Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 352: The Boston Strangler(s) Part 1

Episode Date: June 7, 2026

In the first part of this Bostonian epic, Mathas tells the boys about the crimes committed by the Boston Strangler, and the ineffectual response by police, politics and parapsychology that followed.CHILLUMINATI is a weekly comedy podcast hosted by Mike Martin, Jesse Cox and Alex Faciane. Hold on to your tin-foil hats and traverse the realms of the mysterious, supernatural, spooky and sometimes truly horrible - and your third eye will never be the same!LIVE SHOW TICKETS: https://lh-st.com/shows/08-22-2026-chilluminati-cox-n-crendor-live/YETEE MECH: http://www.theyetee.com/chilluminatiSubscribe to our Patreon to support us and for extra content like full video episodes, weekly Minisodes, exclusive art, and more at http://patreon.com/CHILLUMINATIPODMike Martin - http://www.youtube.com/@themoleculemindset Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - https://www.youtube.com/@StarWarsOldCanonBookClub/Editor: DeanCutty Producer: Hilde @ https://bsky.app/profile/heksen.bsky.social Show Art: Studio Melectro @ http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Logo Design: Shawn JPB @ https://twitter.com/JetpackBragginSources:The Boston Strangler by Susan Kelly

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chulamani podcast. Episode 352, as always, I'm one of your host. Mike Martin, joined my two favorite co-conspirators, none other than Jesse and Alex. 352. 352. Is that a number that we should be worried about? No, I'm just continually shocked that we've been doing this for so long. What are you going to do when we hit 500?

Probably be dead by then. 5.00 minutes long episode. No, you know what? Death options looking much better now. Whenever the corporate war starts, I'll sign up. 500 should happen in our 10 year, somewhere within our 10 year, I think. That's out of control. Maybe maybe a little off.

50 weeks in a year, right? 52, yeah? Yeah, 52 weeks in a year. So like. There's 100, two years. And we probably missed a few, right? Yeah. So like.

Yeah. Technicality wise. Yeah. We're probably hitting 500. We're getting there. We're getting there. We've got so more more topics than getting to 500 could ever fucking like cover. So we could be here until the day one of us truly dies. Let's hope.

Let's hope and not. You know, I don't know. I feel like now both are you rooting for my death? Not necessarily yours. Not yours at all. Okay, that's good. Sorry, Mathis.

Yeah, yeah. I prefer to be the one that dies here. I don't like that. Okay. That's fine with me too. That's fine. Very good. If it's, long as it's not me, it's cool.

That's really what this is about. I don't want to make it seem like I'm being favorite, like playing favorites. I just, I just don't want to die. Sure, man. I don't either. I'll just, I'll be the self-sacrificial one. That's beautiful. Tell you what, what if instead of that, you sacrificed, what is it?

Andrew Jackson, who's on the 10? What? Who's on the $10 bill? Why are you trying to sacrifice someone, a dead president? It's got to be Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. Whatever makes $15. dollars don't worry about it oh i would have gone for ben franklin Alexander hamilton is on the 10

he's the only not president on our money yeah i don't know anything about the 10 dollar bill because i never see 10 dollar bills ever 10 dollars and ones 20s fives ones seem all the time i only see hondoes baby oh yeah oh yeah excited for my new 250 dollar bill whenever i go shopping i use a couple of those

hundreds, even though it's the same. Even though no one accepts them. And people always question why I have them. And sure, I counterfeit them in my basement and they're made of printer paper. Nobody needs to know. That's why there's 350 episodes of the show. It's because we just are master thieves. That's it.

Yeah. The real secret is we are slowly building piece by piece in old printing press. The real Chaluminati organization is being built by the extreme. success of this podcast. Yeah. No, just, just kidding.

Go to patreon.com to keep us off the streets because that's what's, that's what's doing it is the Patreon. That's what's helping us make great episodes

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an hour on a giant exploding tank of molasses that put like over 2 million gallons of molasses in the worst death possible yeah uh or what was before that the gardener museum yes uh the the like giant art heist that and we learned about how

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But it supports Mudsley, who's done these beautiful stickers for us, including that awesome range for Harry sticker. So go check them out, Patreon.com slash Chulminati pod. And you know, while you're over at the Yeti.com slash Illimani buying shirts and stickers and whatnot, why not grab a poster or two,

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Oh, wow. So people are actually buying these. Yes, people are actually going over there and buying them. So not only is it a great deal, they're flying off the shelves. So time is wasting, and Jeff the Mungoose was the coolest one. So hurry up, we're on don't walk to the Yeti.com. That's with two ease. The Yeti.com slash Chulimani, the only website that's not Chulimani pod.

It's really easy to get and find the Yeti.com slash Chulimini. Go there, get some stuff or be square or don't. You're not square. You're cool because you listen to the Chulminati. Back to you. in the studio, Mathis. You ready to talk about some murders? See, I knew we were going there.

I saw on the schedule what it said. Then some time. I've been right. I've been true crime itching. I'm ready for murder. Let's go. I just want to remind you that 21 people were killed in the Boston molasses. But was it personal?

That's what we're here. Yeah. We're another 21 people. We're another 21 people killed in the Salem, which trials and there's what's that personal that are victims here too this personal that felt well okay Salem which trials depended could have been personal for some for sure a little personal yeah we're going back to the world of of true crime today gentlemen I'm very excited to go back we're going to be doing part one of the next of a two-parter today on the Boston strangler

or stranglers as we'll learn through this episode this is going to be a bit different too than we the way I usually do true crime because of the way I think the cops uniquely fucked up this whole thing right away, right basically from the outset as we do. So it's a story that's infuriating but necessary. And a shout out to the main source of today's two-parter, which is Suzanne Kelly's The Boston Stranglers, written in 1966 and still probably the best book with the, you know, genuine boots on the ground, journalism research to figure out the truth underneath what happened here in the 60s. So that books, that books called the Boston Stranglers.

Yeah, the Boston Stranglers. Yes. And it's from the 60s. It's from 66. That's crazy because until you just said that, I did not know that there was like a plural situation going on. I've only ever heard the term the Boston Strangler. Yeah.

Yeah. And you might even know the movie. There's a movie that was made in the 80s, late 60s. I remember this movie. Tony, Tony Curtis. Is that a person? That is. That's a person.

Yeah, then Tim. He's the one that's in that movie, if I'm remembering correctly. Some like it hot. So, yeah, so I'm like,

is that he in that movie? Yep. Okay, cool. I'm amazed you even knew that was a movie, to be honest. I knew that.

I thought I was like in that right past you. I've heard some like it hot. So many times is like a phrase. So like I figured it was a movie title since you're using it as a reference in this. I thought maybe it was because the ending of that movie has been put on the internet. often lately. I don't know how it ends. I don't even know what the story is in that movie. Well, then go watch it. It's classic. So these two guys are musicians and they are on the run from the mob and they dress like ladies. Yeah. Oh, okay. And Marilyn Monroe is in the movie also. So there's

a real lady in there that they become friends with. And there's a very classic ending about, I would say about acceptance. Yeah, you know, Jack Lemon, it's Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis, right? Am I crazy? No, it is. I'm sure it is. Fuck it. I was sticking with my guns. I was in this movie. I was in this movie. I played the Jack Lemon. You were Jack Lemon.

I was, I did it on stage in, in my, uh, in my, uh, career. There's video.

It's out there. It's out there. The truth is out there. Well, for a year and a half, starting in the summer of 1962, somebody walked into apartments all over Boston, strangled the women who live there and walked back out,

uncought. Uh, for a while, the paper said 13, of them all killed in the one place that they felt they were supposed to be safe in their place of residence usually tied up with their own stockings knotted off with a little bow underneath the chin kind of like presented as though somebody like left a present in a weird sick way with the way that the the murder weapon was was left and then right in we're just we're just we're oh we are like

you have to like the best way to tell the story unlike other ones I think is to dive right in because it's in the way that this all goes down that I find the narrative thread most interesting. You sure? I got this like machine that shows you these like time slices. You want to use that? I think we should put that back into Chulamati HQ. Oh yeah. I'll send it there.

Yeah, I'll send it up to the garage. I'm surprised it's still in your apartment actually. It's really big. I can't get it out the door. I built it and now it can't get out the door. Oh, you have to take it back apart again. Let me guess.

You have to pay for shipping too. Yeah, I have to pay shipping. And it's it's like hazardous materials disposal too. So it's like. It's the whole thing. I don't know why we work for these people. In 1965, a few years later, a man in a hospital for the criminally insane basically confessed to every single one of the murders. And the most famous murder case in the history of New England just got stamped closed and filed away.

And like you said earlier, Alex, that's the version you know, the one that Tony Curtis movie that we mentioned and a lot of like what these books written about this are point to. The cops who actually worked these murders thought that version was garbage as well. The detectives who spent four years of their lives on this said the same thing until the day they died. That guy who claimed he did it didn't do it. He was never even close to the person who did it. And more than a year before he confessed to anything, the attorney general's own task force, the people running the whole investigation, quietly wrote down a conclusion that they were never going to say in public that there was no single Boston strangler that some of these were copycats that the bodies

didn't match the methods didn't match the victims didn't match and the boogeyman terrorizing the target in large part was something that the newspapers built up and everybody kind of agreed to believe for the sake i think of their own sanity i blame the zodiac sure around that time right when was the Sodiac active. I think 60s, right? To, yes. This is 62. This is 62 when this is happening.

So tonight. 68 actually. I'm sorry. Okay. So afterward. But we're just doing part one tonight. We're just going to, what we're going to cover today is the year and a half of kind of terror of these

killings, the way it actually went down before anybody started to like hang their own name on this thing. And we're going to go through the murders while the city is kind of losing its mind trying to figure out what's going on. So let's jump in with Back Bay in Boston. Have you guys been to the Back Bay? Yeah, you had to have been, right? Is that big close to the Convention Center?

Like, if you've been near the Convention Center, you might near Be Beck Bay. My belief is that one time I went to a pizza restaurant in the Back Bay for dinner and it was like an Uber ride from where our hotel was near the Convention Center. It is what I'm nearish, but not the actual Convention Center area. I believe maybe you were. We probably maybe at least one of you was with me. We were with some Swedish friends of ours.

Yes, I was definitely there for that. But the back bay is south of the Charles River. Yeah. But close to convention center, but not really. It's not the waterfront, but it's like. It's a hop and a skip. Yeah. It's around there.

Yeah. Well, put your mind mentally there because we're going there, but it's actually going to be June 14th, 1962, a Thursday evening. A woman by the name of Anna Slessers is a 56 years old. And she's a Latvian immigrant, a seamstress and a quiet woman who lives by herself in apartment 3F at 77 Gainesborough Street. And on this night, she has somewhere she has to be. Her son, Euris, is coming to walk her to a memorial service for the people murdered

when the Soviets rolled into Latvia during the war. So that's where she is going to be going on this particular night. She already knows, like, already knows. tragedy in a way so many of us already won't. I can't even imagine being a lot like what that must have been like when the Soviets just rolled into Lavia. She lived that. Euris shows up a little before 7 o'clock and he knocks on her door to no answer.

