Speaker 1: Imagine for a second moving to a brand new.
Speaker 2: City, right, like, just a totally fresh start.
Speaker 1: Exactly, you are nineteen years old, and you are absolutely
buzzing with that very specific kind of electric hope that
you only really get when your entire adult life is
just this big blank canvas.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that feeling of invincibility.
Speaker 1: Right, So you unpack your bags, you look out the
window at the skyline, and you are completely ready to
conquer the world. But instead of starting this grand new chapter,
you actually become a victim on your very second day
in town.
Speaker 2: It's just it's unimaginable, it is.
Speaker 1: And to add a deeply macabre, like an almost unthinkable
insult to injury, the killer leaves a cheerfully sinister, happy
New Year card wiged carefully right between your toes.
Speaker 2: Which is just so incredibly chilling, It really is.
Speaker 1: And I want to be entirely clear right off the
bat here with you listening, we are not dissecting a
movie script today, No, not at all. This isn't some
Hollywood thriller cooked up in a writer's room. Yeah, this
is a documented forensic detail from one of the most
paralyzing crime sprees in American history, and you.
Speaker 2: Know, it is exactly that kind of detail that turns
a standard homicide investigation into like this massive psychological.
Speaker 1: Labyrinth, right, because of the messaging.
Speaker 2: Exactly because the moment you introduce a prop like that
greeting card, it is no longer just about the grim
mechanics of violence. It becomes an active form of communication.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a twisted conversation.
Speaker 2: Right, You are dealing with a predator who is treating
the crime scene like a stage. He's actively playing a
high stakes psychological game with both the authorities and the
public at large, which.
Speaker 1: Is exactly the terrifying terrain we are navigating today. So
welcome to Thrilling Threads.
Speaker 2: Thrilled to be here.
Speaker 1: As always, today, our mission is to completely deconstruct the
anatomy of a city wide panic. We are going to
look at the painful and honestly often clumsy evolution of
modern criminal investigation.
Speaker 2: Incredibly clumsy at times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we're going to explore the horrifying reality of
a killer who bypassed every lock, every alarm because his
victims simply well they just open the door for him.
Speaker 2: And just to give you a solid foundation for where
we are pulling all of this from today we are
drawing on a literal mountain.
Speaker 1: Of historical records, so many documents.
Speaker 2: Oh tons, the original declassified police case files, and the
really sharp retrospective insights of modern criminologists and historians.
Speaker 1: Really want to make sure we're getting all the angles right.
Speaker 2: We are heavily referencing the exhaustive research of experts like
Laurence Natalia Austin, Sammy, Mike John and Matthew. All of
these folks have spent years just dissecting the source materials
surrounding the Boston Strangler case.
Speaker 1: And we are taking all of those disparate perspectives, so
the forensics, the psychology, the historical sociology, and we're weaving them.
Speaker 2: Together for you because we really want to challenge the
fundamental assumptions you make about your own safety.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that false sense of security we all have.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we are going to explore the dark cast skating
psychology of trauma and look very closely at how nineteen
sixties law enforcement had to completely change. I mean, they
were essentially built on just walking the beat and talking
to informants, shoeleather detective work, right, and they had to
radically and painfully reinvent their entire methodology just to catch
a ghost.
Speaker 1: It's wild this shift from that analog detective work to
the very dawn of data driven profiling. It's one of
the most fascinating sub narratives of this entire case. It
really is. So let's plunge right into the timeline. We
were starting in June of nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 2: Okay, setting the scene right.
Speaker 1: We're in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. It is a Sunday.
Anna Slesser's, a fifty five year old divorcee, is scheduble
to attend a memorial service at her church.
Speaker 2: Just a normal weekend routine, exactly.
Speaker 1: Her son Juris, arrives to pick her up, exactly as
they planned. But Anna doesn't come out right. Juris stands
at her door, knocking, calling out, and he ends up
waiting for forty five excruciating men.
Speaker 2: And I actually want to pause on those forty five minutes,
because from a psychological standpoint, that is an absolute eternity.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's agonizing.
Speaker 2: When you are standing outside a loved one's door like that,
your brain just starts running a terrifying diagnostic.
Speaker 1: You go to the worst case scenario.
Speaker 2: Well, first, you cycle through irritation, right, like, come on,
we're going to be late. Oh true, Yeah, Then it
shifts to concern and then outright panic. And Juris knows
his mother is meticulous about church, but he also knows
she suffers from severe, documented bouts of depression.
Speaker 3: Ah right, So that colors his whole perspective exactly so
as the silence stretches on his mind naturally, almost protectively
in a weird way, gravitates toward a tragic internal explanation
rather than some kind of external threat.
Speaker 1: He thinks she hurt herself.
Speaker 2: Yes, he assumes suicide.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this, because he finally makes the call
to force his way in, and the scene he finds
is just It's the absolute worst nightmare of any.
Speaker 2: Child, truly horrific.
Speaker 1: Because mother is lying on the floor near the bathroom,
and she's ice cold, and the belt of her own
bathrobe is wrapped securely around her neck. So, based on
his pre existing knowledge of her mental health, Juris immediately
calls the police and reports the.
Speaker 2: Suicide, which again is entirely logical for Juris in that
traumatic moment, he is interpreting the physical evidence through the
lens of her psychological history.
