It is a scene familiar from many a newspaper film including All the President’s Men. Reporter is on to a big story; hardbitten editor is sceptical; reporter must use graft and guile to win editor over.
The collision plays out again in the new movie Boston Strangler. The editor is played by a suitably tough and hard-to-impress Chris Cooper. The reporter is played by British actor Keira Knightley, armed with a piercing question: “How many women have to die before it’s a story?”
At least 11 women from the Boston area between the ages of 19 and 85 were sexually assaulted and killed between 1962 and 1964, grisly crimes that terrorised the city and made national headlines. The case has been the subject of numerous books and films but Boston Strangler, written and directed by Matt Ruskin, is the first to foreground two reporters who linked the murders to a single suspect they dubbed the Boston Strangler.
Loretta McLaughlin (Knightley) and Jean Cole (Carrie Coon) of the Record American newspaper (a forebear of the Boston Herald) were two women operating in a man’s world, notably the male-dominated newsrooms of the 1960s. One of their first articles, published in January 1963, had the headline “Two Girl Reporters Analyze Strangler”.
Decades later, McLaughlin would recall it was the fourth murder “that galvanized my attention”. She wrote: “An editor disputed the worth of a series on the four dead women, noting that they were ‘nobodies’. That was it exactly, I felt. Why should anyone murder four obscure women. That was what made them so interesting … sisters in anonymity, like all of us.”
McLaughlin died aged 90 in 2018. But her family is looking forward to seeing the film. Her son, Mark McLaughlin, 65, who lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, admits: “Most people don’t imagine that a chapter of their parents’ career is going to be portrayed in a major film and by such a well-known actress.”
Mark was too young to understand what was happening at the time. Gerold Frank wrote in the book The Boston Strangler that, after putting her three children to bed each evening, McLaughlin wrote “late at night at her typewriter on the dining room table under an old-fashioned Tiffany chandelier”.
Mark recalls: “It was an era when a lot of women went into the workplace but a lot of them would depart as soon as they were parents. We never felt neglected. She was a terrific parent and she was also a good professional journalist.
“When we were really young she would come home from who knows what had gone on in the newspaper world that day and she would still put us to bed and sing a song. She was a real mother in addition to being a first-class journalist.”
Mark, a middle school English teacher, adds: “She was entering the business at a time when there were not a great number of women in it and I’m sure she ran into some people who were resistant to that.
“But she also had some really excellent guys who were mentors to her. I’m a great believer that talent usually wins out and a smart editor is going to groom a smart reporter and encourage their career. There were people who were jerks to her but there were also a lot of people who cheered on and were supportive of what she was doing.”
McLaughlin became a medical and science news specialist and joined the Boston Globe in 1976. Mark, who himself worked as a copy editor at the Globe, recalls: “She was a crime reporter when I was a little tiny child. In my consciousness she was a medical reporter. When people were trying to make some early sense of what Aids was, she dove right into that. She was among a handful of the more significant Aids reporters in the United States.
“She had no shortage of opinions on things and she ultimately became the editorial page editor of the Globe, so that was a very satisfying conclusion to her career. She had a good life. She remained intensely curious and interested in things almost right up to the end. She was a lifelong movie fan and the very idea that she would be the protagonist in a film would have delighted her no end.”
The Boston Strangler case has been described as “the Watergate of murder mysteries”. It continues to fascinate in part because it has never entirely been solved, with an array of unanswered questions surrounding the identity of the killer – or killers.
The first victim was Anna Slesers, a 55-year-old Latvian woman found strangled in her apartment in June 1962. Over the next two years more women were murdered in a similar manner, many sexually assaulted and killed in their homes. As fear swept the city, many residents bought new locks, teargas or guard dogs.
The perpetrator left no obvious physical evidence at the crime scenes and police struggled to identify any suspects. The case took a strange turn when a man claiming to be the Boston Strangler began making phone calls to the police and the media.
The man identified himself as Albert DeSalvo and claimed responsibility for the murders. He provided detailed information about the crimes, including details that had not been released to the public, leading many to believe he was the killer.
DeSalvo – a construction worker who had been abused as a child – was eventually arrested on unrelated charges and confessed to being the Boston Strangler. There were inconsistencies in his confession, however, and he later recanted; some experts believe he may have been falsely confessing in order to gain attention.
DeSalvo was convicted of unrelated crimes and sentenced to life in prison. He was stabbed to death by a fellow inmate in 1973 while serving his sentence.
Forty years later, DNA tests tied DeSalvo to the death of Mary Sullivan, believed to be the killer’s last victim. The Massachusetts attorney general, Martha Coakley, declared: “We may have just solved one of the nation’s most notorious serial killings.”
