On December 6, 1972, a week after Damaris Synge Gillispie disappeared, her brother and one of her roommates were taking turns at a telephone in her Cambridge apartment. The family had set it up as a hotline, printed the number on leaflets with two photographs of her, and wired three telephones to record every call. That day each of them took a call from a man who knew about her jewelry, her friends and her family. "You know, I know the phone is tapped," he said on the first call, "I'm hep to that, but I'm going to get in touch." On the second: "I know the thing is being taped, but that's cool too." Years later, numerous witnesses would identify the voice on those tapes as Anthony J. Jackson's.
Gillispie was twenty-two, a senior honors student at Boston University who worked as a cocktail waitress at the Jazz Workshop, the Boston nightclub. She left the apartment at 6:45 on the evening of November 29 to go to work, and the police believed she hitchhiked. She was wearing cork-soled, open-toed shoes, a hooded brown fur coat with her initials, DSG, embroidered in the lining, a moonstone ring made from one of her grandfather's cuff links and a ring of turquoise and silver. When she had not come home by morning, her boyfriend reported her missing.
By then the Boston papers had a name for what was happening: the hitchhike murders. Kathleen Randall, eighteen, had last been seen thumbing a ride near Boston University a week after she enrolled there in late September; she was found raped and strangled in rural New Hampshire. Two days after Randall vanished, Deborah Rae Stevens, nineteen, was raped and strangled in Lynn, and left within fifty yards of her home. Ellen Reich, nineteen, a sophomore at Emerson College who lived off campus in the Back Bay, was killed on November 9; her body was found five days later nailed inside a closet of an abandoned house in Roxbury. Sandra Ehramjian, twenty-one, who drove a Boston taxi and lived not far from Gillispie in Cambridge, disappeared on November 27 on her way to the dentist and was found the next day in a culvert near Waldo Lake, toward Brockton. Most of the dead were students, and most had last been seen hitchhiking.
None of the investigations produced the man. A street encounter did. On December 26, 1972, two Cambridge officers in an unmarked van watched a man in a Cadillac apparently trying to get a woman on foot into his car. The Cadillac sped off and was chased, and was later found abandoned. Officers in a cruiser then spotted 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 with an empty holster, and told the first officer to reach him that he did not have the gun. The keys to the Cadillac and papers identifying him turned up in an alley along his route, and a gun was recovered from the same alley, in the snow, early in January. A bullet found at the scene had been fired from it. It was later matched, by some accounts, to bullets taken from Ellen Reich's body.
Jackson was thirty-three. He lived at 154 Washington Street in Dorchester with three women, Patricia Archer, Michelle Maupin and Diane Dixon, and drove a gold 1967 Cadillac with a dark vinyl top. What the women in that apartment knew became the prosecution's case. Archer testified that when she came home at about 11:30 on the night of November 29, Jackson told her that he had killed someone and had been driving around all night with the body in his car, and asked her to help clean the blood out of the Cadillac before it dried. She did. He later handed her a pair of cork-soled shoes with worn heels and spots of blood, and when she went to put them in the car she saw a moonstone ring and a turquoise and silver ring in the ashtray. The owner of a dry cleaner a block from the apartment testified that Jackson had brought in a hooded brown fur coat with what looked like blood in its lining and the initials DSG sewn inside. The owner had it handed back to him because fur could not be cleaned.
In jail Jackson made another mistake. He asked a visitor, Donald McDonald, to get a green metal box from his former wife and burn what was inside, because some of it could convict him of murder. McDonald and the former wife threw it off the Longfellow Bridge into the Charles River instead, and the police recovered it. It held more than two hundred photographs of nude women. One of them was Gillispie, whose body had not yet been found. On a later visit the two men looked over a newspaper spread with pictures of six murdered women. "The one in New Hampshire, that's not mine," McDonald said Jackson told him. "You know me better than that. I've got more respect for the FBI." Kathleen Randall was the victim found in New Hampshire, and a killing that crossed a state line would have been a federal matter.
Gillispie's body was found on February 3, 1973, in heavy woods in Billerica. She had been strangled, and the autopsy put her death on or about November 29. A Middlesex County grand jury indicted Jackson for her murder and kidnapping on February 13, 1973, and he was indicted in April for the murder of Ellen Ann Reich. A blood-soaked Cadillac later found in a Brockton junkyard was thought to be where the killings had taken place.
The prosecutions dragged on for five years. Jackson fell out with every lawyer retained by him, assigned to him or offered to him, and the delays in the Reich case held up his trial for the shooting as well; he was offered new counsel eleven days before that trial, the judge refused a continuance, and he defended himself. He was convicted of armed assault with intent to murder and unlawfully carrying a firearm, and on December 12, 1978, the Supreme Judicial Court held that there had been no abuse of discretion in making him go to trial alone. In 1983 the same court affirmed a separate murder conviction for a woman killed between December 22 and 24, 1972, the week before his arrest. Later accounts identify her as Ruth Hamilton, and say he was also convicted of Reich's murder and acquitted in Ehramjian's.
The Gillispie case came to trial in Middlesex County in the fall of 1978. Shortly before it began, the district attorney's reelection campaign ran a full-page newspaper advertisement, and distributed leaflets across the county, crediting him with the first conviction of the "hitchhike murderer," after the judge had told the entire office not to discuss the case with the press. The judge called it a lack of good judgment but refused to dismiss the indictments. Jury selection took seven days and eighty-eight prospective jurors. The recordings of the hotline calls were played twice. On November 22, 1978, Jackson was convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping and sentenced to life in prison, plus nine to ten years, both to be served after the sentences he already had, at the state prison at Walpole.
On appeal he argued the publicity, jurors inclined to believe the police, McDonald's account of the newspaper conversation, the shootout evidence and the tapes. The Supreme Judicial Court rejected each point on May 1, 1984. By then, in a libel suit he brought against a newspaper, the same court noted that his only factual complaints about its coverage were that there had been no stolen-car chase and that not all of the 1972 victims had been raped and strangled. He did not contest that he had been convicted of one of the hitchhike murders. Six women were named in the coverage of that autumn. The court record read here establishes his convictions in two of their deaths.