The Boston Strangler by Gerold; Frank

to build a story on? Their names mean absolutely nothing—they’re nobodies. Who’d be interested in them?”
    â€œThat’s just it,” Loretta said. “Why should four nobodies be murdered? Every woman in the city can identify with a woman in no way set apart from another. I couldn’t identify with them if they were celebrities, but if they’re like the rest of us they’re sisters under the skin to every woman who reads the paper.”
    It was the dog days of August, many people were away on vacation, the editorial rooms were hot and uncomfortable. What better way was there to deal with a restless reporter? McLean shrugged his shoulders. “Okay,” he said.
    Loretta had written a series of four articles emphasizing the common links of music and hospital association, the fact that each of the four women was retiring, methodical, fastidious, frugal. She had interviewed doctors and psychiatrists and tried to learn what she could from the police. The police had been tight-lipped, which she thought understandable, even though she did not know that a basic tenet laid down during the FBI Seminar on Sex Crimes had been: Gentlemen, your No. 1 enemy is the newspaper reporter, because you may reveal something to him that will tip over your case.
    But that had been before young career girls were numbered among the victims. Now that new possibilities had appeared in the Strangler’s crimes, McLean thought it time for a new series. He had discussed the idea with Executive Editor Win Brooks and Managing Editor Holland. Both men were in their fifties, both were fathers of daughters, and both were native Bostonians who had come to the Record American nearly thirty years before. They had watched the stranglings mount with increasing concern. These, as Holland put it, were not the usual riffraff murders, the violent, suddenly fatal quarrels of the slums, squalid killings that went all but unnoticed because they were part of a sociological problem common to all large cities, and had little impact upon the community. These stranglings, however unhappy the police felt about publicity, could not be cursorily dismissed. The two editors tried not to overplay the story, but they would not ignore news that Bostonians were legitimately entitled to know—for their own protection, among other reasons.
    Something ought to be done. Brooks and Holland immediately approved the idea. Jean and Loretta were assigned to “go out and do some old-fashioned newspaper work and see what you come up with.”
    In the midst of their investigation came the strangling of sixteen-year-old Daniela Maria Saunders, whose body was found in an alleyway on January 5. It was to be solved two weeks later when a fifteen-year-old boy living nearby admitted killing her because she refused him a kiss, but the discovery of her body, only five days after Patricia Bissette’s, led to the loudest public outcry so far. A beleaguered Commissioner McNamara met the press in his office seventy-two hours later. “The responsibility is mine,” he said. “If there is any onus attached to an individual because the murders remain unsolved, it should fall on me.” It was difficult, he went on, to imagine what else the police could do. He cited statistics. They had checked over five thousand Massachusetts sex offenders, screened every inmate at the Center for The Treatment of Sexually Dangerous Persons at Bridgewater State Hospital, interviewed thousands of persons, questioned four hundred suspects—which meant investigating every detail of their alibis, an almost endless task—they had checked out hundreds of written and telephoned tips, letters and suggestions coming from as far away as Australia. The heel of a hand print had been found on the door frame of Ida Irga’s apartment. Whether it was her killer’s, no one knew, but they had so far examined over half a million prints without matching