In the autumn of 1972 the Boston area was following a run of killings of young women that became known as the hitchhike murders. When Jackson was arraigned in one of the cases, The Harvard Crimson described the victim as one of eight young women found slain in the Boston area since the previous summer. The man who was eventually convicted in three of those deaths, Anthony J. Jackson, was caught by accident. On the day after Christmas 1972 a Cambridge police officer followed his car, Jackson fired at the officer, and the officer shot back. Jackson ended up in the hospital. The gun Jackson had used was found in the snow a few days later.
In the years that followed he was convicted of shooting at the officer, of the first-degree murder of Ruth A. Hamilton, a 23-year-old art teacher, of the first-degree murder of Ellen Ann Reich, a 19-year-old Emerson College student, and of the murder and kidnapping of Damaris Synge Gillispie, a 22-year-old Boston University student. In between, a Plymouth County jury found him not guilty of the rape and murder of another young woman from Cambridge. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts upheld every conviction, and in 1985, ruling on a libel suit he had brought against The Boston Globe, it called his reputation so damaged by his crimes that no newspaper article could harm it further.
Little is known of Jackson's life before 1972. The Harvard Crimson gave his age as 33 when he was arraigned in the Hamilton case. In the autumn of 1972 he was living in an apartment in Dorchester, the Boston neighborhood, with two women, who would later testify against him at more than one trial. He drove a dark Cadillac. A longtime friend visited him in jail after his arrest, and his former wife later testified about his visits to her. His birthplace and his work are not on record.
Ellen Ann Reich was 19 and a student at Emerson College in Boston. She lived in Boston. Her roommate last saw her on the morning of Thursday, November 8, 1972. On November 13 she was found dead in Roxbury. The Suffolk County medical examiner found that she had died of strangulation and gunshot wounds. A later autopsy confirmed the cause of death and recovered a bullet.
Ruth A. Hamilton was a 23-year-old art teacher who lived in Cambridge. She was last seen alive at about 8 p.m. on Thursday, December 21, 1972. The medical evidence put her death no earlier than 11:30 a.m. the next day, Friday, December 22. On Sunday, December 24, she was found dead in Cambridge. Several of her belongings were missing.
On December 30, her father received a check for $593 drawn on her bank account. It had been endorsed with the name "Robert Johnson." A fingerprint examiner later found Jackson's fingerprints on it, and bank video showed a black man presenting the check.
On December 26, Jackson was arrested in Cambridge on what the Supreme Judicial Court later called unrelated charges. According to the court's account, a Cambridge officer saw him in a dark Cadillac apparently trying to get the attention of a young woman. When the officer followed, the Cadillac sped away. A second officer found the car empty and then found Jackson nearby. Jackson drew a gun from a black holster and fired at him, and kept firing as he ran. The officer fired back and saw him drop to one knee. Jackson was taken to the hospital.
Police searched the area but did not find the gun. Several days later a man working nearby found a handgun in a snowbank. One of the women Jackson lived with testified at a later trial that when she visited him in the hospital after the shooting, he drew her a map in eyebrow pencil showing where the gun was in the snow. Ballistics examiners fired test bullets from it and concluded that they matched a bullet recovered from a building at the Cambridge scene. They also matched the bullet taken from Ellen Reich's body.
The cases against Jackson in the Hamilton and Reich trials rested heavily on the people closest to him in December 1972. In the Hamilton trial, the two women who shared his Dorchester apartment testified that he came and went during the days around Ruth Hamilton's death, that on the Friday afternoon he came back with furniture, and that he gave them money and other things that were later identified as Ruth Hamilton's. On December 29 he had one of them move a rifle and other items. On January 6, 1973, a longtime friend of his and his former wife threw the rifle into the Charles River at his request.
The friend became one of the prosecution's main witnesses. He testified under grants of immunity, one covering any role as an accessory after the fact to a murder involving Jackson and another covering a motor vehicle larceny. He visited Jackson at the Billerica house of correction after the arrest, and in early February 1973 the two men looked at newspaper articles about the murders of six young women. According to his testimony, Jackson volunteered that the killing in New Hampshire "was not" his. The Supreme Judicial Court later treated that remark as one indivisible statement that took in the other murders in the articles and held that it had been properly admitted. The friend also testified that Jackson had asked him to recover the gun left behind in Cambridge.
On December 27, the day after his arrest, Jackson told the residents of the Dorchester apartment to move out and take his belongings with them. The rent was paid only through January 1. By January 9 the apartment was bare, and on January 19 police, with the landlord's permission, entered and seized a carton of nails while one of the women was removing the last of her things. An FBI metallurgist later compared those nails with nails from the Reich investigation and concluded that they came from the same source.
A Middlesex County grand jury indicted Jackson in February 1973 for the murder and kidnapping of Damaris Synge Gillispie, a 22-year-old Boston University student. The Harvard Crimson dated that indictment February 15. On April 11, 1973, he was indicted in Suffolk County for the murder of Ellen Ann Reich. He also pleaded innocent to an indictment charging him with the murder of Ruth A. Hamilton and was ordered held without bail, the Crimson reported. In all, he was indicted in 1973 for four murders, the Supreme Judicial Court later noted.
