The Boston Stranglers Read Online Free PDF Page A

the brutality with which this pretty, intelligent member of the Jeremiah Burke High School glee and math clubs, active in Junior Achievement and Saint Hugh’s Catholic Youth Organization, had been done to death sent shock waves not only through her Roxbury neighborhood but through Boston at large. And even though the police fairly quickly closed the books on Donna’s murder—her killer turned out to be a boy whom she had refused to kiss—the volcano kept bubbling.
    It would explode with the violence of Krakatoa in the aftermath of Mary Sullivan’s slaying.
    Edmund McNamara, the man standing hip-deep in the lava flow, was no career Boston cop risen from the ranks but an ex-FBI agent. A graduate of the College of the Holy Cross, where he had played football, he had given sixteen years’ service to the Bureau. Fourteen of them were spent in the Boston area. At the time McNamara became commissioner of the BPD, the relationship between the city law enforcement agency and its federal counterpart was one of mutual loathing, a hostility dating back to the Brink’s Robbery in 1950 when both departments had raced each other to crack the case.
    The irony was that in April of 1962 McNamara had ridden into town like Shane. A man of impeccable personal and professional repute, he had been appointed to clean up corruption in the BPD. (A lethally embarrassing documentary showing members of the force taking bribes from bookies had been aired on CBS, resulting in the resignation of McNamara’s predecessor.) Even more ironically, the ex-FBI man had been charged with trimming the fat from the department. Thus what he had been mandated to do in the late spring of 1962 he would be damned for attempting in the early winter of 1963.
    Not only the politicians but the press were after McNamara and his police. The Record American, which had long since decreed that the murders in Brighton, Dorchester, Beacon Hill, Lawrence, Lynn, and the Back Bay were the work of the same person—“the Phantom Strangler”—immediately designated Donna Saunders as the Phantom’s latest victim. That she was shortly proven not to have been anything of the sort did not noticeably abash the paper. “Cop Laxity Charged in Slain Girl Case,” the Record stated on January 9, 1963. R AP COPS AT S TRANGLE P ROTEST blared the headline.
    Nor was the Globe, the only one of the broadsheets of that era in existence today, any more circumspect. B.U. C OED S LAIN BY K NIFE F IEND, its front page proclaimed the day after the discovery of Beverly Samans’s body. Even the Herald, the most conservative (in both senses of the word) daily, was not immune to the occasional bout of sensationalism, although its preeminent columnist, George Frazier, wrote a scathing commentary about the Record and its “sob sister” reportage of the murders.
    Speaking today, Edmund McNamara offers a pungent assessment of the Fourth Estate of three decades past: “The papers sent all their drunks to cover the police department.”
    Whether written by lushes or teetotalers, the news accounts of the murders had a punch and power that was undeniable. And they generated a whirlwind of hysteria, at least in certain segments of the population of eastern Massachusetts.
    In The Boston Strangler, Gerold Frank wrote that “women all but barricaded themselves in their apartments.” He went on to describe the measures they took to prevent a home invasion by a homicidal sex pervert: “There were runs on door locks and locksmiths; the demand for watchdogs, for dogs of any kind, cleaned out the Animal Rescue League pound minutes after it opened each morning. Elderly widows living alone arranged for their married children to phone them three times a day,” 4
    The newspapers published advice to women living by themselves, including tips from Commissioner McNamara himself:
    â€¢ Make sure all doors are locked and if possible have a safety