No footsteps, no sounds he could see her figures, he said. Usually she runs down the stairs and waits in the lobby, but she didn't show up. So he goes back up, knocks again, still nothing. And that's when he starts to say he gets a little bit worried because his mother, as far as he remembers never came down like for her mail that day either. And Anna Slessers is for what he said, not the kind of woman who forgets to get her mail. Like he saw in the lobby,

her mail was still in the box. And that was net that never happened. By quarter to eight, he's scared enough to force his way into his mother's own apartment. And what he finds is horrifying. She's lying in the hallway between the bathroom in the kitchen. The blue house coat she has had on has been torn wide open, leaving her body exposed, one leg out straight, and the other bent up almost 45 degrees.

The cord from the same housecoat is pulled tight around her throat and tied off underneath her chin in a bow. There is blood in her right ear with a deep gaping split in the back of her skull, and her neck is scratched and bruised. She's been sexually assaulted, almost certainly with an object. The apartment has been gone through, drawers and belongings disturbed, though apart from a little blood on the kitchen floor and a tipped over waistbasket, There's barely any sign of a struggle whatsoever. And for reasons, nobody has ever explained in 60 years. Somebody pulled a chair into the front hallway and set it down right inside the door,

like just a chair sitting there facing in. Now, Jueres standing in that apartment looks at his strangled half naked like dead mother and thinks to himself and tells the police he thinks she killed herself. He says suicide. That's the first theory that just goes. right on the board. And I kind of like try to put yourself in his shoes, right? You walk in,

your brain's not taking in the fine details. Maybe somebody came in and strangled her to death is probably not where his head is at. Yeah. Brain is doing survival mode type thing. Probably just to package this thing in a way that makes sense. The fine details that we just learned about, he's probably not taking in the way we are at this moment.

And it's not hard to figure out why he would land on suicide here. But there were a lot of other evidence that we'd learn that would point to not suicide. The sexual assault, crack skull, blood, ransacked apartment, mystery chair, somebody arranged near the door. You'd have to explain away how a 56-year-old woman strangles herself with a bathrobe cord and then tied the left over into a tidy decorative bow under her chin, which if you've ever tried to tie a bow on your own chin, if you're like me, is very difficult. am I doing it while doing it while you're dead. And then there's another detail that should have ended the suicide talk on the spot because it tells you like what kind of person did this.

Because according to the papers at the time, whoever killed Anna Slessers didn't reach for the bathrobe cord first. He first tried to strangle her with a man's leather belt, but the belt broke. Quote, and this is like from the globe at the time, police said he would have, police said he would have to be a man of unnaturally. strength to do that.

Like a man strong enough to snap a leather belt while strangling somebody is a big guy. Somebody who would have to lie. You're not doing that to yourself, essentially. Like, it wasn't going to be this woman. So naturally, the early read is probably, it shouldn't be she probably did it to herself. And the next morning, the Boston traveler runs the story under the headline, mom found strangled in Back Bay. And over at the globe, they describe Anna Slessers, who was a widow, as quote, an attractive

divorcee, which she was not, like, I don't understand why they ran that. It's so fucking weird. I mean, I understand exactly why they ran it. It's just, it's just Narbar. It's just, it's just a little bit extremely over the line. It's sensationalist journalism. You know, why are we letting any facts slow us down here? We're on murder number one, and the press already has the wrong idea about all of this

shit. Man, we're usually, we have, you, I usually have to wait till episode. two till we get to the murders. I'm getting like whiplash from this. Yeah, we're going in immediately. Because right away, like the press immediately fuck it up. It's all fucked up right from the start. And this is the crux of the Boston Strangler case.

Like it doesn't get more competent from here on now. This first murder, that's as competent as this entire fucking thing gets. Enjoy it. There is one detail in the scene that is. By the way, that's a crazy thing to say. This murder is as competent as it gets. What a phrase. Like, that's it.

So wait. Is it like, is it like the story of the dumb, like the like unlucky police investigation? Or is this like, oh, par for the course for the Boston PD in, in the 60s?

It's exceptionally bad. Okay. It's exceptionally bad. But, and also like, we'll get into it. We'll get into it. Like,

it's hard. It's, that's exceptionally poorly handled. Again, the other thing, though, that I think people hang on to as to why this was a suicide and another point in the crime scene was like, there was very little of like signs of struggle. Again, there was no sign of forced entry. Like the block, the lock wasn't broken, the window wasn't forced open or any of that stuff, which means she probably walked to her door, looked through it and like let whoever it was.

Is it? Maybe she didn't even look through. Maybe she knew her son was coming. And this person just got lucky or whatever and just. figured it was him. And then she opened the door, maybe unlocked the door, turned her back on the door so her son could walk in. And then like the guy stepped in immediately like started strangling her.

But that kind of seems to be what happens though again and again and again in every one of these cases. So after Anna Slessers, it picks up in speed. And every single one is kind of just worse than the last. And then we move to slightly later on in June, June 30th, just over two weeks since the last one. Nina Nichols, 68 years old, a retired physiotherapist found on her bedroom floor in her apartment over on Commonwealth Avenue in Brighton. She has two nylon stockings nodded around her neck and yank tight. Her pink housecoat was open. Her bra dragged above her breasts. Her

slip shoved to her waist. She's been violated with a wine bottle. And on her feet, untouched, This small, ordinary human thing, the killer left exactly as it was. A pair of blue tennis shoes. One of the Boston detectives who works a scene quietly bags up three things and carries them back to headquarters. He grabs an empty wine bottle, a black plastic purse, and a little cardboard box. And the wine bottle is of the three, the one that you want to keep you in your mind for a second, because I want you to let it go.

They don't do anything with it. Just kidding. They get all this stuff and they do nothing with this. The police take the evidence and do nothing with it. Literally just sits in evidence. They don't do anything with it. That's what they all. Is that just because there's like a backup?

Or we just don't know why they just were just sleeping off the job on this one? Because the thing you learn a lot of it's like the cops don't, it's work. It's work. It's a lot of work. And they don't want a lot of work. They don't want to do a lot of work. Maybe they were backed up. Maybe they weren't.

That's no excuse. Your job. is to take care of this shit. A reminder, every time we're here, every time. It's like, the killer killed so many people, and the police let him do it. And then cut to the police being like, we had no way of finding this person. He had chicken. He seemed so trustworthy.

We just simply, there was no signs. And then this is how quickly this shit picks up for this case, too. That same day, same day, 15 miles north up in Lynn, A 65 year old retired practical nurse named Helen Blake, two stockings knitted at the nape of her neck and a bra tied over the top of them, nodded under her chin. Her killer left her face down on her own bed in a ransacked apartment and she lies there undiscovered until her housekeeper lets herself in two days later. The autopsy notes she'd last been seen alive on the 29th. So by the time anybody finds Helen Blake, the man who did it, has had the better part of three days. days to just go somewhere else.

And again, this is the early 60s. It is much easier to just vanish than it is today. I forget what case it was. I forget what case it was that we were talking about in the 60s. Maybe it was so yet. I can't remember, but it was like, yeah, that's like the only thing that's different about like the 60s and Cowboy Times is like airplanes and clothes. Right.

Like it's crazy. There were people alive in the 60s who knew what Cowboy Times looked like. Yeah. It's crazy, man. It's, it is very crazy to think about. They don't have the computers that people that we imagine that society that looks like that was based on. It's crazy. I can't imagine what that was.

Like, we live, we're living through a weird era of like technological, like expansion in a crazy way. But a lot of, I feel like our physical surroundings haven't changed so much in like our life where like somebody who was born in the 1800s probably watched a trans. transforming world in real time. Dude, every single, everything. Like, yeah, it's nuts. I like, I, I forget what movie it is. Maybe it's, it follows. There's like, this sort of, there's just like nebulous sense of time period.

And it's only achieved by changing like a few little things. Or look at that Batman show. It's like, is it the 30s or is it the 90s? Oh, the Mane series? Yeah. Yeah, there's not that much that you have to change to make it different. Remember that weird? I think it's in it.

She has like a shell phone. I don't know if you guys remember that. It's just like some weird thing that doesn't exist that you're like, I don't even know when this is set now. Yeah, no, I know what you're talking about, though. With this third death with Helen Blake's death, though, this is the moment the Boston Police Department was like, okay, we can't just ignore this.

So like, this is not three coincidences. Someone is out there actively doing this. And the department has a brand new commissioner at this time. a guy named Edmund McNamara, who basically empties the building at the problem. We're like, all right, we're going to put every man we have at this. The papers start calling the guy the mad strangler, and they find the nickname that, in that, rather, they find the nickname that really sticks. They also have a, they also call him 56, 68, 65.

It's like his code they use. it's we there's basically like the ages that he killed they're using as like the code of the killer that they're they're labeling him as like internally that makes a 56 years old 68 years old 65 years old so that's where the three numbers come from that they label him with oh okay it's just it's just so many syllables for like a snappy way to reference no the mad strangler sticks so much easier so like you know they they get this the the papers land on it they and The paper land on a name the mother killer because the three victims were mothers in their elderly, like elderly mothers as they were coming into the 60s or so. That's like a fucked up move for the.

Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I get it. It's, it's absolutely spooky. It's absolutely ghastly. Then we move to July 11th. A chamber maid named Eva Day lets herself in a room seven on the second floor of the hotel Roosevelt.

Just like she did every day. Yeah. Yeah, just like she did. Exactly, just like she did every day. That's out in Lower Washington Street and comes back out the room screaming. On the bed is the body of a 60-year-old woman naked and strangled. And the story kind of goes sideways immediately because she checked into that hotel the night before with a man. The two of them.

The 60-year-old woman? Yes. The two of them signed the register as Mr. and Mrs. Byron Spinney. a fake name over a fake address and by morning the man is gone, never seen again. And so like this and this is not and she's not like the tidy grandma victim the other three were. She sticks out a little bit more so than the other three previous victims. It takes the city four tries just to figure out her name.

One person ends up calling her Ethel Johnson. another person swears she's Anne Cunningham who went by Annie Oakley. To somebody else, she's Winnie Hughes. And to a fourth person, she's just Toby. So four different people claim to know this person. One person said, that's Toby? One person's like, no, I know that. I know her.

That's Toby. Stop. First name, one name, Toby. Just literally, that is all the only name I got out of it. So, okay. Four different people claim this woman is four different people. So I was aghast at this at first, like the idea of like, sort of like not being able to see that this is like a different modus operandi than the previous kills. Right?

But then I'm thinking about it and I'm like, okay, what was like the media literacy of like the methodology of murderers at this time? like because there wasn't like two or three generations of like wine moms watching true crime television yet yeah and stuff like that and then on the cops end what was the show that had the the coed killer in there uh mind mind mind oh yeah oh mine hunter mine mine hunter yes i want to keep saying mind freaking what what year is that it's like 61 six so that it's the serial killer decade dude it's in the 60s so like there actually isn't the notion of like modus operandi and stuff as like popular culture yet right like the cops aren't thinking about this stuff like these these ways of investigating crimes are like emerging now yeah the the whole language of serial killing is emerging in this era this is all all new so maybe it's just like it's mindset so maybe it's just like uneducated police work. You know, I don't know.

Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Part of it may very well be. But there's so much where they purposely, like, you're like, well, they didn't, this is them fucking up as we'll see as we continue. But I'm already mad about the fucking evidence not being used for anything. That's not excusable.

