The Phantom Strangler

Bessie Goldberg, 62, wife of a real estate man, lay on the living-room floor of her Dutch-colonial home in Belmont, a well-to-do Boston suburb. Around her neck was a nylon stocking that had been stripped from her left leg. She was dead. Headlined the Boston Herald: HOUSEWIFE TENTH STRANGLE VICTIM.

The ten women, all from the Boston area, have been strangled in the past nine months, throwing the city into panic. The Animal Rescue League cannot keep up with the demand for watchdogs. Hardware stores report a run on chain locks. Detectives have combed the dossiers of more than 2,000 known sex offenders. Newspapers have raised an outcry for the arrest of "the Phantom Strangler."

Patterns. Up to a point, there has been a pattern in the stranglings. Most of the victims were sexually molested. Like Bessie Goldberg, a volunteer hospital aide, four of the women had some sort of hospital or medical-office affiliation. Seven of the women, including Mrs. Goldberg, were 55 or over. But after that, the pattern breaks down.

The strangling spree began last June, when Seamstress Anna Slesers, 55, was found in her kitchen, a blue bathrobe belt wrapped tight around her throat. Two weeks later, greying Physiotherapist Nina Nichols, 68, was found on her bedroom floor, two knotted stockings around her neck. Two days later, it was Helen Blake, 65, a practical nurse, found strangled by two knotted stockings entwined with a brassiere. Eight days more, and Margaret Davis, 60, was discovered manually strangled in a cheap hotel room. On Aug. 21, Ida Irga, 75, was throttled with a pillowcase; her body was found on her living-room floor. And on Aug. 30, Jane Sullivan, 67, a nurse's aide at Longwood Hospital, was discovered strangled with two knotted stockings. At this point, every aging Boston woman who lived alone was in fear of her life.

Then things changed a bit. Not until December was there another strangling--and this time it was a 19-year-old, Sophie Clark, a student in medical technology, who was found strangled with three stockings intertwined with a half slip. Next, on Dec. 29, was Secretary Patricia Bissette, 23, with three stockings and a white blouse knotted around her neck.

Seven days later, 16-year-old Daniela Saunders was choked to death in an alley in Boston's tough Roxbury section, and the city's fury knew no bounds. Police Commissioner Edmund L. McNamara appeared before a mass protest meeting and pleaded for understanding. Said he, sadly: "I wish I could wave a magic wand." In mid-January police arrested a 15-year-old boy who admitted strangling the Saunders girl because she had refused him a kiss; he could not possibly have been the Phantom Strangler.

Studies. There was the continuing supposition that all the murders were the work of a single person, described by the Boston Record American in what it called a "psychiatric study":

1) A man (women excluded).

2) Mature (crime too sophisticated for youth).

3) A psychopathic personality with sex deviations (person is very sick).

4) Intelligent--self-protective (enough clarity of mind to cover his tracks).

5) Motivated solely by a sex urge that encompasses the crime from the strangling, through sex assault, through search.

6) Not suicidal--not likely to become so deranged he will give himself away.

Until last week, there had been no stranglings for two months, and Bostonians could again begin to believe that theirs was a rather normal city. Both New York and Los Angeles had had nine stranglings since last summer; Chicago, which seems to go in more for bullets, had had none. But the death of Bessie Goldberg brought fear back to Boston. At week's end, a Negro handyman was arrested and held on suspicion of her strangling. And Bostonians could only wait and wonder whether he had killed nine, or fewer, or none.

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