‘Those people are the unsung heroes’: the women who tried to unmask the Boston Strangler
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 hardto-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 wellknown 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 oldfashioned 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