The Boston Stranglers Read Free

straight, her right, the knee bent, at a nearly forty-five-degree angle.
    She had been strangled with the cord of the housecoat, which had been drawn very tightly around her neck and tied under her chin in a sort of bow. There was blood in her right ear and a gaping laceration on the back of her skull. Her neck was scratched and abraded and her chin contused.
    The blood in her vagina indicated that she had been sexually assaulted, probably with an object.
    Except for a small amount of blood on the kitchen floor and an overturned wastebasket, there was no sign that a struggle had taken place in the apartment. It had apparently been searched. For a reason no one could guess, a chair had been placed in the front hallway just inside the door.
    The following day, the Boston Traveler carried a story with the headline M OM F OUND S TRANGLED IN B ACK B AY . The Boston Globe story on the murder described the victim as “an attractive divorcee.”
    Slightly over two weeks later, on June 30, the body of Nina Nichols, sixty-eight, was found on the bedroom floor of her apartment at 1940 Commonwealth Avenue in the Brighton section of Boston.
    The pink housecoat she wore was open. Her bra had been yanked up above her breasts. Her slip had been pushed up to her waist. On her feet were blue tennis shoes. She lay on her back.
    The two nylon stockings around her neck had been tied and knotted very tightly. There was blood in and around both ears, and a small abrasion on the lower right side of her face.
    Her external genitalia had been lacerated and there was blood and mucus in her vagina.
    One of the Boston police detectives called to the crime scene took from it an empty wine bottle, a woman’s black plastic purse, and a small cardboard box. These were brought to headquarters for further examination.
    That same day in Lynn, a small industrial city fifteen miles northeast of Boston, Helen Blake met a terrible death. According to the autopsy report, “this sixty-five-year-old white female was found by her housekeeper about 6 P.M. , July 2, 1962, lying upon her bed within her ransacked apartment. The housekeeper had last conversed with the victim at 4:30 P.M. , June 29, 1962 ... Decedent was lying prone on her bed, clad in pajama tops, with legs equally abducted [pulled apart] and face turned toward the left.” There was dried blood in both ears and on the outer part of the left one. The two stockings around her neck were knotted at the nape. Over the stockings was wrapped a bra, tied in front below the chin.
    Her pajama top, which had been pushed up over her shoulders, bore reddish-brown stains. So did her pajama pants and the bed sheets.
    Her vagina and anus had been lacerated, although the medical examiner found no spermatozoa in either.
    A NOTHER S ILK S TOCKING M URDER was how the next day’s edition of the Globe described the crime.
    On Tuesday morning, July 11, 1962, a chambermaid named Eva Day entered Room 7 on the second floor of the Hotel Roosevelt, a now no longer extant fleabag on lower Washington Street in Boston.
    Eva Day retreated shrieking from the room she had intended to clean. On the bed lay an elderly woman, naked and dead. An autopsy would establish that she had been manually strangled.
    Accompanied by a man, she had checked into the hotel the previous night. They gave their names as Mr. and Mrs. Byron Spinney. The address the man wrote on the registration card was as phony as the names he and the victim had assumed.
    The dead woman was identified first as Ethel Johnson, wife of one Johnny Johnson. Someone else identified her as Anne Cunningham, alias Annie Oakley. She was known to a third party as Winnie Hughes, and to a fourth as simply Tobey. Ultimately she was correctly identified as Margaret Davis, age sixty, by her nephew Daniel O’Leary. She was an alcoholic who had been treated, apparently with little success, at City Hospital. She had also been a patient at the House of the Good Shepherd in