Strangled - Brian McGrory [79]
I reached into the envelope and felt a single sheet of paper, but nothing else — meaning no disc that would show a dead woman’s body splayed out in her apartment, no driver’s license to lead us to the next victim. The sheet was folded over once. I opened it up and looked at it warily.
“Dear Mr. Flynn,” it began, again in that same printed font. “It is well known that no one was ever charged or convicted of any of the killings attributed to the Boston Strangler. What is less well known, except among a small group of experts, is that the real Boston Strangler is alive, well, and killing again today. I am the Boston Strangler. The authorities have it as wrong now as they did in 1965. You should ask them why. The answer, should they choose to give it, will be of enormous public interest.
“I will kill again, soon. If you don’t print this note, verbatim, above the fold on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper, I will double the pace of my killing. Blood will be on your hands.
“The Phantom Fiend, also known as, The Boston Strangler.”
Okay, a couple of things are worth noting here, the first, and perhaps most obvious, is that we had a grammatically correct killer on the loose in Boston. I mean, good God, I didn’t write English as elegant as my cold-blooded correspondent, and I wrote for a living. It was as if he was writing a thank-you note to the queen.
That aside, three bodies later, he finally got around to answering the question of what he wanted from me: fame. He wanted to be on center stage in Boston, and he wanted my newspaper, the Record, to put him there. He wanted to intrigue the city with his words and hold it captive with his vicious actions. He wanted to play me. In turn, he wanted the newspaper to play its readership. He wanted me to be involved at the dead — pardon the pun — center of this story in a way reporters usually aren’t. He wanted my newspaper to do things newspapers usually don’t, in the name of a person who doesn’t do what normal people do, which is kill multiple women.
This, in short, was not a good state of affairs.
I reread the note. One hand was shadowing my eyes, while my other hand held the single sheet of paper. That hand, I realized, was trembling. He was short, firm, to the point. Maybe he was like that in real life. Lines kept jumping off the page at me — I am the Boston Strangler…You should ask them why…I will kill again, soon…I will double the pace of my killing…Blood will be on your hands.
I had Bob Walters, the former Boston Police detective at the head of the old Strangler investigation, telling me that DeSalvo was the wrong guy. Unfortunately, he was very recently deceased. I had the current killer of three women — and counting — telling me DeSalvo was the wrong guy. Unfortunately, neither was available for questions, Walters never again, and my correspondent not for the moment.
On the other side of the ledger, it was starting to seem like all the lead people who had implicated DeSalvo in the Strangler case had benefited enormously from their actions in the investigation — most notably Hal Harrison, the detective who became police commissioner and was now vying to be mayor, and Stu Callaghan, the former Massachusetts attorney general who went on to win a seat in the United States Senate.
The authorities have it as wrong now as they did in 1965. You should ask them why.
This implies that authorities knew they had it wrong some forty-plus years ago, and know they have it wrong again. My head hurt, not from too much information, but from a lack of it. What I needed were some answers from people who either weren’t shooting straight or weren’t around to speak.
“All right, long enough. What did it say? Is this going to carry the day for us tomorrow?”
That was Martin, reappearing at my desk, a bundle of nervousness and personality quirks. He was scratching at his forehead. He was tapping what looked like his Buster Brown shoes against the bottom