The Boston Strangler by Gerold; Frank

shoulders, her girdle pushed above her waist, her underpants pulled down about her ankles. She had been strangled with two of her own nylon stockings tied together. Evidence indicated the crime had taken place in another room and she had been carried to the bathroom and placed in the tub afterwards. She was found at 4:30 P.M. Thursday, August 30. The time of death was estimated about ten days earlier—August 20—which would mean that she and Ida Irga had been strangled within the same twenty-four-hour period. It was assumed she had been sexually assaulted but the condition of her body was such that this could not be definitely ascertained. Her apartment had been searched, but apparently nothing had been taken.
    Ida Irga’s son, Joseph, thirty-nine, reading the news, stared at the accompanying photograph of Jane Sullivan, taken a few weeks before her death. “It’s so strange,” he exclaimed. “For a moment I thought it was my mother. They look so much alike.”
    Boston knew a dreadful Labor Day weekend.
    * The Chamber of Commerce’s campaign for “every individual and business organization” in the city to promote the “New Boston” was announced on June 14, 1962—the day Anna Slesers was strangled.
    * Individual reaction to these calls was surprising. Many girls and women felt an inexplicable sense of guilt. Had they brought it upon themselves? Were they encouraging men without knowing it—as though something secretly shameful, wanton, in them made itself known to men? How did the caller get their number? Had he followed them home, seen them remove their mail, looked them up in the telephone book? The idea that a mysterious stranger—perhaps even the Strangler himself—might have been watching them all this time, keeping them under surveillance without their knowledge, was all but intolerable.

3
    Three months followed without a strangling.
    But Boston was like a city created by a mad playwright for the Theater of the Absurd.
    A long-haired man known as Psycho Charlie was arrested in the act of prying dimes out of a parking meter. Several women immediately claimed he was the man who had been running down the halls of their apartment houses slipping obscene notes under their doors. In the rear of a movie house an usher seized a dapper, moustached twenty-six-year-old youth. He indignantly identified himself as a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, but at precinct headquarters his name went on the record with the notation: “The above man apparently suffers from a form of sexual deviation; he has a climax from seeing the open toes of women in theaters or beaches; he carries a pen flashlight so he can see them in darkened theaters.” Police answered an alarm on Columbia Road, not far from Jane Sullivan’s building. A woman had seen a smiling, nattily dressed man coming toward her. Only after he passed did she realize that peeping out of his breast pocket was not the white edge of a handkerchief but unmistakably the tip of a nylon stocking.
    Elderly women were awakened at two and three in the morning by the ringing of their telephone. “Darling,” a husky voice whispered, “can I come over now?” In Brockton a housewife, awaiting a friend, opened her door to a knock: a strange man stood there. She fell dead of a heart attack. The stranger was selling encyclopedias.
    Working women hurried home before dusk—the time the Strangler usually struck—and slammed their doors locked, only to discover hours later that in their panic they had left the keys on the outside of the door. Some found themselves in agonies of indecision the moment they arrived in their apartments. To lock the door at once might mean locking themselves in with the Strangler, waiting in a closet to pounce on them: yet they didn’t dare leave the door unlocked while they looked about to see if anyone was hiding …
    The “Mad Strangler”