Anthony J Jackson was born in 1939 and was thirty-three when he was arrested. In the autumn of 1972, eight years after the Boston Strangler investigation ended, young women in Massachusetts were raped, strangled, stabbed and suffocated. Unlike the earlier case, none of them were killed at home. The account of the case describes him as preying on women who hitchhiked, chosen as they came.
Kathleen Randall, eighteen, was last seen thumbing a lift near Boston University a week after she enrolled there, in late September. She was found two weeks later, raped and strangled, in rural New Hampshire.
Two days after Randall disappeared, Debra Stevens, nineteen, was raped and strangled at Lynn, Massachusetts, and her body was left within fifty yards of her home.
Ellen Reich, nineteen, was a sophomore at Emerson College living off campus in Back Bay, who hitchhiked rather than pay for a car. She was strangled and stabbed several times on November 9. Her body was found on November 14, nailed inside a closet in an abandoned house in Roxbury, and she had been dead at least four days.
Sandra Ehramjian, twenty-one, lived in Cambridge and drove a Boston taxi, and hitchhiked when she was not working. She disappeared on November 27 on her way to a dentist's appointment, and was found the next day in a culvert near Waldo Lake, out towards Brockton.
Two days after that an honour student named Synge Gillespie vanished while thumbing lifts in Boston. Her relatives then received a telephone demand for a ransom of twenty-five thousand dollars, which brought them no closer to finding her. By Christmas three more deaths had been attributed to the same person, all strangled or suffocated and some stabbed.
He was not caught by any of those investigations. On December 26, 1972 two Cambridge officers in an unmarked van saw a man in a Cadillac apparently accosting a woman on foot. The car sped off, was chased, and was found abandoned. Officers in a cruiser then saw a pedestrian they identified as Jackson; he drew a gun and fired at them, they fired back, and he ran. He was found three blocks away lying wounded in the street, wearing an empty holster, and told the first officer to reach him that he did not have the gun. A spent bullet of the officers' calibre was in his clothing. The keys to the Cadillac and material identifying him were found in an alley between the shooting and the arrest, and a gun was found in the same alley eight days later, from which a bullet recovered at the scene had been fired.
A blood-soaked Cadillac was later found in a Brockton junkyard and was thought to be where the killings had happened. Evidence was never assembled in several of the cases. Investigators noted that the killings stopped abruptly when he was arrested.
He was indicted for the murder of Synge Gillespie on February 3, 1973, and was separately prosecuted for the murder of Ellen Reich.
The conviction that reached the Supreme Judicial Court was not for murder. It was for armed assault with intent to murder and unlawful carrying of a firearm, arising from the shootout, and the court upheld it on December 12, 1978. Jackson had gone to trial representing himself. The court found no abuse of discretion in that: the Reich murder trial had been substantially delayed by his own failure to keep a working relationship with any of the lawyers retained by, assigned to or offered to him, and those delays had held up this case too. He was offered new counsel eleven days before trial and the judge had already refused a continuance.
Two matters of record. The earlier figure of three to five or more was a blended range of a kind this archive does not use, and it is now separated into the five victims named in the account, the three further deaths that same account attributes to him by Christmas 1972, and the two murder indictments that are actually documented. What the murder prosecutions produced is not stated in anything accessible here; the life sentence the roster records is not explained in the material available, and the appeal that is available concerns the shooting at the police. And the last victim's name is given as Synge Gillespie in that account and as Damaris Synge Gillispie in the roster.