Yeah. Utterly unexpeasable. Just real quick. Most of the women who have been killed are older and have no immediate family. No, the first three had immediate family. I mean, like living on this is what I'm saying. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No one with with them. They were alone. Gotcha. So like, all right. So after four people claimed to know who this woman was, finally her nephew, a man named a Daniel O'Leary identifies her for real this time. And her name is none of the above. And wasn't to be. It wasn't Toby.

It wasn't crazy. That's crazy. Her name was Margaret Davis. She's 60. She's an alcoholic who'd been in. in and out of city hospital. And until the start of that June, she'd been working as a domestic at a place called the House of the Good Shepherd. And she wasn't... A domestic? Yeah, like she helped around that,

like helped around, I think there's like a helping hand in the area. Like an opera? Yeah, I think that's like a way to look at it. Yeah, it's a cleaning, cooking,

you know, just like taking care of the general household. Well, before you said that, I thought you were going to say this was like a murdered sex worker. Sure, absolutely gives that.

It gives that right away. But no, she was just a domestic work at a place called the House of the Good Shepherd. And unlike the others, it wasn't with her own stockings that she was strangled. She was choked to death by hand. And there was a man who was with her there the night before. With her that checked in. Yep, exactly. Margaret Davis, again, we're going to kind of like come back to because the official investigation is going to quietly conclude that she was never actually a strangler victim at all.

they're going to decide she died the way a lot of people in a sex life die the sex worker life die in a fight with the man she walked in with a man who like may have just been a random person she met while she was drunk because again she was an alcoholic who went and melted back into society never to be found again just a one off occurrence of this other guy but he wasn't the same guy that was killing the other three people but as far as the papers and the media was concerned she's victim number four and she gets thrown in with the other for three as far as the public consciousness is aware yeah I mean damn then a little over a month later August 19th Ida Urga 75 at the bottom of Beacon Hill is the next victim um her killer strangled her beat her badly enough to leave a trail of blood from the bedroom where he attacked her then dragged her body out into the living room and then arranged it he propped her legs up on two separate chairs, spread four or five feet apart. He shoved a standard bed pillow up her up under her body to raise it up.

And he aimed her at the door so that the very first thing anyone walking in would see would be her exposed to his body pointing straight at them. Like this person set it up with horrifying and ruining another person's life in mind. Because you see that. I don't care who you are. That's going to fuck with you for the rest of your life. The person who walked in was her own younger brother, Harry Halpern. The Globe puts her on the front page the next morning and calls her the Strangler's fifth victim.

Whoever did this wanted it found, obviously, and wanted to found exactly the way it was staged. This is a lot of murders for 30 minutes in. I, yeah. How is the great one of these? Timeline wise? Month or weeks, usually. So from the last one to this one, a month and six days. So this is feeling like a fervor to the people.

It is feeling like a fervor to Boston. It is absolutely dominating the headlines because right when you probably starts to taper off, another one happens. Like 30 days of news and then like this one happens and then, but this one didn't even have a month between. This one had four, two days between from August 19th. We go to August 21st and then a woman named Jane Sullivan, who was 67, a nurse's aide who just moved over to Dorchester seven weeks prior and she lies there for 10 days before anyone finds her because she'd gone quiet and her sister got worried and finally sent her son, Jane's nephew, to go check the apartment.

And when he does, he finds his aunt on her knees in the bathtub, head down under the faucet, half submerged in six inches of water. She's positioned so that her kind of rear was in the air. Her body already badly decomposed because she was sitting in water. her for 10 days. And there's a corn broom in the apartment with her blood dried on the handle. There's a partial fingerprint at the scene. The one piece of physical evidence in the whole summer that could actually help the

police point towards somebody of human being that is actively doing this shit. By the way, for the record, really quickly, a corn broom literally is when you think of a broom in your head, that's what it is. It's the one that has like the symbol of a blue one. You'll know it in your mind's eye immediately. Unfortunately, while they got this fingerprint, not a single soul matched it. They had nobody on record. And much like every other one, there was no forced entry.

There never is in any of these. So count the summer with me here. One season, six women. That's a lot in three months, summer. And not one broken lock in any of them. Every one of these women either open their door or the door is already unlocked, size ups, the man in the hallways usually somewhere, and then let him in. And then in the fall, the pattern does something that in my mind should have blown up the whole idea

of a single killer doing this whole thing in 1962. October 13th now, we move a couple months ahead. we're in the early morning and a woman named Violet Pirillo glances out her apartment window at the back lot behind a building on Tremont Street and sees what she's pretty sure is a body lying out in the yard. She flags down a man who works in the building and he goes and looks and yes, it turns out she's right. There is a dead woman. The dead woman that's lying there is a woman by the the name of modest Freeman. She's 37 years old.

And she breaks the mold in every direction compared to the previous victims. For one, she's not elderly. She's also the first black victim. And she's not strangled in a tidy apartment with a bow under her chin. She's beaten to death out in the open in a vacant lot. Her face beaten into a pulp and her skull caved in. A wooden stick was driven into her body. And her blood alcohol was so high that it was like,

the charts a thing the medical examiner found in none of the other victims like this nothing about this victim looks like the careful like indoor staging of the previous summer it's all completely different than every other murder and like margaret davis what yeah the hotel one right yeah was she bow no no bow she would beat into death beat in the death until our skull caved in she wasn't strangled the one in the hotel oh strangled with their hands they didn't No bow. But she was strangled. That one also felt other ones.

Yeah, that one also felt quite. The cops quietly told themselves that wasn't part of it. But the public got the media version of it all. And this person's super, are completely, completely different motive than all the others. Like again, just kind of no, no strangling at all.

But it doesn't really matter. Like Margaret Davis, the task force is eventually going to do the same thing and scrub her off of their personal list of victims of the strangler that they're looking. for. They'll say it's a beating, not the strangler internally. So we're barely halfway through and the murders already don't match each other. The papers have decided this is one one monster. The body's coming into the morgue are telling a different story. There's different people doing this.

Nobody's listening to the bodies yet because this entire city is at this point lost its mind, convinced there's a single demon out there running around killing women. The killer is complete to the people. The killer is completely. completely invisible. There's no description of him out there right now for the simple reason that the only people who ever got to look at this guy are dead. He doesn't break in. He gets invited in or walks in. He picks women who are always alone in their own homes and he turns the safest place they have into the last place that they'll ever be. And every few weeks, another one turns up posed and strangled and the police have nothing on this at all. So how do you think the city in the 60s where this is Donner, dominating the headlines are feeling right now. Like it's not good. Like the temperature in Boston right now is chaos. There's a lot of internal panicking.

Jesse, you look confused. I'm literally just trying. I'm like trying to supplement my knowledge of all of this. I'm like hardcore Googling because it's fascinating. But also like Alex was saying, it continues the frustration of, I mean, I guess we're kind of like Monday morning

quarterbacking this. We're, you know, we have hindsight on our side. Yeah, and we have somebody who did like, again, Suzanne and who wrote the main source I'm using here, did all the incredible work to put all this together. I don't want to feel like I'm pooing the police. You know what I mean? Like, but at the same time,

it definitely seems like they really keep screwing up constantly. There are good cops out there. You know, but that's the thing is like you don't hear the good news. You always hear the bad news, but the bad news for the police. I mean, like a good cop would have caught the guy first time and it wouldn't be about the Boston Strangler, you know what I mean? But this is like, it just keeps falling back on that error after error after error after error equals serial killer.

Not it's, yeah, don't you feel like, well, it's like a lot of things. Don't you feel like today like though there's like killers out there? Like aren't you like? Oh, oh, I am literally right now going through Frank Flagluzzi's book. about there is currently some 800 unsolved like a ludicrous amount of unsolved murders along one specific corridor of highway that they think truckers are doing yeah yes and they're like truckers can keep moving so like I want to do that episode there's so many crazy it's it's insane well when you look when you look into serial killers a lot of the reason

they get caught is because they stay within the comforts of their playground so to speak they stay where they know. Yes. If they, the hardest one is like Israel Keys is one we may cover one day. But the reason he was so hard to catch as a serial killer is because he moved through the countries. He had kill packages hidden in random areas across states that had the tools for him to go

and murder if he got the urge. And it's so hard to catch him because he wasn't staying in one area. And just like, just like the whole thing moving through the quarter, if it's truckers, they're always in the move. How the fuck do you ever pin anybody down? Yes.

Yeah. I mean, that's kind of what it is. It's wild. Yeah. So the, The city, Boston at this point, it's kind of like panicking. And she goes on to talk about in the book, like the city starts to kind of arm itself here.

They're like people start adding more locks to their doors. Locksmith themselves are getting booked solid. Like imagine being a locksmith and like being booked. I don't know. It's silly to me. But like maybe it's not as silly as I think. But I think it feels like the first time that there were ever murderers. Like I feel like it feels like murderers are suddenly among you.

You know what I mean? Or at least the way you. Yeah, it's crazy. Like, because you never, there's never been a sensation like this probably in your memory. Like, there's no, like, uh, your parents never had anything like this to help you understand it. Like, it probably just felt like every, around every corner was a fucking guy that was literally going to strangle you. Yeah. So while locksmiths are booked solid to your point, there's also the other point that I found fascinating is that animal rescue pounds were being cleaned out of their dogs in minutes every time they opened.

like people wanted a dog a guard dog something yes they were just wanted something something in their house like a dog to protect them so the rescue dogs were getting like cleaned out of like rescue pounds around the city i will say like i will say like as as you know my dog barks quite a lot listener but i do feel safe when i go to sleep because i know that that motherfucker would be yelling his fucking face same somebody same with my dumb ass little dogs i'm like i know they you wouldn't be able to defend me for worth of shit but you'll wake me up before me the fuck up Yeah, I'll be facing my fate alive and awake. Yeah, exactly.

Elderly women living alone arranged for their kids to do like, basically they set of phone call schedules three times a day, every day, lots and lots of check-ins, basically. And if there was ever a missed call, that was like an alarm for someone to go check and make sure they were good. The commissioner himself, McNamara, goes into the papers with a list of safety tips for women living by themselves. And they are kind of the most saddest, like most reasonable advice

you'll ever read basically because it's just like, hey, lock every door, put a safety lock on if you can, check that all the windows are latched, make the janitor confirm the building's front door, secure. Another big one basically is to let no one into your apartment until you are positive

of who they are. I think this was a time where there was a little bit more a lax of concern of like safety. You know your neighbors, you know people, leaving your door unlocked. Wasn't as uncommon as it is day.

That's like the ultimate metaphor of the Manson murders, which were like years after this where it was like it was the moment when America stopped leaving their door unlocked. But it's also, we've established that there's some of these killings have no direct connection. Like it's media manufactured as well. Oh, absolutely. The media is, you can point the media is the whole reason they're all freaking out like this. And there's a, there's a woman in Kelly's book, a Cape Cod woman. who remembers that her grandmother every night before bed used to go around the house and hide all

of her stockings like hide them so that she maybe like wouldn't get strangled with them because that was like to everyone that was a known murder weapon she was probably thinking about it a lot and didn't want it to happen you know what I mean yeah like yeah maybe like exactly thinking that maybe if they hid them and they did break in and find no stockings they wouldn't go through with it or something yeah you know what I mean or she's just picturing it a lot so she thinks maybe if I hide them then at least I won't that won't happen another another Another woman that she's talked about or two in the book, she says that the person kind of put it into words as it was as if Jack the Ripper had come back from the dead to walk the streets of Boston. That's what it felt like during that time.

