Blood on the Cobblestones PT 1

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Are there two sides to every story?

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Sometimes the truth is just a matter of perspective.

I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson.

I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them.

Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.

And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens.

Some are solved, and some are cold.

Very cold.

This is Buried Bones.

Bones.

Hey, Paul, how are you?

Hey, Kate, I'm doing good.

What's going on?

Well, you know how much I love history.

I'm surrounded by it here in the cottage.

It's everywhere.

everywhere.

Oh, really?

I never would have guessed.

But what I like the most is personal history.

And so there's some photos in the background.

One is of my

mother's grandmother.

So my great-grandmother and the girl's great great grandmother.

And I love that I have the photo.

I found it, you know, stashed away somewhere.

And I framed it.

And it's really, it's sweet.

The older I get, the more I care about reconnecting with people that come from my past.

And I think you and I have talked about, have you, you've done some digging, a little bit of digging, right, on your background, on the holes background?

Well, both sides, both my dad's lineage as well as my mom's lineage.

You know, it's fascinating.

And part of that,

learning your personal history is fascinating.

But for me, part of the reason I did that was to learn, well, how do you build family trees, you know, for the genealogy aspect

and how it's used in cases.

I don't remember.

I'm not going to say which genealogy site did this, but there was some great commercial.

And it was a young woman who was sort of seeing through records her grandmother, her great-grandmother, who was really influential and sort of creating a revolution, a political revolution.

And sort of she sees shades of that in her own life.

And I thought, okay, well, that's the connection.

And we talk about these kinds of historical connections all the time.

But my stepfather, Jack, who I've posted about before.

So his dad was a corrections officer at a prison near where they lived in Rosenberg, Texas.

And Jack adored his father.

And his dad drove a 1969, I'm going to make it up and say Chevrolet, but it was some old truck, but I know it was 1969.

Okay.

And it was baby blue.

And it has been, I believe, since Jack's father's death sitting in a field at Jack's nephew's property, not covered, rusting everywhere.

And so now my lovely stepfather is getting all of the papers together and he's going to have it hauled to my parents' house in Austin and he's going to work on it in the garage to try to restore it.

And I think he's been thinking about it for a long time.

He really wanted a 19-something, 1960-something Mustang fastback.

I've been hearing him talk about that forever, but this truck is so meaningful.

And it's, I guess, I never really thought about objects as connecting us so much to the past, but he could get, you know, a car that is not a personal connection to him, but he wants his daddy's truck.

And I just thought, that's so sweet.

I love that idea.

No, that's, well, that's very cool.

I watch shows on restoring vehicles.

Sometimes I'll watch YouTube videos, these barn finds.

You know, a vehicle's been parked in a barn for decades.

It turns out it's a very valuable vehicle.

And now you have people, these experts that can come in, appraise the vehicle, and then, of course, restore it in a way to preserve its value.

Yeah.

And so you and I are so different because, you know, he does the same thing.

He looks at cars and how people restore them.

And I look at, like, I was just getting ready to watch a show about an American couple who inherited a 500-year-old French mansion, castle, actually.

I think they called it a castle, and how they are going to plan to remodel it to save it from falling apart.

And that's a little bit of my dream.

So, but it is still taking the past.

I just, I absolutely love history.

And I love history where you can smell it, touch it, cook things,

you know, that were from the past, even if they're disgusting.

I like doing that kind of stuff.

I guess that's just a getting older kind of thing, but I think it's sweet.

I'm so proud of him for wanting to do that.

And he said, You can help me winch it.

And in which I said, I don't know.

I might be really busy that day

during winching day.

Oh, come on, Kate.

That's a valuable life skill.

I know.

Have you ever worked on old cars?

Like, I actually worked on an old car before?

Well, I, in high school, the second vehicle that I got was a 1977 Mustang Cobra.

And this was not the like the really fancy, expensive Shelby Cobras.

This is sort of the, no, it was sort of a down era in Ford Mustangs, you know, but it had this whole Cobra package on it.

And I spent a lot of time wrenching, working on the engine, you know, installing my own radio,

doing all the mechanical work on it.

And I learned so much doing that.

And I enjoyed it, you know, and like I have my Jeep, which is a 2008 Wrangler JK.

And I do a lot of the work on the Jeep myself.

And that satisfies you in some way.

I mean, I think it's like earning your own money versus somebody giving you money.

I mean, giving money is great, but earning, it's just so different.

It's a different feeling.

There is a, yeah, there's a, a type of satisfaction, but there's also a lot of frustration

when things don't go right and you're kind of stuck.

Well, I can't even drive anywhere because my Jeep is up in the air and I can't figure this out.

Yeah.

Where would I live while this 500-year-old French castle is being remodeled was the first thing I thought of.

Am I pitching a tent on the 200-acre property?

I don't know what's happening.

Sure.

Well, I find relics or remnants or whatever it is connected to things, especially personally in my past.

There's, you won't be able to see it, but there's a pair of eyeglasses on the shelf behind me.

And it's my mom's father's eyeglasses.

Now, I've never met him.

He died when she was very young, but I don't know why.

I just, I really want to see that kind of stuff up in this space in my cottage.

Yeah, you can't see it in the image view that I've got, but over here to my left is

a set of shelves.

And that's sort of similar to what you've got.

I've got what's been passed down through the generations, this cedar little hope chest that I keep sentimental knickknacks inside.

Oh, that's sweet.

I have,

you know, a hat that my dad used to wear, as well as other gifts from my parents over the...

the years.

I've even got this old AM FM radio that my dad bought way back.

I think it was a wedding gift, something like that.

And it was just something growing up, I remember seeing in the house, you know, and

when they finally moved out of California to Hawaii, that was one thing where I was like, nope, I got to keep that.

It's an object, right?

But there's a sentimental attachment to it.

Yeah.

And I definitely, I think everybody feels like this.

There's certain dishes that trigger things for you that you can smell and certain breezes in the air.

But anyway, let's stop waxing poetic about

items items that are probably not useful right now, like my clay pipes, which I adore.

My daughter bought me a set of clay pipes from the 18th century where, you know, men would dig out, men would take these pipes, these clay pipes, and smoke them in a restaurant.

And the restaurant would keep them there and would return them to the man every time he came to smoke.

And so my daughter bought me these pipes.

So anyway, I could go on and on.

And I will.

Over the course of our episodes, I will talk about these individual things.

One of the reasons I bring this up is because we are going back back in time here with this story, not as far back as we normally do.

But before we get into it, Buried Bones will be on board Virgin Voyage's true crime voyage this October.