The Gillispie case turned in part on recordings. Telephone conversations between Jackson and Synge Gillispie's brother had been taped, and in June 1976 the Supreme Judicial Court upheld a lower court's decision to let them be used as evidence, the court recalled in its 1985 opinion. What was said on the calls was not set out in that ruling.
The murder cases moved slowly. Jackson clashed with a series of lawyers assigned to defend him, and in April 1976 the Supreme Judicial Court considered his challenges to lower court rulings about who would represent him on the Reich indictment. In its 1981 ruling the court reaffirmed an earlier finding that the first three years of delay in the Reich case were due to Jackson's own conduct, mainly his problems with the assigned attorneys. The rest of the delay came largely from the trials on his other indictments and from further conflict with another lawyer.
The first case to reach a verdict was the Cambridge shooting. In June 1976, according to the Globe article later described by the Supreme Judicial Court, Jackson was convicted of armed assault with intent to murder and unlawful carrying of a firearm. The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the convictions on December 12, 1978.
On December 22, 1976, a jury in the Middlesex County case convicted Jackson of murder in the first degree, kidnapping, rape and unarmed robbery. He was sentenced to life imprisonment at MCI Walpole for the murder, a sentence the Supreme Judicial Court described in 1985 as life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He received five to ten years for kidnapping and twenty to thirty years each for rape and unarmed robbery, to be served together after the murder sentence.
The prosecution's case drew on the two housemates, the friend, the forged check and the fingerprints on it, and a jailer who testified to an incriminating statement Jackson had made. Testimony about his flight and arrest in Cambridge was admitted as evidence of consciousness of guilt. Shell casings of the same caliber as two guns linked to him were recovered in the investigation, and a hair from a hat taken from Jackson at his arrest was described by an examiner as "microscopically like" a hair recovered in the case. Jackson's former wife also testified about his visits.
Jackson's defense was an alibi. Two nurse's aides testified that they had spent an evening with a man named "Tony," and one of them identified him, but there was evidence that their evening with him had taken place weeks before December 22.
Jackson's run of convictions was broken in Plymouth County. A jury there found him not guilty of the 1972 rape and murder of a Cambridge woman. On May 20, 1977, The Boston Globe published an article by Kay Longcope reporting the jurors' explanations for their verdicts. The jurors had not been told that Jackson had already been convicted in other cases. The article said he was under indictment for the slayings of two other young women.
Jackson's trial for the murder of Ellen Reich began in Suffolk County on January 10, 1978, 57 months after his indictment. The case combined the witnesses with an unusual amount of laboratory work. The ballistics evidence tied the bullet recovered from her body to the gun found in the Cambridge snowbank. An FBI agent testified about blood-group factors in stains found in the investigation, and a second FBI agent found that Jackson's blood type was consistent with those results; about 80 percent of people share the trait at issue, and about 40 percent have his blood type, according to the evidence. A prosecution expert described head hairs as microscopically alike in all identifiable characteristics to samples of Jackson's hair, while another hair did not match him. The FBI metallurgist gave his evidence about the nails. One of the housemates identified the holster and the gun from the snowbank as Jackson's and said she had seen the nail carton in the trunk of his car.
The prosecutor told the jury in his opening statement that two more witnesses would link Jackson to the case. Neither testified. The trial judge refused a mistrial, and the Supreme Judicial Court later found no bad faith and no harm. The defense suggested that police had failed to investigate another man properly; the court held that testimony offered to explain why police had not suspected him had been admitted only for that purpose.
Before the case went to the jury, the judge told Jackson that if he testified, his murder conviction would be kept from the jurors but his conviction for the Cambridge assault could be used to impeach him. He did not testify. A Superior Court jury convicted him of murder in the first degree, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, to be served after the sentences he was already serving.
In 1978 a Middlesex County jury convicted Jackson of the murder and kidnapping of Damaris Synge Gillispie. The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed those convictions on May 1, 1984, noting that the hitchhike murders had received extensive publicity in late 1972 and 1973, as had his trials in 1976, 1977 and 1978.
In the Hamilton and Reich appeals Jackson also asked the Supreme Judicial Court to use its power under section 33E of chapter 278 of the General Laws to order a new trial. Each time the court examined the record and found no basis for relief.
In the Hamilton appeal, decided on January 28, 1983, in an opinion by Chief Justice Hennessey, Jackson challenged the evidence of his flight and arrest, the guns, his statements to the friend and the jailer, and references to his earlier trials. He argued that he had been made to wear prison clothing, that pretrial publicity had made a fair trial impossible, that prosecutors had withheld a Brockton police report and the criminal records of the two housemates, and that his trial lawyer had been ineffective. The court rejected each claim. It found that he had an adequate wardrobe and had not been compelled to wear prison clothes, that the newspaper articles had been generally factual and had mostly appeared well before the trial, and that the jurors had been questioned one by one and sequestered. The Brockton report, which recalled a man seen in a jewelry store before Christmas, could at most have covered a small part of the Saturday afternoon, the court said. It described his trial lawyer's work as "more than merely adequate."