Right. And that's like a really cool, like, I appreciate her putting it that way because it really does kind of put you into the mindset. I was going to say it does feel like that. A little Ripper issue. Everybody just starts fingering each other like for Jack the Ripper. You know what I mean? Like everybody's like, well, this guy scares the shit out of me. So he's Jack the Ripper.

And this guy, this guy looked at me like this guy tried to raise my rent. So he's Jack the Ripper. This guy. Yeah. This guy walked on the same street as me for three blocks. And now he's Jack the Ripper. Like, you know, he's everywhere. Another thing I kind of want to point to, too, to give like a taste of what this is like.

The terror at this time, it wasn't evenly spread across Boston. And like Kelly is very particular about this. She says, like, in the working class neighborhoods, In the immigrant and ethnic parts of the towns, places like East Cambridge, people were genuinely, like, terrified. Priests were warning women from the pulpit, like, to lock their doors. But three miles away, up in the money areas and Harvard Square and all those leafy parts of Cambridge and Beacon Hill where the professors and all the old money families lived, there was barely a panic there. Nobody seemed to care. Because as always, they're separated entirely.

Like, it's that separation of class playing out in real time. Most of the reason serial killers get away is because they target what we call lesser dead. In this way, it's a little bit different than the usual what is considered lesser dead because they're like grandmas and not sex workers. But still, it's like a part of the community that's not as- Citizens. Yes. I mean, if you're like- I think you're right.

If you're not, yeah, if you're not going to like, you know, include like life choices, It's like, you know, women talk about disappearing once they turn 40, like in the entertainment industry. People disappear altogether once they turn 65. They just go into a room in America. It distresses people, I think, from other countries to see how we treat old people here sometimes because our lives are so overwhelmingly, devastatingly hard all the time because we're stupid and don't understand we're under the boot of capitalism that we just can't

be bothered with an old person's problems. You know what I mean? Yeah. So we just, we just toss them out. We just, we don't, we, if they got all murdered, we wouldn't even notice. Yeah. Nobody sees them in their day to day life. Yeah, you're completely correct.

And kind of a good sum up of how the rich people felt. There was a bartender at the Casablanca, which was a very fashionable spot in Harvard Square, summed up a, the rich person's attitude at this time in one sentence saying, quote, people were too busy having fun to be scared. So they just didn't care. They just didn't register for them at all. We don't talk a little bit. Now, moving from that, we're going to move to the cops a little bit because while the city was out there buying guard dogs and stuff, the police department was taking out behind the fucking woodshed.

By early 1963, Commissioner McNamara is standing in an absolute nightmare. He's got somewhere between six and nine unsolved murders in his city in a matter of months, depending on how you're counting that week, obviously, and what they just consider part of the, the stranglers murders and what's not. None of the cases are moving forward in any way. So the politicians start coming for him. A city counselor named William Foley stands up and says more or less, if this crime wave keeps up, the mayor will fire McNamara as fast as he'd fired anybody. Another counselor, a guy named McDunna, who used to be a cop himself, piles on in the moment,

going straight at McNamara. McNamara's plan to shrink the department. Of course, this is another opportunity to try and. shove money and expand the police state, and a state legislator named Hurley Dyer Chase, the one who represents the Back Bay area where Anne or Slessers and Sophie Clark and

Patricia Bissette, all other victims, all died, throws an actual kind of grenade onto the floor of the state house and he demands that the Boston Police Department's detectives be investigated themselves. He wants somebody to investigate the investigation. Okay.

Isn't that kind of like implied? by like being police officers that they're held to some sort of law like like like is don't we have like a like a service within the cops that like yeah i don't know as needed yeah but at the same time like these guys are jumping in as well it's been during like they're jumping in for a lot of political reasons oh like they're not going in for like the actual reasons uh the other thing is like macnamera wasn't like i said he he's not some green dude who came up through the ranks by the way like that he was an ex-fbi agent, 16 years at the Bureau, 14 of them in Boston.

The commissioner was not some newbies like scrub here. He'd been brought into the, to run the Boston Police Department in April of 1962 just two months before Anner Slessers died for one specific reason. He was brought in to clean up the corruption. That's why he was at this Boston Department, and he was barely there two months before this show. went down. There had been a genuinely humiliating CBS documentary that put Boston cops on national television taking cash from bookies. It blew his predecessor out of the job. So there is some

precedent for the Boston Police Department not being super, super legit all the time. Oh yeah, 100%. This is like the worst time for any of this to be going down. McNamara basically tries to ride into town like the new sheriff with a mandate to scrub the place and just trim the fat off of the department. And just two months in, the body start piling up. He's barely there. And the very thing he was hired to do, like make the department leaner clean out the corruption becomes a thing now. He's getting publicly crucified for the second there aren't enough warm bodies to chase like this phantom killer. This guy honestly got fucked and it be like I feel for this guy.

And it gets kind of worse than that because the FBI and the Boston PD also genuinely hated each other. Hated each other like a real blood feud going back to the Brinks robbery in 1950 when the two departments raced each other to crack the case and the case and came out the other side loathing one another. Like over a decade of literal blood feud is playing out with McNamara. So weird. Here, isn't it? It's so stupid. You're all supposed to be working together for the same thing. It's like an ongoing secret thing in this like Boston month that like the press is like

whipping people into a frenzy over some sort of thing or like actually legitimately a family feud is secretly behind everything. Those are like the two. Those are like the two. It's always some. Yeah. Dude. So now, but think about it.

Now you got McNamara who's an ex-FBI guy. working with the FBI during the brink robbery situations, now coming over from being in the FBI to run the department that hates each other. Like you are an enemy territory fucking instantly. So this is just an opportunity for them to jump on. His two best homicide men at the time, a guy named John Donovan and Edward Sherry are good. Like genuinely good cops.

And I do want to make sure that is put out there. Donovan would later say he lived with this thing day and night for four years. The failure to catch this guy is not laziness on these guys' parts. There's just at this point, nothing to grab onto. There's no physical evidence. The fingerprints turned out nothing. There's nothing there for the whole bottle. A few other things.

Yeah, which went to which went disappeared into evidence some fucking somewhere. And McNamara puts it as bluntly as he got like a cop. He just says in a premeditated murder, the killer doesn't intend to leave evidence and premeditated murders are very rarely solved. And at this time, it's true. That's the whole problem. That's the whole problem in just one sentence

for this guy to kind of fix in this moment. And in the middle of all that pressure, the press hands the cops two fake victories that make everything so much worse. First ones, a teenager. A 16, yeah, I know it makes no sense, but wait, it'll make sense. A 16-year-old girl in Roxbury

named Daniela Saunders, Donna to everyone, was just an honest to God, good kid, Glee Club, math club, junior achievement, active in her parish

youth group, kind of teenager that adults idolize in a lot of unhealthy ways. I guess you could put it. Oh, look at her. She's such a princess. Oh,

darling of the community. Well, unfortunately, she gets dragged into an alley near her house, choked and thrown down on the ice. And the record American,

which by now is decided every crime within fucking 50 miles of this Phantom Strangler is part of it. Instantly slaps Donna Saunders on the board as his latest victim. A cop like laxity, killer still lose the whole shit. Except she wasn't a strangler victim at all.

The police solve it pretty fast, actually. She was killed by a boy whose kiss she turned down. Because fucking men, dude. Nothing to do with any of the strangler shit. I know. The paper barely blinks at it because the, legend sells so much better than the truth ever will. So it just completely gets overlooked. And then there's the one that actually looked like it may have been a strangler case for about

24 hours at least. The entire country believed the Strangler, Boston Strangler actually had been caught. Belmont, Massachusetts, March 11th, 1963, a man named Israel Goldberg, lets himself into his home in the late afternoon and finds his 62-year-old wife, Bessie, dead on the living room floor strangled with one of her own stockings, clothing and disarray, you know, raped the whole thing that all the other victims went through. And the scene, and the scene has that same wrongness to it. Like most of the living room furniture has been dragged into the middle of the room. The vacuum cleaner is standing out in the center of the floor.

Knickknacks have been like lifted off the shelves and set out on the dining room table weirdly. Like somebody was either searching for something or just staging it, playing around with objects. And there's an obvious suspect ready to go for this one, too. An itinerant handyman, an ex-con named Roy Smith, who'd been hired to clean the Goldberg house that exact same day. Wanted posters go out by the thousand.

Two Cambridge officers run him down at his girlfriend's place near Central Square the next day. And that night, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, the two biggest news anchors in America at the time, go on national television and tell the country, the Boston Strangler has been captured and his name is Roy Smith, which gives relief, finally, because everybody now believes they got the guy. It just is like the narratives needed ending, basically. Yep.

But unfortunately, they did not get the guy because when the cops actually pull Roy Smith's record, they find he'd been locked up in prison from April clear through September of 1962, which means he physically could not have killed Anna Slessers or Nina Nichols or any of the other women who died that summer because he was in a cell. So he obviously isn't the strangler because he couldn't have killed anyone else. Roy Smith goes to trial and he gets convicted of murdering Bessie Goldberg and he gets life for that though. But he is not the Boston Strangler because he just simply could not be.

Roy Smith lived on North Hampton Street in Boston, the same street the modest Freeman lived on, few blocks down and she died the month after he got out though so but that's like he may have been two of the deaths but we don't know for sure if that earlier one was him that's a thread you could pull on for a whole other episode that's crazy so that and that's where we are at the state by 1963 of this whole mess already like so you see what i mean like the story isn't how messy this whole thing is i see why you started with the murders it's just crazy it's the whole thing is Yeah.

Yeah. The state, like, this is the state of the manhunt in 1963, still less than a year after this is all started. The commissioner is getting torn to pieces publicly by all these politicians. Like, it's all fucking falling apart. And into that vacuum, walked two new people to history books almost completely erased as well. This is one of my favorite parts of the story, but it's also one of the most maddening for me. Remember, these murders are spread across five separate police departments, Boston, Cambridge, Lynn, Lawrence, and Salem.

Departments that don't share files, don't share suspect lists, and in some cases, actively can't stand each other just like the FBI and the Boston PD. Bad blood, rivalries, case bullshit, all that stuff. The entire structure of law enforcement at this time is basically built to never see the pattern. Like, they're not built to talk to one another. They're all completely separate doing their own things. the people who finally connect the killings into one coherent picture,

who finally synthesized all the work the cops were sporadically doing on their own are two reporters at the record American. Their names were Gene Cole and Loretta McLaughlin. Two women in a 1960s newsroom run wall to wall by men at this point, just something to put in your mind, doing the honestly, maybe the single most important journalism of the entire case period. They write a four-part investigative series.