Speaker 1: It makes total sense for him to.
Speaker 2: Think that it does. But when the detectors actually cross
the threshold, they aren't looking at her emotional history. They
are reading the room forensically. They have a totally different lens,
and immediately the physical evidence violently contradicts the suicide theory.
Speaker 1: The juxtaposition is honestly what gets me. I was reading
Natalia's analysis of the crime scene photos and the domestic
normalcy of the apartment is just jarring.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: There are fresh baked muffins sitting on the kitchen table.
There is a kettle resting on the stove. I mean,
I don't care how deep a depressive episode is. The
psychological momentum required to bake muffins and put the kettle
on does not align with someone who ten minutes later
decides to end their life.
Speaker 2: No, not at all.
Speaker 1: It looks like someone who was briefly interrupted while preparing brexast,
and that.
Speaker 2: Is the absolute hallmark of a blitz attack. Yeah, the
police quickly confirmed that Anna had been sexually assaulted, but
the detail that completely obliterates the suicide theory, and the
detail that would eventually define this entire panic. Is the
bathrobe belt itself right?
Speaker 1: How it was used?
Speaker 2: Yes, it wasn't just utilized as a simple ligature. It
was tied under her chin in a very deliberate, perfectly symmetrical.
Speaker 1: Bow, A bow like a gift a bow.
Speaker 2: And you know you do not tie a decorative knot
when you were in the desperate, agonizing throes of taking
your own life.
Speaker 1: Obviously not.
Speaker 2: That is an external signature. That is a killer leaving
a deliberate, highly personalized mark on the scene.
Speaker 1: It's so twisted it is, and it.
Speaker 2: Brings up this really fascinating criminological debate about methodology among
the experts we research. Why use the victim's own clothing?
Why the bathrobe belt instead of bringing I don't know,
a groat to a rope.
Speaker 1: See, I'm actually stuck on that too. If this killer
is confident enough to meticulously stage your body and tie
a decorative bow, why risk relying on finding a weapon
in the apartment?
Speaker 2: That's a great question.
Speaker 1: Doesn't relying on a weapon of opportunity suggest this wasn't
really premeditated, Like maybe it was just a burglary that
escalated into a panic.
Speaker 2: So that is a brilliant pushback, and it's exactly what
the initial detective is likely debated in that room. Yeah,
because in behavioral analysis, using a weapon of opportunity often
does point to an impulsive, disorganized.
Speaker 1: Crime, right, like a crime of passion or a break in.
Speaker 2: Gone wrong exactly. However, the application of the weapon here
totally changes the math. How so, Well, yes, he used
what was available, but manual or ligature strangulation is an
incredibly intimate, physically demanding way.
Speaker 1: To kill someone takes a lot of strength.
Speaker 2: It takes strength, and it takes minutes of sustained effort
to do that, and then take the time to fashion
a bow. Displays a terrifying level of psychological control and
expressive violence. Yeah, it's not a panicked burglar. It's an
offender who is so utterly confident in his physical dominance
that he doesn't need to bring a weapon. He knows
he can subdue her with literally whatever is lying around.
Speaker 1: That level of arrogance is just chilling, and it perfectly
sets up the locker room mystery element of this case,
which is wild.
Speaker 2: Oh, the locker room aspect.
Speaker 1: Is baffling because the forensics yielded absolute nothing. There were
no foreign fingerprints. The neighbors in the adjoining apartments heard
absolutely no struggle, no screams, nothing at all. And most importantly,
there was zero sign of forced entry. The lock wasn't picked,
the door wasn't jimmied, no windows were broken. It's like
the ultimate trojan horse scenario.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect way to put it.
Speaker 1: I mean, the scariest monster isn't the one shattering your
glass in the dead of night. It's the one you
willingly invite into your home for tea.
Speaker 2: It fundamentally subverts the entire architecture of domestic security. Yes,
think about it. The door is our primary boundary against
the chaos of the outside world. But what happens when
the threat knows the exact social script required to make
you open that boundary yourself?
Speaker 1: It makes you question everything. Yeah, but at this specific moment,
right in mid June nineteen sixty two, the Boston Belize
don't know they have a serial predator yet.
Speaker 2: No, they just think it's a tragic anomaly exactly.
Speaker 1: They just have this one deeply weird, incredibly strange murder.
Weeks pass, the trail goes cold.
Speaker 2: Until it doesn't.
Speaker 1: Right then, the killer loudly announces that Annis Lezar's was
not a one.
Speaker 2: Off event, because a single bizarre murder is an isolated tragedy.
But the moment the highly specific, impossible circumstances of that
crime repeat themselves, the entire investigative paradigm shifts.
Speaker 1: And this pattern really solidifies during one of the most
punishing heat waves in Boston's history, which adds such a
crazy layer to the story.
Speaker 2: Oh, the environmental factor is huge here.
Speaker 1: Let's really place ourselves in that ronment for a second.
It's late June. It is a sweltering, oppressive Boston summer.
We're talking about the early nineteen sixties, long before central
air conditioning was like a standard utility in every apartment.
Speaker 2: He basically had fans and open windows if you were lucky.