So I'm wondering, Paul, there's an event called Scarlet Night.

And to me, it sounds a little bit more like a case file, less of a big party.

Tell me about it.

Do you know anything about this?

You know, I've seen my share of blood pools that are scarlet in color, but that's not what this refers to.

Virgin Voyages has a scarlet night, which is, it sounds like it's a shipwide party, but the theme is, is you have to wear red.

So pack red in whatever you're bringing.

Okay, I got to think about that.

What would you wear that's red?

I don't think I've ever seen you in red before.

No, you know, I might have just like a red t-shirt.

I'll get you a sash.

Maybe I'll bring a sash on board and it could be like a sash.

True crime host.

Oh, one of those.

I was thinking of something totally different.

I love a big party, so I'll be excited to do that with you.

Yeah, it'll be a lot of fun.

Reserve your spot now at virginvoyages.com/slash true crime.

Okay, for this story, we're not in the Caribbean.

We are in Boston.

And I think we've done a couple of Boston stories.

Well, one was the man at Harvard who was murdered.

You remember that?

So, technically, Cambridge, but I think we've had a couple of other Boston stories.

But this is, I think, the Boston story, at least for the 20th century.

This was a really, really big story.

And I've mentioned it to you before, but I hope that you forgot.

Did you forget what we're doing today?

No, I know what we're doing.

Oh, dang it.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, we're in Boston.

I'll give everybody a big hit.

We're in Boston and it's a serial killer and he strangled people.

So if our smarty smart audience can't put that together, then

that's what we're talking about.

And I don't actually, I didn't before reading all of this know a ton about this case.

I feel like that about the Hillside Stranglers also.

There are just some cases that I've just never really looked at.

And this is one of those cases.

So did this pop up in any of your education or anything, the Boston Strangler?

Yeah.

In fact, I have a book on my shelf on the Boston Strangler.

Now, it's been decades since I've read.

Good.

about the Boston Strangler.

So in terms of the details,

I wouldn't even say they're fuzzy.

You know, it's, I, I think you're going to remind me a lot as, as we go along.

And it's funny because like Hillside Strangler, I actually paid a lot of attention to that one because one of the serial killers I was going after, he had a newspaper article on the Hillside Strangler in his residence.

He's following other serial killers and what they're doing.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, let's get to Boston, one of my favorite places.

Let's go ahead and set the scene.

There are things that I, since we're talking about the Boston Strangler, and this is not a mystery, there is an update that I think a lot of people probably haven't heard yet, as well as you.

You haven't heard this update, I'm sure.

But what I'm interested in is a couple of different aspects.

You know, we talk about why these guys do things.

Like Richard Cottingham, we talked about the Times Square serial killer with that story.

So there are a couple aspects of this that I really want to hear your insights on.

Like, I don't know if it's posing or, and we'll talk about that in a little bit, but body positioning,

where all these people are, how they're connected, does it make a difference?

It's sort of the,

why is he doing this?

Or are we overthinking?

Did you feel like that with Golden State Killer?

Did you feel like every tiny little thing had to be crucially important?

And this is what's going to break the case.

And I don't mean DNA.

I just mean, oh, this person knew this person and, you know, their brother was the next victim or something.

Did you just get ever get hung up on that kind of stuff?

Very much so.

With such a large series of cases, it is paying attention to those small details.

And often I would find myself marching down this rabbit hole only to see it dead end over and over and over again.

But that's just part of any

real whodunit type investigation.

Yeah.

And we know also, you know, there's, I don't know if this is profiling, but there's only so far that's going to take you until you get the really hard evidence.

But in this case, just like like with Cottingham, where we were, we, where we kind of figured out that he was murdering women who would just be like quote unquote standard people in society.

And then when he got a divorce, he seemed to switch to sex workers.

And what that means, there are some pretty obvious things, but you know, some of this is supposition, I know.

Yeah, well, but that's also looking for patterns in a series can provide insight into the offender, who the offender might be, or what the offender is experiencing in their personal life.

You're right.

And let's start out by saying that I have a two-tier trigger warning here.

One is the sexual assault aspect of these cases.

But then Allie, our researcher, put in another note, which I really appreciate about kind of a particularly gruesome section.

So I'll do, you know, this trigger warning now, and then I'll just flag people that this next section, if you're very, very sensitive to this, go ahead ahead and 30 second your way through it.

Okay, this is a classic case people still talk about.

Big case.

So let's get going.

Let's see if you can solve it, Paul.

No pressure.

It's a two-parter.

I mean, nobody's surprised by that.

It's a massive story.

Okay, Boston, 1962, Back Bay neighborhood.

So I went to school at Boston University undergrad.

And so I lived in this area and it was very nice.

Back Bay was purposely built by filling in a part of the bay, Back Bay, to add more luxury housing.

So it's always been a nice area.

I loved that area.

I think of it, I don't know if it's dramatically changed now, but quintessential, I lived in a red brick building, you know, one of these really like a brownstone.

And when I moved to Boston, besides the history, that was one of the things that look, the ivy and the red brick, you know, it's so different than what I had in Texas.

And you've been to Boston, I'm pretty sure, right?

Only passing through.

That's right.

Yeah.

So it's a city that I would like to explore.

One, because it seems like a beautiful, cool city, but second, because of the history.

And everywhere, it's like being when I go to London, everywhere feels like historic.

I know that's not the case, but I just love Fanuel Hall and the countryside.

And so I'm going to fangirl over Boston.

Okay.

You know, anybody who's fangirled over a city, surely you must.

That's the first time I've ever heard that.

Fangirling over a city.

I have a city crush on Boston and a university crush on Boston University and on Cornell randomly.

I did research at Cornell University.

I loved Cornell.

So

anyway, now you know more about me.

So this is where we are, 1962, and this is happening in the evening.

So with these cases, you know, like with the Cottingham case, I will sometimes say, well, who do we think in her inner circle, blah, blah.

But there are so many people here.

we don't really have time for inner circles.

And we know that they're all connected.

So this is more of like, what is this guy thinking?

Thursday, June 15th, 1962.

There is a 21-year-old man named Juris Slessers, and he comes home to see his mother.

His mother's name is Anna, and she has an apartment in the back bay.

He wants to take her to church.

This would be kind of a normal routine.

So Anna is divorced, and she's only been in this apartment for two weeks.

Up until then, she and Juris had been in the same apartment in Somerville and he has a job at MIT.

So he had just gotten his own place in Lexington.

So they sort of split up and she is now in Boston proper.

She's 56.

She is our victim.

And she had just gotten home from her job as a seamstress at 5.30 that evening.

