The Boston Strangler Read Free Page A

fingerprints, too, for purposes of elimination.” By this time Detective Lieutenant John Donovan, Chief of Boston’s Homicide Division, had arrived with other men and it was Mellon’s duty to join in a door-to-door questioning of tenants. But before he left the apartment, he could not help asking, “Juris, how come you can walk into a situation like this, see your mother in that position, and not cover her body?
    Juris thought for a long moment. “I saw she was dead,” he said dully.
    Mellon looked at him, then turned away and went down to the first floor. For nearly a decade Mellon had been assigned to night duty, from 4 P.M. to 2 A.M. , covering on foot and by car an area of ten square miles of the Back Bay area, and he knew this neighborhood and the people in it. In the building lived a man well known to the police. He made a practice of corresponding with women belonging to a Lonely Hearts Club, inviting them to come to Boston and stay with him on pretext of marriage. After a week or so he would announce he’d changed his mind and send them home. Perhaps a dozen women had been involved, but only two or three had complained to the police, and all had been too embarrassed to prosecute. Now he swore he knew nothing of what had happened in Apartment 3F, but his name was put down for further checking.
    In the apartment directly below Anna Slesers’ apartment lived an interior decorator. He had come home just before six o’clock and lain down for a nap. Suddenly he was awakened by a loud bump! bump! bump! overhead. He looked at his watch—he had no idea how long he’d dozed off—it was 6:10. Only ten minutes. The noise, he said, sounded like someone was moving furniture—or perhaps dancing. He had stared up at the ceiling, thinking angrily, “What do I have living upstairs now, a dancer?” A lady had moved in only two weeks ago and he knew nothing about her. The noise had subsided and then it seemed to him—he explained that his bedroom was immediately next to the stairwell—that he didn’t so much hear as feel that someone was sneaking down the stairs. No creaking of the steps: he could only say he “felt” it. After a few minutes he heard someone mounting the stairs, heavy footsteps, and a loud knocking at the door of the Slesers apartment. Then, footsteps descending again. He had rolled off his bed and looked out the window onto Gainsborough Street. He saw a thin young man in glasses and crew haircut pacing back and forth, then reentering the building; he heard him go up the stairs once more and knock again on the door.
    In Apartment 4F, just above the Slesers apartment, the tenant turned out to be a forty-two-year-old student at Boston University. He, too, had heard the knocking. “Someone was pounding on that door like he was trying to wake the dead,” he said.
    Mellon said, “That’s what he was trying to do—it was his mother and she was strangled.”
    The other said, shocked, “You’re kidding me!”
    â€œIt’s not part of our job to kid people,” said Mellon, and returned to the Slesers apartment and took Juris in his police car to headquarters to learn a little more about Anna Slesers and who would have wanted to kill her, and why.
    He was still troubled by Juris. Sitting next to him in the car, he said slowly, watching the other in the dashboard mirror, “Whoever did this will be living with it the rest of his life. He’ll be doing it over and over again in his dreams as long as he lives.” Juris’s face disclosed nothing; he said nothing.
    When they entered police headquarters, Mellon let Juris mount the stairs ahead of him, and listened carefully. Was his tread light or heavy? It seemed to Mellon that it was light. If so, why did Juris make so much noise going up and down the stairs at 77 Gainsborough Street? Or was he imagining things—as perhaps the interior decorator in