The Boston Stranglers Read Online Free PDF

lock put on doors. Also check all windows to ascertain they are safely locked.
    â€¢ Have superintendent or janitor in building make sure entrance door is securely locked.
    â€¢ Let no one into an apartment until positive identification is established.
    â€¢ Notify Police Department immediately if you see anyone in the neighborhood acting suspiciously.
    â€¢ Remember the Police Department wants all information which may have a connection to any of those crimes.
    These suggestions, made in the wake of Ida Irga’s murder, were good counsel at any time, in any city. And thousands of urban women hastened to adopt them.
    A retired metropolitan-area police detective, looking back on the eighteen bloody months between June 14, 1962, and January 4, 1964, says, “There was such a furor, such an uproar. Everybody was scared stiff.”
    â€œOh, my God,” recalls an eighty-year-old East Cambridge woman. “That was a terrible time. The priests were warning all the women not to leave their doors unlocked.” A Cape Cod resident remembers that her grandmother would hide all the stockings in the house before going to bed. Another local woman says flatly, “It was as if Jack the Ripper had come back from the dead to stalk Boston.”
    The demonic tread of the Phantom Strangler fell only lightly, if not inaudibly, however, in the affluent suburbs. A woman living in Andover, barely three miles from the murder scenes of Joann Graff and Mary Brown, shrugs when asked for recollections of the period: “It was something that happened in Boston.”
    The Andover woman’s sentiments were shared even by some Bostonians. The granddaughter-in-law of a well-to-do and socially prominent Beacon Hill resident whose townhouse was only blocks from where Mary Sullivan and Ida Irga had been killed maintains that the dowager had no fear she might fall prey to a murderous intruder. And if the women of East Cambridge, a blue-collar ethnic community, were frightened, their white-collar and largely WASP sisters in West Cambridge and Harvard Square (where Beverly Samans died) harbored no such anxiety. “The hysteria passed over us,” the wife of a Harvard Business School professor remarks. Jack Reilly, bartender at the Casablanca in Harvard Square in the early sixties, adds, “People were too busy having fun to be scared.”
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    Edmund McNamara, now in his seventies and long retired from law enforcement work, still retains the imposing physical presence of the fullback he once was. He also retains a vivid memory of what it was like to be a cop in the line of fire during the strangling investigations. “Boston homicide was under tremendous pressure. They were being called stupid and incompetent every day. They were hugely frustrated.”
    Two of the most frustrated of McNamara’s detectives were Edward Sherry and John Donovan. Donovan, formerly chief of the homicide squad and later director of security at Holy Cross, says, “I lived with this thing night and day for four years.” According to sources outside as well as inside the BPD, he and Sherry (who died a number of years ago) ran the homicide unit very well. And despite the accusations by the press and politicians, the fact that by mid-January of 1964 the police had failed to solve the killings of Anna Slesers, Nina Nichols, Margaret Davis, Ida Irga, Jane Sullivan, Modeste Freeman, Sophie Clark, Patricia Bissette, and Mary Sullivan was in no way the result of carelessness or sloth. In any event, the BPD’s colleagues in Cambridge, Lynn, Lawrence, and Salem weren’t having any better luck tracking down the murderers of Beverly Samans, Helen Blake, Joann Graff, Mary Brown, and Evelyn Corbin.
    Unlike the Record American , the BPD was sure it was looking for multiple killers rather than one single Phantom Fiend, a conviction again widely shared in the Cambridge, Lawrence, Lynn, and Salem departments. A number of very strong