The Boston Strangler Read Free Page B

the apartment below had been imagining things?
    Boston has some fifty murders each year, and so the death of Anna Slesers became one more statistic. Few of the details of the scene or the manner of her dying were made public. Two days later Lieutenant Donovan, through his right-hand man, Detective Lieutenant Edward Sherry, announced that more than sixty persons had been questioned—neighbors, friends, fellow employees, building maintenance men, the painters, the contractors who had hired them, the mailmen, delivery men, and the like—without yielding any clue as to the identity of the assailant or how he got into the apartment. Would Mrs. Slesers, shy and retiring, open her door to a stranger or even to a friend while in her robe and without her dentures?
    The ransacking indicated that burglary might be the motive. Mrs. Slesers had suffered head injuries, either from a blow or a fall, but she had been strangled, no doubt of that. And though there was no evidence of rape, she had been sexually assaulted. As one detective put it, a routine housebreaking—with complications. Presumably, the assailant broke into the apartment to rob, came upon Mrs. Slesers disrobing for her bath—a woman appearing much younger than her age—was seized by an uncontrollable urge, and then strangled her fearing she might recognize him in the future.
    Whatever the case, it seemed obvious the motive was not to be found in her own background. Her days were bounded by her work, her church, her music, and her son and daughter. The husband she had divorced two decades ago in Latvia had remarried long since and now lived in Canada. She had no known men friends. At work she was described as a conscientious woman who kept to herself and did not associate with other employees. No one there knew anything of her friends or her social life.
    The information Juris supplied about her past in Latvia was equally unrewarding. His mother had graduated from a university as an agronomist, worked as a bookkeeper; then the war came and tossed them about until they found themselves in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany. She worked there as a kitchen helper until they came to the United States and settled in Michigan, where relatives lived. Mrs. Slesers had worked to send Juris through the University of Maryland. After his sister Maija married two years before, he and his mother had lived together until a month ago, when Juris had taken his room in Lexington. On June 1 Mrs. Slesers had moved into Apartment 3F.
    Housebreaking—with complications. The complications privately troubled the police. Had the apartment really been ransacked? Or had it been made to appear so? The bedroom dresser drawers had all been pulled open, their contents disturbed, but they had not been pushed completely shut again: instead, they had been left to describe a pyramid, the lowest drawer two inches out, that above it an inch and a half, that above it one inch … A case of color slides had been carefully placed on the bedroom floor—certainly not dropped. This was no hasty search. The record player was still on, though it was silent. Mrs. Slesers could not have turned it off because Juris had fixed the master switch inside the player itself. Whoever had turned it off had actually turned off only the amplifier. Someone had taken time to do this, and to set a scene of apparent robbery—perhaps. A small gold watch was left untouched on a shelf above the tub; other modest pieces of jewelry remained in a jewel box on the dresser. If robbery had been the motive, why weren’t these taken?
    The Anna Slesers file was kept open. In the Homicide Division on the second floor of Police Headquarters Lieutenant Donovan and Lieutenant Sherry, though busy with other homicides—fights, drunken shootings, and the like—studied the photographs taken in Apartment 3F and the reports still filtering in. Although 90 percent of murders are solved, experience has shown