Juris comes two hours later.

So 7.30, he comes, and he sees Anna lying on the kitchen floor.

She's wearing a house coat, which has been ripped open, and the fabric belt of the house coat is found around her neck.

And it appears she's been strangled by the cord.

And there's a laceration at the back of her skull and blood in her right ear.

And I see this.

There's blood in the ear with a couple of people slash blood in the mouth.

Does that come with strangulation?

Because, you know, I know that she has a bash in the back of her head, but I think ultimately they rule this death by strangulation.

Well, the blood in the ear, that's a very common, it's very common when you have significant blows to the head.

So now you have potentially the base of the skull underneath the brain could be fractured.

You can get bleeding that will come out the nose, out the ear, even out the mouth, because it's all connected.

So with strangulation, generally you're not going to see significant bleeding out of the mouth.

And so if this is a significant amount of blood, I would say she's got a fractured skull in all likelihood.

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So let me tell you kind of as we move forward what people say.

So when they do an examination on her, it is positive that she was sexually assaulted, likely with an object.

though the press doesn't know about this at the time.

They must see trauma.

Even though during sexual assault, you can see vaginal trauma as a result of just the male anatomy.

Oftentimes you don't.

So it would be unusual to see some significant trauma.

if it's just the male anatomy.

And so they must be seeing probably some pretty significant injuries internally, thinking, okay, we've got what we call a foreign object insertion.

And it's a relatively common act that offenders do during sexual assault.

Okay.

Well, as we move forward, I'm going to ask you about circling back to Anna, just comparing her, which we're saying is the beginning of this series.

But as you and I have said, who knows?

We don't know.

But this is officially the beginning of it.

It looks like they're looking kind of in her apartment and it appears like the drawers in the apartment have been rifled through, but they don't know if anything's been taken because Anna's the only one who really knows what's in this apartment because she's only been there a couple of weeks.

Well, I would, I would ask if any of these drawers contained the women's Anna's underwear for lingerie.

I don't have a note about that as far as somebody taking it, right, as a souvenir or something.

Yep.

Okay.

They find fingerprints around the apartment that don't belong to Anna or her son.

Is the benefit of being in a basically brand new apartment that they in theory would have cleaned it, cleaned off fingerprints before she moves in when they do a quote-unquote thorough cleaning?

I'm not sure if they ever did that.

Is that at least somewhat helpful for the police to be able to know?

When you fingerprint any space, you're likely going to find fingerprints or, you know, ridge detail from, you know, palms or whatever, even in the most clean.

types of apartments.

I would say it depends on, well, what surfaces did they find fingerprints on?

Are these surfaces that are frequently cleaned?

You know, let's say a kitchen counter.

Now you have sort of a compressed period of time in which those fingerprints were left.

It raises the likelihood that they could belong to the offender.

However, even though fingerprints are very fragile evidence, they can stay for years on protected surfaces.

I've got a homicide case in which it turned out the captain of the investigating agency, his prints were found low down on a closet door.

And of course, why is his prints in this homicide scene?

He'd never responded with law enforcement.

Well, it turns out as a teenage boy, he lived in that house.

Oh my gosh.

And now you're talking decades later, his prints were still present.

So you're always going to find fingerprints.

And you fingerprint an apartment, you fingerprint a house.

You're going to find fingerprints that you can't identify to anybody that lives there.

And of course, you go, well, maybe it's the offender.

You hope it is.

But oftentimes these prints are to just innocent people that had some point in the past come in contact with whatever surfaces are being printed.

The cord that she was strangled with would have his DNA, right?

If he didn't wear gloves.

Very possibly, yes.

And you mentioned, I guess it was a jacket belt was wrapped around her neck.

Yeah, it says, so she's wearing a house coat and the house coat had been ripped open.

And then the fabric belt of the house coat is found around her neck.

Okay.

Appears she had been strangled by the cord.

So maybe the belt and the cord are kind of the same thing.

Yeah.

So, you know, evaluating where you can find DNA, you take a look at how the jacket is ripped open.

You know, where would the offender grab that jacket in order to do that?

That would be, those are hot spots for his contact DNA.

Of course, the ligature, the belt would be where is he likely touching in order to do the strangulation.

And he, and, and, you know, whether he's tying a knot or if he's holding, you you know this cord you know he's really having to pull on that that belt in order to for a period of time so in this day and age you know this is a dna case just off of that but she also is sexually assaulted you haven't said if there was any semen detected there was a foreign object inserted did they did he leave the foreign object behind it doesn't sound like it they can't identify it and it doesn't sound like there is semen in this case.

There will be in future cases.

Okay.

Yeah, I was thinking about that, that the house coat might have some DNA on it.

I mean, who knows?

And I'll probably ask you about that.

Now, actually, let me ask you kind of a practical question about DNA.

Let's say we call Boston police and say, hey, we've got a gazillion dollars and we're going to run DNA everywhere.

And they say, here, use this house coat belt that was around her neck.

And we're looking for his DNA.

How does that work with, you know a company that like your company that you work for are you guessing on a tiny little section or do that are they able to swab or do whatever they do on the whole belt what are you spending your money on sure well this is really the the toughest part of the dna process is finding the DNA.

A lot of money has gone into improving the DNA testing technology, but there hasn't been major improvements on how to find the sources of DNA that are probative.

So when you're dealing with something like the jacket or the belt, initially it's a visual examination.

Are there any stains?

Do I see a crusty stain on the jacket?

Of course, you're going to

need to do further testing.

Is that semen?

Is it saliva?

Does it contain DNA?

Another visual examination is using an alternate light source.

So now you can find fluorescent material that would stand out under different wavelengths of light.

In the the event of something like the belt, where maybe there isn't any visible stains, now you can start swabbing areas that you think the offender likely grabbed in order to do the strangulation with the belt.

And so there are probably multiple swabs would be taken across the length of the belt itself.

But this is one of the things that people often overlook is that the analyst is not able to test 100% surface of of this belt.

So if it comes back negative with whatever swabs are collected, you can also go back to the belt and take more swabs in different areas.

You know, and too many times an investigator will get a DNA report saying no DNA found.

And they go, well, I guess not going to be able to move forward with this case.

And I was like, well, hold on.

I need to see the DNA analyst's notes because the analyst notes are going to show where he or she actually swabbed.

And I go, well, maybe let's take a swabbing or a cutting from this untested area on the belt and keep our fingers crossed that it actually has offender DNA.

You can always do more when you have physical evidence, such as clothing.

Okay.

Well, let's keep an eye on DNA and physical evidence.

Let's talk about access for Anna's apartment.

