The Boston Strangler by Gerold; Frank Page A

and “Phantom Strangler” and “Sunset Killer” took over the newspapers. From London came special dispatches comparing Boston’s Strangler with Jack the Ripper. There were parallels but differences, too. Though seventy-five years had passed since Jack the Ripper killed seven women in the slums of London, his file still remained open at Scotland Yard. He had never been caught. He did not strangle his victims; he cut their throats, then dismembered them with the skill of a surgeon. He chose only prostitutes—as if carrying out an awful moral judgment of his own—and after each murder sent Scotland Yard taunting letters signed “Jack the Ripper.” (Some were fiendish beyond belief: in one he enclosed a human kidney, and wrote, “I ate the other one: it was delicious! Yours in Hell, Jack the Ripper.”)
    Even as the newspaper reported these parallels, attempts were made to reach out to the Strangler. The Boston Advertiser , remembering the success of a public appeal to the “Mad Bomber” who had terrorized New York in the 1940’s and 1950’s, printed a front page APPEAL TO THE STRANGLER .
    â€œDon’t kill again,” it began. “Come to us for help … You are a sick man. You know it …” It paid tribute to him as “a clever man smart enough to have avoided detection by the shrewdest detectives in the community,” and went on, “This appeal is to you the man you were before this terrible urge overwhelmed you. YOU don’t want to kill again, but you know you will unless you give yourself up.”
    No reply came.
    Two days after Labor Day Dr. Richard Ford, Chairman of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University, called together state and Boston law enforcement officials, medical examiners, and psychiatrists to “exchange ideas.” Some way must be devised to meet this siege by a maniac. Boston, with its great universities, its law and medical schools, its hospitals, clinics, and diagnostic centers, its NASA installations, surely possessed as formidable a concentration of human intelligence as anywhere else in the world. It was ironic that this community which called itself the Athens of America, which prided itself upon its rationality, should find itself—as it did now—at the mercy of a supreme irrationality.
    â€œSince robbery is not the motive, we are dealing with a demented man,” Dr. Ford said flatly. As chief Suffolk County Medical Examiner, he was familiar with the autopsies of the victims. Beyond his initial statement he would not go. It might be one man, it might be many. “There is nothing to tie these crimes together, no single proof,” he said. “The more such things happen, the more are likely to happen because—and you can quote me—because the world is full of screwballs and there are so many around we just couldn’t begin to round them all up.” He and his associates were looking for “a common denominator,” perhaps to be found “in how and when these women met their deaths, or in something about the places in which they lived, or in something relating to their mode of living. All we know is that we are looking for one or more insane persons.”
    If one eliminated Margaret Davis, was there a common denominator? Music? Association with a hospital? Helen Blake and Jane Sullivan were nurses. Nina Nichols was a physiotherapist. Anna Slesers and Ida Irga had both recently been outpatients. Had the killer met his victims at a concert or in a hospital, ingratiated himself and so prepared the way for his fatal visit? Was he even now to be found seated quietly in a concert audience, or working in a hospital as an attendant, an orderly, or even a physician?
    The ransacking of apartments might also be a common denominator. What was the killer searching for? He searched carefully, and obviously he wore gloves, for no fingerprints had ever been found. Why