The Boston Stranglers (4 page)

On January 17, 1964, Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke announced that as the highest-ranking law enforcement official in the Commonwealth, he would take over the investigation of all fourteen of the strangling homicides. His action was, as Brooke himself noted, an unprecedented one. But as he further pointed out, desperate times demanded desperate measures. And the press was getting out of control.

A Republican who had pulled off the considerable feat of being elected in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, Brooke was handsome, dignified, charismatic, and an extremely astute and able politician. He was a husband and father of two daughters, a World War II veteran and combat hero, and a lawyer with a flourishing private practice. He was also something else—the most prominent African-American holder of public office in the entire country. There were rumors that he might soon become its first black governor.

Brooke had his sights set on higher things.

There is no reason to doubt that humanitarian considerations as well as a desire to see justice done were prime factors in Brooke's decision to intervene in the Strangler case. His public statements about it leave no doubt that the string of murders caused him sorrow and concern. But for a man in his position the issue had a greater complexity than simply catching a killer or killers.

It was a tremendous risk for the attorney general to preempt the authority of the various municipal police departments. The maneuver would backfire if the fourteen murders remained unsolved. And if despite his intervention women continued to die in various horrible ways, Brooke could probably kiss his political career good-bye.

But
—if under his stewardship the cops nabbed the Strangler or Stranglers, what public office might he not aspire to afterward? With his eye on that glittering prize, Brooke took the gamble and took command.

His decision made pragmatic as well as political sense. The murders had occurred in Suffolk (Boston), Middlesex (Cambridge), and Essex (Lawrence, Lynn, and Salem) counties, so there were not only five city police forces involved but three district attorneys' offices as well. The potential for jurisdictional wrangles was enormous. To consolidate the various independent murder investigations would eliminate a great deal of this worry. It would also provide a clearinghouse for information that might lead to the quicker solution of one, some, or ideally all of the homicides. And it would reduce, if not eliminate, duplication of investigative effort.

A further advantage to Brooke's plan was that it would enable whatever detectives he appointed to devote their time and energies solely to the strangling murders. This was not the case with the municipal and state police agencies, which had not only other past and present felonies and misdemeanors to investigate, but new ones coming in all the time. Even if every cop in Cambridge wanted to spend eight hours a day every day tracking down the killer of Beverly Samans, the workload wouldn't have permitted it.

And Brooke's move would also pacify the media, which was surely one of his goals. Two extraordinarily resourceful and tenacious reporters for the
Record-American
, Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole, had written a series of articles on the murders (it was these that drew the critical fire of their colleague at the
Herald
, George Frazier) in which they not only reconstructed the crimes themselves but dissected the police investigations as well. In a meeting with three representatives of the attorney general's staff, McLaughlin and Cole charged the BPD with negligence and gross inefficiency: failing to exchange names of suspects with other law enforcement agencies; refusing to acknowledge the similarities between the crimes; failing to assemble complete autopsy reports and photos of the victims; feeding false information to the press; and not cooperating with Suffolk District Attorney Garrett Byrne, among other derelictions.

Perhaps most important, Brooke's action would assure the public that finding the perpetrator or perpetrators of the stranglings was still the top priority of Massachusetts law enforcement.

So on the chilly morning of January 17, the attorney general invited to his office the commissioner of public safety; the captain of the state police detectives; the district attorneys of Essex, Middlesex, and Suffolk counties; and the chiefs of the Cambridge, Lawrence, Lynn, and Salem police departments. The gathering reviewed the situation that had evolved over the past eighteen months. Then Brooke announced that he was appointing as coordinator of what would become known as the Strangler Task Force, or the Strangler Bureau, Assistant Attorney General John S. Bottomly.

Bottomly and Brooke went way, way back together. It was in fact Bottomly who, while he and Brooke were law students at Boston University, had introduced the latter to Republican party politics. Other than this ideological bond, the two had in common their military experience during World War II, although Captain Bottomly had spent his tour of duty in the office of the secretary to the General Staff rather than in slogging up a fortified hill in Italy as had Brooke. Beyond that they were opposites. Bottomly was an independently wealthy Yankee blueblood who came to the law only after deciding not to take up medicine, divinity, or teaching as a career. His avocations were eclectic: ship salvage, investment, mining, and sports. Most of all, he professed an interest in reforming “the system.”

When Brooke chose him as the Strangler Bureau Coordinator, Bottomly was chief of Eminent Domain. Why did the attorney general not reach out for an assistant attorney general who had a background in the investigation and prosecution of murder cases? This was the biggest case of all. Why hand it to a man whose expertise lay in government-enforced real-estate buys?

“Mostly because of his organizational skills,” Brooke says today. “He was a good administrator.”

Bottomly was also “unimpeachably honest,” according to Roger Woodworth, another of Brooke's assistant attorney generals. And, “Jack bubbled over with enthusiasm.” Woodworth cites an example of Bottomly's effervescence: When he'd concluded an especially advantageous land deal, Bottomly would request his staff to leap up from behind their desks and cheer.

In addition to these credentials, Bottomly had another sterling qualification for his new job: “Jack had no experience in criminal law per se, so he was the perfect guy.”

When asked to clarify this statement, Woodworth replies that the fourteen murders were “nontraditional,” and Bottomly was given to “nontraditional methods.”

Perhaps it was another incidence of desperate times requiring desperate remedies. In any event, the ensuing months would underscore the truth of Woodworth's comment.

Other people who came in contact with Bottomly during his tenure as task force coordinator did not share Woodworth's high opinion of the man and his capabilities.

Says Edmund McNamara: “Holy Jesus, what a nutcake.”

Says a former Cambridge detective: “He was an idiot.”

