Albert DeSalvo

Boston got a 3-month breather, which gave the police a chance to check out absolutely everyone they wanted to check out. Nothing much came of this flurry of diligent activity except a long list of people who probably were not the Strangler.

Sophie Clark

Vacation ended December 5, 1962, when Sophie Clark, a popular and attractive twenty-one-year-old African-American student at the Carnegie Institute of Medical Technology was found by her two roommates. The apartment Sophie shared was at 315 Huntington Avenue in the Back Bay area, a couple of blocks away from Anna Slesers’ apartment.

Sophie lay nude with her legs spread wide apart in the living room strangled by three of her own nylon stockings which had been knotted and tied very tightly around her neck. Her half-slip had also been tied around her neck. There was evidence of sexual assault and semen was found on the rug near her body.

There was no sign of forcible entry, but Sophie was very security conscious and had insisted on having a second lock on the apartment door.  She was so cautious that she even questioned friends that came to the door before she let them in, yet her killer had somehow convinced her to let him in. Sophie had struggled with her murderer. The killer had rummaged through the drawers in the apartment and had examined her collection of classical records.

Sophie had been writing a letter to her boyfriend when she was interrupted, probably by the Strangler. She did not date anyone in the Boston area and was very reserved with the opposite sex.

There were some differences now that had not surfaced in the earlier Strangler murders. Sophie was black and she was young and she did not live alone. Also, for the first time, there was evidence of semen at the scene of the crime.

When police questioned the neighbors, Mrs. Marcella Lulka who lived in the same building mentioned that around 2:30 that afternoon a man had knocked on her door and said that the super had sent him to see her about painting her apartment. He then told her that he’d have to fix her bathroom ceiling and complimented her on her figure. "Have you ever thought of modeling?" he asked her.

She put her finger to her lips and the man became angry. His character seemed to change completely.

"My husband is sleeping in the next room," she told him. He then said he had the wrong apartment and left hurriedly. She described him as between 25 and 30 years old, of average height and with honey-colored hair, wearing a dark jacket and dark green trousers.

Was this the Strangler? Very likely, since the building superintendent had not dispatched any one to check on his tenants. Also, 2:30 in the afternoon was approximately the time that Sophie Clark had been murdered.

Patricia Bisette

Three weeks later twenty-three-year-old Patricia Bissette, a secretary for a Boston engineering firm, was discovered on Monday, December 31, 1962, when her boss became worried about her. He went to her apartment that morning to pick her up for work, but she had not answered the door. When she never arrived at work, he went back to her apartment building at 515 Park Drive in the Back Bay area in which Anna Slesers and Sophie Clark had lived. Her apartment was locked, so her boss with the help of the custodian climbed through a window into the apartment.

They found her in face up in bed with the covers drawn up to her chin, looking like she was taking a nap. Underneath the covers, she lie there with several stockings knotted and interwoven with a blouse tied tightly around her neck. There was evidence of recent sexual intercourse and she was in an early stage of pregnancy. There had been some damage to her rectum. The killer had searched her apartment.

Things were quiet for a couple of months. The police took the opportunity to backtrack and look for any clue that would link these people together. Any person that they may have all known or met; any place they may have all visited or shopped. Creeps, nuts and perverts were checked again, but with no significant results.

In early March of 1963, twenty-five miles north of Boston in Lawrence, sixty-eight-year-old Mary Brown was found beaten to death in her apartment. She had also been strangled and raped.

Beverly Samans

The murder scene moved back to Boston two months later. On Wednesday, May 8, 1963, Beverly Samans, a pretty twenty-three-year-old graduate student missed choir practice at the Second Unitarian Church in Back Bay. Her friend went to her apartment and opened it with the key she had given to him.

The moment he opened the door, she lay directly in front of him on a sofa bed, her legs spread apart. Her hands had been tied behind her with one of her scarves. A nylon stocking and two handkerchiefs tied together were tied and knotted around her neck. Over her mouth a cloth had been placed. Under it, a second cloth had been stuffed into her mouth.