Speaker 1: Exactly the physical reality of living in a brick apartment
building in the back bay during a heat wave means
you desperately need to leave your windows open to catch
any kind of crossberries.
Speaker 2: Otherwise you're basically in an oven.
Speaker 1: Right But suddenly, as rumors of a killer start to circulate,
there is a very real paralyzing fear of doing exactly that.
Speaker 2: It creates this absolute pressure cooker environment. The residents of
Boston are essentially trapped baking in the heat of their
own locked apartments because of the alternative feels like an
open invitation to a phantom.
Speaker 1: It's awful.
Speaker 2: The physical discomfort really amplifies the psychological terror.
Speaker 1: And right in the middle of this awful heat wave,
we look at the case of Mina Nichols. She's a
sixty eight year old retired psychotherapist.
Speaker 2: And just trying to go about her yeah.
Speaker 1: To escape the stifling heat of her apartment, she decides
to go shopping for the afternoon, and according to the
timeline meticulously laid out by researcher Sammy, she returns home
around five zero zero zero pm and begins getting ready
for a planned dinner at her sister's house.
Speaker 2: But seven point thirty pm rolls around and Nina hasn't
shown up right, and here we see that exact same
ripple effect of anxiety that we saw with jurisalizers earlier.
The sister calls, gets no answer, the panic escalates.
Speaker 1: It's that same building.
Speaker 2: Driss Yes, She drives over, knocks on the door, and
eventually has to track down the building janitor to open
the apartment with a.
Speaker 1: Master key and What the janitor finds is horrifying. Nina
is in her bedroom. She has positioned half on, half
off her bed, and around her neck is a nylon stocking.
Speaker 2: The scene itself is chaotic too. The apartment has been
heavily ransacked.
Speaker 1: Right drawers, pulled out, stuff everywhere.
Speaker 2: Exactly belongings just scattered to a beat. Cop walking in
it immediately reads as a bird glory gone catastrophically.
Speaker 1: Wrong, which would make sense on the surface.
Speaker 2: It would, but criminologist Mike highlights a detail in the
files that completely rewrites the narrative. Her cash is sitting
right there in plain sight.
Speaker 1: Which is the ultimate tail. Right. If you are risking
a breaking and entering charge, let alone a murder charge,
you do not leave the untraceable paper money behind.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the fact that the cash is untouched proves the
motive is completely divorced from financial gain. The ransacking is
actually a behavioral artifact known as staging.
Speaker 1: Okay, wait, I need to jump in here. Usually staging
is done by someone who knows the victim right, typically yes,
like a husband killing his wife and breaking a window
to make it look like an intruder did it just
to throw the cops off his trail. Why would a
random serial killer bothers staging a robbery?
Speaker 2: That is exactly how staging was understood by the FBI
at the time. It was viewed purely as a defensive
countermeasure by a known associate.
Speaker 1: So why do it here?
Speaker 2: Because in this case the staging isn't offensive, it's almost theatrical.
It's the killer actively playing a game with the detectives.
Oh wow, he wants them to briefly think it's a robbery,
only to realize the horrible truth when they look closer
at the victim, because the staging is immediately betrayed by
his own psychological signature.
Speaker 1: The bow again, the.
Speaker 2: Bow, the nylon stocking used to strangle Nina Nichols wasn't
just pulled tight and knotted. It was fashioned into that
exact same grotesque bow.
Speaker 1: It's so dark.
Speaker 2: It takes the murder weapon and transforms it into a
macabre presentation. It suggests the killer who views his victims
not just as targets, but as objects to be arranged
and wrapped.
Speaker 1: And the timeline here is what genuinely breaks my brain
because on that exact same day, the same day, fifteen
miles north of Boston, in the relatively quiet suburb of Lynn.
Police are dispatched to another apartment right Helen Blake, a
sixty five year old divorcee, is found murdered. The methodology
manual strangulation, utilizing and nylon stocking, the signature tied in
a bow, and the entry point absolutely no sign of
forced entry.
Speaker 2: The physical and psychological stamina required to execute this timeline
is staggering, and it completely shatters the existing behavioral models
of that era.
Speaker 1: I mean, I have to stop you there, because how
is that even physically possible? Two manual strangulations in a
single day, separated by fifteen miles of nineteen sixties traffic.
Speaker 2: It's a logistical nightmare, right, And.
Speaker 1: We always hear about serial killers needing a cooling off period.
They commit a horrific act that psychological tension releases, and
they recede into the shadows for weeks or months to decompress.
Speaker 2: You're touching on a fundamental pillar of traditional profiling. The
cooling off period is what distinguishes a serial killer from
a spree killer. But this offender completely defies that. Gravity
strangulation is not like pulling a trigger from across a room.
Speaker 1: No, it's very hands on.
Speaker 2: It requires immense sustained physical exertion. It is exhausting to
complete that act, meticulously staged the scene, tie, the signature bow,
travel fifteen miles, successfully con his way into a second apartment,
and do it all over again in the span of hours.
Speaker 1: It's insane.
Speaker 2: That suggests an offender operating in an absolute fugue state
of adrenaline, or someone whose compulsion is burning so hot
that a cooling off period is just impossible. It is
a level of brazen frenzy that absolutely terrified the profiling community.
