Search for the Strangler Read Online Free PDF

Police Department, called Mellon into his office. An analysis
     of the fibers vacuumed from the runner in the victim’s apartment showed three African American hairs, as well as three canine
     hairs, most likely from a small terrier. Anna Slesers was not known to have had any black friends, and she did not own a dog.
JUNE 30, 1962
    While Mellon and DiNatale were still chasing leads in the Anna Slesers murder, another woman was strangled in Boston. This
     time, the victim was Nina Nichols, a retired physiotherapist. The sixty-eight-year-old Nichols was discovered on the bedroom
     floor of her apartment at 1940 Commonwealth Avenue, in the city’s Brighton section, just beyond Boston University. Nichols
     was wearing a pink bathrobe, which was open. Her bra was pushed up above her breasts, and two nylon stockings were tied around
     her neck. At first, police thought the crime was a burglary that ended in murder because the victim’s apartment had been ransacked,
     with every drawer pulled open, the contents strewn across the floor. On the other hand, a set of sterling silverware, an expensive
     camera, and the victim’s watch had been left untouched. There was also money in the woman’s purse. The medical examiner later
     determined that Nina Nichols had been raped.
    The Boston Police Department was now facing an unprecedented situation. Two older women had been strangled and sexually assaulted
     within two weeks of each other. The newly appointed police commissioner, Edmund McNamara, found himself in a difficult position.
     Mayor John Collins had appointed him on April 5, 1962, after a gambling scandal had rocked the department. McNamara knew that
     if he did not solve the murders quickly, he would be in danger of losing his job. To make sure that his department heads knew
     about the two crimes and their possible connection, he rounded up the police brass on July 2 and went through each detail
     of the murders. Before the meeting had ended, a detective interrupted the new commissioner and whispered something in his
     ear.
    That day, ten miles north of Boston in the city of Lynn, a third woman had been killed. Mellon was sent to the crime scene,
     an apartment house at 73 Newell Street, to see if there were similarities between the first two murders and the latest one.
     The victim, sixty-five-year-old Helen Blake, had not been answering her phone, and neighbors feared she might have suffered
     a fall inside her apartment. The building custodian was finally called to check on her at approximately 6:00 P.M. Like Nichols’s apartment, Blake’s had been ransacked. The custodian found her lying on her bed, clad in a pink pajama top.
     Her killer had wrapped a pair of nylons around her neck, placing one above the other and knotting them separately in the back.
     The killer had also used a third ligature, a brassiere knotted tightly below Blake’s chin. Bloodstains were on both the top
     and bottom bedsheets. The woman’s vagina and anus were lacerated, but the medical examiner found no trace of semen on or inside
     Blake’s body. Investigators later theorized that she had been murdered between eight and ten o’clock in the morning because
     the autopsy revealed no food in her stomach.
    Despite some dissimilarities, Jim Mellon discovered one notable connection between the murders of Anna Slesers and Helen Blake.
     After noticing a painting scaffold outside Blake’s building, Mellon learned that the same painting crew that had worked on
     Slesers’s apartment building the day she was murdered was now painting Blake’s. Mellon raced to the MacDaniels Painting Company’s
     office in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. “What took you so long?” asked Pat MacDaniels, the owner. “It seems women die in
     every building we work on.” MacDaniels, who had had run-ins with the law, was anything but cooperative, but he grudgingly
     allowed Mellon to look through the company’s employee records. But the search was unlikely to be