Movie
A new film starring Keira Knightley sheds light on the forgotten journalists who led the search for a serial killer
It’s a scene familiar from many newspaper films, including All the President’s Men. Reporter is on to a big story; die-hard editor is skeptical; The reporter has to use cunning and cunning to win over the editor.
The collision plays out again in the new film Boston Strangler. The Editor is played by a suitably tough and hard-to-impress Chris Cooper. The reporter is played by British actress Keira Knightley, armed with a stinging question: “How many women have to die before it’s a story?”
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At least 11 Boston-area women, ages 19 to 85, were sexually assaulted and killed between 1962 and 1964, gruesome crimes that terrorized 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 spotlight two reporters who linked the murders to a single suspect, whom they dubbed the Boston Strangler.
Loretta McLaughlin (Knightley) and Jean Cole (Carrie Coon) of the Record American newspaper (an ancestor of the Boston Herald) were two women operating in a man’s world, particularly in the male-dominated newsrooms of the 1960s. One of her first articles, published in January 1963, was entitled “Two Girl Reporters Analyze Strangler”.
Decades later, McLaughlin recalled that it was the fourth murder that “got my attention.” She wrote: “An editor questioned the value of a series about the four dead women, stating that they were ‘nobody.’ That’s what it was, I felt. Why would anyone murder four obscure women. That’s what made them so interesting…sisters in anonymity, like all of us.”
McLaughlin died in 2018 at the age of 90. 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 believe that a chapter of their parents’ career is portrayed in a big movie and by an actress that is as well known.”
Mark was too young to understand what was happening back then. Gerold Frank wrote in The Boston Strangler that after putting her three children to bed each night, McLaughlin “typed late at night at her typewriter on the dining room table under an old-fashioned Tiffany chandelier.”
Mark recalls: “It was a time when many women entered the workforce, but many of them left as soon as they were parents. We have never felt neglected. She was a great mother and she was also a good professional journalist.
“When we were very young, she would come home, who knows what had happened in the newspaper world that day, and she would still put us to bed and sing a song. Not only was she a top-notch journalist, she was also a real mom.”
Mark, a middle school English teacher, adds: “She got into the business when there weren’t many women in it, and I’m sure she encountered some people who were against it.
“But she also had some really excellent guys who mentored her. I firmly believe that talent usually wins out and a smart editor nurtures a smart reporter and advances his career. There were people who were jerks to her, but there were also a lot of people who cheered her on and supported what she was doing.”
McLaughlin became a medical and scientific news specialist and joined the Boston Globe in 1976. Mark, himself an editor at The Globe, recalls, “She was a crime reporter when I was a little kid. In my mind, she was a medical reporter. As people tried to get an early sense of what AIDS is, she dived right into it. She was among a handful of the more prominent AIDS reporters in the United States.
Keira Knightley in Boston Strangler. Photo: Disney+
“She had no shortage of opinions on things and eventually became editor of the Globe editorial page, so that was a very satisfying conclusion to her career. She had a good life. She remained very curious and interested in things almost to the end. She was a lifelong movie buff and just the idea of being the protagonist in a movie would have delighted her to no end.”
The Boston Strangler case has been described as “the Watergate of mysterious murders.” It remains intriguing in part because it was never fully solved, with a number of unanswered questions about the identity of the killer – or killers.
The first victim was Anna Slesers, a 55-year-old Latvian woman who was found strangled to death in her home in June 1962. Over the next two years, other women were similarly murdered, many sexually abused and killed in their homes. As fear gripped the city, many residents bought new locks, tear gas or guard dogs.
The perpetrator left no obvious physical evidence at the scene, and police made efforts to identify suspects. The case took a strange turn when a man posing as a Boston Strangler began calling 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 molested as a child — was eventually arrested on independent charges and confessed to being the Boston Strangler. However, there were contradictions in his confession, and he later recanted; Some experts believe he may have made a false confession to attract attention.
DeSalvo was convicted of unrelated crimes and sentenced to life in prison. In 1973, while serving his sentence, he was stabbed to death by a fellow inmate.
