The Boston Stranglers (32 page)

Two cups of stale coffee were found in Patricia's apartment after her murder.

Rothman's description to Billy of Patricia's appearance was grossly exaggerated. The dead woman's eyes were closed, as was her mouth, and she appeared to be asleep. The blankets on the bed were pulled to her chin.

“Now, Billy,” Martin said. “Will you please tell me in your own words what further conversation you had with Jules Rothman after the homicide?”

Billy told Martin that Rothman had expressed to her just how much Patricia had meant to him. “Well, at first he started telling me that she was like a daughter to him, and then as he got more use to talking to me, he started telling me about them going out together and going different places and about the time they went up to her mother's.” According to Rothman, his sons had treated Patricia like a sister, and she had often come to the family home for dinner.

Rothman had also given Patricia paintings to hang in her apartment, and he and Sheldon Kurtzer had given her a television set.

Billy told Martin that Rothman complained to her of the aridity and isolation of his existence, and of the hole Patricia's death had made in his life.

Martin asked Billy to elaborate on the theme of Rothman's loneliness.

“Well,” Billy replied, “after Pat died he had some trips to take. One of them was up to New Hampshire, and he asked me if I wanted to go with him.” Billy refused, on the grounds that her father was hospitalized with a serious illness. “Why don't you take your wife with you?” she asked, perhaps ingenuously.

“My wife never goes anywhere with me, and you know these trips are long lonesome trips and I don't like going by myself,” Rothman had answered. “I thought maybe if you didn't have anything to do you could come with me.”

Billy told Martin that “this went on all the time after Pat died,” and that Rothman “had nothing to do with himself so he had to get someone to take Pat's place.”

“Did he ever put his hands on you, Billy, in fondness?” Martin asked.

“Well, like holding my hands, he has,” Billy replied.

“And rubbing my shoulders and coming up behind me, you know. He didn't do anything fresh to me or anything.”

“No?” Martin asked, possibly surprised by this uncharacteristic restraint.

“I didn't even like the idea of him having his hands on me either,” Billy said.

Martin wanted to know if Rothman had ever propositioned her. She said he hadn't, although she and he had certainly held a number of “crazy conversations.”

A Boston homicide detective had asked Billy to furnish him with Patricia's personnel folder. When she went to look for it in the file, it was missing. She later found it in Rothman's desk, under a pile of papers. She also found there seven or eight black and white photographs of Patricia and Rothman.

Billy and Rothman were the only two people in the company who had access to the personnel files.

Martin wanted to know how Rothman had behaved after the homicide detectives had initially questioned Billy.

Billy told Martin that the young woman who had replaced Patricia after the latter's death had been hired from another firm in the building. Prior to this, though, the woman and some of her male coworkers had joined Rothman and Patricia for after-hours parties in the Engineering Systems offices. “They had a refrigerator there with vodka and scotch and rye and all types of things.” The young woman's mother did not want her working for Engineering Systems, Billy reported, and had finally sent her to Europe to get her out of the place. “I think she knows a lot more than she's telling anybody about,” Billy concluded darkly.

Rothman had retained an attorney right after Patricia's murder because, he told Billy, he and one of his sons were suspects in the case. He had also refused to take any phone calls, business or personal, at the office. He had them transferred to his home number, and his wife would answer and take messages.

Martin asked Billy again about Rothman's invitations to her to accompany him on trips.

“He told me he wanted to take me up to New Hampshire,” Billy replied. “To paint my picture under the trees, in a peasant outfit, and all those things. And he asked me if I'd go on a business trip with him, because he was lonesome on the road and he didn't like to be alone. And I said to him, so why don't you take your wife with you, and he said his wife didn't go anywhere with him ... and he was always alone, by himself, and that he was lonely. And, he said, Pat used to take up a lot of his lonely hours.”

Martin asked Billy why she had ultimately quit her job at the engineering firm. Did it have anything to do with Rothman?

“I was afraid of him,” she said.

“Thank you very much,” Martin replied.

The exact time of Patricia's death was never accurately established, and the more information detectives gathered in the course of the two-and-a-half-year investigation, the more complicated the issue of time became. On April 28, 1965, Phillip DiNatale interviewed a close friend of Patricia, Jacqueline Johnson. The story Jackie told was a puzzling and disturbing one.

On Sunday, December 30, 1962, Jackie, an employee of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Clinic, left work a little after three in the afternoon. Her destination was Patricia's apartment, and she arrived there around 4:00. She knocked at Patricia's door and got no answer, so she crossed the hall and knocked on the door of Apartment 1. In response to the question she asked through the closed door—did anyone know if Patricia was home?—the young woman who lived in 1 could only tell Jackie that Patricia lived in Apartment 2. Jackie returned to the other door. This time, she heard water running in the bathroom. She knew it was the bathroom because she was familiar with the layout of Patricia's apartment from previous visits and was aware that the bathroom was on the building hallway side of the flat. She stood there for about ten minutes, listening to the water gush. She heard Patricia's telephone ring and go unanswered. Five minutes later she left the building, crossed the street to the Evans drugstore, and called Patricia from the pay phone. She got no response. She went back to the building and knocked a few more times on the door of Apartment 2. No one answered.

