearers for the service. The group would be made up of Mary’s
best friends, including Nathan’s roommate, Tom Bahr. Diane drove to their apartment to ask Tom to be a pallbearer. While she
and Tom were discussing the details, Nathan walked into the living room, screaming. “You can’t talk about this here! I don’t
wanna hear anything about Mary’s funeral. . . . I can’t take it!” His face was red with anger. Diane restrained an impulse
to confront Nathan about her suspicion that he was involved in the murder. “It wasn’t the time or the place, so I just left,”
she recalls. “Besides, I figured if Nathan did it, the police would do their job and arrest him.”

Mary’s funeral took place on January 11, 1964, on what would have been her twentieth birthday. Florry watched as Diane and
David got ready for the service. “I wish we were going to Mary’s wedding instead,” Florry sighed, her voice cracking. Her
thoughts drifted back to that rain-swept night when her young daughter had followed the Virgin Mary into the woods. “She was
always searching for peace. I pray to God that she has found it,” Florry thought to herself. At the funeral home, Diane walked
up to the open casket and looked down at her sister. “Her head was so swollen that the body in the casket did not look like
Mary,” Diane remembers. “I just said to myself, ‘She’s not there. She’s not there.’ That made me feel a little better.”

Three hundred people crammed into St. Francis Xavier Church in what was one of the biggest funerals Cape Cod had ever seen.
Most of the mourners were family members and Mary’s high school classmates. (Mary had been a popular student. The quotation
under her picture in their 1962 Barnstable High School yearbook read, “Of more than common friendliness.”) One person was
noticeably absent from the church that day. Nathan Ward, Mary’s boyfriend for nearly three years, did not attend the service.
Undercover police officers were sprinkled among the people at Mary’s funeral, looking for a suspicious face in the crowd,
a face that could belong to the killer. Mourners wept openly as the priest railed against the brutal crime but assured them
that Mary was being called to Heaven.

A few weeks after the funeral, someone entered the Sullivan home uninvited. Back then, no one locked doors on quiet Cape Cod.
That day, Diane returned home from school, left her books in the hallway, and walked into the living room, where she saw that
Mary’s photo was no longer on the mantel. Instead, the picture frame had been smashed and was lying on the floor surrounded
by shards of glass several feet away from the mantel. Diane looked to see if a window had been left open so that a gust of
wind could have knocked the photo off the mantel, but it was the middle of winter, and all the windows were shut tight. The
mantel also held several other family photographs; only Mary’s was on the floor.

The photo incident was just one of many troubling events that occurred in the months following Mary’s funeral. During that
time Florry noticed that someone was stealing the flowers mourners had left at Mary’s grave. She would replace the flowers,
only to find them missing the next day. Then, a few months after the funeral, Diane and her mother made plans to drive to
Boston to retrieve Mary’s belongings from the Boston Police Department. The Boston Police Department had taken more than two
hundred items from Mary’s apartment as evidence but promised Florry a swift return of any belongings not deemed necessary
to the murder probe. “What about Mary’s letters? She kept lots of letters,” Florry asked when she arrived at police headquarters.
An investigator told her they had not found any of Mary’s letters inside the apartment.

On the same trip Florry and Diane visited St. Anthony’s Shrine in downtown Boston to present a gift to the priest who had
given Mary the last rites. Entering the rectory, they asked to speak with the monsignor. He would know where to find the priest
they were looking for. They were kept waiting a long while. Diane had an eerie feeling the priests working in the rectory
were going to great lengths to avoid them. No priest came to offer condolences for Mary’s highly publicized death.

Finally, the Sullivans were summoned to the monsignor’s office. Diane remembers him as a tall, slim older man wearing a long
black robe. Sitting behind a mahogany desk, he did not even bother to stand up to meet his guests. Diane and Florry sat down
in two wooden chairs across from him, and Florry began to speak. She said, “I have a gift for the priest who blessed my daughter,
and we were wondering if you had a lost and found. I believe Mary came here on New Year’s Eve, and we think she may have left
her letters behind.” The priest suddenly rose from his chair and rapped his knuckles on the mahogany desk. He stood over the
two women, shouting accusations and questioning the motive behind their visit.

