On June 30, when Nina Nichols, 68, failed to show up at her sister’s house for dinner, her brother-in-law called her apartment superintendent to ask if he could check on her. The janitor found Nichols lying on the bedroom floor in her fourth-floor unit, strangled with a pair of her own stockings, her housecoat pulled up so she was exposed from the waist down.
Worried after not seeing Helen Blake all weekend, two neighbors borrowed her key from the super in their Lynn, Mass., building and peeked in at 5 p.m. on July 2. They called police, who found the 65-year-old face-down on top of her bed, her pajamas pushed up over her shoulders.
Blake was strangled with a stocking and the ends of her bra were tied under her chin into a floppy bow—similar to how Slesers’ robe cord and Nichols’ stockings were tied. Investigators determined Blake had also been killed on June 30.
Ida Irga, 75, was found on the living room floor of her fifth-floor apartment in Boston’s West End on Aug. 22. She’d been manually strangled but a pillowcase was tied around her neck.
On the afternoon of Aug. 30, Jane Sullivan, 67, was found strangled with her own stockings in her first-floor apartment in Dorchester, across town from Irga. She’d been left posed in a kneeling position in her bathtub, her face and forearms in six inches of water, and it was determined she’d been dead for days.
Investigators found that the items tied around each woman’s neck were all tied with what’s known as a granny knot.
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