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detective closed Mary
     Sullivan’s case file and picked up another manila envelope from the large stack on his desk. The cover read: Anna Slesers.
JUNE 14, 1962
    At fifty-six, Anna E. Slesers had witnessed enough horror in her life. She had watched helplessly as loved ones died when
     Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fought over her native Latvia in World War II. Anna Slesers did not know how she had managed
     to survive, and she would never forget those who died for her small country. Vowing that her son and daughter would never
     be subjected to the same fate, she escaped Eastern Europe with them shortly after the war and immigrated to Boston, which
     had a small but vibrant Latvian community.
    Slesers, an attractive divorcée, found work as a seamstress. By 1962, her children grown, she lived alone in a small apartment
     at 77 Gainsborough Street, two blocks from Boston’s Symphony Hall. Her quiet neighborhood catered to lower income families
     and college students from nearby Northeastern University.
    On the evening of June 14, 1962, Anna Slesers was getting ready for a bath. Later, she was to accompany her son to a memorial
     service for Latvia’s war dead. She had taken off her clothes and wrapped her robe tightly around her small body. Slesers placed
     a record on the turntable and walked toward her bathroom to turn on the water. As the steam started to rise, the sounds of
Tristan und Isolde
echoed through the apartment. In the next few minutes, Anna Slesers would be dead.
    Juris Slesers, Anna’s twenty-five-year-old son, told police he had arrived at his mother’s apartment just before seven o’clock
     that night. He knocked on the door of apartment 3-F, but there was no answer. He then returned to the building’s foyer and
     waited for his mother there, believing she might have gone to the store. Several minutes passed. Finally, the son returned
     to the apartment and forced his way in. The music was still playing. He found the body of his mother lying in the hallway,
     her bathrobe open, revealing her breasts and stomach. The cord of her robe was wrapped around her neck.
    That night, Jim Mellon had been cruising in his squad car on nearby Huntington Avenue, so he was one of the first police officers
     at the murder scene. He found Juris Slesers sitting on his mother’s couch. Looking around the immaculate apartment, Mellon
     noticed that the drawers of Anna Slesers’s bedroom dresser had been pulled out in arithmetic progression. The top drawer was
     open a quarter inch, the middle drawer was open a half inch, and the bottom drawer was open three-quarters of an inch. But
     nothing appeared to be missing. Juris Slesers led Mellon over to his mother’s body, telling Mellon he believed his mother
     had committed suicide. According to Juris’s theory, she had tried to hang herself from a hook on the bathroom door, but her
     body had fallen to the floor. There was no panic in his voice as he gave this explanation. “It’s as if I were a plumber and
     he was describing a broken pipe,” Mellon recalls now. Maybe he’s just in shock, the officer thought at the time. The son had
     made no attempt to cover his mother’s naked body, which Mellon also found odd. Kneeling down closer to the dead woman, he
     noticed that Slesers’s neck was scratched and that blood was trickling out of her vagina. This was no suicide. Anna Slesers
     had been sexually assaulted.
    Phil DiNatale was Mellon’s partner. Fellow cops kidded DiNatale about his resemblance to the retired heavyweight champion
     Rocky Marciano. The likeness worked well when he interrogated suspects. Mellon and his stocky partner went door to door that
     night, interviewing Slesers’s neighbors. No one remembered seeing the woman, though they recalled that a painting crew had
     been working outside the apartment that day. Mellon hoped that maybe someone on the crew had seen something.
    Two days after Slesers’s murder, Dana Kuhn, a chemist at the Boston