They lay the murders side by side. They reconstruct the crimes, scene by scene, room by room. They don't stop at the killer. They go after the cops, too. In a meeting with the Attorney General's own staff, they lay out the charges directly. That the Boston PD failed to share suspect names with the other departments, refused to even admit the murders were connected,

didn't bother to pull together the complete autopsy reports in victim photos, fed false information to the press, and wouldn't cooperate with the Suffolk County DA. And it's Cole and McLaughlin who hang their name on the killer that's going to outlive every single person in this story. Not the mad Strangler, not the Phantom Fiend that the media was running with all this time. It's their name they give the Boston Strangler.

And that's where the name the Boston Strangler comes from. And it sticks so hard, so fast that by the time anybody confesses, the name is already cemented into American folklore. If I was the mayor of Boston, I'd be so pissed. For, for number of reasons, I'm guessing, like some independent people having to do this, my Boston people won't do it, not doing it properly. Well, I just mean, I just mean like, oh, the name you went with was the Boston strangler. Like, damn, like you couldn't have called him like at least the back bay strangler or something like

that just anything besides like for all time associating our city with one of the most notorious serial killers of the 60s yeah yeah it does suck for the mayor um but in in a kind of unfortunate turn to like the same reporting by these two women uh that named him is the same thing three years later that actually helps convict an innocent man in all of this so like because like this is where and that point right there is where the entire two-parter like hinges on. Colin McLaughlin were good, almost too good. Their work was so detailed, it laid out the exact floor plans of the victim's apartments.

Like, I'm serious when I said it described step by step, which drawers the killers opened, what he moved, what he touched, where he left things. It told you that a coffee cup was sitting clean and set out on a table that he'd opened a foot locker where the bed linens were kept that in one apartment the tip of a broken knife blade was still wedged in a lock and on January 23rd the record published something it printed under that actual name in the newspaper for anyone in New England to read it it's called the strangle worksheet that is what all these details were labeled under in the news the strangle worksheet that was that's a rough one that's a bit it's a bit morbid it really is uh it was literally is it was

literally a grid. It was a chart under full face photographs of six of the dead women. Every victim laid out in a row. It gave her name, her age, the exact time she died, the time she was found, exactly how she was killed, whether she'd been sexually assaulted, where she was found after she was killed, where she was, like, what she was wearing, whether the apartment had been ransacked, her hobbies, her interests, where she worked, even the local hospitals she'd been connected to. Literally, this worksheet that they published in the newspaper had fucking everything. It printed an inventory, essentially, of every single one of these murders. And kind of a how-to guide in a weird way, which is why this leads to convicting an innocent

man and all this, it was everything a person would need to walk into an interrogation room and confess in convincing detail to a murder that he didn't commit. Like, that's where, like, this is all going to hinge because in part two, a man with a flawless photographic memory recites the chart back to investigators basically line for fucking line, including the handful of facts the newspaper got wrong in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

would call it a confession and close the case on 11 murders because of this. Like that's where this two-parter hinges. Ah, damn. Yeah, the newspaper, fuck did it. Like, there's so many areas where this goes wrong, but having, like, I can't imagine, like, printing the Strangle worksheet.

I don't understand the, the concept behind printing that out for the public to have. Probably, because people buy the newspaper. Yeah, probably the same reason why people post insane stuff now to get clicks. You take the chance. You're like, I got to have, we got to be first to, if we don't publish this, someone else will, that kind of stuff. And so, like, something to be clear, too. I didn't put in the script is like these are being leaked to.

Like all this stuff is being leaked to the press. Someone internally is taking the strangle chart and all the stuff and leaking it out there to the press. This also went when McNamara found out like pissed him off so bad. He was so fucking angry and disgusted that there was like leaks were happening all over the place because it made this so much fucking harder. The Suffol County Medical Examiner was holding what amounted to like unofficial press conferences. and handing reporters copies of the autopsy reports, which is fucking insane. Inside the Strangler Bureau itself,

once it existed, the confidential case books weren't kept under lock and key. They were left out spread across desks and tables. And on at least one occasion, a Boston homicide detective walked in to find a group of statehouse pages, Aaron Kids, passing the scene photographs around the office, and gawking at them for entertainment.

So there wasn't even an attempt at like keeping the shit secure in the fucking police department. It's, uh, they were feeling celebrity status. They were letting fame get to their heads. They felt like it was, they were special, I think, because they had something interesting happening that they were able to like, be the inside men on.

You know what I mean? Yeah. That's how it feels to me. So as we move forward and can, now you have a kind of better understanding. how chaotic it isn't behind the season publicly. The story starts to fall apart right as we begin to look at the winter season coming. This is all happening very, very quickly, too.

Like, it just starts and it's like full speed the whole time. After the summer cluster of older women, there's a moment of quiet stretch. And then in December of 1962, it starts again. But it's changed this time. And it actually keeps changing from this point on all the way through 1963 until the idea that one man did all this stops making any sense at all. December 5th, 1962, 315 Huntington Avenue in Boston, Sophie Clark is 20 years old, a student studying medical technology, engaged to a young man back home in New Jersey, and living with two roommates.

And so right away, she breaks the pattern in two main ways. One, she's 20, not 60s, 70s, you know, older, and she doesn't live alone. One of her roommates comes home, opens the door and runs. She's found on the living room floor, partly dressed, a stocking nodded around her neck under a half slip gagged. And she's gagged. She has, there's some bodily fluid stain on the rug. There's a cigarette butt floating in the toilet.

And the roommates did smoke Salem's. And it was a Salem cigarette. So it might be nothing, but it also might belong to the killer. And Sophie Clark, yeah, I know. There's a weird detail, though. Like, you know, it makes that piece of evidence, it's hard to know. And Sophie Clark is black. The man who spent the summer exclusively murdering elderly white women has supposedly now raped and murdered somebody that matches none of the pattern in any way to his other victims at all.

And there's another, among Sophie Clark's belongings, the police find a type, a typed scrap of amateur pornography, a few pages written from a, woman's point of view about a woman who gets seduced specifically because she's wearing silk stockings. We have no idea who wrote it and why it's even there or whether it even means anything at all, but an apartment where a young woman has just been strangled and there's like, it doesn't, it didn't seem to fit among her belongings, essentially. December 31st now, New Year's Eve, Patricia Bessette, 23, a secretary at her apartment on Park Drive. Her boss is supposed to pick her up on this night for work or for work.

Or rather, her boss is supposed to pick her up the next morning for work in the morning. But she doesn't answer the door. He calls and calls a few times and he finally gets worried enough to come back and climb through her living room window. What he finds is like, again, the opposite of everything that we understand the strangler to do. Her killer doesn't pose her. He doesn't degrade her. He tucks her into bed, sheets and blankets pulled up to her chest. the ligature

hidden underneath and one of the forensic men who sees her says she honestly looked like she was just asleep. Like there's like a gentleness to the way there was like a level of care

to the body that the other bodies did not receive. Still a victim obviously. The other sad thing is that the autopsy turns up something in the morning as well. Patricia Beset was one month

pregnant. Again, Three and a half weeks apart. Sophie Clark, Patricia Beset, totally different patterns, not only from the pattern of the strangler, but even from each other. Does that sound like right away to you, like the same man doing these murders, the same murderer?

No, like, it's clearly not. But with the information out there, you now know how you could mimic it. Exactly. Exactly correct. Yeah, at least superficially, yeah. It keeps going. March, 1963, up in Lawrence, Mary Brown, 68.

Beaten, stabbed, strangled, and raped with a knife or a fork driven into her chest up to the handle, and it's the beating that kills her, the autopsy finds. So different, the task force originally doesn't even count her from the other victims. Then, May 1963, and the pattern continues to break. Beverly Salmons, 26, a graduate student in Cambridge, a singer, a part-time counselor for people with mental illness, and a student at Boston University. And Beverly Samins was not strangled.

She was stabbed 17 times in and around the left breast area with four more cuts laid across her neck, like two on each side of the neck. There are ligatures around her throat, two stockings and a scarf, but underneath them, there is no strangulation marks at all. They were tied on for decoration, maybe after the kill was done to make it look like

it was the Boston Strangler. Like the murder reads to me that the person killed them snapped out of whatever it is. They were like a state they were in, realized what they'd done. And in an effort to try and make it look like the Boston Strangler, they then tied the stuff underneath the chin. But there was no strangulation that happened at all, no.

Mark's nothing. That didn't happen. Somebody just tried to make it look like the scene. That's fucking crazy. I mean, it really is. That's not. So it's just like you're like, you're basically just like making like a meme of it.

Yeah. Like, yeah, I guess. You're like trying to remind, you're trying to like remind the cops or remind. Yes. The,

the newspapers of the other thing. Yeah. That's the only thing in my mind that makes sense for why they would do it that way. Because like Jesse just said, there's a whole fucking textbook on how to be the Boston Strangler. Like you have the step by step. I had to do it. Then September,

in Salem, Evelyn Corbyn, who's a divorced woman who looked decades younger, according to the newspapers, looked decades younger than her age and was seeing a man 17 years younger than her. A neighbor lets herself in with a spare key and starts screaming. The neighbor's son, a man named Robert Manchester, goes inside and comes back out with his hands on his head saying, she's gone, she's gone, she's gone. He and Evelyn had been lovers, apparently. Her killer forced her to perform oral sex before her strangulation, different again from the pattern. November 23rd, 1963 in Lawrence, Joan Graff, 23, devout Lutheran and a Sunday school teacher.

Same thing, sexual assault strangled roughly 24 hours after President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. To give you an idea where we are. A fun fact. A fun fact. I know it's been said a million times since the 60s, but just to reiterate. be it lady or gent if you are if anyone threatens you in any way and they're like hey man the way you get out of this is like you suck my dick or whatever bite that shit off and then kick like literally they're all like the lesson is they're definitely going to kill you if they take you someplace

they're going to kill you if they're in your home they're going to kill it so just whale on those guys if you're going out take them out with you because oh my god the lesson here is is like you don't get to like there is no well if i do what this crazy person says i'll be fine like like that does not happen it just doesn't the other the other lesson i feel like we're we're kind of losing in the moment because we're doing it in this way is like they're also all sad pathetic fucking losers like the even the guys he's not the monster that the media is making him to be this genius or whatever evil guy who's getting like literally he's a fucking pathetic loser the ones the ones that seem to be connected are all older women

defenseless like there's yeah there's an MO here that's kind of sad exactly complete coward pathetic person of an individual um the reason that i bring up the uh kennedy assassination is because that day that means her murder ran on the back page of the newspaper back page man you like that's exactly correct yeah because i guess because the president got shot yeah because the president got killed so when they found her they her right hand was curled into like a fist probably tried to fight off the best she could her attacker um but set very similarly um They found her with three ligature marks. Each were tied with a different knot, a square knot, a granny knot, and a surgeon's not,

different knots completely like, again, does not fit the previous kills. So now put it all on the table the way detectives had to. The dead are 19 years old and they're 85 years old. They're white and they're black. They're Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. Some strangled by hand, some with ligatures, some stabbed, some beaten. Knops don't match. Staging doesn't match.

Posed one time, tucked into bed the next, dumped into a bath. left in a vacant lot. The sexual assaults don't match. Sometimes with an object, sometimes oral, sometimes none at all. A real serial killer, as we've covered time and again on the show, has a type, has repeats, because the ritual is the whole point for these people. Ted Bundy is ritualistic. Jack the Ripper, even though we don't even, like, there was some ritualistic aspects to it.