Florry and Diane went numb for a moment. Finally, Diane regained her composure. She stood up and told the priest, “No one
is accusing you of anything. We are simply here to drop off a gift and search for my sister’s belongings. Why would you say
such a thing?” The monsignor deflected the question. “We do not have anything of hers, and I would like it if you left my
church,” he replied. Florry, who had devoted her life to the Catholic Church, was furious. Mother and daughter stormed out
of the rectory and into their car. “I can’t believe what just happened,” Diane muttered to herself as she stepped on the gas
and sped away.

As soon as they returned to their Cape Cod home, Diane got on the phone with the Boston police. She told a detective about
the incident at the church and asked what was being done to find Mary’s killer. The detective later learned that the priest
who had given Mary her last rites had left the church for the Assumption Friary in Woodbridge, New Jersey, where he took a
vow of silence.

Silence would be exactly what the family got from the Boston Police Department, too. The phone calls from detectives came
less frequently. In the days following Mary’s murder, investigators called Mary’s parents at least twice a week. But more
recently, the Sullivans were lucky if they heard from the police twice a month. And soon after Diane and Florry’s trip to
Boston, the family was getting no updates at all on the murder investigation. “I remember thinking, ‘God, I hope they know
what they’re doing,’” Diane recalls. Growing desperate, Florry wrote a letter to the psychic Jeane Dixon asking for help.
Dixon claimed to have predicted the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The letter went unanswered.

The weeks and months after Mary’s murder were the most difficult of Diane’s life. She went back to class at Barnstable High
School, where she was a senior, and tried to regain some sort of normalcy. Diane’s close friends applauded her strength, but
the pain in her heart would not go away. “On those snowy winter nights,” she says, “I remember waking up out of a sound sleep
and thinking, ‘Mary must be so cold, so cold. I even grabbed a blanket out of the linen closet and almost drove to the cemetery
before I realized what I was doing.”

The murder of Mary Sullivan struck a particularly emotional chord with the general public. Mary’s photo was on the front page
of virtually every major newspaper in the nation. Her smiling eyes and auburn hair reminded readers of their own daughters,
their own sisters, and the girl next door. Letters from terrified citizens poured into the Boston Police Department and the
Massachusetts attorney general’s office. The message was clear: Find the Boston Strangler before he strikes again.

But Bostonians did not put their complete faith in the authorities. Frightened women dramatically changed their everyday routines.
Some began to vary their route home from work. Others purchased attack dogs. Hardware stores ran out of door locks. Women
even began to carry knives. Responding to the intense public pressure, Attorney General Edward Brooke created the Boston Strangler
Task Force. The goal of this elite unit made up of Boston and state police was to consolidate evidence from each strangling
to separate the serial killer from the copycats. The Boston Strangler Task Force would answer only to Brooke himself.

Special officer Jim Mellon of the Boston Police Department rubbed his tired blue eyes and lit a cigarette. He exhaled a small
plume of smoke and stared at the ceiling. Mellon was brainstorming. The forty-year-old cop, who had been working on the Boston
Strangler case from the beginning, was one of the first investigators chosen for the Boston Strangler Task Force. Mellon kept
reviewing Mary Sullivan’s case file inside the task force office under the golden dome of the statehouse. The office was filled
with bulging filing cabinets containing thousands of documents on the Boston Strangler case. Mary Sullivan’s murder was not
yet a month old, but because of the media attention, her file was already double the size of any of those concerning the other
ten slayings.

Mellon racked his brain to find a common element in Mary Sullivan’s murder and the previous killings. Yes, the women all had
been strangled, and most of the victims were found with multiple ligatures wrapped tightly around their necks. But the killer
or killers of the later victims could have taken this cue from the city’s two major newspapers, the
Boston Globe
and the
Record American,
which had recounted the crimes in graphic detail.

If you hated a woman and wanted her dead, you could strangle her and the blame would be pinned on the perpetrator of the earlier
killings. Mellon went over this theory in his mind. The detective could not get past the many discrepancies in the crime scenes.
The newspapers were calling the murders sex crimes; yet only a few of the women had been raped. The wide range of the victims’
ages also troubled Mellon. The psychiatrists he consulted said serial killers selected their victims based on a particular
profile. They hunted old women or young women, but usually not both. Thus, Mellon believed these murders were not the act
of a single crazed man. But to prove his theory, he would have to go back to the very beginning. The detective closed Mary
Sullivan’s case file and picked up another manila envelope from the large stack on his desk. The cover read: Anna Slesers.