The Boston Strangler by Gerold; Frank Page A

it.
    Governor Peabody had announced a five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the apprehension of the murderer or murderers, but the outcry continued. “If this rampant crime keeps up, the Mayor will fire McNamara as quickly as anyone else,” a city councilman declared. In the House of Representatives, with memories of the bookie-police scandal months before, there were demands for an investigation of the police department as well as its methods of crime detection.
    Doggedly, McNamara insisted that everything human intelligence could do was being done. Every man on his force, the eighth largest in the United States, would continue to work around the clock, “using every good, known, and solid law enforcement technique” to discover “the persons responsible for the murders.”
    Although McNamara several weeks before at a closed session of the City Council had admitted that three or four of the stranglings might be connected, now he spoke only in the plural—“the persons responsible.” There were too many “dissimilarities” to make one man responsible. He would not disclose what they were, but “they indicate more than one killer.” He would not speculate beyond this.
    The result was that the public was terrified not only of what it knew, but also by what it didn’t know. Women now carried pepper and ammonia in their purses, tear gas bombs in their pockets, hatpins stuck in their coat sleeves; and some had even taken up judo and karate. The fear was such that when a woman came upon a bundle of six used laundered doctor’s coats tossed into a corner rubbish can, panic descended on the area. Police spent two days investigating before they found that the coats had been routinely discarded by a neighborhood physician.
    Holland told Jean and Loretta: “Go back to the Anna Slesers case, talk to friends and neighbors, get into the apartment. The same with the second and third strangling and right through to Patricia Bissette’s. We’ll print the facts: maybe these murders do fit a pattern and the pattern will point the way to the killer.” He no longer cared what McNamara or anyone else thought, whether the police believed it was one or a dozen stranglers. “Now we ourselves want to know.” The girls were to work together in a team of two, as did detectives, so one would always be a witness for the other.
    They had unexpected difficulties. Repeatedly, a Mrs. Margaret Callahan telephoned them to insist they investigate her neighbor, Dr. Lawrence Shaw. She had considerable material on Dr. Shaw she was prepared to show them, if they had sense enough to recognize facts as clear as the noses on their faces—something the Boston police obviously lacked. The girls received crank letters and obscene telephone calls until finally both obtained unlisted numbers.
    Each night, after their investigations on the scene, and after they cooked supper and put their children to bed, each sat behind locked doors in her home in suburban Boston—Jean in Weymouth, Loretta in Braintree—and wrote her story. Loretta worked late at night at her typewriter on the dining room table under an old-fashioned Tiffany chandelier that cast its kaleidoscopic colors on her paper to make the grotesque events she described even more unnerving. Several times she went upstairs to wake her husband Jim and insist he come down and sit by while she wrote. Both her own and Jean’s photographs appeared with each article: their only safety lay in their assumption that neither of them was the Strangler’s type.
    How, how could it have happened? Jean and Loretta asked themselves. How must it have happened? Time and again they were overcome by the conviction—irrational as it was—that the dead women, killed and violated so brutally, were trying to break through, to speak from the grave to them, to help them so that they would suddenly realize. Of course! Of