Free The Strangler by William Landay

experts and whatnot. Your job, with George here, will just be to synthesize it all, to keep everybody pulling in the same direction. We’re not asking you to do anything you’re unqualified for. We’re not stupid. You underestimate yourself, Michael.”
    “No, no, I estimate myself just right. I’m not a detective. I can’t even figure out the cases on
Perry Mason
.”
    Byron chortled. “No one’s asking you to be a detective. We’re asking you—no, we’re telling you—to be part of a team, a team that needs your particular skills.”
    “What skills? I don’t have skills. Ask anyone.”
    “Michael, do you know what I see when I look at you?” Byron fixed his eyes on Michael. “I see a bright young lawyer who is satisfied doing work that is beneath him. He comes from a family of cops, he has a good mind, yet he wants no part of the biggest murder case that ever happened in this city. It makes me wonder, what is he so afraid of? What does he want?”
    “Maybe I just don’t want to touch murder cases. Cuts a little close to home, you know?”
    “I see. Your father.” The city rustled outside. Byron considered it a moment. “Well, I’ll tell you what, Michael. You help me here, catch me a strangler, and I promise you, you can try eminent domain cases to your heart’s content.”

10
    It had begun in the summer of 1962. On June 14, a rainy Thursday evening, a fifty-six-year-old woman named Helena Jalakian was raped and murdered in her apartment near Symphony Hall. The case drew little attention. The newspapers reported that she had been strangled but no details were given. Boston averaged about a murder a week; there did not appear to be anything exceptional about this one. But the stranglings continued. Four more in the next four weeks. And by July, in the humid heat of summer, the panic was on. There was a lull from mid-July to mid-August—no murders. Then two in two days, August 19 and 21. There could be no doubt that the seven stranglings were all the work of one man. At first the newspapers did not know what to call him. They tried out Phantom and Fiend, even The Silk Stocking Murderer, before they finally settled on The Strangler. But they believed in him, they believed he had murdered all those women, and so did everyone else.
    And why not? The cases were similar. The victims were all older white women. The youngest, Jalakian, was fifty-six; the oldest was seventy-five. All lived alone, quietly, in smaller apartment buildings, three to six stories high, mostly nineteenth-century structures of stone or brick with thick walls which, it was noted, were highly soundproof. The victims dressed neatly. They looked younger than their true ages. To some, they even resembled one another. With one exception, they had been killed midweek, Monday through Thursday; perhaps the Strangler prowled on his way to or from work. The killer left a signature, too: the garrotes, which were braided together from the victims’ own stockings and cords from their housecoats, were tied off in a big theatrical bow around their necks. The murder scenes were all bloody; the victims had been beaten and raped. Some of the corpses were mutilated. Some were arranged in obscene poses.
    The police had no witnesses, no physical evidence of any real value, no sign of forced entry. The police commissioner, a former college football player and by-the-book FBI man named Edmund McNamara, could not do much more than order more and more overtime for detectives. Over and over, he admonished women to keep their doors locked and not open them to strangers, to buy a watchdog, and to call a special emergency phone number if they had any information—DE 8-1212. It became known as the “Strangler Number.” But no arrests.
    It was the summer of the Strangler, the summer no one slept.
    Then the Strangler went quiet. September passed without a murder, and October and November.
    On December 5, he struck. The victim was a twenty-year-old colored girl,