What's happened? Ed Kemper, ritualistic dedicated toward his mother. Like countless serial killers, there is reason and ritual. What's happening in Boston is the opposite of a type. They're different ages, races, methods, not. It's pure chaos of information that doesn't really connect with each other at this point. Killing women, they had their own private reasons to kill and letting the Boston Strangler take the weight is probably what's going on with a lot of these. All personal motives, not the same person.

The perfect serial killer to pin it on is the one who, like, is the one they put the instructions on how to be in the fucking newspaper. And I'm not the one, like, I'm obviously not the one that came up with this. The people came up with this and put it in the writing where the Attorney General's own task force, which will get exactly what they wrote. It's pretty fucked up.

Sure. Yeah. Now we're at 44A Charles Street in Boston on the edge of Beacon Hill, January 14th, I mean, January 4th, 1964. Mary Sullivan is 19 years old. Cape from Cape Cod, uh,

hyanus. And she has just moved into the city three days ago to start a new job. in a new life, sharing a little three-room apartment with two roommates, Pam and Pat, both teenagers themselves. Oh, that's crazy. Like, I can't. 19 years old, I was still living with my mom. I couldn't.

It's the world too scary. Mary's 20th birthday is the following week. The people who knew her say she was funny, warm, kind of girl, you didn't have to, she just didn't have anybody who didn't like her. She's like got this whole vibe that's like people described as just very easy going and easy to talk to. Her roommates come home from work that one evening. and they see Mary on the bed in the dark and figure she's taking a nap.

So they head into the kitchen to start dinner. About 15 minutes later, they go wake her up. We're going to keep this restrained because Mary Sullivan is family that is still fighting for her today. And her nephew turns out to be a central figure in part two as well. So we owe her that. But what you need to know is Mary Sullivan was violated, strangled, kind of similar stuff that was seen with the other stuff. And her body was staged with a cruel thing. that genuinely rattled

even veteran homicide cops who'd already been living inside this case for a year and a half. Men who thought they'd seen it all. This one really, really got to them. And her killer left one little touch, propped up against her foot. He left a greeting card

and it said, happy new year. Like this felt targeted. Yeah. Mary Sullivan. Yeah. This is like somebody who's like sophisticated. Yes.

And Mary Sullivan goes into the history book as the 13th and final victim of the Boston Strangler. But I want you to hold on to that specific thing about her too because it becomes the whole ballgame in part two, the fact that she is the last quote and quote killer of the Boston Strangler. Of all 13 murders, the task force singled hers out as the most elaborate, the most staged. And one line was it was the most theatrical. and they concluded that it had no probable connection to the murders that came prior to it. They thought her killer was working off of a script, like working off of what he'd read in the papers about the others.

And this is, again, all part of that stuff we talked about earlier. Because 50 years later, when DNA supposedly closes the entire case forever, the body that DNA points to is Mary Sullivan's. The one death in the original investigators believed was a copycat, hers. That's a part two problem. We'll leave that there. After Mary Sullivan, there is no more. No more bows, bodies, victims, there's no more cards. It seemed like the thing that terrorized an entire region for 18 months finally goes quiet.

But of course, nobody really knows that yet. And as far as Boston knows in January of 64, the monster is still out there. It just murdered a 19 year old in her bed and signed the card. Like, that's where we're at publicly. And Mary Sullivan's death is the one that breaks the dam, too. Two weeks later, the Attorney General of Massachusetts does something they've never done. He takes the whole investigation over himself. His name is Edward Brooke.

I know. It's like the whole, the Attorney General of the state takes it over. Edward Brooke. And the man, to give you an idea, he's a considered brilliant, a deck. World War II combat veteran and a lawyer with a thriving practice. He's also right at this moment, the most prominent black elected official in the entire United States. He's a Republican who got himself elected statewide in a state full of Democrats.

A man, people are openly whispering could be the country's first black governor, maybe even U.S. senator. So understand the stakes for this guy personally when he's taking this on, taking over 14 unsolved murders across three counties is a colossal gamble. If women kept, keep dying on his watch, his career is fucking done. It should, it should not be allowed to make murders public like this. No shit, dude. Like, there should be like one ticker that comes out and that's, nobody should be allowed

to, you could look at it and that's it. Like, this is so fucked up that there should be the stakes. Right. There should even be, that there should even be stakes. Because like if yeah, if he fucks up, it's over him. But if he catches him, there's no ceiling on where his career could go after this. In both ways, it's political. It's fucked up.

In the record at the point, it was clear that the real human horror drove him to a real, this guy had a real hunger for justice. But you can't understand a single decision that follows unless you understand that the man running the show had one eye on a very shiny prize the whole time. On paper, the move is like smart. This is where you kind of get to what you're saying, Alex, where five police forces, three district attorneys, nobody's sharing files, put it all under one roof, kill the turf wars, build one clearinghouse.

He's politically making a move that ideally could both solve the murder problem and solve the disparate feud between all of these things in one go. Like he's like, all right, I'll take the case. And I know you're all fighting each other. No more, you're all working under my roof with me on this. case and you're all working together, you don't have a choice. We're going to do no more turf wars. Daddy's stepping in and doing what he has to do.

Like, that's the goal. That's how he sees it. He said, I think it's a little, it's reasonable to a degree. So Brooke gathers all the chiefs and DAs into his office and walks through the whole grim year and a half and announces who's going to run the new unit. This is where it's dubbed the Strangler Bureau. And the man he hands it to is one named John Bottomley. Uh, rough one.

And John Bonham. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. John Bottomley. Uh, at this moment, John Bottomley is the head of the eminent domain division of the eternal attorney general's office. Eminent domain, the man's entire professional expertise is the legal process for the government buying real estate.

He's a real estate guy. He has, and I want to be exact about this, uh, about zero percent experience. experience investigating a homicide. Not some. Zero. Not a single murder in his whole fucking career. The perfect candidate. The perfect candidate.

And he's kind of a character. Like, he's an independently wealthy Yankee Blue Blood who drifted into law only after deciding against medicine, the clergy, and teaching. Law was his fourth choice. Of course. Of course. His listed hobbies included ship salvaging, mining, and investing. Those were his like hobbies.

I don't know how ship salvage is a hobby. I didn't really look into it. I just probably took Susan on her word. Yeah, it's like magnet fishing, but just like big. Yeah, I guess. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Apparently too, according to people who worked for him, he was the kind of boss that when he closed in a, especially good real estate deal for the state, he would have his staff jump up from their desks and cheer. Like, Anchorman? Like, get them on there.

Like, stand them, get on the desks and like, yeah, we all did it. Get up. Get up on the desks. Now chair.

Cheer everybody. I'm looking. Like, everybody up, up. I've got an announcement to make an amazing. And they all just like, I don't,

I don't know how that. Applaus, please. You better. Cheers. How you build that. Like, your bonuses are going this week. You better cheer.

You better chair, but he gets on their desks and cheer. One of Brooks other deputies called him unimpeachably honest and said he bubbled over with enthusiasm. So maybe he was just a killer. Maybe he just slayed. Maybe he just slayed. This dude, though, now is the one in charge of capturing the most feared killer in America at this time. This guy. So why him?

I think the answer is because wouldn't it be? great if he did. That would be amazing if that was the reason. Wouldn't it be great? There's something he saw in him, right? The glimmer of something good. I think it's just more like, oh, I hope he gets him. We love this guy. It was even more unfortunately like boring than that. He picked him because they went way back. Oh, good.

Bottomley was actually the guy who first dragged Brooke into Republican politics when they were law students together. Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. There's a friendship there. Brooke himself asked about it and said it came down to organizational skills. That's why he picked Bottomley, not because they were friends. And that Bottomley was a very good administrator.

And when one of Brooks' own assistant attorneys generals got asked years later, why in God's name the biggest murder case in state history landed on the real estate lawyer's desk, the answer was, and I'm barely paraphrasing, that because Bottomley had no criminal experience, he was the perfect guy. These were non-traditional murders. They called for non-traditional methods. I knew somebody was going to say that shit. I knew somebody was going to say, or perhaps he's exactly who we need.

That's exactly. Dude, that's I. So stupid. I just, I need fresh eyes on this. The perfect. What eyes are fresher than someone has no clue what they're looking for? Other than a stupid person's eyes. Dude, I have this image in my head of like this mockumentary camera where in the office,

they're cheering on a. desk, there's like a knock at the office door and there's like a peek in and it's like Brooke being like, bottomly could have a word with you. And as they're all cheering for the sale, he gets pulled aside and told he's going to be run. He's going to run the entire. It's like Michael Scott going to run the whole fucking bottomly dude.

Shit. Oh God. I can't like it's crazy. To understand how the actual cops felt about this appointment, it's actually on the record. Commissioner McNamair's professional assessment of the man that now leading it, actually it's just one

line, it's a quote directly from him. Alex, this is how McNamara felt about bottomly being appointed. Go ahead and read this one line. Holy Jesus, what a nutcake. Amazing. Yes. That's what he felt.

Isn't that what Alistair Crowley used to eat? Yeah, he did. It was his favorite little magical snack. Yeah. A little nutcake. I will never find out because I will never practice that kind of magic, unfortunately. Of course.

Maybe another life. Of course, the first rule of Magic Club is never to tell the secrets of Magic Club. A novelist who covered the case for the Associated Press said he never once first. A novelist who covered the case for the Associated Press at the time. Okay. This is just where we're at, man. Things are still, you know, it's still early, you know, in like America here. Can I spark for a journalist?

I mean, I guess. No, the Associated Press had a novelist cover the case. And he said he never once heard. anyone say Bottomley's name without a certain four-letter word attached to the front or the back of it, until he genuinely started to wonder if it was the man's middle name. A retired Cambridge detective put it shorter than that. He just said, he's a fucking idiot. And the forensic psychiatrist who had to work alongside him screening suspects didn't even bother what the sentence asked about Bottomley,

he just exhaled and said the man's name twice the way you'd say the name of a headache. literally asked about bottomly by this guy. He just went, bottomly, bottomly, bottomly. Bottomly. Bottomly. So this man becomes integral to this case now. The man, this is the man who when he quits, walks out the door with 54 hours of confessions,

of confession, confession tapes and stashes them in a bankfall. What, why? Wait, why? What the fuck? Get to all that. This is important because like this is a man who personally sits in this in a little room and takes the confessions that close the 11 murders. Bottomly is the man who gets the shit that closes it all.

When he like and like when he quits, he puts him in a fucking bank vault. So it's like a Fargo situation where he's just trying his best to not get in trouble this whole time. And he's kind of, it's kind of working. Never seen Fargo. So I don't know. You try. Alex. You know what?

You were, you were almost three for three today. I know. I open my heart just a little bit. And I let a heart, I let an arrow right in. I'm so sorry. I don't mean to hurt you. It's just how I am. No, it's okay. The point of Fargo is a man is in over his head because he come into crime that he was not equipped to commit. I don't mean to hurt you. It's just how I am is an insane statement. And honestly, I love it. No, I think it's more selfish than that. Alex, because this is a few years down the line, this guy, bottomly, is the same dude

who makes a nice, tidy pile of money off of the movie rights to the Boston Strangler in the role he played in catching him. Interesting. So he was gaming the system. 100%. That is crazy. That is legit crazy. That's wild style is what that is.

