The Strangler

10

It had begun in the summer of 1962. On June 14, a rainy Thursday evening, a fifty-six-year-old woman named Helena Jalakian was raped and murdered in her apartment near Symphony Hall. The case drew little attention. The newspapers reported that she had been strangled but no details were given. Boston averaged about a murder a week; there did not appear to be anything exceptional about this one. But the stranglings continued. Four more in the next four weeks. And by July, in the humid heat of summer, the panic was on. There was a lull from mid-July to mid-August-no murders. Then two in two days, August 19 and 21. There could be no doubt that the seven stranglings were all the work of one man. At first the newspapers did not know what to call him. They tried out Phantom and Fiend, even The Silk Stocking Murderer, before they finally settled on The Strangler. But they believed in him, they believed he had murdered all those women, and so did everyone else.

And why not? The cases were similar. The victims were all older white women. The youngest, Jalakian, was fifty-six; the oldest was seventy-five. All lived alone, quietly, in smaller apartment buildings, three to six stories high, mostly nineteenth-century structures of stone or brick with thick walls which, it was noted, were highly soundproof. The victims dressed neatly. They looked younger than their true ages. To some, they even resembled one another. With one exception, they had been killed midweek, Monday through Thursday; perhaps the Strangler prowled on his way to or from work. The killer left a signature, too: the garrotes, which were braided together from the victims’ own stockings and cords from their housecoats, were tied off in a big theatrical bow around their necks. The murder scenes were all bloody; the victims had been beaten and raped. Some of the corpses were mutilated. Some were arranged in obscene poses.

The police had no witnesses, no physical evidence of any real value, no sign of forced entry. The police commissioner, a former college football player and by-the-book FBI man named Edmund McNamara, could not do much more than order more and more overtime for detectives. Over and over, he admonished women to keep their doors locked and not open them to strangers, to buy a watchdog, and to call a special emergency phone number if they had any information-DE 8-1212. It became known as the “Strangler Number.” But no arrests.

It was the summer of the Strangler, the summer no one slept.

Then the Strangler went quiet. September passed without a murder, and October and November.

On December 5, he struck. The victim was a twenty-year-old colored girl, very pretty, a student, killed in the apartment she shared with two roommates. On New Year’s Eve, he killed another young girl, this one white, twenty-three, a lovely blond secretary. These two cases did not fit the Strangler pattern. The victims were young, one was a Negro. Both had been strangled, but neither had any external injuries, nor had they been raped. The secretary was found lying in bed, neatly tucked in. She looked like she was sleeping peacefully. To the city Homicide cops, it seemed unlikely that the Strangler had killed these girls. But the press and public instantly credited them to the Strangler. A lone villain in the classical mode made a neater story-easier for the newspapermen to write, easier for readers to grasp.

In 1963 the stranglings were erratic and widely spaced: in March, a sixty-eight-year-old woman in the city of Lawrence, a half-hour’s drive from Boston; in May, a young girl in Cambridge; nothing all summer, then another young girl in September, again outside the city. Through it all, the police and public retained their different views of the cases. The cops saw a dozen murder cases, perhaps related, perhaps not. The public saw only the Boston Strangler.

On November 22, hours after President Kennedy died, the Strangler struck one last time, killing Joanne Feeney in the West End. Another old woman, another obscenely posed corpse. It was a return to the form of those first killings in the summer of ’62, as if the Strangler was announcing, I’m still here.