Speaker 1: It's like a Category five hurricane. The physics of the
escalation suggests it simply cannot be stopped by normal friction. Right,
and the moment the detectives in Boston and the detectives
and Lin compare notes and they realize the undeniable signature
linking these three women, the lack of forced entry, the
nylon or belt, the decorative bow, the entire weight of
the investigation shifts.
Speaker 2: It transitions from a series of localized tragedies into a
unified existential threat.
Speaker 1: Everyone is on edge.
Speaker 2: Yes, it is the entire Greater Boston area realizing they
are being hunted by a single cohesive entity, and that
realization forces the authorities into a posture of absolute.
Speaker 1: Desperation, and naturally the press gets wind of the bow signature.
Speaker 2: Oh, of course they do.
Speaker 1: You know, the media is going to run with a
detail like that. They officially christened the killer the Boston.
Speaker 2: Strangler, which is just a terrifying moniker.
Speaker 1: Just hearing that name in the daily papers incites mass hysteria.
Hardware stores sell out of dead bolts, locksmiths are working around.
Speaker 2: The clock, people are terrified.
Speaker 1: And the police are standing there empty handed, unable to
find a single connective thread between these victims other than
the grim mechanics of how they died. I mean, they
didn't go to the same church, they didn't shop at
the same stores, they didn't share a milkman.
Speaker 2: Historian John makes a brilliant point about the sociological pressure
of this exact moment. When a killer operates this randomly,
the pressure on the police department ceases to be merely
about solving a homicide.
Speaker 1: What does it become.
Speaker 2: It becomes about restoring the fundamental social contract. Ah the
public feels that the basic agreement of civic life that
you are safe behind your own lock door has been violated.
The police aren't just hunting a man, They're trying to
save the city's sanity.
Speaker 1: Which leads us to Boston Police Commissioner Edmund McNamara. Right.
He is a veteran of the force, but he is
relatively new to the top job. He is watching his
city lose its collective mind, and he decides he has
to take drastic, unprecedented.
Speaker 2: Action, very drastic.
Speaker 1: On July second, he issues a mandate. He takes every
single detective on the Boston Police Department, every single one,
and assigns them exclusively to the Strangler case.
Speaker 2: The logistical shock wave of that decision simply cannot be overstated.
It is an administrative earthquake.
Speaker 1: Let's really gain this out for the listener, because assigning
every detective sounds amazing, and press conference.
Speaker 2: Oh, it sounds fantastic. We are putting one hundred percent
of our resources on this monster, exactly.
Speaker 1: But in practice, it's like trying to fix a delicate
Swiss watch by having fifty people simultaneously poke at the
gears with screwdrivers.
Speaker 2: That's a great analogy.
Speaker 1: More hands do not equal more precision. They just create gridlock.
What happens to the city's other crimes. What happens to
the armed robberies, the auto thefts, the other homicides.
Speaker 2: It fall by the wayside.
Speaker 1: And more importantly, how do you even process that much
information on one case?
Speaker 2: You don't. And that's the ultimate tragedy of McNamara's decision.
It almost certainly caused massive informational gridlock.
Speaker 1: Just too much data, way too much.
Speaker 2: When you have hundreds of detectives independently chasing down thousands
of citizen tips, interviewing witnesses, and typing up physical carbon
copy reports, without a centralized, efficient way to cross reference
that data, you get absolute paralysis.
Speaker 1: Right because there's no digital database exactly.
Speaker 2: Detective A in the North End might interview a suspect
with a green jacket. Meanwhile Detective B in the South
End has a witness who saw a man in a
green jacket. But those two pieces of paper will literally
never meet in the filing cabinet.
Speaker 1: That is so frustrating.
Speaker 2: The sheer volume of raw, unfiltered data comes a weapon
against the investigation itself.
Speaker 1: And the killer clearly recognized that the police were flailing.
Because the strangler continues to strike, and crucially the profile
of the victims begins to shift in a way that
throws absolutely everything.
Speaker 2: Into chaos, a very terrifying shift.
Speaker 1: Up until now, the victims were older women. But in
late November of nineteen sixty three, twenty three year old
Joan Graff, a young industrial designer, is found strangled in
her apartment thirty miles north of Boston.
Speaker 2: A huge change in demographic huge.
Speaker 1: And then just weeks later we arrive at the tragedy
you mentioned in the intro, nineteen year old Mary Sullivan
murdered in the heart of the city on her second
day living in Boston. The scene features the exact same methodology,
the ligature, the strangler's not fashed into a.
Speaker 2: Bow, and that taunting New Year's card wedged between her toes. Yes,
if we look at the shift through the lens of
modern behavioral science, the escalation in victimology is profound. Initially,
the killer strictly targeted older women, and it was fifty five,
Nino was sixty eight, Helen was sixty five. It pery consistent,
but jumping down to a twenty three year old and
a nineteen year old shatters that rigid victim type model.
Usually a highly organized serial offender hones in on a
very specific physical demographic that fulfills a rigid psychological fantasy.
Speaker 1: So what does it mean when they change types so drastically.
Speaker 2: To drastically alter the age demographic suggests an offender who
is either psychologically unraveling or an offender whose compulsion is
driven more by the opportunity of access than by a
strict physical preference.
Speaker 1: And that New Year's card. I just cannot shake the
image of that card. It is so arrogant. It's not
just a killing, it's a performance.
Speaker 2: It is a direct, unilateral dialogue. It is a brazen
display of a god complex. Yeah, the killer is fully
aware that literally every detective in the city of Boston
is looking for him, and yet he feels so supremely confident,
so untouchable, that he lingers at the crime scene to
arrange a prop specifically to mock them.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable.
Speaker 2: He's telling the police, I own this city and you
were powerless.
Speaker 1: And honestly, at that point he was kind of right.
The Boston Police Department is drowning in carbon copy reports,
the public panic is causing economic and social disruption, and
the murders are continuing.
Speaker 2: Things were bleak, very bleak.
Speaker 1: Eventually, a higher power has to step in. The floundering
at the local level has to be stopped, and this
necessity leads to a revolutionary and incredibly fraught shift in
the history of American policing.
Speaker 2: Because the state government realizes it can no longer just
stand by while the city fails. Two weeks after Mary
Sullivan's murder, Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke invokes his authority
and legally strips the case away from the Boston Police Department.
Speaker 1: Wow, we have to unpack the historical and sociological weight
of this move because context is everything here, it really is.
Attorney General Book is a brilliant legal mind, and he
is also an African American man, a black Republican in fact,
stepping in to take direct authority over the box and
Police Department in the early nineteen.
Speaker 2: Sixth which was a massive deal.
Speaker 1: Massive sources note that the BPD at the time was
predominantly white, fiercely Irish, Catholic, highly insulurt, and notoriously proud.
The racial and political friction of that takeover must have
been absolutely blinding.
Speaker 2: Oh. It was a tectonic clash of cultures. The Boston
Police Department viewed themselves as the absolute sovereign authority on
their own streets. To have the state government step in
and declare them incompetent is inherently insulting to them. But
Brooke compounds that institutional insult by how he structures his
new command. He doesn't just put state police brass in charge.
He brings in civilians.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Brook assigns the day to day operation of the case
to his trusted friend from law school, assistant US attorney
John Bottomly, and.
Speaker 2: Bottomly brings a completely different mindset.
Speaker 1: He really does. Bottomly looks at the situation and decides
they don't need more cops, they need different brains. So
he builds a task force comprised of psychiatrists, forensic academics, sociologists,
and outside researchers.
Speaker 2: Imagine the reaction in those precinct houses.
Speaker 1: Oh, we must have lost their minds completely.
Speaker 2: To the veteran Boston police detectives, who prided themselves on
traditional shoe leather detective work, hitting the pavement, shaking down informants,
trusting their gut, bringing in a panel of academics with
elbow patches to theorize about the killer's mother complex felt
like a massive slap in the face.
Speaker 1: Right you thought it was useless.
Speaker 2: It was viewed as academic elitism, encroaching on the gritty
reality of blood and God's police work.
Speaker 1: But John Bottomley had a vision that went far beyond
psychiatric profiling. And this is the part of the research
that absolutely fascinates.
Speaker 2: Me, the technological leap.
Speaker 1: Yes, Bottomly walks into the command center and looks at
the literal mountains of unorganized paper, thousands of suspect interviews,
witness statements, alibis, and he realizes that human cognition simply
cannot process the data fast enough.
Speaker 2: It's mathematically impossible for a human right.
Speaker 1: So he introduces early computer science to the hunt is.
Speaker 2: An absolute watershed moment. It is the genesis of modern
cyber policing and data driven profiling.
Speaker 1: So cool.
Speaker 2: Before Bottomly tracking a serial killer meant pinning index cards
to corkboards and connecting them with red string, Bottomley decides
to take every single piece of evidence, every variable, and
feed it into a machine to mathematically hunt for correlations.
Speaker 1: I really want you, the listener, to visualize what this means.
In nineteen sixty four, we aren't talking about opening an
Excel spreadsheet on a laptop.
Speaker 2: Not even close.
Speaker 1: We are talking about giant, room sized mainframe computers that
have less processing power than a modern musical greeting card.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They were massive and incredibly slow by today's standards.
Speaker 1: They used IBM punch cards, so if a suspect was
left handed, a researcher literally punched whole number forty two
on a cardboard card. If the suspect owned a green jacket,
they punched whole seventeen.
Speaker 2: It was so manual, very manual.
Speaker 1: They would load thousands of these cards into the mainframe,
which would run them through physical light sensors. If the
light sh shine through both holes simultaneously, the machine dropped
the card and boom, you had assess book it was
left handed with a green jacket.
Speaker 2: It was agonizingly tedious work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it allowed them to cross reference data points
at a speed that human eyes just couldn't match.
Speaker 2: And it forced law enforcement to undergo a massive paradigm shift.
They had to stop looking at crimes merely as isolated
physical events and start looking at them as data.
Speaker 1: Sets right, seeing the matrix exactly if.
Speaker 2: An offender operates within a pattern, a computer using boolean
logic is infinitely better equipped to recognize the mathematical structure
of that pattern than a tired detective on our forty
of a shift.
Speaker 1: But okay, I have to play devil's advocate here, Oh,
for it was the Boston PD's resistance to this purely
driven by bruised egos and racism? Or did they have
a valid philosophical point?
