A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger

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.

      The FBI was brought in to give a seminar on sexual perversion, and investigators gradually put together a psychological profile of the kind of person who might be driven to kill and sodomize elderly women. Since most of the murders happened around dusk or on weekends, it was thought that the killer might have a nine-to-five job in the Boston area, and that he killed when he wasn’t working, or on his way home at the end of the day. His job, one psychiatrist hypothesized, was a menial one, possibly at a hospital. Since several of the murders took place in or near the Back Bay—known for its concentration of artists and bohemians—some suggested that the killer might be homosexual. Or he might be a man dressed as a woman—which would explain his ability to get women to open their doors to him. Or maybe he was just a woman, period. A local psychiatrist consulted by the police decided that the murders “were palpably the work of a homosexual. They could have been done by a woman homosexual—one who through frustration or emotional upheaval develops a hatred of her sex. If a male homosexual was the killer, he probably had a hatred of his mother or some other older woman who dominated his childhood, and he now gets his satisfaction from the defiling of older women’s bodies.”

      It didn’t require a degree in psychology to theorize that a man who molested and killed older women might harbor a grudge against his mother. Such was the level of terror in Boston, however, that even an insight as vague and obvious as that one could still make it to the front page of the papers. It was right around that time—the fall of 1962—that my mother had her first experience with the workman named Al.

       SIX

      ELLEN JUNGER, Belmont, Massachusetts:

      “It was quite early. I heard the bulkhead door slam, and I heard him go downstairs, I was still in my nightgown and bathrobe, and I hadn’t gotten dressed yet. I heard him come in, and two or three minutes later I heard him call me. So I opened the door to the cellar, and I saw him down there at the foot of the stairs and he was looking at me. And he was looking in a way that is almost indescribable. He had this intense look in his eyes, a strange kind of burning in his eyes, as if he was almost trying to hypnotize me. As if by sheer force of will he could draw me down into that basement.”

      My mother knew almost nothing about Al at this point; it was only two or three days into the job, and they had never even been alone together. She stood at the top of the stairs looking into Al’s eyes and wondering what to do. What is it, Al? she finally said.

      There’s something the matter with your washing machine, he told her.

      My mother thought about that. Al had been in the house only a couple of minutes and the washing machine wasn’t even on. Why was he worrying about it? He was supposed to be outside building a studio, not in our basement worrying about the appliances. It didn’t make sense. Clearly he wanted to get her down into the basement, and clearly if she did that things could go very wrong. My mother told him that she was busy, and then she closed the basement door and shot the bolt.

      A few moments later she heard the bulkhead door bang shut and the sound of Al’s car starting up. He drove off and did not come back for the rest of the day. My mother didn’t tell my father about the incident because she was afraid he would overreact and cause a scene, but she decided that when she saw Russ Blomerth the next morning, she would tell him she didn’t want Al working on the property anymore. The next morning my father left for work and this time the whole crew showed up for work—Mr. Wiggins, Russ Blomerth, and Al. My mother got ready to confront Blomerth, but when she saw Al, he was so friendly and cheerful—“Hi, Mrs. Junger, good morning, how are you?”—that she hesitated. Was she overreacting? Did she really want to get a man fired for the look in his eyes?

      Al had a wife and two children to support, and in the end my mother