Free The Boston Strangler by Gerold; Frank Page B

Patricia was not only covered, but her arms had been placed neatly along her sides, her legs placed together, almost as if her killer had tenderly arranged her body and as tenderly drawn up the covers to hide her nakedness. Dr. Luongo, who at forty-six had conducted several thousand autopsies, had seen this “compassionate” setting before. One usually came upon it when a man killed his wife or mistress and, already remorseful a moment after his act, painstakingly rearranged her clothes, and cleaned up the room before turning himself in to the police.
    The police wondered, too. Patricia, they learned, had been having an affair. This might explain the signs of recent intercourse and the fact, soon determined, that Patricia was one month pregnant. Could her lover have killed her?
    Another possibility occurred to them. The Strangler could have been hidden in the closet while Patricia and her lover were together, and waited for the lover to leave before carrying out his insane compulsion, now intensified by a God-like wrath. In this case he might have slipped into the apartment when Patricia was in the basement picking up her wash. She might have left the door ajar to avoid the bother of unlocking it with her arms full of laundry.
    Whatever the case, the fact was that twenty-three-year-old Patricia Bissette had been strangled and sexually assaulted, and decorated in the Strangler’s fashion, in her locked apartment, in the Strangler’s area, at the Strangler’s time.
    What was one to say to the people of Boston?
    Until now elderly women living alone had met this awful death. Now the Strangler, if there were a Strangler (and could one actually believe there were two or three such insane men on the loose in Boston, each imitating the other), now the Strangler had begun to choose young women, career girls; and age no longer mattered.
    On this final day of the year of 1962, after six appallingly similar sex stranglings, not a single sound clue had been found by a force of nearly twenty-six hundred men working twelve and fourteen hours a day. Not only that, but in the midst of this search, the greatest manhunt in history, a seventh strangling had taken place.
    All that could be said now was, no woman in Boston, young or old, living alone or with others, was safe.

4
    The morning after Patricia Bissette’s murder, Jack McLean, the mild-looking but energetic city editor of The Boston Record American , Boston’s large circulation morning tabloid, called two reporters to his desk. Both were women, in their early thirties, married, with young children. He wanted them to drop everything they were doing and, working together as a team, retrace the steps of the Strangler—or stranglers.
    One of the two was Jean Cole, thirty-four, who had won several awards for her ability and resourcefulness as an investigator. The other was Loretta McLaughlin, thirty-three, who, like Jean, had earned recognition, and frequently worked on medical stories. At that time, Jean was in the midst of an exposé of Massachusetts nursing homes, a Record American campaign that Managing Editor Edward Holland had begun some years before. Jean, dressed in a nurse’s uniform and posing as a nurse’s aide, had managed to get employment in several nursing institutions, and had worked in each one long enough to emerge with firsthand reports of fire hazards, primitive facilities, and lack of proper nursing help. Her stories caused a furore.
    Meanwhile, Loretta had become deeply interested in the stranglings. She had been particularly unable to get Ida Irga out of her mind: a seventy-five-year-old woman killed so senselessly. She had gone up to McLean the day after Mrs. Irga’s body had been found. “Look,” she had said. “I’d like to write a series of articles on the stranglings. Try to pull them together, to put them in perspective—”
    At that time, McLean had been unenthusiastic. “What are you going