Jackie wrote two notes, one of which she slipped under the door and the other put on it. She hesitated a few minutes. Then she went home.

There is no indication in the police report of whether Patricia was expecting a visit from Jackie that Sunday afternoon, although Jackie's actions seemed to indicate that she hadn't simply dropped in casually.

Jackie also told DiNatale that she'd been a guest at Patricia's tree-trimming party on Friday, December 19, and that Patricia had introduced her to John Melin and Jules Rothman. (Melin had told DiNatale that the last time he'd spoken to Patricia had been December 18, although he did of course admit attending the party. This confusion about dates is compounded by the fact that other people thought that the tree-trimming party had been held on either December 15 or 16. The date of December 19 that Jackie cited seems most reasonable in view that December 19 was a Friday, a more appropriate time to throw a party than midweek.)

Jackie, who like Patricia and John Melin was a Ver-Melinr, knew that John was married. She told DiNatale, however, that she didn't think that Patricia was aware of this. She was also surprised to learn that Patricia had been making wedding plans; she told DiNatale that Patricia, whom she visited at least once a week, had never mentioned them to her.

Jackie's story, which is extremely specific in its details, bumps up against that told by the waitress at the drugstore who claimed to have seen Patricia having a snack at the soda foundation, in the company of a dark-complexioned, foreign-accented man, at 4:30 Sunday afternoon.

The waitress's story is supported to some extent by Billy MacKenzie, who in her interview with Leo Martin said of Patricia that “she told me about meeting an Indian in the drug store across the street from her house, but she told me that she talked to him in the drug store and they were just friends. It wasn't anyone she went out with.”

Patricia was also friendly with some Nigerian students, degree candidates at MIT, who lived in her building, and had gone to a party given by one of them. According to Billy, Rothman had not approved of Patricia socializing with nonwhites.

If, on late Sunday afternoon, Patricia had been having coffee or tea in the drugstore at the time the waitress gave, would not Jackie have seen her there? Or at least seen her leave her apartment and cross the street to the drugstore? By her own account Jackie had spent at least twenty-five to thirty minutes either knocking at Patricia's door, telephoning her from the drugstore, speaking to Patricia's neighbors, or standing around the first-floor hall of 515 Park Drive.

And who was in Patricia's bathroom running the water, if it wasn't Patricia?

And what significance does this have in connection with the testimony of the resident at 500 Park Drive who told police that she had heard screams between 3:00 and 4:00
P.M.
on that Sunday afternoon?

The note Jackie left on Patricia's door was there when Jules Rothman arrived Monday morning.

And on Sunday evening, the lights had been on in the apartment, according to John Melin.

Christian Van Olst, the sixty-nine-year-old janitor at 509 and 515 Park Drive, told Leo Martin that as far as he knew Patricia was a quiet, friendly, clean-living girl who never threw wild parties or indeed caused any trouble during her tenancy. He saw no indication that she was promiscuous, although he did notice that one of her most frequent visitors was Rothman. Maintenance man Harry Martin told police that Ada Kotock, the owner of 515 Park Drive, had been a little upset by Rothman's constant presence, distressed by the spectacle of a married man carrying on a flagrant affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter.

Van Olst was sure that Patricia had rented the apartment herself. He had no idea whether Rothman was paying for or contributing to its upkeep, and he didn't think Mrs. Kotock would know either.

Leo Martin had asked Van Olst this last question for a good reason. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Park Drive was informally known as “Mistresses Row.” For whatever reason—perhaps its relative accessibility and air of slightly seedy gentility—it had become the neighborhood of choice for the extramarital love objects of well-off Boston business and professional men. If indeed Rothman had been keeping Patricia (when they first became sexually involved she was sharing an apartment with Ruth Darling on Newbury Street), this would have been the logical place for him to put her. And 515 Park Drive was only a five-minute walk from Engineering Systems, which made the arrangement convenient as well as in accord with local tradition.

More interesting than any speculation about Patricia's living arrangement that Van Olst could provide was his account of the events of the morning of December 31, when he had watched Jules Rothman climb through the open window of Patricia's apartment. (This unorthodox means of entry was necessitated by the fact that Van Olst didn't have a key to Patricia's apartment, nor to several others at 515 Park Drive.)

Van Olst said that he, not Rothman, had removed the window screen, and that Rothman had asked him to go into the apartment ahead of him. Van Olst refused, and added that Rothman, once inside, should open the front door. Rothman agreed.

Van Olst said that Rothman was inside the flat for a minute or two before he opened the door to admit the janitor. “It looks like something's wrong,” Rothman said. “She's dead, I think. She's got a stocking around her throat.”