In the Reich appeal, decided on November 13, 1981, the court rejected seven claims, among them the challenge to the friend's account of the newspaper conversation, the advisory ruling on prior convictions, the prosecutor's opening, the speedy trial claim and the motion to suppress the nails. On the nails, it held that Jackson had abandoned the apartment when he told the residents to move out, that the landlord's permission made the entry reasonable, and that one of the women's consent independently supported the seizure.
Prison was not safe for Jackson. In the summer of 1976 about eight inmates of the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Cedar Junction came into his cell, beat him and poured disinfectant in his eyes. In 1983 the Supreme Judicial Court upheld the corrections commissioner's decision to move him from a medium security facility to a maximum security one. Jackson feared for his safety if he were sent back to Cedar Junction.
In 1979 Jackson sued The Boston Globe and Kay Longcope for libel over the May 1977 article on the Plymouth County verdict. He objected to two statements in it: that the Cambridge shooting had happened during a stolen car chase, since he disputed that the car was stolen, and a statement about the way all of the hitchhike murder victims had died. A trial judge granted judgment to the newspaper. The Supreme Judicial Court took the appeal on its own motion, heard argument on February 6, 1985, and ruled on April 17, 1985, with Justice Wilkins writing for the court. Jackson argued his own case.
The court assumed for the purpose of the appeal that the article was libelous, then held that Jackson had been libel-proof when it was published: by May 1977 his record, including a murder conviction, a rape conviction and the convictions from the Cambridge gunfight, meant that his reputation could not have been further harmed, and the best result he could hope for at trial was nominal damages. The rule, the court said, applies only where that is clear as a matter of law. Recounting the 1976 attack in prison, the court added: "Even in that segment of society, Jackson appears to have had a reputation not universally respected." At the time of that ruling he was serving a life sentence.
Jackson was convicted in three deaths and found not guilty in a fourth. The Plymouth County case ended in acquittal, and nothing in the later court rulings treats that killing as his. The Harvard Crimson's count of eight young women slain in the Boston area was a count of victims, not of charges against Jackson. The killing in New Hampshire that came up in his jail conversation with his friend was not among the cases brought against him; the friend's testimony was that Jackson denied it.
November 8, 1972: Ellen Ann Reich, 19, an Emerson College student, is last seen by her roommate in Boston.
November 13, 1972: Reich is found dead in Roxbury.
December 21, 1972: Ruth A. Hamilton is last seen alive at about 8 p.m.
December 24, 1972: Hamilton, 23, an art teacher, is found dead in Cambridge.
December 26, 1972: Jackson fires at a Cambridge police officer, who fires back; Jackson is arrested and taken to the hospital.
December 27, 1972: Jackson tells the residents of his Dorchester apartment to move out.
December 29, 1972: Jackson has one of his housemates move a rifle and other items.
December 30, 1972: Hamilton's father receives a $593 check drawn on her account.
Days after the shooting: a man working nearby finds a handgun in a snowbank in Cambridge.
January 6, 1973: Jackson's friend and his former wife throw a rifle into the Charles River at his request.
January 19, 1973: police seize a carton of nails from the Dorchester apartment.
Early February 1973: Jackson and his friend discuss newspaper reports of the murders of six young women.
February 1973: indicted in Middlesex County for the murder and kidnapping of Damaris Synge Gillispie.
1973: pleads innocent to the Hamilton indictment and is held without bail.
April 11, 1973: indicted in Suffolk County for the murder of Ellen Ann Reich.
April 1976: the Supreme Judicial Court rules on his challenges over counsel in the Reich case.
June 1976: the court allows recordings of his telephone conversations with Gillispie's brother to be used as evidence.
Summer 1976: about eight inmates attack him in his cell at the state prison.
June 1976: convicted of armed assault with intent to murder and unlawful carrying of a firearm.
December 22, 1976: convicted in Middlesex County of the first-degree murder of Ruth A. Hamilton, with kidnapping, rape and unarmed robbery; sentenced to life without parole.
1977: a Plymouth County jury finds him not guilty of the rape and murder of a Cambridge woman.
May 20, 1977: The Boston Globe publishes Kay Longcope's article on the verdict.
January 10, 1978: his Suffolk County trial for the Reich murder begins; he is convicted of first-degree murder.
1978: convicted in Middlesex County of the murder and kidnapping of Damaris Synge Gillispie.
December 12, 1978: the Supreme Judicial Court affirms the shooting convictions.
1979: files a libel suit against The Boston Globe and Kay Longcope.
November 13, 1981: the Reich conviction is affirmed.
January 28, 1983: the Hamilton convictions are affirmed.
1983: the court upholds his transfer to a maximum security prison.
May 1, 1984: the Gillispie convictions are affirmed.
April 17, 1985: the court rules against him in the libel suit, holding him libel-proof.