The Boston Stranglers Read Free Page B

except for a piece of clothing wrapped around her neck. What had been a beautiful face was now a distorted pulp, the nose virtually flattened. Her skull was battered into a lump. She had died of strangulation by ligature and multiple blunt force trauma.
    Her blood alcohol level was staggeringly high, something not found in any of the other victims.
    A wooden stick had been shoved up her vagina.
    At five-thirty in the afternoon of December 5, 1962, a student at the Carnegie Institute of Medical Technology, Gloria Todd, returned to the apartment at 315 Huntington Avenue in Boston that she shared with two fellow students, Audri Adams and Sophie Clark. What confronted her when she opened the door made her turn and rush headlong back down the building stairway. In her flight she encountered a neighbor, Anthony Riley of 313 Huntington Avenue. Later that evening, at police headquarters, Gloria told investigators, “He [Riley] spoke to me and I said, ‘Hi, Tony.’ I stopped, and he said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ and I felt as if I was going to faint, and he said ‘What’s the matter?’ and I told him what I had saw [ sic ].”
    What she had seen was the body of twenty-year-old Sophie Clark.
    Sophie lay on her back, legs apart, partially dressed in a print housecoat, a garter belt, black stockings, and black tie shoes. Beneath the garter belt she wore a menstrual harness with a fragment of the tab of a sanitary napkin attached to the metal clasp. Around her neck was a half-slip, and beneath that, a nylon stocking tied very tightly. Near her body were a ripped bra, bloodstained pink flowered underpants, and the sanitary napkin that had clearly been torn from her.
    Gloria and Riley, accompanied by Nat Nelson, the janitor of the building, went back to Apartment 4-C. Riley, a nurse, felt Sophie for a pulse. There was none. With a surgical scissors, he removed a gag from her mouth. He attempted resuscitation.
    A male friend of the victim arrived at the apartment nearly simultaneously with Gloria, Riley and Nelson.
    The nurse’s effort to revive Sophie failed. He called the police.
    Sophie had suffered no external genital injuries, nor was there any trauma to her scalp, skull, or brain. Smears taken from her vagina and rectum showed no fresh blood, nor was there any menstrual discharge. She had died of strangulation by ligature.
    A Salem cigarette butt was found in the toilet. The roommates smoked Salems, Newports, Pall Malls, and Marlboros.
    A seminal stain was found on the rug in the living room near where Sophie lay.
    And also among the effects in the apartment was discovered a typed document headed “‘Silk Stockings’ From an Old Story Entitled, ‘The New Look’ Or ‘Mother Should Have Stayed At Home.’ ” It was an adolescent, quasi-literate fragment of pornography that told from the woman’s point of view the tale of her seduction—which took place all because she wore silk stockings.
    Like Modeste Freeman, Sophie Clark was black, although of mixed-race ancestry. Her lovely features, reproduced in newspaper photographs the day following the murder, had an almost Polynesian cast.
    In six months, eight women had been savagely murdered. Six were white and late middle-aged to elderly (although Anna Slesers had looked somewhat younger than she was). The two most recent victims were young, black, and beautiful.
    What were the other differences?
    Modeste Freeman had been killed on the street, unlike any of the others. Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, and Jane Sullivan, all widowed, divorced, or never married, had lived alone. Sophie Clark, engaged to a young man from her home state of New Jersey had not. Margaret Davis, a street person, had lived wherever she could find shelter.
    If there was any sort of pattern to these crimes, the next murder would introduce a further aberration to