But for now, he just sets up shop on the second floor of the statehouse with four investigators working under him and a medical psychiatric committee working alongside. His people commissioned the Xerox Corporation to copy more than 37,000 pages of police files into casebooks one set for each victim. The governor posts a $10,000 reward and the public does what the public always does. It buries them in mail. It buries them in mail within months. They've got a thousand letters and phone calls from all over the world from people who want to. help catch the strangler because there's $10,000 on the line. Most of them are sincere enough.

Like a solid chunk of them are completely deranged like you would expect. Very similar to when we covered, when Alex covered the Zodiac Killer. We had weird phone calls. You know, remember on that? Like we had those moments. Just like people who want to get like LARP experience in when you have to do it in like really weird ways. This is honestly one of like for me, one of the only parts of this story where genuinely

funny things are. happening with like bottoming. Bottomly enters this and this all starts going down. It starts the absurdity. What I meant, my competency can only go down. Like this is what I mean. It feels like,

it feels like he was written by like a comedy writer who need to like inject some humor into the situation. So they, so they invented the character bottomly. Like that is, that's crazy. And yet he is a real person. Uh,

you got one guy in Connecticut who writes into them, explaining to them that the strangler is actually, a Frankenstein's monster built by a cabal of communists who implanted bugging devices into the bloodstreams of jail inmates to turn them into electronic zombies. Like a literal,

like a literal Frankenstein's monster. Yes, you have to understand Alex Jones is an eternal concept. Alex Jones is not a man. He is a concept that exists. I don't like this. That exists eternally. These kinds of people are always around.

Like, they're putting, they're putting plants, in the water to turn the inmate zombies. Like, that's the kind of energy that this guy brings. You've then got a woman who tries to protect her anonymity by signing her letter, a fellow Trinity Church member, and then types the whole thing on stationary with her full name engraved across the top.

She just forgot. You know what I mean? She just lost side of what was important for a second. You know what I mean? Two of my personal favorites are, both of which are very real, are both of, I'm going to have you guys read real quick. These are not making it up. First, elderly gentlemen from Canada.

I hate the you have to say, I'm not making it up. That's so fun. I'm not making it up, guys. This is real. He wrote in a single sentence word, a single sentence description on how to defend yourself. This is for women on how to create some self-defense. And Jesse,

because of your personal self-defense tips not long ago, this is what he wrote in. Very simple. It's one sentence, one line. This is what women should do if they get attacked. Squeeze good and hard, and that's all is necessary. If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. Squeeze the dick super hard.

Squeeze the ball super hard. That was an elderly man's suggestion. Thank you, sir. He's not wrong. Like, just twist and pull. I don't want to give away too many guy's secrets, but that's a weakness. That's an unfortunate. It's a weakness.

We are. It is a weakness. Yeah. We don't deserve better. Let's just say. I'm sure that women. It's a flaw in the design. Exactly.

You do not deserve better. A fail safe. An emergency ripcord, if you go. I don't like that. Sure. Then there's a woman who wrote in with a theory that, uh, theory she was clearly hoping would land her the reward money in my mind.

The theory being that the strangler has supernatural powers and can pass through locked doors and then vanish into thin air. I have a theory. Maybe it was Satan. Ooh. Could have been. No. No, he was too busy helping the communists.

Oh, right, right. At the end of that letter, she said, quote, please do not broadcast or advertise my name concerning the above theory. Thank you. Love Linda. I realize this is crazy. And as such, would not like to be associated with the reaction. Thank you.

So that's what we got. That's the brain trust. And now the flood of letters that they're actually getting into all this. Like, it's starting to kind of spiral out of control in a weird way, which is like obviously saying something because of what we've all witnessed so far. Brooke does two things to crack this case. One is reasonable. The other one turns his office into a punchline from coast to coast that we'll get to.

The reasonable thing first, he puts together a medical psychiatric committee, real doctors, one of whom a man named James Brussels, had famously helped catch the mad bomber who terrorized New York for the better part of a decade. Their job is to build a psychological profile of the killer, and they do. They sketch out a man, they nickname Mr. S, at least, 30, probably older, neat, orderly, punctual, good with his hands or with a hobby that needs his hands, a loner with no real friends of either sex, no wife, or if there was one, no real connection to her, the kind of man who would not strike you as crazy if he passed him

on the street. And crucially, a man they imagined raised by a specific kind of mother. They imagine that this person was raised by a mom who was sweet, neat, and overwhelming, quote unquote, uh, seductive and punishing at the same time. Like a woman who might walk around the apartment half dressed and then punish the boy for savagely,

punish the boy savagely for any flicker of sexual curiosity with their father who was essentially absent, essentially not there. That's the kind of profile this guy thought that the serial killer would be. Such a strangely specific. Very specific and weird. Yeah. Off in the corner,

this committee lands on the same conclusion. street cops already carry kind of like in their gut at this point. There's almost certainly more than one person doing this. And the man who ran the committee even signed off his report to the task force by wishing them in writing good hunting. Now the second part, which is like the weird shit. John Bottomley brings in a psychic. The psychic's name is Peter Kirkos.

He's a Dutch house painter who claims he fell off of a ladder, fractured his skull, woke up from a coma and could suddenly read minds. So what are we, what are we doing? What are we doing? What are we doing? One guy who's like, actually from like a case in New York,

putting together actual psychological profile, that's what Brooke brought in. And then bottomly brought in this guy. We're doing X-Men plots now. Yep. Well, Bottomly read about him in a paperback about the paranormal and sent his investigators out

with one instruction, find me this man bottomly read about him dude all right where do you think they found this guy oh uh I feel like if we're lucky but I'm going to

okay not I'm going to assume like at a bar okay at a bar like just like drinking and living like literally the norm of a bar like everyone knows his name he's there all the time like a bar fly yeah like a drinker like a day drinker. Yeah. What about you? What's your

guess? Is that yours, Alex, too? You agree? I think he's the town milkman. He is nowhere within fucking 50 to 100 miles of New England. He's at in Hollywood. Yeah?

Buh, Buh, Bury, Bauer, Hollywood. At this time, how does that work? He's coaching the actor Glenn Ford who was going to play him in a movie about himself. Well, obviously. Wow. Okay.

Okay. Yeah, obviously. Cool. So that's where he was. I don't know who Glenn Ford is. I know the name. No face comes to mind. That's straight out of like LA Confidential, by the way.

That whole setup like that. Really? In LA Confidential there's like a cop show and the cop like spends his time advising the cops. It's like kind of similar kind of situation. Yeah, this guy out in Hollywood, movie is going to be made. And the decision to bring him in at all, depending on, which insider you believe because there are multiple claims, came down to one of two things, essentially.

One version is that Bottomley had a longstanding fascination with telepathy experiments out out at a NASA lab in Cambridge. Fucking Bottomley, dude. That's one. That's Popkin, by the way, from the Christopher Reeve, Superman, Glenn Ford. Oh, okay, okay, okay. I know who he is now. The other version from the forensic psychiatrist on the case

is funnier and probably truer, that Bottomlein's own mother was obsessed with ESP and kept badgering her son to get a seer, go get a seer, good God, go get a seer, it's the only way you're ever going to catch the strangler, go get a seer, young boy, it's the only way. Why that phrase of all of all the things you could call it, a seer. I don't know. I guess, I guess seer was a big thing to say in 1962. Hilariously, though, the cops were thrilled.

They loved this. McNamara's own reaction to the news that his investigation was bringing in a clairvoyant. He said, fucking fine. Why don't I just fire all my detectives and hire a bunch of gypsies with crystal balls to solve crimes? Oh boy. Oh, boy. I mean,

put quote at the end of that real quick because that is right. No, no, no, no, no, no. That is 1960. What I hear. For officer commissioner and McNamara's opinion on this. He for Ben for Bade his top two homicide men from going anywhere near the psychic body. family brought in. And they fly Peter Herkos to Boston, except they don't fly him to Boston. They fly him into Providence, Rhode Island in the dead of night because Herk Coast insisted on it so that

no Boston reporter would spot the famous psychic detective and ruin his delicate concentration. It's almost like a psychic version of like Jessica Fletcher or the dude for the Knives Out movies or like just a notorious crime solving guru. It's literally that's so Raven is what it is. Yeah, actually, except did Raven solve crime? I mean, like, it's what Raven would have done. Yeah, yeah, it's like that's a Raven as a detective. Right, yeah.

That's a Raven 35. That's a show, man. Like, honestly, that's a fucking show. Get on that. A drama series of Raven seeing things. That'd be great. Seeing things would be great. She's still got, I'm sure she could pull that off. Yeah, no doubt of that.

I hope you could. So here's how this, I want to, I'm going to paint the scene in your mind, boys, because this is how he arrives. Lands in Providence, middle of the night, okay? The Great Sear steps off his plane, not alone, but he's accompanied by his bodyguard, who is a six-foot eight-man, armed, dressed head to toe like a western.

Cowboy. Why? He leaves. Who walks with a quote, John Wayne Swagger. Of course. So he's just like a cowboy cosplayer who's six foot eight.

That's his bodyguard. Yeah. And why is he there? Why is he acting like that? Because who's going to stop him? Yes. Why wouldn't you? Life is but a game.

He's just dressed like Woody from Toy Story. Yeah. Literally I have a six foot eight Woody from Toy Story in my head. When this is getting described to me, it's insane. So he's accompanied by his fucking cowboy from hell. And then it turns out, I bet you boys would never have seen this coming. Peter Hercos, he turns out to be the house guest from fucking hell.

He's awful to deal with. They put him up in a hotel in Cambridge with a city detective assigned to babysit him. And in the middle of the night, the detective gets a frantic phone. call. Hercos demands to be moved out of the hotel immediately because he cannot sleep. The ghosts of the Revolutionary War Cemetery next door are screaming at him. So the cop, like a professional, gets dressed, drives over, picks up world famous seer and psychic and brings him to his home. And Hercos refuses to stay there too because the detective's children are in the house. house and the innocent aura of the kids is jamming his signal and blocking him from picking up

the evil vibrations of the Boston Strangler. Maybe like it's just better than saying like, I don't know what to do. You know what I mean? Like I have no idea what to do. Maybe that's maybe the guy just couldn't do that. Maybe he just could never get himself to say, actually, I got to say, guys, I'm stumped right now. Oh, I would have been like, you don't want to be here going back to the hotel. You can deal with the ghosts.