Novelist George V. Higgins, who reported on the stranglings for the Associated Press, remarks that he never heard a reference to Bottomly without the word
asshole
attached to it “as either a suffix or a prefix. I started to think maybe it was part of the guy's name. That Asshole John Bottomly.”

Dr. Ames Robey, the forensic psychiatrist who helped the Strangler Bureau screen possible suspects, merely sighs: “Bottomly. Oh, God, Bottomly.”

For better or worse, this was the man now overseeing one of the biggest criminal investigations—and most intensive manhunts—in the history of jurisprudence.

 

 

Working directly for Bottomly were four men: State Police Detective Lieutenant Andrew Tuney; Metropolitan Police Officer Stephen Delaney; and Detective Phillip DiNatale and Special Officer James Mellon of the Boston Police Department. They were given administrative and clerical assistance by Jane Downey and Sandra Irizarry. A medical-psychiatric committee, formed at the instigation of Brooke, worked in conjunction with the Task Force. Headed by Dr. Donald Kenefick of Boston University's Law-Medicine Research Institute, the committee included Michael Luongo, a Suffolk County medical examiner; James Brussel, associate commissioner of mental health for the State of New York (Brussel was famous for helping to track down George Metesky, the “Mad Bomber” who terrorized New York City from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s); Massachusetts State Police Chemist Arthur J. McBay; Carola Blume, graphologist for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health; two psychiatrists, Leo Alexander and Max Rinkel; and a clinical anthropologist, plus several other psychiatrists who did not wish to be publicly identified.

 

 

On March 23, 1964, Governor Endicott Peabody invoked the authority vested in him by the General Laws of the Commonwealth to offer a reward of ten thousand dollars to any person who could furnish information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons who had committed the murders of Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Margaret Davis, Ida Irga, Jane Sullivan, Sophie Clark, Patricia Bissette, Beverly Samans, Evelyn Corbin, Joann Graff, and Mary Sullivan.

 

 

The first duty—and it was a daunting one—facing the Task Force was to copy the reports made by the municipal police departments and district attorneys' offices on the murders that had taken place in each of their jurisdictions. The Xerox Corporation was commissioned to reproduce the over 37,500 pages of material that began pouring into the attorney general's office. These duplicated reports were then divided into casebooks—one for each victim, five copies of those—chronologically arranged and fully indexed. One set of casebooks went to the Medical-Psychiatric Committee, a second to the Massachusetts Bureau of Identification, and a third to Boston Homicide. The two left over stayed with the Strangler Bureau, housed in offices on the second floor of the State House.

A local computer firm offered to collate free of charge the ton of data being fed to the Task Force. The offer was gratefully accepted.

The Strangler Bureau actively solicited the help of local private detective agencies. It was Brooke's feeling that the promise of the reward money would encourage offers of such help.

The general public was also asked to come forward with “any and all information which might be considered to have any relationship to the crimes. To facilitate that, a special Post Office Box, No. 1193, was rented in the main Post Office in Boston. The telephone number, 227-4600, Ext. 271, of the office of the Coordinator was also widely publicized.”
⁵

As of mid-August 1964 the Strangler Bureau had received a thousand letters and phone calls from people the world over who wanted to help solve the murders. The correspondence is on file today in the Massachusetts State Record Office.

Many of these letters were written by intelligent and conscientious individuals with potentially useful insights and information to offer. Others were clearly the products of crackpots as sincerely committed to their beliefs as were their more rational (and literate) counterparts. Reading some of them was like trying to read
Finnegans Wake
without the key. A man from Meriden (or, as he spelled it, Meridin), Connecticut, laboriously outlined a theory that the Strangler was a sort of Frankenstein monster created by a terrorist cabal. This “crew of orgy sex crazyed ‘Red hitlers' ” had implanted bugging devices in the bloodstreams of the population of the New Haven jail, turning the inmates into homicidal electronic zombies.

Some of the crackpots were mercenary. A woman from Leominster, Massachusetts, staked a claim to the reward money posted by Governor Peabody in exchange for her theory that the Strangler had magical powers that enabled him to pass through locked doors and to vanish into thin air at will. She ended her letter on a becomingly modest note: “Please do not broadcast or advertise my name concerning the above theory. Thank you!” The attorney general's office was more than happy to comply with her request.

An elderly Canadian man offered not a solution to the murders but a suggestion as to how the women of Boston might protect themselves from further harm. “Get the Ladies Aid to warn young and old to grab the tough guy by the balls or testicles as some call,” the self-described old age pensioner advised. “Squeeze good and hard and that's all is necessary.”

A Boston woman opined that the Strangler had taken the inspiration for his crimes from a television broadcast of the movie
Dial M for Murder.
“You people should look into these pictures before they are put on the air,” the letter-writer scolded.

There was a constant flow of correspondence from people who maintained that the stranglings might be solved most quickly by a psychic. These writers fell into two categories: the apparently rational and the obviously demented. The essence of lunatic rambling on the subject of extrasensory perception and its value to criminal investigation is embodied in two letters directed to the attorney general of “Massachesetts,” sent by a Detroit man. In the first letter, heavily studded with ellipses and exclamation points, the author claims not only to have foreseen the murder of Mary Sullivan but to have had a vision of its perpetrator: a bespectacled, dark-skinned, muscular but effeminate transvestite “messenger of God.”

When the attorney general did not reply, the Detroit man shot off a second letter even less lucid than the first. Paragraph after paragraph was filled with disjointed and completely incomprehensible references to Chou En-lai, Charles “degualle,” Cassius Clay, Clare Boothe Luce, Robert Kennedy, and “Hoofa,” presumably Jimmy Hoffa. These were followed by reflections on the sad lot of the psychic, who had to choose between going public with his visions and being thought crazy or suppressing all telepathic knowledge—an effort, the writer claimed, that made him “Heave ho
ho ho ho REGURGITATE!”