Van Olst looked into the bedroom. He saw Patricia lying on her back, the sheets and blankets pulled up to her chin. He saw no stocking.

“And you didn't observe her tongue or anything hanging out of her mouth or she didn't look distorted in any way?” Martin asked.

“No, no, none whatsoever,” Van Olst replied. “She looked to me like she was asleep on her back.”

“I see,” Martin said. “And from all outward appearances she'd look like that to anybody?”

“That's right, she would.”

“Well,” Martin persisted, “could you see any ligatures around her neck from where she—?”

“No, no, you couldn't,” Van Olst said. “The sheets were right up to—now, he must have saw it and pushed them right back up again, because he told me that they [the ligatures] were there.”

“Oh, yes,” Martin said.

“When I looked you couldn't see it,” Van Olst repeated.

The crime scene photos confirm Van Olst's statement: The bed covers are drawn up to Patricia's chin and no part of her throat is visible.

Rothman always insisted that he hadn't touched the bed covers. So if he didn't pull them down, as he said he hadn't, how did he know that there were stockings tied around Patricia's neck? And why did he say that her tongue was protruding from her mouth and her eyes were bulging when they obviously weren't?

In May of 1965, Phillip DiNatale showed Van Olst photographs of Albert DeSalvo and George Nassar. Van Olst said that he had never seen either man before.

At this point, a year after his interrogation by Leo Martin, Van Olst remembered another curious fact. On the morning of December 31, it was he and not Rothman who had made the call to the Boston police reporting the discovery of Patricia's body. As he was at the telephone he realized that he had only to turn his head slightly to see through the open door into the bedroom. Patricia's body lay in the direct line of his gaze.

Harry Martin, who said he had been standing in the exact same position sometime between 10:00 and 11:00 on Sunday morning, had looked into the bedroom and seen only a bed heaped with boxes.

Leo Martin interviewed John Price, whom Rothman had said he'd conferred with on the matter of Patricia's pregnancy because Price had once “gotten a girl in trouble” himself and knew how to deal with such situations. Price told a slightly different story: that Rothman, whom he barely knew and had had no contact with for several years, had telephoned him the week before the murder proposing that Price meet with him to discuss an exciting and potentially profitable business deal. Price said that he would indeed like to get together with Rothman sometime. They left matters there.

On Friday, December 28, 1962, Rothman called Price again and urgently requested a meeting that night. Price, who was tired, tried to stall Rothman, but the latter was insistent, and Price finally agreed to meet him at the Smith House in Cambridge for a drink.

That evening Rothman did indeed speak about business. Then he turned the conversation to other matters. According to Price, “Jules told me some friend of his knows a girl in trouble and he thought I could help him locate someone in the abortion field. After I heard Jules talk like that, I told him this was wrong lawfully and morally and would help him in another matter. I didn't like to talk about this, being a sticky matter. But, I told Jules that my wife knew of a convent located in Laconia [New Hampshire] that would care for any girl in the condition of pregnancy unmarried. I even called a priest named Father Baker and explained the situation to him and he referred me to sister superior at the convent. I don't remember the name now, but I wrote down the address and gave it to Jules.”

Price never spoke to Rothman again after that evening. He thought of telephoning when he read in the newspaper of Patricia's murder and saw Rothman's name mentioned in the article.

Price's lawyer advised him not to have anything further to do with Rothman, and to dismiss the notion of getting involved in any business deal with the man.

 

 

On November 8, 1962, Patricia wrote a letter to her mother in which she requested that Hazel send her a photograph album. She had a drawerful of snapshots, clippings, and other such mementos, Patricia said, and she wanted something in which to put them. Hazel sent her the album.

After Patricia's murder, when Mrs. Bissette made the heartbreaking journey to Boston to sort through and pack up her daughter's effects, she found two things missing. One was a 1921 silver dollar Patricia had prized. The other was the photograph album. All that remained of Patricia's memorabilia was a single letter and one photograph.

Also absent from Patricia's handbag and wallet, which were otherwise intact, even to her last paycheck, were pictures of her friends. Mrs. Bissette had found this very strange. Patricia had carried such items around with her constantly.

Mrs. Bissette assumed that detectives had taken the photographs to use as evidence. But when she got in touch with the Boston police, they told her that all they'd found in the apartment were twelve letters.

Patricia could have lost—or even spent—the silver dollar herself, or given it to a friend as a special gift. Or a visitor to the apartment could have pocketed it. The absence of the photograph album was a little more difficult to explain. Would a mere thief have stolen it—but left Patricia's $125 watch on the dresser?

The only substantial collection of photographs that ever turned up were those of Patricia and Jules Rothman that Billy MacKenzie had found not very well hidden in Rothman's desk.

And it was odd that the police had found only twelve letters among Patricia's possessions. She was a pack rat where personal correspondence was concerned.

Had her killer taken the album and any other letters Patricia might have kept because his face or name appeared in them?