Search for the Strangler by Casey Sherman

Author:Casey Sherman [SHERMAN, CASEY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446561648
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

9 : Laying the Groundwork

A fter graduating from college, I began the job hunt. No Boston television stations were hiring reporters straight out of college, so I jumped from one low-level sales job to another. Frustrated, I would call my Nana Florry for a few words of encouragement. My grandmother and I were particularly close. She had watched my transformation from aimless teenager to driven adult. “You’re better than anyone I’ve seen on TV,” she said, trying to boost my confidence. By coincidence, the day I landed my first television job was the day Florry Sullivan died. I delivered the eulogy at her funeral. It was the spring of 1994, thirty years after Mary’s murder. The Sullivan family had gathered once again at St. Francis Xavier Church to say good-bye.

The day after the funeral, I began work at WHDH Channel 7, which was then the CBS affiliate station in Boston. My first job was organizing scripts for the news anchors and running the teleprompter, for six dollars per hour. It did not matter to me that my friends were making $20,000 and more in their first year out of college. Television news was where I wanted to be. I was drawn to its frantic atmosphere. There were deadlines for each of the daily newscasts, and they had to be met: your job depended on it. Assignment editors barked orders over the two-way radio to news crews out in the field. Producers pounded on their typewriters, quickly absorbing news stories as they came in, then sending them out as coherent scripts. As a production assistant, I ran script to the studio, most times just before the previous story was read. I would have considered myself lucky if anybody at the station even knew my first name.

Soon I was growing more concerned with my work at the station and less concerned with the Boston Strangler case. Then, in the fall of 1994, the name of Albert DeSalvo was suddenly in the news again. That’s when Sean M. DeSalvo, his twenty-seven-year-old nephew, was arrested for the kidnapping and attempted rape of a forty-three-year-old Lynn woman. Of course, the newsroom had a field day. The file tapes of Albert DeSalvo and the Boston Strangler crime scenes were taken out of storage. “Imagine if we had another Boston Strangler. Now, that would be good for ratings,” one veteran reporter said. I just bit my lip, hoping this story would go away and the references to the Boston Strangler case with it. However, the case of Sean DeSalvo would drag on for months and get even more bizarre. “He has tried to strangle me in my sleep,” his wife, Claudia, claimed when she filed for divorce. “He has slept with a butcher knife under the pillow and told me he would not strangle me. If he killed me, he would stab me to death. I live in fear that my son could grow up to be the next Boston Strangler.” How much of what she claimed was accurate and how much was rhetoric is unknown.

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