Speaker 2: That's a really fair question.
Speaker 1: Like are we sure the computer actually helped or did
it just create a false sense of mathematical certainty? Does
a giant calculating machine actually translate to the chaotic reality
of the streets.
Speaker 2: It's a deeply nuanced conflict. The ego and cultural resistance
were undeniably massive factors, but their philosophical objection was not
entirely baseless. Okay, how so, well, a mainframe computer can
efficiently tell you that eighty percent of the attacks happened
on a Tuesday. A psychiatrist on the task force can
theorize that the killer has deep seated misogyny stemming from childhood. Sure,
but neither of those abstract conclusions physically puts handcuffs on
a suspect.
Speaker 1: Right, That makes sense?
Speaker 2: The beat cops felt that while Bottomley's high tech task
force was busy chasing a theoretical phantom inside a machine,
they were completely losing touch with the physical reality of
the city.
Speaker 1: And the darkest irony of this entire saga is that
the beat cops were right.
Speaker 2: They absolutely were.
Speaker 1: While the high tech task force is busy feeding cardboard
punch cards into a mainframe trying to build a digital
profile of the strangler, a very tangible, physical predator is
literally walking right through the front doors of Boston apartments
in broad daylight.
Speaker 2: Exactly while the entire city's focus and all the media
oxygen is consumed by the strangler, a parallel string of
horrifying crimes is occurring right under their noses.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying.
Speaker 2: A rash of brutal sexual assaults is sweeping the Boston area,
where crucially the victims are not murdered.
Speaker 1: And the modus operande this guy uses is the skeleton
key that completely solves the locker room mystery from the
sluzzer's case and all the others.
Speaker 2: Yes, the handyman ruse.
Speaker 1: Surviving victims are reporting a nearly identical scenario. A man
comes to their door in the middle of the day.
He's dressed casually, bit cleanly in greenwork clothes, and he
claims to be a handyman sent by the building's landlord
or management company.
Speaker 2: It's a con, a brilliantly simple, devastatingly effective social con.
Speaker 1: It really is the weaponization of trust. In one of
the attacks, a woman opens her door to a man
in a green uniform who says he's there to inspect
a leaky pipe in the bathroom. Right, that's him in
He follows her to the bathroom, physically assaults her, and
then flees the apartment. It's horrible, but here is where
his hubris finally catches up with him. A few days later,
this exact same man knocks on the door of another
apartment building, but this time the woman on the other
side of the door refuses to unchain it.
Speaker 2: She trusts her gut.
Speaker 1: She does. She tells him to go away. He gets
visibly frustrated. He storms out of the building, and because
he's operating in the middle of the day and causing
a scene, he is spotted by half a dozen different
witnesses on the street, and.
Speaker 2: Those witnesses provide a description sharp enough that local police
are finally able to identify and apprehend a thirty three
year old factory worker named Albert DeSalvo.
Speaker 1: Finally a break.
Speaker 2: Yes, they bring him into the precincts solely for questioning
regarding these green men sexual assaults.
Speaker 1: We really need to pause and examine the terrifying psychology
of his entry method, though, because it affects every single
one of us.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, it's universally applicable.
Speaker 1: He exploited our fundamental reliance on cognitive shortcuts. If someone
knocks on your door wearing a utility uniform and speaks
with the bored authority of someone just doing their job,
like management sent me to check the radiators, our default
societal setting is compliance.
Speaker 2: We're conditioned to cooperate.
Speaker 1: We want to be polite. We want our radiators fixed.
Think about the last time a maintenance worker knocked on
your door. You probably let them in without a second thought.
I know I have that innate neighborly trust. Is exactly
what this predator hijacked.
Speaker 2: He understood that perceived authority and utility override caution. And
consider the psychological fallout for the city once this method
became public. Oh, the paranoia, exactly what happens to the
fabric of a community. When the incredibly mundane act of
answering your door at two twenty zero pm on a
Tuesday becomes a life or.
Speaker 1: Death gamble, it ruins everything.
Speaker 2: It introduces a permanent paranoia into the domestic space. You
can no longer trust your own eyes. A uniform is
no longer a symbol of help. It's a potential thing.
Speaker 1: But here is the massive, glaring contradiction that throws the
entire narrative into a.
Speaker 2: Spin, the behavioral anomaly.
Speaker 1: Right researcher in Italia points it out beautifully in her
analysis the case files. DeSalvo is captured and identified as
the green Man rapist, but the high tech task force
immediately starts wondering could the green Man also be our
Boston strangler.
Speaker 2: It's a natural leap for them to make.
Speaker 1: But if he is, it raises a massive red flag.
Why would a ruthless, organized serial killer who is already
brutally murdered over a dozen women suddenly start leaving his
victims alive?
Speaker 2: That is the great anomaly that continues to fuel debate today.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2: In behavioral science and predatory profiling, violent offenders operate on
a curve of escalation. They might start with voyeurism, graduate
to sexual assault, and eventually across the threshold into murder.
As they require increasingly extreme stimuli to satisfy their compulsion.
Speaker 1: They escalate. They don't dial it back exactly.
