The Boston Strangler Read Free

scale, the fingerprint man dusting tables, doorjambs, and toilet seats, the men from Homicide, who live with murder, to examine and question, and the police stenographer to take down statements.
    Cruising on Commonwealth Avenue, Special Officer James Mellon and Sergeant John Driscoll of Homicide heard the dispatcher’s message over their radio. Mellon swung the car around. “They’ll want us over there anyway, may as well go now.” A moment later the order came sending them to 77 Gainsborough Street, too. A few minutes after eight o’clock Officer Mellon walked into Apartment 3F. As he came through the door he found himself in a tiny foyer; directly before him the living room desk with a lamp, a telephone, and the tiny Latvian flag. Mellon’s first impression was of neatness. The very floor gleamed. A policeman was seated near the desk making out his report. Mellon glanced automatically to the left, toward the rear, bedroom section of the apartment. “Where’s the body?” he asked.
    The other gestured in the opposite direction, toward the kitchen. “Nothing to it—suicide,” he said.
    Mellon turned to the right and found himself staring directly at the body of a woman. He was always to remember his first sight of Anna Slesers’ body, its sheer, startling nudity, the shockingly exposed position in which it had been left. She lay outstretched, a fragile-appearing woman with brown bobbed hair and thin mouth, lying on her back on a gray runner. She wore a blue taffeta housecoat with a red lining, but it had been spread completely apart in front, so that from shoulders down she was nude. She lay grotesquely, her head a few feet from the open bathroom door, her left leg stretched straight toward him, the other flung wide, almost at right angles, and bent at the knee so that she was grossly exposed. The blue cloth cord of her housecoat had been knotted tightly about her neck, its ends turned up so that it might have been a bow, tied little-girl fashion under her chin. There was a spot of blood under her head.
    The tub, he saw, was one-third full of water; next to it, her gray knitted slippers, left neatly as she had stepped out of them. In that first swift glance Mellon saw a pair of dentures soaking in a glass of water on the pantry shelf, a kettle on the four-burner stove, a pan of muffins on the kitchen table, next to it a change purse partly open, and a pair of steel-rimmed glasses; near the body, on the runner, a white pocketbook open, some of its contents beside it—Kleenex, cigarettes, matchbook, comb. Near the threshold of the kitchen stood a wastebasket in which someone had rummaged, for odds and ends of trash were strewn on the floor about it.
    Mellon was a tall, blond man of thirty-four. Thoughtful, resourceful (for the last half dozen years he had eked out his limited policeman’s salary by working after hours as a housing contractor), he was a man unafraid of facts. Holy Christ, he thought, how can you call this a suicide? Obviously the woman had been hit over the head in the tiny bathroom, placed upon the runner, dragged into the hall, probably raped, then strangled.
    He walked back into the living room. “Did you look at the body?” he asked the policeman. Juris, sitting immobile on the sofa, seemed almost invisible, half-melted into the background.
    The policeman nodded.
    â€œYou call that a suicide?” demanded Mellon, angry despite himself. He could not forgive Juris for not covering the body with a sheet.
    â€œI’ll bet you five dollars it’s suicide,” said the other, still working on his report.
    â€œI’ll be stealing your money, but you’ve got a bet,” said Mellon. “I say it’s definitely murder.”
    He sat down next to Juris and had him repeat what he had told the policemen. “I’ll have to take you to Homicide and take a statement from you,” Mellon told him. “We’ll want your