The Boston Strangler by Gerold; Frank Page B

course, this is the way it was! That’s how he got in, that’s why there’s never been a scream, that’s how he leaves no clues—this is how it had to be!
    Working on the basis of several autopsy reports they obtained through leaks in the Medical Examiner’s offices, they printed a number of unpublished details. The police were indignant. Good journalism or not, Lieutenant Donovan felt it was sabotage and ordered no information given out beyond routine releases.
    In these first months of 1963 a public feud got under way, between those supporting the police and those attacking them. Sides were chosen. Blake Ehrlich, Science Editor of the Boston Herald , retraced the crimes in a series of articles that stressed the enormous amount of police work done. The girls meanwhile charged that some written autopsy reports were still not available to the very detectives working on the cases.
    At Harvard Medical School Dr. Richard Ford, Senior Medical Examiner, also read the Record American series with annoyance. No question of it: printing those details furnished Boston’s lunatic fringe with a modus operandi . Now housebreakers and rapists who might have left their victims alive could silence them forever, decorate them with nylon stockings, leave them in exhibitionist poses, and go off confident the crimes would be ascribed to the Strangler.
    Among the detectives themselves there was an even greater bitterness. Reporters were meddling in police work. Jim Mellon refused to read the articles. “I don’t want to be confused between fact and fiction,” he told a friend. “I want to be sure that what I know comes from the case itself, not from someone’s typewriter.”
    The girls’ series of twenty-nine daily articles was brought to an end in early February. Both Jean and Loretta felt that the reason was, in part, police pressure. But their conclusions were clear:
    There was a clear linking of the stranglings. There was a pattern in the choice of victims, a pattern in the crimes. Each victim was “orderly, well-groomed, self-sufficient, respectable”; each crime was “marked by a strangling, using a personal article of the victim”; each murder was committed in the victim’s dwelling and each aftermath of death revealed “time spent in inspecting the victim’s belongings”; and each sexual assault was “peculiarly incomplete.” *
    They summarized psychiatric opinion: the strangler was a man, intelligent, psychopathic, suffering from some form of sex deviation. The entire crime—strangling, assault, ransacking of apartment—was all part of the strange sexual urge he could not suppress. He would not become so deranged as to give himself away, and would be “more likely to continue his crimes than to stop.”
    But all that brought no one closer to the Strangler.
    The city waited.
    A moment of comic relief came for the police when Lieutenant Sherry’s net pulled in the elusive “Dr. Jonathan Logan.” He had made the error of calling a nurse whom he had taken out before: she had been warned to notify police, and when he walked into her apartment that evening, two detectives greeted him.
    Dr. Logan turned out to be a slight, pleasant-faced man in his late twenties with the courteous manners of a hotel clerk. He was not a doctor but a wholesale pickle salesman. He was married, with two children and a third on the way. A little black address book in his pocket held the names of some five hundred women he had telephoned in the past year and a half: he had taken out at least one hundred of them, and his proportion of successes was remarkable. How had he found the time for these affairs? “I’d tell my wife I was going to Buffalo on a selling trip,” he said calmly. He would go to Buffalo for three or four days, call her from there to establish his alibi, then return to Boston with three full days and nights to play