Boston State Hospital, Mattapan.
Seated at his desk, the psychiatrist pondered a photograph. His index finger went to his upper lip and swept back and forth, back and forth, over a brushy mustache. “No,” he decided. He set the photo aside and picked up the next one, another head-and-shoulders photo of an old woman.
His name was Dr. Mark Keating. He was chief of psychiatry at this public mental hospital, which was set in a sprawling woodsy campus in Boston. He had an air of slovenly cultivation: a froth of gray curls that still bore the impression of a hat, snaggled teeth, spectacles rotated a few degrees off horizontal. Michael equated that sort of Einsteinish sloppiness with purity of intellect, or of purpose, or courage or simple eccentricity, or all of these, because Michael knew full well that his own sensible, conformist appearance-the bag suit from Brooks, the brogans which he polished regularly with an old pair of underpants-signaled the opposite. The psychiatrist seemed to take Michael’s visit in stride. He had been treating Arthur Nast and talking to policemen about Arthur Nast for nearly ten years, on and off.
“This was the one, I think.”
The doctor handed the photo across the desk to Michael.
“Helena Jalakian,” Michael said. “She was fifty-six.”
“She looks older.”
“She lost her parents in the Armenian genocide. She was just a child, of course.” Michael frowned. “She lived on Gainsborough Street in the Fenway, so she could walk to Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall. Classical music buff.”
“This was the picture.”
“I don’t understand. She was the first victim. But you said you called the police on August”-Michael checked his notes-“twenty-third, in ’62. There were already seven women dead by then.”
“This picture was in the newspaper. Or a picture just like it, I don’t know. But it was this woman. Until then I wasn’t sure.” He riffled through a bristling file folder, his head shaking. He came to a form with a photo paper-clipped at the corner. He tugged the picture free and laid it beside the first. “You see? This is Arthur Nast’s mother.”
Michael compared the two. The similarity was striking.
“And look,” the doctor said. He arranged three more pictures from Michael’s collection around the tiny shot of Nast’s mother so they formed a cross.
Michael recited, “Ina Lanzmann, Mary Duffy, Jane Tibodeau. Look at that. Amazing.”
“They are all, at least they appear to be, between fifty-five and seventy. Arthur’s mother was fifty-eight when she died.”
“So why did you wait so long to call the cops?”
“All I had was the resemblance of the pictures. I needed more. You understand, I’m bound by patient confidentiality. Generally, anything Arthur tells me, I’m forbidden to repeat. I could not come forward until I was convinced Arthur might really be murdering these women. Even then, many of my colleagues would not agree with my telling you these things. If it ever comes out that I revealed all this to you…”
His finger agitated the bristle-ends of his mustache again.
“Look, I’ve had my suspicions about Arthur for a long time. Arthur is not confined here. We do not have the resources to monitor his movements, and he has ground privileges, which means he can leave the campus almost any time he wants. So he has a history of wandering off. And of course he tends to get in trouble on these rambles. Arthur is rather odd looking and quite a large man; people tend to be alarmed when they find him rustling around in their backyards. He’s been arrested several times for breaking and entering, trespassing, that sort of thing. Usually he’s just broken into the basement of a building to sleep there or to take some little thing that’s caught his eye, a bicycle or whatever. But sometimes he does more sinister things.
“After I saw the woman’s photo, to satisfy my curiosity-to allay my fears, really-I checked the dates of Arthur’s absences from the hospital against the dates of the first seven Strangler murders, in that summer of ’62. The dates lined up perfectly.”
“What about the other stranglings?”
“That’s just it. If you remember, the first seven murders were all older women, all in a three-month period from June through August 1962. Those are the warm months, when Arthur tends to wander. Then there were no murders for a while, until the winter, December, I think, and those next two victims were young girls in their twenties. I checked: Arthur was here on those dates. Which made perfect sense to me because Arthur’s anger is not simply directed at all women. It is directed at one woman in particular: his mother.”
“So Nast could not have done them all?”
“I know for a fact he didn’t. It’s the murders involving these old women that concern me. You see, Arthur despised his mother. He first came here in 1956. He’d already been in other institutions-Bridgewater, Tewksbury, the Shattuck. But I first met him in ’56. He’d tried to kill his mother. Threw her down a flight of stairs. The judge pink-slipped him to us for the thirty-day competency evaluation. In the end it did not matter. The mother refused to testify; the case never went forward. But Arthur seemed to form some connection with me in those thirty days, and when the family ultimately decided he should be committed, in ’59, he came back here. I’ve been treating him ever since.”