Speaker 2: For an offender to routinely murder, to take the time
to pose the bodies and tie decorative bows and then
suddenly de escalate back to mirror assaults and intentionally leave
living witnesses who can identify him, it completely contradicts the
established laws of predatory behavioral evolution.
Speaker 1: It's like a Category five hurricane suddenly deciding it just
wants to fly a kite.
Speaker 2: That's exactly it.
Speaker 1: The physics of the psychological momentum just don't allow for it.
But what if the murders were just accidents, like he
only meant to assault them but things got out of hand.
Speaker 2: That theory was floated at the time, actually, but it
falls apart when you look at the crime scenes because
of the boat, because of the bow. An accidental panic
strangulation during an assault is frantic and messy, right, Taking
the time to fashion a symmetrical bow under the victim's
chin requires post mortem time and deliberate, calm intent. The
murders weren't accidents. They were the goal wow, which makes
the sudden shift to leaving the green man victims alive
so baffling.
Speaker 1: Baffling or not Capturing the man in the green uniform
was one thing. But when John Bottomley and the psychiatrist
started digging into Albert Disselbo's past to see if he
possessed the specific terrifying architecture required to be the strangler,
they uncovered a history of trauma that shocked even the
most hardened experts on the task force.
Speaker 2: Dissalvo is transferred to Bridgewater State Hospital for a comprehensive
psychiatric evaluation, and the deeper the psychiatrists probe into his
formative years, the more the pieces of a classic, albeit
horrifying behavioral puzzles start to walk into place.
Speaker 1: The abuse in his childhood is staggering. It's difficult to
even read the transcripts.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly dark.
Speaker 1: During these evaluations, it comes out that Dissalvo was viciously,
repeatedly beaten by his father. He vividly recalled witnessing his
father break his mother's fingers one by one, just horrifying
and most disturbingly, he claimed his father would frequently bring
prostitutes into their small home and violently have sex with
them right in front of the children.
Speaker 2: If we evaluate that through the lens of modern criminal psychology,
severe compounding childhood trauma is an incredibly common foundation in
the profiles of violent sexual offenders.
Speaker 1: It lays the groundwork.
Speaker 2: It does witnessing extreme domestic violence, specifically violence perpetrated by
a patriarchal figure, severely fractures the developing psyche. It teaches
the child that physical violence is the primary currency of control, and,
in Dssalvo's specific case, witnessing his father abuse sex workers
intrinsically linked violence, degradation, and sexual arousal. In his formative
neural pathways, he was taught that sex and violence are
completely inseparable.
Speaker 1: Bottomly sensing, he finally has his man steps in and
personally conducts the grueling series of intensive interviews with the
Salvo at Bridgewater.
Speaker 2: He really zeros in on him now.
Speaker 1: At first, DeSalvo is surprisingly candid about his life as
a criminal. He freely admits to hundreds, literally hundreds of
break ins and sexual assaults operating as the Green Man.
Speaker 2: He was very open about those.
Speaker 1: But when Bottomly pushes him on the murders, DeSalvo vehemently
denies killing anyone.
Speaker 2: But during the standoff, a very interesting, highly circumstantial piece
of data emerges.
Speaker 1: Oh, I know where you're going with this.
Speaker 2: While Albert DiSalvo is locked securely inside the walls of
Bridgewater State Hospital, the strangulations completely stop.
Speaker 1: Just abruptly end.
Speaker 2: The phantom disappears. No other women in Boston are killed in.
Speaker 1: That manner, which is exactly the kind of circumstantial coincidence
that makes desperate police departments and terrified politicians very, very hopeful.
Speaker 2: Oh they were thrilled.
Speaker 1: The public finally starts to sleep a little better, But
the prosecutors know they can't take a timeline pause to
a jury.
Speaker 2: They need more, They need a confession.
Speaker 1: And then, in the summer of nineteen sixty six, the
dam finally breaks. During another session with Bottomley, DiSalvo suddenly confesses.
Speaker 2: And it isn't just a partial confession. He confesses to
the eleven known canonical Boston strangler murders.
Speaker 1: But then he goes even further right.
Speaker 2: He does, he provides a stunning surplus. He confesses to
to two additional previously unsolved killings that the police hadn't
even definitively linked to the Strangler yet the murder of
eighty year old Mary Mullen in June of sixty two
and sixty nine year old Mary Brown in March of
sixty three. Wow, he delivers a perfectly tidy confession to
a total of thirteen murders.
Speaker 1: I have to push back on this narrative, though, Okay,
what are you thinking. We talked extensively about his horrific
childhood trauma and how it wired him for violence. But
does severe trauma guarantee a monster has made or does
it just set the stage? That's the big question, because
from where I'm sitting looking at the historical record, this sudden,
sweeping confession to bottomly feels incredibly, I don't know, convenient.
Speaker 2: You are hitting on the crux of the entire historical
and legal debate surrounding the Boston Strangler. Yes, trauma sets
the stage. It absolutely does not guarantee the outcome. Millions
of people suffer unimaginable abuse and never emit a single crime, right.
But your instinct about the convenience of confession is exactly
why this case remains so ferly debated among experts today
because here is the massive, unavoidable, glaring red flag.
Speaker 1: What is it?
Speaker 2: Despite this incredibly detailed, sweeping confession to thirteen murders, there
was absolutely zero physical evidence that conclusively linked Albert DiSalvo
to the strangler crime scenes.
Speaker 1: Wait, nothing, not a single fingerprint.
Speaker 2: Nothing. Obviously we are in the pre DNA era, but
there were no definitive blood typing matches, no fibers, no
shoe prints, no fingerprints that placed him in those rooms.
Speaker 1: That is wild.
Speaker 2: The entire foundation of the case was his word to
John Bottomley.
Speaker 1: And yet Bottomly and the task force decide that his
word is enough.
Speaker 2: They took a win.
Speaker 1: They have the confession. The computer models don't matter anymore.
They officially announced to the press that the Boston Strangler
has finally been.
Speaker 2: Caught, and the city just exhales.
Speaker 1: The city throws a collective parade, the hardware stores stops
selling out of dead bolts. The long suffocating nightmare is
declared over. But was it really?
Speaker 2: This is where we have to ask you, the listener,
to consider the deeply flawed nature of the Justice Sister's
reliance on confessions, especially in the era before forensic science
could definitively corroborate them.
Speaker 1: Right, because people confess to things they didn't do all
the time.
Speaker 2: Exactly. We know today, through the exhaustive work of organizations
like the Innocence Project, that false confessions are shockingly, terrifyingly common.
Speaker 1: Why do they happen?
Speaker 2: They can be coerced through exhaustion, or they can be
willingly offered by a deeply mentally unwell individual who is
seeking infamy, attention, or maybe even just better living conditions and.
Speaker 1: Custody and DISSALVL was undeniably mentally unwell. The transcripts show
he absolutely reveled in the attention he was getting from
Bottomley and this team of prestigious psychiatrists.
Speaker 2: He loved the spotlight.
Speaker 1: He was a nobody factory worker who suddenly had the
most powerful men in the state hanging on his every word.
Speaker 2: Exactly, you have a highly suggestible, deeply traumatized man with
a documented history of sexual violence, who clearly enjoys being the.
Speaker 1: Center of a t It's a dangerous mix.
Speaker 2: Combine that volatile psychology with a police force, an attorney general,
and a political establishment that are all absolutely desperate for closure.
To save their careers and calm the public. It is
a perfect recipe for a profoundly flawed resolution.
Speaker 1: Did bottomly intentionally feed him details of the crime scenes
to secure the confession?
Speaker 2: Many historians suspect he did even subconsciously.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly unsettling when you step back and look at
the massive scope of what we've unpacked today on thrilling threads.
Speaker 2: It really is a massive story.
Speaker 1: We started this analysis looking at the jarring, innocent visual
of fresh baked muffins in anislauser's apartment, completely contradicting the
violence around it.
Speaker 2: Such a haunting image.
Speaker 1: We moved through the sweltering, oppressive, claustrophobic panic of the
nineteen sixty two heat wave. We saw the revolutionary, albeit
incredibly clunky, introduction of mainframe computers and punch cards to
law enforcement to hunt a digital phantom.
Speaker 2: Which changed policing forever.
Speaker 1: And we confronted the chilling reality of the handymail ruse,
the predator who bypassed every lock simply by asking nicely.
Speaker 2: We covered massive ground today, tracking the painful evolution of
investigative methodology alongside the darkest, most fractured corners of behavioral psychology.
Speaker 1: But we are left with a haunting consideration that is
simply not fully resolved by the historical record we examined.
Speaker 2: No, it's still an open question in many ways, in.
Speaker 1: A case that was ultimately built entirely on a verbal
confession with absolutely zero physical evidence linking the suspect to
the dead, and knowing that Albert Dissolvo left his later
green Man victims alive, which devised everything we know about
how serial killers evolve. Did the high tech, computer driven
task force truly catch the Boston Strangler or.
Speaker 2: Did they simply lock away a very bad, very damaged
rapist who was willing to wear the terrifying mask of
the strangler just to give a panic city its peace
of mind.
Speaker 1: That is the million dollar question, and that.
Speaker 2: Leaves us with one final, broader reality to consider. Regardless
of whether Dissolvo acted alone or if the real strangler
slipped away, the legacy of this case fundamentally altered the
architecture of American society. Also before nineteen sixty two, the
concept of a woman living alone in a city apartment
was becoming a symbol of newfound independence. The Strangler case
weaponized that independence. It ushered in the era of the
dead bolt, the peopole, and the chainlock. Wow, it permanently
changed how we build our apartments and how we view
our neighbors. The strangler didn't just kill women. He killed
a very specific era of urban innocence.
Speaker 1: The architecture of paranoia that is incredibly profound. It really
makes you look at your own front door differently.
Speaker 2: It definitely does.
Speaker 1: What do you think about today's discussion? Does the psychological
profile of Disalvo's trauma and the sheer volume of his
confession convinces that he was the sole monster haunting Boston?
Or do the glaring inconsistencies like the lack of physical
evidence the impossible de escalation of violence suggests the real
strangler might have vanished into history while everyone was busy
staring at the green.
Speaker 2: Mant to ponder it is.
Speaker 1: Drop your theories in the comments. We really want to
know where you stand on this. Thanks for joining us
on today's thrilling threads. Catch you next time.