Sullivan was 19 when she was raped and murdered in her apartment in January 1964, a few days after she moved from Cape Cod to Boston. Her nephew, Casey Sherman, a bestselling author and journalist, was born five years later and says her death left a hole in the family.
“It was never the same. We tried to keep Mary’s spirit alive. She was a very intelligent, very smart, very witty, very beautiful young 19-year-old girl with so many hopes and dreams and they were stolen from her, they were stolen from my family. My aunt Mary Sullivan should be enjoying her grandchildren right now. Instead she’s frozen in time at 19 years old.”
Sherman started to do research on the case when he was a teenager after seeing The Boston Strangler, a 1968 film starring Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda. “I broached the subject to my mother, who was 17 at the time that her 19-year-old sister was taken away from her. I just said, ‘Mom, at least they got the guy’, and she said, ‘Well, I don’t know if that was ever the case.’
“It was a sister’s intuition. It was a bond between two sisters that couldn’t be broken even decades after the crime. That bond led me to journalism school at Boston University and that bond led me to investigate this case for several years.”
Sherman researched every one of the Boston Strangler murders, poring over crime scene and autopsy reports, culminating in a 2003 book, A Rose for Mary: The Hunt for the Real Boston Strangler. He tracked down an alternative suspect in his aunt’s murder, who was a student at Boston University at the time, although the case has never come to court.
The 54-year-old argues: “One of the big problems with the Boston Strangler case over the past decades is the misconceptions that the media put out there in the world, specifically around the illusion that there was one Boston Strangler, a Jack the Ripper-type character resurrected to stalk the women of Boston. But that really wasn’t the case.
“In fact, there were several suspects in the Boston Strangler case, not all working together but independently and taking their strategies and methods from some of the grisly details that were printed in the newspapers at the time. So I think that McLaughlin and Cole working as reporters – and I know the constraints they were under in the 1960s – certainly helped create this mythology around the Boston Strangler case.”
He adds: “McLaughlin came up with the phrase ‘Boston Strangler’. The killer had also been called ‘the phantom fiend’ and ‘the silk stocking strangler’ but Boston Strangler fit on a headline. A story about a serial killer certainly would sell more newspapers than stories about copycats who were committing murders for their own agenda.”
Law enforcement officials, authors and crime experts still disagree about whether DeSalvo was the killer or whether the murders could have been the work of multiple individuals.
Susan Kelly, 73, author of The Boston Stranglers, recalls: “I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I was writing mysteries which were published. I went to the Cambridge police station just for technical advice and sooner or later the topic would go around to the Boston Strangler.
“Somebody asked me, who do you think the Boston Strangler was? I said, Albert DeSalvo. When he picked himself up off the floor after laughing, he said, ‘There’s not a cop in Cambridge who thinks DeSalvo was the strangler.’ I said, ‘Oh, hmm, tell me more!’”
Kelly interviewed McLaughlin and studied all the case files. “I concluded that DeSalvo was not the strangler because he got too many of the details of the different crimes wrong. They had very strong suspects for a lot of the different murders: people who could be put at the time and place and had the motive and had the opportunity.”
The case received a fresh, exhaustive review in 2016 in Stranglers, a 12-episode documentary podcast. Its host, Portland Helmich, a journalist, writer and producer, says: “All these years later, it’s still not absolutely clear as to whether Albert DeSalvo, the self-confessed Boston Strangler, committed all of these crimes.
“Yes, his body was exhumed in 2013 and there is DNA evidence that seems to suggest there’s a 99.9% certainty that the semen found at the crime scene on Mary Sullivan’s blanket can be linked to him. So we can say he committed that murder but there is no other definitive evidence that suggests that he absolutely committed all of the other murders.
“He was never tried for all of these murders. There were so many other possible suspects and there was never any conclusive evidence. He gave these amazing confessions. Some of the details were outlandish. How could he possibly have known what he seemed to have known? But then there were other glaring inaccuracies. I believe Albert DeSalvo committed some of those murders. I am not convinced that he committed all of them.”
Helmich’s podcast series featured an interview with McLaughlin, who believed that one person was responsible for the killings. Speaking from Boston, Helmich, 57, adds: “Wow, what a feisty, smart, interesting, strong-willed woman. I’m excited to see Keira Knightley play that part. I’m assuming they’re not focusing the whole film on Albert DeSalvo and who the killers were but actually focusing on the women who tried to bring this case to the forefront.
“That’s a wonderful angle and an important one. So often we glamorise or celebrate the killers while the victims fall by the wayside or all the other people who were connected with the case, who tried so hard and gave so much of their life force and energy to solving it, are forgotten. Those people are the unsung heroes. Having met Loretta McLaughlin, it’s thrilling that she’s actually going to be given her time in the sun.”
Boston Strangler is now available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK
