Right now, I just craved a steak — a fat, juicy, dry-aged sirloin sizzling in its own juices on a warm plate that would also carry some home fries and grilled asparagus.
I was punchy. I was tired. I had precisely three hours of sleep the night before. And what I craved wasn’t what I needed, because what I needed was a crash course on the Boston Strangler and Albert DeSalvo, and why the latter was believed to be the former, and why it was that Vinny Mongillo didn’t think it was necessarily so. So I did something that no right-thinking reporter in any newsroom in America ever wants to do. I walked into the morgue, asked them to set me up at a table, and began my own exhaustive research.
Soon enough, a nice man by the name of Chadwick — or maybe it was Chad Wick, I really don’t know — delivered to me about a dozen musty manila folders, all of them crammed full of the yellowed news clips of the Record’s coverage of the Boston Strangler killing spree and DeSalvo’s confession about a year later.
Poring over the stories, I quickly learned this: There were eleven murders in all from the summer of 1962 through the very early winter of 1964; the first victims were women in their fifties and sixties who typically lived alone, the later victims women in their twenties and thirties; the killer often left semen on their bodies — in one case, on the victim’s chest, in another, around her mouth; sometimes the killer left garish looping bows around the victims’ necks, not unlike the one I saw earlier that day on Lauren Hutchens; sometimes the victims were ghoulishly positioned to greet investigators as they came onto the crime scenes. Again, see: Hutchens, Lauren. All of the women were strangled to death.
The city had been panic-stricken, just as Justine Steele predicted it would be again. Dog pounds were cleaned out. Locksmiths worked twenty-hour days. The streets emptied after dark. Single women set up phone trees to check on one another’s safety.
The investigation, at least on my first, brisk read, sounded like a mess, led by then state attorney general Stu Callaghan, who used his success on the Strangler case to win election to the U.S. Senate, where he remains. The Suffolk County district attorney’s office fought with the state attorney general’s office, which fought with the Boston Police, which fought with the state police. There was so much fighting I’m surprised the Strangler’s victims were the only ones who wound up dead.
Then in 1965, more than a year after the last of the killings, Albert DeSalvo, a smooth-talking laborer who was described in stories as having the odd gift of being able to slip into a crowded room completely unnoticed, confessed. He was being held in a state prison for sexually dangerous convicts at the time. He had never been a suspect. In the company of his now-famous lawyer, H. Gordon Thomas, he provided cops with vivid details of many of the crime scenes. Like Mongillo said, he was neither charged in any of the slayings nor convicted. Instead, he was sentenced to life in prison on an unrelated rape charge. He later recanted his confession when he learned his family could not profit from any of the book or movie deals that the Strangler killings had spawned.
He was stabbed to death in prison in 1973 by an unknown killer on the day before he was to meet with his lawyer to provide what he had described as an important revelation. Reading between the yellowed lines of these old stories, it didn’t look like authorities had busted a gut trying to crack Albert DeSalvo’s murder.
I opened up a folder of newspaper photographs from the era and saw a much younger version of now police commissioner Hal Harrison — then a police detective — sitting beside Senator Stu Callaghan, who was then the state attorney general, at a press conference announcing DeSalvo’s confession. I saw multiple shots of DeSalvo in various settings. I saw a shot of a Boston PD detective identified in the caption as Bob Walters walking out of a Charles Street apartment building that was the site of the last strangling attributed to DeSalvo.
That last photograph stopped me cold, though at first I wasn’t sure why. I stared at it longer and harder, harder and longer. And then it struck me — hard. Charles Street. Beacon Hill — the site of the Jill Dawson slaying. I strained my eyes to see the address above the door on the brick town house, but the picture was too grainy to clearly see the numbers. I was peering so close that my forehead banged against the table, making me reflexively jump back in surprise. I leapt up and ran over to the counter where Chad or Chadwick or Chad Wick was chortling through his nose at something he had just read in The Economist.
“Do you have a magnifying glass I could borrow?” I asked.
He shot me a look like I was an idiot. Do they have a magnifying glass? It’s their weapon of choice in the Record morgue. He opened a drawer and asked in a nasally voice, “How strong do you need?”
How do you answer that? I hesitated and replied, “Pretty strong.”
He seemed to understand and handed me a perfectly nice magnifying glass, handle first. I headed back over to my conference table and held the glass about two inches above the photograph. I immediately saw the number clear as day, even though in the photograph it was night — 146; 146 Charles Street, Boston, Massachusetts. I thought I knew what I had, but to be sure, I snapped up the phone and called up to the newsroom.
“Mongillo here.”
“Flynn here.”
“I’m on the other line.”
“Doesn’t matter. What was the address of the Jill Dawson murder earlier this week?”
“One forty-six Charles Street.”
“You’re an animal.”
“You’re my bitch.”
I’m not sure his salutation was really necessary, but I got what I needed. I riffled through the files again, looking for stories on the other murders, until I finally found one from the Fenway — 558 Park Drive, to be exact, the same location where we found Lauren Hutchens’s strangled body that morning. The modern-day killer was retracing the steps of the old Strangler — a discovery that sent one of those electric chills up my back and into my neck.
Something else kept nagging at me about that Charles Street photograph as well — something about the scene, or the people in it. I placed the magnifying glass over the shot again and scanned the sidewalk, inside the windows of the awaiting police car, the street — until there it was: the young, handsome face of one Hank Sweeney walking several paces behind Detective Walters. Hank Sweeney is a retired Boston Police homicide detective. Far more important to the point of this story, he was also a very good friend who owed me a very large favor.
“Thank you, Hank Sweeney,” I murmured to myself.
I picked up the phone again and called Hank’s cell, a number I knew by heart, even if I hadn’t called it in over a year.
He picked up on about the third ring, his voice as smooth and calm as ever.
“Hank, how’s about I buy you the best steak at Locke-Ober in thirty minutes?”
“That place is so ten minutes ago, Jack. How’s about I meet you over at Grill 23 instead?”
That’s really what he said. The guy is in his mid-seventies and he’s talking like a sophomore coed at Wellesley High. Beyond that, he’s questioning my taste in restaurants. And beyond even that, maybe he could act a little more excited about having the pleasure of my company again.
“No, Locke-Ober,” I replied. I mean, you can push me around on a lot of things, but not about restaurants. “I’ll see you there.” And just like that, I was on my way — hopefully for a lot more than a good meal.