Albert DeSalvo in 1967. Photo: AP
Forty years later, DNA testing linked DeSalvo to the death of Mary Sullivan, believed to be the killer’s final victim. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley stated, “We may have just solved one of the nation’s most notorious serial murders.”
Sullivan was 19 when she was raped and murdered in her apartment in January 1964, days after moving from Cape Cod to Boston. your nephew, Casey Shermana best-selling 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 was about to be enjoying her grandchildren. Instead, she’s frozen in time at 19.”
Sherman began researching the case as a teenager after seeing The Boston Strangler, a 1968 film starring Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda. “I raised the issue with my mother, who was 17 when 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 ever happened.’
“It was a sister’s intuition. It was a bond between two sisters that could not be broken, even decades after the crime. That bond led me to Boston University journalism school, and that bond led me to investigate this case for several years.”
Sherman researched each 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 has tracked down an alternate suspect in the murder of his aunt, who was then a student at Boston University, although the case never made it to trial.
The 54-year-old argues: “One of the big problems with the Boston Strangler case over the last few decades is the misconceptions that the media has carried out to the world, particularly around the illusion that there was a Boston Strangler, a Jack the The character Ripper-type has risen again to haunt the women of Boston. But that really wasn’t the case.
“Indeed, in the Boston Strangler case, there were several suspects who, rather than all working together, worked independently, drawing their strategies and methods from some of the grisly details printed in the newspapers at the time. So I think McLaughlin and Cole, who were reporters – and I know what pressures they were under in the 1960s – certainly helped create this mythology surrounding 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 Silkstocking Strangler,” but “Boston Strangler” fit into a headline. A story about a serial killer would certainly sell more newspapers than stories about copycats killing for their own agenda.”
Law enforcement officials, authors, and forensic experts still disagree as to whether DeSalvo was the killer or whether the murders could have been the work of multiple people.
Carrie Coon in Boston Strangler. Photo: Disney+
Susan Kelly, 73, author of The Boston Stranglers, recalls: “I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I wrote mysteries that got published. I went to the Cambridge Police Station just to get some technical advice and sooner or later the subject would end up in the Boston Strangler.
“Someone asked me who you think the Boston Strangler was? I said Albert DeSalvo. Raising himself off the ground after laughing, he said, “There’s not a Cambridge cop who thinks DeSalvo is the strangler.” I said, ‘Oh, hmm, tell me more!’”
Kelly interviewed McLaughlin and studied all of the case files. “I came to the conclusion that DeSalvo wasn’t the strangler because he misunderstood too many details of the various crimes. They had very strong suspects for many of the different murders: people who could be brought in at the time and place and who had the motive and the opportunity.”
The case received a new, comprehensive review in 2016 in Stranglers, a 12-part documentary podcast. Host Portland Helmich, a journalist, writer and producer, says, “All these years later, it’s still not absolutely clear 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 indicate that the semen found on Mary Sullivan’s blanket at the crime scene could be linked to him with a 99.9 percent certainty. So we can say that he committed this murder, but there is no other definitive evidence to suggest that he committed absolutely all of the other murders.
“He was never tried for any of those murders. There were so many other possible suspects and there was never conclusive evidence. He gave these amazing confessions. Some of the details were odd. How could he know what he seemed to know? But then there were other glaring inaccuracies. I believe Albert DeSalvo committed some of those murders. I’m not convinced he committed them all.”
Helmich’s podcast series included an interview with McLaughlin, who believed one person was responsible for the murders. Helmich, 57, speaks from Boston and adds: “Wow, what a feisty, smart, interesting, strong-willed woman. I look forward to seeing Keira Knightley play this role. I assume they don’t focus the whole movie on Albert DeSalvo and who the killers were, they actually focus on the women who tried to bring this case to the top.
“It’s a wonderful angle and an important one. So often we glorify or celebrate the killers while the victims fall by the wayside or forget about all the other people involved in the case who put so much effort and put so much vitality and energy into the solution . These people are the unsung heroes. Having met Loretta McLaughlin, it’s exciting that she’s actually getting her time in the sun.”
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