So the police say that the building was being worked on.

So there's scaffolding all over this building.

It's a small four-floor apartment building.

So anybody who hopped on the scaffolding would have had access to her apartment.

So the police interview all of the workers who had been working on the building, no new leads, and they interview a total of about a hundred people just within those first few days.

In Anna's death, nothing.

So I would say that this case went cold, except in two weeks, something else happens, and then all of this stuff gets tied together.

So let's just say that Anna's investigation is paused until, you know, we move on to these next two cases.

So anything that we need to talk about with Anna before we wrap up?

Nope.

I think I've got a pretty good handle on what happened to Anna.

Okay.

So yeah, let's move on.

So we have two bodies that have been discovered now in two different locations two weeks after Anna's body is discovered by her son within 48 hours.

So let me start with this one because the police immediately linked these together, which was different than what happened with Richard Cottingham and Times Square.

The women in that case, they were kind of all over.

You know, there were some in Long Island, there were a couple in Jersey, and then in the city, but they immediately say these are connected.

Okay, so both women are in their 60s.

There's a woman named Nina Nichols.

She's 68 and she lives in Boston.

Helen Blake.

So Nina and then Helen.

Helen Blake is 65.

She lives in nearby Lynn, Massachusetts, which is right outside of Boston.

So Nina was a physical therapist and Helen was a nurse.

And this becomes sort of important moving forward.

So firstly, I'm going to tell you what happened, but this is a little bit of a rinse repeat from what happened with Anna.

Anna was 56.

One of these women is 65 and the other one is 68.

Does age tell us anything at this point?

Or do we need to see victims of this same relative age continue on in order to pick up on some kind of something with a series?

Aaron Powell, age is a factor for sure.

However, with just age, I can't really draw any conclusions, you know, because I need to take a look at the totality of the victimology with what we can discern to try to see, well, why is the offender purposefully choosing women that are mid-50s or older?

There could be a sexual interest in older women that this offender has.

This may be something where the offender recognizes that these women are more easily overpowered.

Oftentimes, well, actually, I just talked about this on my other podcast, now retired FBI profiler Mark Safarik.

He's an expert on the sexual assault of the elderly.

And his studies, he's even published on this, is that when you see the very elderly being sexually assaulted and or killed, oftentimes you're looking for a teenage boy that lives in the area.

And it's because this boy doesn't have the self-confidence to be able to overpower a younger but adult woman.

And so we'll go and attack this elderly person, not because that's their primary sexual interest, it's because of almost the practicality to that offender.

I've never heard that before.

That's fascinating.

And, you know, I've, I've heard a lot of different cases really focused in on the elderly, not always involving sexual assault, but, but that makes sense.

It's interesting.

Okay.

So both women, both Nina and Helen, have been strangled with one of their own silk stockings.

So we're used to the silk stockings or the stockings of today for women pantyhose that are connected.

These were individual.

So when I say stockings, that's what I mean.

I might say one stocking.

I may say two stockings, but they're individual stockings.

They're not connected.

Okay.

So strangled with their own silk stockings, which were left around their necks.

So Helen Blake's bra was also found around her neck, as well as the stocking.

So her downstairs neighbor heard noises from above, like furniture being moved in the afternoon on the day that Helen had been killed.

Both women were found with blood in and around both ears.

Both appear to have been violently sexually assaulted.

Also, seemingly with objects.

And again, they don't share this with the press.

I don't know if this is something where the police are withholding or it's 1962 and that would traumatize readers too much.

I don't know what the answer would be.

It could be a holdback for sure.

Okay.

This is where if you have somebody who's wanting some sort of notoriety for confessing to this crime, but is not responsible, can that person provide the details that law enforcement knows about the case?

And it's easy to assume, well, there's a sexual assault when you're dealing with female victims, but well, what happened during the sexual assault?

Give me the details that I can corroborate with the physical evidence.

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Allie wanted us to note, and I think is important, there was a writer named Susan Kelly who wrote a book in 96 called The Boston Stranglers, and she was able to access police records that I don't think anybody else had access before.

So some of these details like the blood in the ears comes specifically from Susan's book, but most of that comes from the police records.

So I think that's so far going to be one of the most important sources that we have.

At this point, the police think that these two murders are linked.

So these are both murders that are, while one is in Lynn and one is in Boston proper, it seems like kind of the same MO, and it's within 48 hours of each other and within two weeks of Anna.

So they think everything is linked, all three of these, which seemed kind of quick to me, but I mean, what do you think?

So, you know, the things in common, does it seem irrefutable that these three are linked?

I wouldn't say it's irrefutable.

However, it's best to proceed with the investigation with the consideration that they are potentially linked.

Now, you may find that they actually aren't.

And so, in many ways,

you're kind of having to investigate these cases as standalone cases in addition to looking at them as part of a series.

And typically law enforcement, particularly from this era, probably would not consider these cases linked.

So this tells me that these investigators are familiar with the types of crimes that are occurring in this Boston area and that these cases stand out.

It's not like they're having women strangled on a consistent basis over the course of the last 10 years by a variety of different offenders.

And you may think, well, that's kind of, well, obvious.

Well, no, in the Bay Area, that's what we were dealing with in the 1970s is all sorts of different serial offenders were committing almost like the same type of crime at the same time.

Well, a little bit of a note.

There's a movie about the Boston Strangler, and it stars Kira Knightley and Carrie Kuhn, which I've heard is a great movie.

So the real reporters were named Loretta McLaughlin and Gene Cole.

So they get a lot of credit for linking these cases together, but it seems like the police were already on that track to begin with, just like you had mentioned, sort of the circumstances.

But these two women were the ones who coined the phrase Boston Strangler, just like Michelle McNamara came up with the name, the press always has, I think, the best names, right?

She came up with Golden State Killer.

Right.

Because, you know, people think law enforcement develops these monikers themselves.

We generally don't, you know, so it's the press that will come up with East Area Rapist, Visalia Ransacker.

And then Michelle, of course, was like, well, what does that mean?

And

let's come up with Golden State Killer.

And, you know, there's some professional friends of mine really abhor the use of monikers because it seems like it glamorizes the bad guy.

But the reality is, is there's a practical aspect.

If you've got multiple serial killers, like Sacramento had multiple rapists in the 1970s committing attacks at the same time, it's so much easier to say, well, these cases are associated with East Air rapists, these cases are with the woolly rapists, et cetera, versus, well, you know, case number eight over here is a different guy, you know, so it's just an easy way to check the box going, hey, this group of cases is associated with this particular offender who goes by this moniker.