While it appeared that Beverly had been strangled, she had, in fact, been killed by the four stabwounds to her throat. She had sustained twenty-two stab wounds in all -- eighteen of which were in a bull’s eye design on her left breast. The ligature around her neck was "decorative" and not tied tightly enough to strangle her. The bloody knife was found in her kitchen sink. She had not been raped by man or object, nor was there any spermatozoa present in her body. It was estimated that she had been dead approximately 48-72 hours and had probably been killed between late Sunday evening or Monday morning.

She was studying to be an opera singer and had planned to try out for the Met in New York that year. Police speculated that because of her singing she had developed very strong throat muscles that may have made strangulation more difficult and resulted in her stabbing.

The police were getting desperate. Someone had put them in touch with an ad copywriter named Paul Gordon who supposedly had special ESP qualities, who claimed that he knew who the Strangler was and what he looked like. The police were more than normally receptive to this untraditional approach. Paul began his description of the man who killed Anna Slesers:

I picture him as fairly tall, bony hands, pale white skin, red, bony knuckles, his eyes hollow-set. I was particularly struck by his eyes. His hair disturbed me a little because he has a habit of pushing back a little curl of hair that falls on his forehead. He’s got a tooth missing in the upper right front of his mouth. He’s in a hospital… or some kind of home. He’s not confined, I know that, because I see him walking across a wide expanse of lawn. He can walk about, and he does a lot of sitting on a bench on the grounds.

He has many problems. He used to beat up his mother cruelly –she was an idiotic, domineering woman - and his two sisters live unhappy lives. The family comes from Maine or Vermont. He’s terribly lonely - when he’s in the city I see him sleeping in cellars, but he likes to wander about the street watching women, wanting to get as close as possible to them. You see, the poor fellow is in a continual search for his mother, but he can’t find her because she’s dead.

One of the detectives brought out a number of photos of men who had been caught mugging or breaking and entering into buildings in the Back Bay area. Gordon identified one of them, an Arnold Wallace, as the Strangler, who matched the description that Gordon had given earlier.

Wallace was a 26-year-old mental patient at Boston State Hospital who had "ground privileges". A few days earlier he had wandered away and was sleeping in the basement of apartment houses. He was violent and had beaten his mother on occasion.

Then Gordon switched to the murder of Sophie Clark, correctly describing her apartment in minute detail as though he had been there. The killer, Gordon said, was a large, husky black man who Sophie knew. The detectives were flabbergasted by the detail in which he described the apartment. Not only that, Lewis Barnett, who fit Gordon’s description, was a suspect in Sophie’s murder. He had dated her once and it was possible that she would have let him in her apartment.

Gordon said that the Strangler would identify himself soon and confess. "And when this fellow confesses, it’s going to be like a big carpet rolled out in front of you and all the answers will be so simple you’ll kick yourself for months at a time that you couldn’t see it."

When the police went to check on Arnold Wallace they found out that he had escaped the hospital five or six times, which happened to coincide with the strangling deaths. Gordon also went to the hospital so that he could see Arnold Wallace in the flesh. "He’s the man," Gordon told them positively.

The police decided to look into Gordon’s activities before they went any further with Arnold Wallace. Gordon had been to the hospital before he had talked to the police, so he could have seen Arnold on the grounds. Maybe the whole thing was a hoax. Maybe Gordon was the Strangler.

Arnold, whose IQ was between 60-70, was given a lie detector test. His low intelligence and his inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality made communication difficult. The test was inconclusive. He was taken back to the hospital, while police tried to check out all of the circumstantial evidence.

There was another quiet period during the summer of 1963. June, July and August passed without another strangling. Then on September 8, 1963, in Salem, Evelyn Corbin, a pretty fifty-eight-year-old divorcee, who passed herself off as more than a decade younger, was found murdered.

She had been strangled with two of her nylon stockings. She lay across the bed face up and nude. Her underpants had been stuffed into her mouth as a gag. Around the bed were lipstick-marked tissues that had traces of semen as well. Spermatozoa were found in her mouth, but not in her vagina.

Her locked apartment had been searched, but apparently nothing was stolen. A tray of jewelry had been put on the floor and her purse had been emptied onto the sofa. One strange clue could not be explained. Outside her window on the fire escape was a fresh doughnut, which was not deposited or thrown there by anyone in the building.