He handed me the sealed envelope with my name typed on the front in small letters in a familiar font — familiar because it was the same size and font as the type on the envelope that contained Jill Dawson’s driver’s license four days before.
Four days. Seemed like four weeks, or four months, a veritable lifetime ago. You’re going to help me get the word out or other women will die. The Phantom Fiend. That’s what he wrote at the time, and I still wasn’t sure what he meant. The only thing I was sure about was that other women had died, and more women were undoubtedly about to. As a matter of fact, I was probably holding either a death sentence or a perverted death certificate in my very hand. What the “word” was, how I was supposed to help get it out, whether I could help, these were the things I didn’t know.
Until now.
We were walking into the newsroom, toward my desk. Edgar said, “Do you want me to stay with you while you open it?” He nodded toward the envelope as he spoke. “You know, could be anthrax or some other chemical.”
“Not his style, if this is even from him,” I answered. “Give me a moment with it.” He peeled off. I made my way through the maze of desks in the busy newsroom at the start of another news cycle.
Once I settled in, Martin, of course, arrived in about three nanoseconds with a whirl of questions, expectations, and instructions. I asked him to give me a minute, perhaps not as politely as I might have. Oddly enough, without questioning me, he did, and walked away.
I carefully opened the envelope with a painfully familiar sense of dread. Another correspondence, another dead woman, whether it be Jill Dawson or Lauren Hutchens or Kimberly May. Maybe I should have been invigorated to be injected this far into the biggest unfolding story in the country, but what I really felt was a gloomy sense of futility, and the worst thing a reporter can feel is futile, even if we so often are. I heard about each of these women after they were no longer alive. My reporting only brought bad news. My published words could do nothing to help them. I could only carry the distant hope that I might be bringing a sense of caution to those who would — or perhaps wouldn’t — be next.
I reached into the envelope and felt a single sheet of paper, but nothing else — meaning no disc that would show a dead woman’s body splayed out in her apartment, no driver’s license to lead us to the next victim. The sheet was folded over once. I opened it up and looked at it warily.
“Dear Mr. Flynn,” it began, again in that same printed font. “It is well known that no one was ever charged or convicted of any of the killings attributed to the Boston Strangler. What is less well known, except among a small group of experts, is that the real Boston Strangler is alive, well, and killing again today. I am the Boston Strangler. The authorities have it as wrong now as they did in 1965. You should ask them why. The answer, should they choose to give it, will be of enormous public interest.
“I will kill again, soon. If you don’t print this note, verbatim, above the fold on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper, I will double the pace of my killing. Blood will be on your hands.
“The Phantom Fiend, also known as, The Boston Strangler.”
Okay, a couple of things are worth noting here, the first, and perhaps most obvious, is that we had a grammatically correct killer on the loose in Boston. I mean, good God, I didn’t write English as elegant as my cold-blooded correspondent, and I wrote for a living. It was as if he was writing a thank-you note to the queen.
That aside, three bodies later, he finally got around to answering the question of what he wanted from me: fame. He wanted to be on center stage in Boston, and he wanted my newspaper, the Record, to put him there. He wanted to intrigue the city with his words and hold it captive with his vicious actions. He wanted to play me. In turn, he wanted the newspaper to play its readership. He wanted me to be involved at the dead — pardon the pun — center of this story in a way reporters usually aren’t. He wanted my newspaper to do things newspapers usually don’t, in the name of a person who doesn’t do what normal people do, which is kill multiple women.
This, in short, was not a good state of affairs.
I reread the note. One hand was shadowing my eyes, while my other hand held the single sheet of paper. That hand, I realized, was trembling. He was short, firm, to the point. Maybe he was like that in real life. Lines kept jumping off the page at me — I am the Boston Strangler…You should ask them why…I will kill again, soon…I will double the pace of my killing…Blood will be on your hands.
I had Bob Walters, the former Boston Police detective at the head of the old Strangler investigation, telling me that DeSalvo was the wrong guy. Unfortunately, he was very recently deceased. I had the current killer of three women — and counting — telling me DeSalvo was the wrong guy. Unfortunately, neither was available for questions, Walters never again, and my correspondent not for the moment.
On the other side of the ledger, it was starting to seem like all the lead people who had implicated DeSalvo in the Strangler case had benefited enormously from their actions in the investigation — most notably Hal Harrison, the detective who became police commissioner and was now vying to be mayor, and Stu Callaghan, the former Massachusetts attorney general who went on to win a seat in the United States Senate.
The authorities have it as wrong now as they did in 1965. You should ask them why.
This implies that authorities knew they had it wrong some forty-plus years ago, and know they have it wrong again. My head hurt, not from too much information, but from a lack of it. What I needed were some answers from people who either weren’t shooting straight or weren’t around to speak.
“All right, long enough. What did it say? Is this going to carry the day for us tomorrow?”
That was Martin, reappearing at my desk, a bundle of nervousness and personality quirks. He was scratching at his forehead. He was tapping what looked like his Buster Brown shoes against the bottom drawer of my desk, and not in any particular rhythm. His right eye seemed to be twitching. Forget that Zen zone he would often enter. He looked like Nomar Garciaparra stepping up to the plate.
I merely shook my head in response and handed him the note to read himself, which he did, first fast, and then a second time slowly, all the while standing over me. What I was coming to learn about Martin, perhaps later than I should have, was that it was never news that made him nervous, but the lack of it. News he can handle. News he can revel in, shape, edit, then publish. It’s not having news, not having information, not having something that the competition doesn’t that makes him near crazy. For this, he will always have my respect.
“What the fuck,” he said, but he said it in a tone that betrayed an enjoyment of the decision that was to come, that decision being whether to publish the Phantom Fiend’s words, verbatim. Then he added, “Any idea if he’s sent this to any other media outlets?”
“My best read is that he’s still dealing exclusively with us. He sent me a text message on my cell phone earlier this morning saying pretty much the same thing.”
“I don’t even know how to send a text message,” Martin said. “Then again, I don’t know how to strangle a woman, either.”