Well, and I think also from the press's standpoint, having that phrase, Boston Strangler, in a headline, you're going to get so much attention because people recognize it.

You don't have to tell the story maybe over and over again because they've been keeping up with this one particular series of murders.

And yes, it's the salacious part of it, but more eyes on a story like this when they're pursuing someone, I assume, would be better.

So these two women came up with Boston Strangler.

So now we have Paul, three victims right now.

Okay, so we've got Helen and then we've got Anna, then we've got Nina and we have Helen.

So they've made this connection and here's some more information that we have about Helen and about Nina.

In both cases, the police think that the women must have known their attacker or believed him to be like some kind of service provider.

I don't know who that would be, maintenance person, because there was no sign of forced entry in either apartment.

We've talked about this over and over again.

A gun will not show a sign of forced entry.

You can scare somebody and they'll go right back into the apartment.

But, you know, it seems significant there's no sign of forced entry both women were sexually assaulted and you know both apartments had been ransacked so is the ransacking kind of secondary i'm assuming the primary has to be the sexual assault no for sure you know and and offenders like like i speculate with with anna you know it's possible that this offender is looking for her underwear drawer you know to take something with him and you may have the same thing happening with Nina and Helen.

But offenders will, if they're committing, you know, let's say these sexual homicides, they also will steal valuables for financial gain.

You know, they're doing both.

You know, so it really is going to be dependent upon, okay, where is the offender targeting to do this ransacking, if you will.

If it's areas where the victims likely would have kept, let's say, their jewelry, then maybe he's financially motivated.

But if he's going through the drawers and it's clothing stuff, then that sounds more of what we would call a fetish burglar, even though in this case, he's a serial killer.

Well, now we're moving on to potentially a fourth victim.

And now you're going to have to tell me what you think because the police have their doubts.

Less than two weeks after that, so this is July 11th.

So this is about four weeks from the beginning of the series with Anna.

There's a Roxbury woman, which is in Boston, named Margaret Davis, and she's found strangled and killed in a hotel in the south end of Boston.

At the time, her death is reported as connected to the others, but ultimately, the police don't really buy into that.

She checked in to a hotel that night with a man.

They both used fake names.

I don't know much about Margaret's background.

Most people think that the man who checked in with her killed her.

And I don't know if they've ever tracked down this man, but the police feel like this doesn't fit in very well with the other ones, even though she is strangled.

So not every strangling is connected to the Boston strangler, it sounds like.

Just the act of strangulation, whether it be manual or ligature strangulation, is a very, very common way to kill somebody, particularly if the offender is a more powerful human than the victim.

In terms of trying to connect Margaret to the other three just based on the fact that she was strangled, that's just not enough data points for me to be able to say, yeah, this must be connected.

I think it's evaluating more about Margaret and ultimately, you know, if she's checking in under a pseudonym and this male is checking in under a pseudonym, well, they're going to the hotel to have sex.

And so there's a chance that there is DNA evidence that today, of course, we might be able to use to see if Margaret truly connected to the other three.

Well, we're going to take Margaret out of this, and now we're back to three.

About a month later, on August 21st, so we started with June 15th.

So, you know, a little more than two months later, they discover a body of a 75-year-old woman.

Her name is Ida Irga, and she's found lying between two chairs in her apartment.

And this is what I meant by positioning.

So she is found lying between two chairs with one foot propped up on each chair.

This is withheld from the press.

It's reported that this has happened, you know, in her fifth floor apartment.

She has been sexually assaulted and she's also been strangled in this case with a pillowcase.

And then we can talk about some blood because there's a little bit more blood in this case than what we've experienced.

So lying between two chairs with one foot propped up on each chair, what does that mean?

The immediate thought is this could be a form of posing, posing,

you know, where the offender has taken the time in order to put her feet up on these chairs.

And this may have a significance to the offender.

This may be something that he, you know, what I would call is trying to do a taunt, you know, in terms of putting this victim's body in an unusual position to where now he's trying to convey a message to the people who either find the victim or to law enforcement themselves.

themselves.

Right now, like I can think of a case in which the offender put the woman's legs up onto a sofa after he cut her throat.

And the reason the offender did that was to aid in her bleeding out.

It doesn't sound like that's the scenario here.

So right now, I'm going to say that this appears that it's a type opposing, but can't say exactly what the offender is thinking by doing this.

So pillow case.

And then I want to talk about objects as far as what you're choosing, what he's choosing to use on these different victims, because, you know, we have pantyhose.

I mean, they're found objects.

It's pantyhose.

In Anna's case, it was the belt around her house coat.

Then we've got pantyhose in Helen Anita's case.

And now we're talking about a pillowcase.

So let me tell you about blood first.

There's dry blood under her body and blood covering her face, her mouth, and her ears.

There is a trail of blood leading from her bedroom, where it looks like the attack originated, to where she is found in the living room.

Does that mean she was carried and placed?

Do we think I don't have photos of that before you ask about it?

No, that's where I would need to see the blood patterns, the blood flows on her.

I mean, she gets a bleeding injury.

And right now, I don't know what that bleeding injury is, but let's say you have, let's say, a laceration to your scalp, and now you go upright, you stand up, or

you're seated.

The blood is going to flow with gravity.

If you see blood flows that are flowing, let's say from her forehead backwards, then that sounds like if she's bleeding in the bedroom, sounds like, well, she is in a face-up position during the time which she is moved from the bedroom to the final position.

So that's part of the evaluation of the blood patterns to try to reconstruct, well, what exactly is going on with Ida and the movement of her body.

Okay.

Well, let's see.

I wish we had some photos of that.

I was searching around for that too, but it doesn't seem like we do.

Police do question a suspect, but we don't know what this person's name is.

He had been in Boston at the time of the earlier murders, also, but had since gone home to Rye, New York, which is an affluent suburb, and was not in Boston during Ida's murder.

He's reported to be from a prominent family, but you know, after Ida's murder, police cross him off the list.

So he was looked in for the first few murders.

And then when Ida's murder came and he wasn't here, they assumed that he shouldn't be questioned any further on the other three murders.

Do you agree with that?

It depends on how strong of a suspect he was for the other three.

You know, and then this is also going, can you truly link Ida's homicide?

to the first three.

You know, right now I'd say he's at least a suspect.

They have tabled him.

I would say he's not eliminated from the first three based off the fact that he did not, I mean, they can alibi him out for Ida's case.

But one of the things that, you know, you brought up the ligatures that this offender is using.

And I do want to kind of address that.

It is very, very common for these serial predators to utilize women's clothing articles to strangle them with.

