Of the eleven official Boston strangling victims, six were between the ages of 55 and 75. Two possible additional victims were 85 and 69 years of age. The remaining five victims were considerably younger, ranging in age from 19 to 23.

Not that 55 years of age is really old. Not these days and not really in 1962. And certainly not for Anna E. Slesers, a petite divorcee who looked years younger than her age. More than a decade earlier, she had fled Latvia with her son and daughter and settled in her small apartment in a quiet old-fashioned neighborhood in the Back Bay area.

Anna Slesers (CORBIS)

On the evening of June 14, 1962, she had finished dinner and just had enough time to take a quick bath before her son Juris was to pick her up for the Latvian memorial services that were being held in her church that night. In her robe, she went into the bathroom and turned on the water, listening to the inspiring strains of the opera Tristan und Isolde.

Just before seven o’clock, Juris knocked at his mother’s door. No answer and the door was locked. He was annoyed. He hadn’t wanted to take his mother to the services in the first place. Juris pounded on the door and – then he began to get worried. Was she sick, perhaps lying helpless on the floor inside? Maybe even worse, she had sounded so depressed on the phone when he spoke to her the night before. He threw his weight against the door twice and it flew open.

His worst fears were confirmed when he saw her lying in the bathroom with the cord from her robe around her neck. He telephoned the police and his sister in Maryland to tell her about the tragic "suicide." Gerold Frank in The Boston Strangler describes how Homicide Detectives James Mellon and John Driscoll found her:

Mellon was always to remember his first sight of Anna Slesers’ body, its sheer, startling nudity, and the shockingly exposed position in which it had been left. She lay outstretched, a fragile-appearing woman with brown bobbed hair and thin mouth, lying on her back on a gray runner. She wore a blue taffeta housecoat with a red lining, but it had been spread completely apart in front, so that from shoulders down she was nude. She lay grotesquely, her head a few feet from the open bathroom door, her left leg stretched straight toward him, the other flung wide, almost at right angles, and bent at the knee so that she was grossly exposed. The blue cloth cord of her housecoat had been knotted tightly about her neck, its ends turned up so that it might have been a bow, tied little-girl fashion under her chin.

The apartment was made to look as though it had been ransacked. Anna’s purse was lying open with its contents partially strewn on the floor. A wastebasket in the kitchen had been rummaged through with some of the trash on the floor around it. Drawers had been left open in the bedroom dresser, their contents moved about. A case of color slides had been carefully placed – not dropped – on the bedroom floor. The record player was on, but the amplifier had been turned off. But despite this attempt to make the scene look like a robbery, a gold watch and other pieces of jewelry were left untouched.

Anna had been strangled with the cord of her robe which had been tied around her neck tightly into a bow. Her vagina showed evidence of sexual assault with some unknown object.

A detailed investigation into her life revealed a woman completely involved in her church, her children, her work and her love of classical music. She kept to herself and had very few friends. There were no men in her life aside from her son.

Police assumed that the crime had started out as a burglary. When the burglar saw the woman in her robe he was overcome by an uncontrollable urge to molest her, killing her afterwards to avoid being recognized.

A couple of weeks later on June 30, sixty-eight-year-old Nina Nichols was murdered in her apartment at 1940 Commonwealth Avenue in the Brighton area of Boston. The apartment looked like it had been burglarized: every drawer had been pulled open, possessions lay scattered around wildly on the floor as though a tornado had ripped through it. But, oddly enough, one open drawer revealed a set of sterling silver that had been untouched, as were the few dollars in her purse, her expensive camera and the watch on her wrist. The killer had gone through her address book and her mail for some unknown reason. Later it was determined that nothing had been taken. The chaos of disorder, the ransacking was for nothing.

She was found with her legs spread, her housecoat and slip pulled up to her waist. Tied tightly around her neck were two of her own nylon stockings with the ends tied ludicrously in a bow. She too had been sexually assaulted. Blood had been found in the vagina. The time of death was estimated to be around 5 o’clock in the afternoon.

The retired physiotherapist led a very quiet and modest life. She had been widowed for two decades and had no male friends except for her brother-in-law.

Helen Blake (CORBIS)

Her apartment had also been thoroughly ransacked. It appeared as though the two diamond rings that Helen wore had been pulled from her fingers and taken. The killer had tried unsuccessfully to open a metal strongbox and a footlocker.

Police Commissioner Edmund McNamara was very alarmed. A warning went out to women in the Boston area to lock all of their doors and be wary of strangers. He cancelled all police vacations and transferred all detectives to work for Homicide. A thorough investigation began of all known sex offenders and violent former mental patients. They were looking for a madman, one that probably attacked older women because of some hatred of his mother. A former FBI man, McNamara called on the Bureau to hold a seminar on sex crimes for his fifty best detectives.

Ida Irga (CORBIS)

On August 19, seventy-five-year-old Ida Irga, a very shy and retiring widow fell victim to the Strangler. She was found two days later in her apartment at 7 Grove Avenue in the Boston’s West End. As in the other deaths, there was no sign of forced entry. Whoever killed her, she had probably let in voluntarily.

Police Sergeant James McDonald described how he found her: "Upon entering the apartment the officers observed the body of Ida Irga lying on her back on the living room floor wearing a light brown nightdress which was torn, completely exposing her body. There was a white pillowcase knotted tightly around her neck. Her legs were spread approximately four to five feet from heel to heel and her feet were propped up on individual chairs and a standard bed pillow, less the cover, was placed under her buttocks." It was an alarming parody of an obstetrical position, which faced the front door of the apartment and was the first thing anyone saw when coming through the entrance. Most of these details were withheld from the press.

She had died from manual strangulation. Dried blood covered her head, mouth and ears. She, too, had been sexually tampered with although no spermatozoa were present.

Jane Sullivan (CORBIS)

Within twenty-four hours of Ida Irga’s murder, a sixty-seven-year-old nurse named Jane Sullivan was killed in her apartment at 435 Columbia Road in Dorchester, across town from where Ida lived. She had been dead for some ten days before she was found.

Police found her on her knees in her bathtub with her feet up over the back of the tub and head underneath the faucet. She, too, had been strangled by her own nylons, probably in the kitchen, bedroom or hall where blood was found on the floors. She may have been sexually assaulted, but the corpse was so badly decomposed that it could not be determined. However, there were bloodstains on the handle of a broom. There was no sign of forcible entry, nor was the apartment ransacked, even though Jane’s purse was found open.

Woman places bottles in front of a door as an early warning device (Art Rickerby/TIMEPIX)

Panic gripped all of Boston.