I'm going to take this line right out of the book because I think Susan Kelly puts it perfectly. She just writes in the book that it comes as great surprise and that the detectives and talks about the detective's sense of self-control that there was never a male strangling victim that night. It's like, I get it. To his self-control? That the police self-control who picked him up

that he didn't strangle the psychic in his car for being like a, insane to deal with. That's an insane thing to say, uh, regardless. Well, that's what she wrote. It gets,

and it continues to get pettier as well. Within about two days of Hercos arriving, bottomly gets a confidential report that the great seer is currently being sued in Wisconsin for breach of contract and is on top of that an adulter. No. What? He's an adulter from California. It's,

It's 1964. A lot of people care. I guess they do. I guess they do. The bottomly, like this guy who's running this investigation, puts in writing that this is conduct of which he personally does not approve. But eventually the psychic delivers. He points the finger at a suspect, a shoe salesman who is completely and totally innocent. And who happens to fit Mr. S almost too neatly like a life.

long celibate with a history of mental illness who had four reasons no one could explain recently joined three separate marriage clubs what do you mean what do you mean marriage clubs i think there are clubs that existed at the time that were for like married couples to hang out and socialize and do things marriage clubs he had joined three of them chill bedroom in public somewhere that you can like talk about your day in i guess so again no hold on hold on no marriage clubs referred to matchmaking services marriage bureaus or the emerging phenomenon of computerized dating during this era single adults used to go to these clubs along with social mixers and group uh community groups to find suitable marriage minded partners interesting very strange very dating kind of thing yeah early i just i should have looked at it because my brain is my brain was like oh it's where it's a club where married couples come together and they have like a social life and they hang out and they maybe have have a drink or something.

Nope. Famous examples was the Marriage Bureau in London. Operation Match in 1965 created by Harvard undergraduates. Okay. It's probably like literally probably one of the ones he belonged to at this time. So yeah, they check him out. They clear him and the poor man ends up committing himself to a mental hospital

over the entire ordeal as the police like kind of like put him as a suspect. And then comes the kind of like whole, I guess you could call it. like the punchline of the psychic detective saga. The FBI shows up and they arrest Peter Hercos, the detect, that's a psychic. Not obviously to do with anything with the murders. Yeah, but dude, I was imagining that he might be arrested. So you got arrested for impersonating a federal agent at a gas station out in Milwaukee.

Well, of course. What did he do? What did he do? He was just like, can I have these beef jerks for free? I'm in the FBI. But like while he was, he'd been in Boston helping, somebody in the Strangler Bureau had given Hercos a little card naming him an honorary assistant attorney general since the man collected fake badges and fake titles the way other people collect stamps. Like this dude literally also collected fake titles the whole, the whole time he was there. So now the great clairvoyant is in cuffs.

He's arrested, gone. And bottomly is firing off like, he writes. a Huffy four-page letter to the FBI lecturing the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country on the value of accepting criticism all in defense of the honor of his psychic. Smart. Smart. Probably, like, probably turned out super well for him. Age like wine, right?

Like fine wine? Yeah. So apparently when the letter arrived, it made for a great laughing stock is what said like they loved this letter it was so funny but that's fucking crazy it's insane uh a real estate lawyer is is like still running this thing now the psychic consultant now arrested by the FBI the profile says they're looking to re kind of iterate a tidy mother dominated loner and the killer himself is still out there as far as anyone can prove still in plural killers and it's right there with the whole investigation a national joke at this point like

That's the other part. We're not going to cover because it's too much. Like, the investigation became a fucking joke. Like, it became a national joke, the psychic, bottomly, all that stuff. This in turn, this is the thing the headlines, like, also never said, is that the thing that should have killed the legend of the single Boston Strangler before it ever got off the ground. Let me start.

I want to start with how Susan Kelly, the writer of this book at the very beginning, I said, kind of figured out, she's the one that figured out there were multiple killers. She stumbled into this whole thing in the first place because it tells us. you like how big of an open secret it really was back in 1981 almost 20 years after the murders kelly was sitting in a cambridge police station doing research for a novel and she got to talking with two veteran detectives two old white-haired guys who've been working homicide for 30 years she mentioned she was interested in serial killers the boston strangler etc and one of them got a little smile on his face and asked her who she thought the boston strangler was she said what everybody says

a man by the name of Albert DeSalvo, who we will get to, and the two old cops just laughed. Albert DeSalvo was the public person that got put into jail and like innocently arrested for all this stuff. They say, quote, Albert DeSalvo was the Boston strangler, like my dog was the Boston strangler. That's what one of the cops says to her, like verbatim to her. And that was the moment the book started, she said. That was when it began, two cops laughing at the official story. And as Kelly kept pulling the thread, year after year, she found the same thing everywhere she went.

The police department didn't believe it was hunting one man. Neither did Cambridge, neither did Lynn or Lawrence or Salem. Like, and bang. Yeah. But like exactly. For her, she's like, oh, this isn't some fringe hunch that this one old police officer had. It was literally the working, the secret working consensus of nearly every experience detector who ever touched one of these cases in the. their career. And decades later, with nothing left to lose, they basically just started saying it

out loud. Like over two decades later is when it finally started coming out that like, there isn't a single quote, there isn't a cop in Cambridge who ever believed DeSalvo was the strangler. Or quote, I knew there was one more than one killer. Another quote, Albert DeSalvo did none of the Boston stranglings nor any of the others. And last one, quote, from what I know of Albert DeSalvo, he didn't kill anybody. like that's what and yet he said he went to prison it's crazy they'd go on the record yeah that is weird right it's crazy they'd go on the record and just be like that's all bullshit that guy's in jail for something he didn't do but also think it's it's weird but also it's not for surprise fucking john wayne gasey hung out with cops and fed them chicken and they gave him details on

the cases they were working on it's how he stayed away and out of like cops are are also human, right? And like, discussing something and maybe even 20 years down the line, what's the frustrating part is like the fact that it took 20 years for anybody to actually slip on this shit. Yeah. And I mean,

there is some consideration to be given to like doing your job well, right? Like just because it's hard and like we make, make mistakes doesn't mean that it's like fine that they didn't do a good job, right? You know what I mean? Right. Yeah,

yeah. But that's the point is like at this point, she's learning the cops always knew better and they put it in writing and August of 1964, a full year before anybody confessed to anything, the Strangler Bureau, Brooks' own office, issued an internal progress report. And in that report, in black and white, the official investigation, even in 1964, said the following quote, Jesse, you can go ahead and read this. It's like, this is not in the 80s, like, to hammer home, this is not a new belief. The Strangler Bureau is such a bizarre name for the Stringlewell.

Yeah, it's really good. At an early stage of the coordinated deliberations, it was concluded that certain homicides bore little relationship to the so-called stranglings or to each other. It is also probable that the homicides on and after December 5th, 1962, were not committed by one person. Just written right out in their documents that in their operating thing. How do you write that and then you don't just like get the person out of jail as a lawyer? Like if you see that document, like how does that not automatically, how does there even have to be a trial even like how could it not just be like oh we fucked up let them out right and it goes further we're

even like that's the other part too like this this is written down before albert de salvo is even uh he hasn't he's not a name they even know yet this is and they've written this down and the report literally doesn't stop there it goes through them name by name like a prosecutor and it goes off a list it's like margaret davis it says looks like the result of a fight with the man she was with modest freeman and mary brown vicious beatings mary brown most likely killed by a sneak thief, quote, unquote, who ransacked her place. Who wrote this report, Ghalom? Yes, Gallum.

But like, and then it gets to the copycats. And the murder of Patricia Bissette, the report says, looks like the killer arranged the scene based on what he'd read in the papers about Sophie Clark 26 days earlier. Beverly Sevens, the one stabbing victim, the ligatures were tied on for decoration and what was undoubtedly an attempt to imitate the stranglings that had been all over the news. Evely Corbyn, the imitation factor, and Mary Sullivan, the famous one, the 13th victim, by far the most elaborate of all of them, within the report's own words, had no probable relationship to the murders before it in the work of someone strongly influenced by a desire to imitate previous stranglings as he understood them from the newspaper accounts. All of them, they knew.

internally they knew. That's the official investigation a year before any confession telling you the most famous murder and the whole thing was just a copy case. That's all it was. And the proof that it was never one killer is literally sitting there in front of all of them. And it is infuriating to see, like, them actually have it written down. It's crazy that it's like in,

it's crazy that it's in public knowledge today when we care so much about murderers. And it's, then there's no like reaction. Yeah. So that leaves us in the city sit at the end of 1964. The killings have just abruptly stopped. There hasn't been an arrest or anything. And the investigation is, like I said earlier, national punchline.

Like, it's become a joke that is privately given up on the idea of a single strangler. And the people of Boston are left holding the worst possible version of this whole story. The city did not get a monster in a cage. They got no perpetrator. The city just got this person who killed a bunch of people and got away and could be anywhere in town right now. And for 14 months, everything went quiet. No more murders, no arrests, no answers for any people. The Strangler Bureau keeps grinding away.

The files continue to stay open. But for the public consciousness of this all, it kind of all starts to fade back into the hum of like everyday life after a little over a year. And then in March of 1965, in a hospital for the criminally insane, a man starts to talk. he says quite openly that he is the Boston Strangler. He says he killed all 13 and he then throws in two more on top for good measure. His descriptions are graphic and they go on forever. It takes him two solid months to recite all of it to the cops. And he's got two qualities by the account of nearly everyone who ever met him that make him the perfect suspect.

He has a flawless near photographic memory. and a desperate bottomless need to be somebody. Famously good place for reliable witnesses is a insane asylum. Yeah. And somebody who wants to actively be famous. Like for once in this guy's miserable life to be the biggest and best at something. And it doesn't matter what it is. Positive or negative.

It doesn't fucking matter. So the detectives who burned four years of their lives, chasing this killer, listen to the confession and think the same thing that they'll go on saying for the rest of their lives. No way. They immediately say that's not him. It's not him was never him. But it doesn't fucking matter because a confession, as we still learn to this day with police,

is the fastest, cheapest and easiest way on this planet to close gruesome murder cases that you were never going to solve anyway and to make the whole humiliating night. that is on the national stage, finally just go the fuck away. That's all. That's not one, there's not one shred of physical evidence tying this man to any of the crimes. His fingerprints didn't match the fingerprints that they had. No eyewitness could put him at any single scene.

There is only his voice reciting a chart he could have read in a newspaper to a real estate lawyer privately in a room who badly wanted the case to be solved. And so the most famous answer in the history of American crime in this, like for this time in this case, and quite possibly the most convenient lie gets written down as truth for a long time. That the person who did it is named Albert DeSalvo. Next time on part two, we are going to look at who Albert DeSalvo actually was. He is not the person who committed all this. The contract killer in the next cell who may have even coached Albert DeSalvo and the celebrity lawyer who turned him into a product.

Exactly who fed him the details of these murders that he never committed, including beyond any doubt, the man who took the fucking confession himself. In the real suspects, the local cops were chasing for every one of these women in the background quietly. That's where we'll pick up next week. That's funny. And that is where we end part one of the Boston Strangler S in parentheses. Thank you all so much. Come see us in Chicago in August.

Yeah, come see us in Chicago. We got a show August 22nd in the Lincoln Theater. Tickets are still available. Go buy them. Link of the description. Chalumadipod. FM. Get your booties over there.

It's all there. Go grab them. We'll see you then. Thank you all. We're off to go to a Minnesota Patreon. We appreciate you. We love you. Goodbye.

Anyway, anyway, me and my wife were sitting outside. the delging I'm bored. I enjoyed. I needed to go to the back. So I stepped back inside and after. I hear my wife go. Holy shit, get out. So I quickly dashed back outside. She's looking up in the sky. I look up to. There's a bird. There line of a dozen lights trapped across the sky.