That is a frequent finding when you have strangulation homicides of females.

And oftentimes, it is pantyhose or bras.

And part of this is the practicality.

You have, in essence, a cordage, you know, that can be fashioned out of these women's clothing articles and used as a ligature.

But there's also an aspect that this is part of the offender's fantasies.

You know, if you ever pay attention to the imagery in those old true detective magazines,

you frequently see women who are strangled and bound with panty hose.

This is the type of imagery that these offenders look at and they develop fantasies about.

And so, with two of the women, Nina and Helen, you know, they're both strangled with their stockings.

And then Helen had the bra also around her neck.

However, with Anna, the first one, she had the jacket belt, and then Ida had a pillowcase.

Well, those objects seem to be more chosen for the practical aspect.

They're within reach,

and the offender knew he would be able to use them as ligatures.

So at this point, I'm kind of leaning towards even with

the women that are strangled with the stockings, that may not be purposely chosen for sexual fantasy aspects.

It may be the practical aspect of this is something that is well within reach while he's interacting with those victims.

You know, my first book was about the serial killer, John Reginald Christie, who was in 1952, 1953, London.

And he strangled the majority of his victims with pantyhose.

And when asked later on about it, he had always felt very physically weak.

I remember him saying, pantyhose made it easier than using his hands, which I thought was interesting.

I mean, is that the case?

There's such a small area with pantyhose, you can really cut off the air quickly, right?

But pantyhose are extremely effective ligatures and they're easy to tie into a tight knot.

In many ways, yes, I agree that for Christie, you know, it sounds like he recognized probably through practical experience that it was very hard for him to manually strangle a victim.

And I've actually heard other offenders or read other offenders who have come to that same conclusion.

They're going, it was a lot harder than what I thought.

Yeah.

Including the happy face killer, I think, Jesperson, huge, huge man.

And he, in his, if you want to call it a biography, you know, he's talking about, yeah, I was surprised at how hard it was to strangle.

And this is where offenders may initially manually strangle, but then they will grab the panty hose and basically cinch that onto the neck to be sure that the victim is going to die.

And you've talked about that when we hear that phrase phrase overkill, where sometimes it's not overkill with stabbing, where you're so mad at the person that you want to stab them as many times.

It's that you're so freaked out that you haven't killed him that you're doing everything you can to figure it out, right?

Yeah.

Well, it's how many of these killers are expert killers?

You know, so I want to make sure this person is dead.

It's, we see this all the time in gangbang shootings.

They will shoot their rival 15 times in the head.

And part of that is to send a message, but part of it is just their inexperience.

They just want to make sure that the, you know, the rival is dead.

Yeah.

So that's where, like, I've, I've got a case where I have a father and son who were executed and each was just shot a single time in the back of the head.

I'm going, that's not a gangbanger.

You know, that's not that this person had confidence that these bullets were going to do the job.

When you were talking about the young boys or teenagers attacking older women because they don't have the confidence, you you know, to overpower a woman in her 20s or 30s.

I was thinking also of Christie.

So Christie, I think, knew his physical limitations.

And his method from the very beginning was to get women, this is starting with right after World War I in the middle of World War II, to get women to come back.

and say, you have a bad cough from smog.

That's the other half of my book is the smog.

You have a bad cough.

I have a certificate in first aid.

And he would bring a woman back and he would say, breathe this in.

I've made this concoction, breathe it in.

And it was like a glass bowl almost that had kind of a menthol smell and it was vapors.

And they would breathe in, but they didn't clearly see or understand that there was a tube going also from the bowl to the back of his stove so that he could open the tap and knock him out like that.

And between that and the hose, he was able to do some pretty horrific things.

But it was interesting to think about that sort of understanding what his limitation limitation was.

I don't know if we're diverging a little too far, but you think about some of these serial killers who target men

and what is a common process.

They are now dealing with somebody that is physically equal or maybe even more capable than them.

How do they overpower these male victims?

Well, they drug them, right?

Randy Kraft, you know, he's picking up young Marines who are much more powerful than he is as a male, and he's drugging them.

They have no idea what he's about to do to them.

Well, the reason that I say that is we are continuing on with older women.

So we've got, you know, these women who are all older, and the youngest one is 56.

And Ida is 75.

She's the oldest one we have so far.

Now we're going to talk about Jane Sullivan and she's 67.

Do you want to talk about age first?

I mean, this is now number five, I believe.

Yeah, well, there's, there's a definite pattern, you know, and part of this is, does the offender really know these victims' true age?

Or is he just judging,

you know, certain criteria that he associates with an older victim?

And that's why he's choosing these women.

So with Anna being 56, significantly younger than the other three, she may, to his eyes, may have looked older.

And he may have thought.

she was older.

Don't know.

But there's a pattern here.

And now, why is he choosing women that are, you know, basically 60 years and older?

Well, he may have a sexual preference for older women, or these women represent somebody in his life that he is trying to get back at by proxy.

He's like an anger retaliatory victim.

As an example, maybe he has a mommy issue and these women, these older women are representative of his mother.

And so instead of attacking and killing and sexually assaulting mom, he's doing it to these women.

That's just, you know, speculation, but that's a real scenario.

That's like Ed Kemper.

Yep.

That's why I was just going to say, Ed Kemper, he had a terrible childhood, he says, with his mother, and of course, kills her and does some pretty horrific things.

But and then he says that it's like over and over again, right?

So that's where right now can't draw a conclusion, but there is a pattern.

He is going after women that are 60 years or older.

Well, I didn't think you needed victims' pictures, but I'm going to go ahead and email them to you right now just because I want you to see what he saw.

So if you, when the email gets there, if you look and open that up, let me know when you get it.

So I'm looking at

newspaper clipping, I think.

Newspaper clipping showing Anna, Helen, Ida, and the next victim, Jane.

They all look older.

Anna doesn't, but everybody looks older to me.

Oh, I will tell you, I think Anna looks older than 55.

Yeah.

You know, and part of it may be hairstyle.

You know, I couldn't tell you what you would call this, these hairstyles, but all of these women have a shorter hairstyle that you typically see women adopt as they get older.

I mean, all of them do look elderly to my eyes.

Yeah, I agree.

Now we'll talk about Jane.

How many do we have now?

This is number six.

Jane is six.

Anna, Nina, Helen, Ida, and Jane is number five.

We've talked six, but we were not counting Margaret.

Okay, so Jane is number five.

So I'm going to put you in charge of keeping track of all of these people.

Okay, here we go.

She is 67, and this is happening on August 30th.

So we were at mid-June before.

Now we're at August 30th, and this is victim number five.

