On June 30, when Nina Nichols68 years old, didn’t show up at her sister’s house for dinner, her brother-in-law called the concierge at her apartment to ask if he could watch her. The concierge found Nichols lying on the floor of her bedroom in her fourth-floor apartment, strangled with a pair of her own stockings, her dressing gown pulled up so that she was exposed from the waist down.
Worried after not seeing Helene Blake All weekend, two neighbors borrowed his key from the super in their building in Lynn, Massachusetts, and took a look at it at 5 p.m. on July 2. They called police, who found the 65-year-old woman face down on her bed, her pajamas pulled up over her shoulders.
Blake was strangled with a stocking and the ends of her bra were tied under her chin in a soft knot, in the same way that the drawstring of Slesers’ dress and Nichols’ stockings were tied. Investigators determined Blake was also killed on June 30.
Ida Irga75, was found on the living room floor of her fifth-floor apartment in Boston’s West End on August 22. She had been strangled manually but a pillowcase was tied around her neck.
On the afternoon of August 30, Jane Sullivan67, was found strangled with her own stockings in her first floor apartment in Dorchester, opposite Irga. She had been left kneeling in her bathtub with her face and forearms in six inches of water, and it was determined that she had been dead for days.
Investigators discovered that the items tied around each woman’s neck were all tied with what is called a grandmother’s knot.
