When Nina Nichols, 68, didn’t show up for dinner at her sister’s house on June 30, her brother-in-law called the apartment manager and asked if he could check on her. The manager found Ms. Nichols lying on the floor of the bedroom of her fourth-floor unit, strangled with her own stocking and her dressing gown pulled up, exposing her from the waist down.
Two worried neighbors who hadn’t seen Helen Blake all weekend borrowed her keys from a supermarket in a building in Lynn, Massachusetts, and looked inside at 5 p.m. on July 2. Police were called and they found Blake, 65, face down on a bed with his pajamas pulled up to his shoulders.
Ms. Blake was strangled with a stocking, and the end of her bra was tied in a ribbon that hung below her chin. This was the same way that Sleathers’ robe string was tied to Nichols’ stockings. Investigators determined that Blake was also killed on June 30th.
On August 22nd, 75-year-old Ida Irga was found in the living room of her fifth-floor apartment in Boston’s West End. She had been strangled by hand and a pillowcase was wrapped around her neck.
On the afternoon of August 30, Jane Sullivan, 67, was found strangled with her own stocking on the ground floor of a Dorchester apartment building across the street from Irga. She was found kneeling in the bathtub, her face and forearms under 6 inches of water, and was found to have been dead for several days.
Investigators discovered that everything around each woman’s neck was tied in what is known as a granny knot.