She's discovered in the bathtub.

So this is different.

She's discovered in the bathtub of her apartment.

They actually use the word posed here.

She's found naked and posed on her knees in the tub with her feet up over the back of the tub and her face is on the bottom of the tub underneath the faucet partially submerged in about six inches of water she's found with a house coat draped over her oh that's interesting okay and they said she's been dead 10 days she had lived by herself and no one came to check on her yeah so she was badly decomposed but they're saying strangulation but he doesn't say with what to the press so the police say we're back to stockings to stockings her stockings it appears like she was not sexually assaulted, but I mean, you know, we know the caveat to that.

There is matted blood on the side of her scalp.

Is there pooled blood somewhere else in the house?

So the newspaper reports are there are no signs of a struggle.

So now, you know, they're thinking that somebody talked their way in.

But police reports show there is blood in multiple rooms of the house.

It doesn't say where they think it starts or stops, and it doesn't say huge pools of blood.

Sure.

Her purse is found open.

There's no other signs of robbery.

And they say the outer door of Jane's apartment building was often left unlocked.

So anybody could come into the apartment building off the street, but somebody would have to talk their way in, I guess.

Okay, so the matted blood, the way I'm visualizing that, and I've seen this, is it sounds like she may have laid at a location.

with her hair in a pool of blood, if you will, for a period of time.

Then the offender has moved her, but the blood has started to dry in her hair.

The offender is moving her into the bathtub.

Now, the positioning of her on her knees with her face down by the faucet, the way you're describing that position, it almost sounds like he was,

I don't know if it's true posing, or he was actually placing her in the bathtub in order to potentially drown her, you know, put her in a body of water.

Regardless, he's manipulating the body probably after death and moving her into the bathtub for some reason, but the covering with the house coat is significant.

When an offender takes the time to cover, oftentimes that offender is not wanting to see what he's done to the victim.

Sometimes this suggests that the offender and the victim had some sort of knowledge of each other, like being a friend or we're in a relationship and the offender is now not wanting to be reminded of what he has done.

So the covering of the body does have some behavioral significance that could limit the suspect pool.

Now, not necessarily.

You know, he may be covering her.

He may be an absolute stranger to Jane, and he's just taking the time to cover her for one reason or another.

But I pay attention to that type of action.

And it's like, okay, why is the offender covering Jane?

Well, Now there's even more detail that I think complicates things.

The police are feeling like they're on a little bit of a track because I know I kind of skirted over this, but we have three victims now who are all in health care.

They were at different hospitals, but Nina was a physical therapist at one hospital.

Helen was a nurse at another hospital.

And Jane was a nurse at a different hospital.

We also have Anna, who was unaffiliated with a hospital.

She was a seamstress.

Ida didn't have, I mean, she was retired.

I don't think she had anything happening.

She was 75.

And I think it's important, you know, to look for those types of patterns in the victimology and go, oh, there seems to be a bump in terms of this medical connection that the victims had.

However, you also have to take into consideration, well, this is a pretty common profession for women, especially in the 1960s, right?

The nursing aspect.

So just by chance, are you going to have during a series, are you going to have multiple women that are all nurses?

I would say, yeah, there's a likelihood, you know, but have to also consider, is he choosing these women based off of their occupation?

Is he at a medical facility, following them home or whatever?

That's always a possibility.

Well, here we go.

The police commissioner now says older women need to keep their doors locked securely, not to open the door for anyone they don't personally know.

So now they're trying to alert older women that this guy might be targeting them.

So I don't know if he reads the news, Paul, but there's a break in the strangling for several months.

So he doesn't do anything for several months that we know of.

So we went from August 30th now until December 5th.

And now we're going in the totally opposite direction because our next victim is a 19-year-old college student.

And, you know, that happens, of course, a couple of months later, but that is with the last victim is when the police commissioner said.

If you're older, you better watch out.

And now we're at a 19-year-old.

Do you think that's a coincidence?

You know, I think the offender is following the news and is now shifting, but there also may be a evolution of the offender, a natural evolution of the offender, sort of like talking about when you have the very elderly victim, you're looking potentially at a non-confident teenage boy or somebody who doesn't have the confidence to take on a more robust victim.

You may have an offender in this series who has now killed five women and now has the confidence of being able to commit these types of crimes and is now shifting to a younger victim.

But I'm very curious to find out about what happened to this 19-year-old.

Well, and this is also another deviation because all of the victims before, the five women before, were white and this woman, Sophie Clark, is black.

Okay.

Let me tell you about Sophie and then let me tell you about a case in between Jane, the 75-year-old, and Sophie, the 19-year-old, and whether or not that fits in between, because there's a lot of debate about another woman who happens in between, but we just aren't sure.

So December 5th, I'm sure it's cold.

It's Boston.

There's a 19-year-old college student, Sophie Clark, as I said.

She's found naked by her roommate in the entryway of her apartment.

And she's been strangled with three silk stockings.

And her half slip is also found around her head and her neck.

There's a handkerchief in her mouth.

There's evidence she's been sexually assaulted.

And I think for the first time, there is semen found.

It's on a rug near her.

So that's Sophie.

But then I can tell you, you know, of course, about the one in between and the debate.

They're in Back Bay, by the way, which is where Anna lived, our first victim.

The buildings are actually only about 100 yards apart in this case.

You know, I think one of the things that stands out about Sophie's case, you know, she, of course, is being strangled with the stockings, just like we see with some of the prior victims.

The handkerchief in the mouth.

And I'm assuming this, this handkerchief is something that was Sophie's or present within her room or something and is not the offender's handkerchief.

Not that we know of.

You're right.

Okay.

So, you know, that might

be

an act the offender is doing in order to gag her.

You know, just prevent her from being able to scream out while he's attacking her.

The semen being found on the rug, I would not be shocked if there was semen nearby with these other cases.

This guy's masturbating after he's killed these victims or while he's holding them down.

And they just didn't look for it and didn't see it as easily as the semen stain was apparent in Sophie's case.

Well, let me finish up with Sophie and then I'll tell you about the woman who came in between.

There's a neighbor in the building that tells the police that the same day that Sophie was murdered, a man had gotten her to open up her apartment door to him, claiming to be a house painter.

But the neighbor says she could hear him using crude language with Sophie.

And basically Sophie said, you know, you've got to go.

My husband's coming home.

She wasn't married.

But that's how he left.

They have not been able to find this guy, it sounds like.

They've questioned people, the men throughout the building and gotten nowhere with this.

So that could be how this guy has gotten into everybody else's house before he said, I'm a house painter.

So if I understand right, a witness actually hears somebody posing as a house painter and interacting with Sophie prior to the date of the homicide.

It looks like earlier in the day.

Earlier in the day.

And then he comes back at some point after that.

Is that how I'm interpreting things?

I don't know that.

The neighbor says this guy shows up early.

He says I'm a painter.

Sophie's kind of talking to him.

And then he starts saying some obscene things with crude language.

And she says, my husband's coming.

You better get out of here.

And she shuts the door.

And then she's dead hours later.

All right.

So we don't know exactly how this man, if he is the killer, how he's getting back into her apartment.

Exactly.

But again, no signs of forced entry with Sophie's apartment.

She is studying to be a nurse.

We do not know if she had done any work in a hospital setting by this point.

That's not something that the reporting came up with.

But again, the nurse.

So now they're going to be warning people in healthcare between the ages of 19 and 75, I'm assuming.

You know, they're trying to figure out who is this guy targeting at this point.

You know, Sophie obviously stands out because of her race and her age.

However, it is not uncommon to see in a series victims of a variety of races, of a variety of ages, even though she's a young black female, most certainly this seems to be consistent with the same offender as with the older women.

And we saw that with Cottingham, too, in that case.

There was a variety of different types of people.

So the case in between Jane at the end of August and Sophie in December, there was a woman named Modeste Freeman, 37, also black.

She was killed and her body was found in the the street in Boston.

She was strangled, but she was also very badly beaten.

And ultimately, the police don't think this is part of the series, even though she was younger and black.

So there are some people who believe that she was the first in his deviation away from elderly white women, but the police aren't buying into it.

It's a little different in the street and severely beaten.

We haven't had that with any of the other victims, but I also know there could be escalation in all of that.

No, sure.

There's so many dynamics that can occur during the commission of a crime.

You know, she fought back harder.

He's having to amp up the violence to keep her under control.

This is just where there isn't enough information.

And this is where it's very, very hard to do linkage based off of circumstances, because most certainly this offender could attack a woman out there on the street.

It sounds like it's such a significant deviation that it must be a different offender.

It's like, no, it could be.

But you also have other crimes occurring that are unrelated to the series so this is where in this particular case you still have to consider it as maybe part of the series but you also have to consider it as standalone and nowadays is where you go okay i hope there's dna can i associate this case with the others or do i have offender dna as showing that it is not part of the series it's really tough to draw a conclusion just based off of this type of information well who who is considered officially victim number seven is a woman named Patricia Bissette.

She's 23.

She's found in her apartment, which is also in Back Bay, just like Sophie Clark's apartment and Anna's apartment.

Police believe that she had been killed the night before.

So her body is discovered on New Year's Eve, but they think it happened on December 30th.

So this would have been a few weeks, three weeks or so after Sophie's murder.

She's in bed.

Covers are pulled up to her chin.

She's been strangled with several stockings tied together with a shirt.

There's evidence that she, no, this is what I was confused about, okay?

There's evidence that she had had sex shortly before her death, but it's not clear that she was sexually assaulted.

She has a boyfriend who is cleared.

What does that mean?

Why would they think that there's evidence that she had sex?

They don't say condom or anything like that.

I don't know.

I was confused.

My thought is, is that, you know, it's possible that they're seeing some sort of drainage, vaginal drainage.

Okay.

Why they don't think that it's related?

Not enough trauma, probably.

See, and that's, that's just such a misconception.

Yeah.

You know, that a sexual assault, the act of rape is going to just completely traumatize, injure, if you will, vaginally or rectally.

And that's, that just doesn't happen that frequently.

Sometimes you see it, oftentimes you don't.

And just to be clear now, Patricia is another woman who is white.

So, you know, we had Sophie Clark and now Patricia is back to, well, I mean, she's young too, 23.

No, but this is just part of any series, you know, as you start to see the different victims that the offender is going after.

Why is he choosing these victims?

Sometimes it is opportunity that overrides everything else, you know, and so maybe he saw an opportunity with Sophie.

And even though she doesn't fit in from a race standpoint with the other victims he's just now i've got an opportunity here i'm going to go after her

with patricia i mean she's attacked in her bed she's she's strangled stockings that he's put the sheet up over her he's covering her up i would say he's almost leaving her to make it look like she's asleep

right but there's that again that behavior of covering the body that might be similar to what he did with jane covering her with the coat in the bathtub.

He may psychologically be doing that to these particular victims for some reason.

Yeah, because he didn't do that with he posed the woman with one foot up and, you know, on one chair and one on the other.

It seems so different.

The police wonder if he knows her because there's two cups of coffee, one black and one with cream.

And so they're thinking, oh, maybe she knew them.

I'm not really buying that, but who knows?

Maybe, you know, he pretended to be be a painter and she came in and, you know, we don't really know.

She is one month pregnant.

Okay.

So she wouldn't have even known that she was pregnant, most likely, I'm assuming, right?

That's, that's probably likely if she's just one month pregnant.

Maybe she's starting to, you know, suspect that she's pregnant.

But like the two cups of coffee, this is where like interviewing the boyfriend would be important.

You know,

were you over earlier or the night before or something?

Did you guys have coffee?

You know, does she have friends that have come over and, you know, she's made them coffee?

But it's also possible you see these nice, nice individuals, somebody posing as a house painter knocks on the door.

Hey, come on in.

I'll let you take a look at the apartment to see what your job is going to be like.

Can I make you a cup of coffee?

It turns out he's a killer.

Yeah, I think that's, those are all possibilities.

So now we have these seven victims and we have a sprawling case.

crossing over, you know, different ages, different races, different areas of the city, but but all either in Boston or very close to Boston.

We're trying to figure out, there doesn't seem to be forced entry.

They all seem to have been sexually assaulted in one way.

Patricia is a big question mark.

I'm not quite sure, you know, what they're thinking there, but we still have more people to go and we have hit capacity for part one of this episode.

So you can wrap up if you want or you can save it all, all that energy for the second episode because there's a lot more happening.

Well, I think we should save it for the next episode and open up with a summary just so we can get everybody caught up as to where things are at.

We're on the same page, Paul Holz, as usual, as always.

All right, Kate Dawson.

Okay, so I will see you next week and percolate in your little mind what you want about the Boston Strangler.

All right, sounds good.

This has been an Exactly Right Production.

For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com/slash buried bones sources.

Our senior producer is Alexis Emorosi.

Research by Maren McClashin, Allie Elkin, and Kate Winkler-Dawson.

Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

Our theme song is by Tom Breifogel.

Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

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Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind, is available now.

And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.