“And?”
“Over the years he continued to abuse his mother. Punched her, kicked her, eventually he threw her down that flight of stairs. He would be arrested but the charges were never pursued. It’s an awful thing to ask a mother to testify against her own son.”
“What happened to her?”
“I can’t prove it, of course, but it seems fairly obvious to me that he killed her, finally. This was in 1961. She was in the hospital, immobilized in bed, hooked up to an I.V. And then Arthur paid her a visit. Soon after he left, the old woman was found nearly dead on the floor beside her bed. The I.V. had been ripped out of her arm. The bed railing was still raised, so she could not have rolled off the bed. There were bruises on her neck. Arthur had choked her, obviously, ripped out the I.V., and tossed her on the floor. The mother died before she could ever tell what happened. The cause of death was heart attack induced by asphyxiation. So again, he was never prosecuted.”
“Why did he hate her so much?”
“I don’t know, not with any certainty. Look, I can’t tell you everything Arthur has said about her; I do still have some obligation to maintain confidentiality. But I’m not sure it matters anyway. Arthur reports all sorts of abuse when he was a child, some pretty monstrous things, all of which may be gospel truth or, equally likely, all of it could be delusional. It was real enough to Arthur, that’s the important thing. And of course the mother-hatred and the delusions feed on each other until Arthur can no longer see his mother as anything but a complete monster, one who persecutes him even from the grave. I will tell you that Arthur reports he still hears her voice. She berates him, accuses him, doubts him. On and on. So there was motive, if you can call it that.”
“What’s actually wrong with him?”
“A precise diagnosis in a case like Arthur’s is very difficult. He’s deeply disturbed. Likely schizophrenic. That’s how he exhibits, anyway: delusional, with some pretty bizarre illusions; fractured speech and thought; occasional hallucinations; obsessive about certain things, his mother, women, sex. One problem in treating Arthur is that his intelligence is very limited, as is his ability to articulate his thoughts. At times he seems childish, almost autistic. So as a clinician you have this knot of problems: the storm of emotion whipping around inside him, the constellation of behaviors that may or may not signal schizophrenia or some other psychotic disorder, and all of it viewed through the fuzzy window of the man’s limited intelligence and ability to communicate. And of course what makes this all so dangerous is that Arthur’s mind is housed in this enormous, powerful body.”
“Sounds like a real E-ticket ride.”
“That wouldn’t be the clinical term, but…”
“What about young women? When my brother found Nast in that alley, he was choking a college girl, twenty-one years old, very pretty. She sure did not look like his mother.”
“Yes. Well, Arthur’s sexual…impulses are quite primitive and unrestrained. Now, to what extent that’s rolled up with these feelings about his mother, I don’t know. It’s probably a reach to say his hatred for one woman has poisoned his perceptions of all women. In our conversations I have always had the sense that Arthur just does not have any feelings at all toward women except as sexual playthings. He does not empathize with them, he does not even perceive them as human. This is why I found it troubling that there have been old and young Strangler victims but none in between. Women interest Arthur either because they are old enough to be his mother or young enough to be objects of sexual desire. Women who fill neither role are of no interest. He does not see them.”
“But you say he was here when the two young women were strangled, in December of ’62?”
“That’s right.”
“So there’s at least two stranglers?”
The psychiatrist shrugged. Not my job.
“Have you ever confronted him directly about the murders?”
“No. In clinical terms, that would be a very bad idea. He would never trust me again. But one day last year-and I did report this to the police-I found Arthur wandering in the hall in a doctors-only area of the hospital. He said, ‘Dr. Keating, I need to talk to you.’ I asked him what it was about. He said, ‘The stranglings.’ I took him to my office immediately. I was going to inject him with sodium pentothal and question him about the murders. But at just that moment I got an emergency call and I had to leave. I never got the chance to question Arthur directly. He never gave me another opportunity like that.”
“Doctor, do you think Arthur Nast is the Strangler?”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? Look, all I can tell you is I have a terrible, terrible feeling.”