Reporter Loretta McLaughlin's actual story is already remarkable. So why does 'The Boston Strangler' need to turn her into a conspiracy theorist?
Over the course of 18 months in the idealistic early 1960s, 13 Boston-area women were strangled and sexually assaulted. The elusive killer left behind a grotesque, ritualized crime scene, as if taunting the people who would come upon it. Bodies were left in suggestive positions. Nylon stockings or other items of their personal apparel had been knotted around their necks. Some had bottles, broomsticks or other foreign objects jutting out of their bodies.
Gerold interviewed every major figure in the investigation over three years of covering the case, including reporter Loretta McLaughlin, the Keira Knightley character. And his front-row seat to history tells a story that differed in important ways from the one coming to the screen this week. “You all created a myth,” Nassar tells McLaughlin, who finally gets ahold of tapes that, in the film, confirm the confessions were coached. People wanted to believe it was DeSalvo, he explains, because the alternative was too disturbing—that there are many DeSalvos out there, “and your safe little world is just delusion.” At the end, an “s” is added to a headline to indicate the new consensus that there are multiple “Boston Stranglers.
The film’s timeline is compressed, a reasonable capitulation to the demands of cinema but one which also eases the fictionalization of key plotlines. In reality, McLaughlin had left the paper by the time DeSalvo became a suspect. In fact, DeSalvo was not publicly named as the strangler until 1966, when my grandfather printed the link in his book. This was nearly three years after the stranglings ended.
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