Anthony J. Jackson (born 1939), known as The Hitchhike Murderer, is an American serial killer who murdered at least three young women in Massachusetts from November to December 1972. He was also suspected in four similar murders throughout that year, but was not charged in three and acquitted of the fourth.
Jackson was eventually convicted of his three proven crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment. The murders attracted media attention and led to widespread discussion surrounding hitchhiking during the 1970s.
Early life and crimes Little is known about Jackson's early life, aside from the fact that he was born in Boston in 1939. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he started committing crimes and was prosecuted several times on charges of assault and rape. He married to a woman in the mid-1960s, but the couple later divorced.
By late 1965, Jackson was dating 27-year-old Rosalind Weiner, a mother of three children who lived in Cambridge. The couple's relationship eventually soured and Weiner said that she no longer wanted to see him. Enraged by the rejection, Jackson went to her home on December 15, 1965, and attempted to strangle her, before shoving her head into an oven and turning on the gas. However, before he could harm her any further, he ceased his assault and went out into the street, where he asked a passer-by to call the police. When officers arrived at the scene, Jackson was found sitting and sobbing in a corner of the kitchen. Weiner was transported to a local hospital, while Jackson was interned for 35 days at the Bridgewater State Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.
In February 1966, Jackson was ordered to appear before a grand jury for the assault charge, and was held with a $60,000 bond. He confessed to the crime, admitting that his reason for the attack was because Weiner had turned him down. As there was no further reporting on the case, it is unclear if he was convicted and whether he faced any jail time for this offense.
Jackson resumed his criminal activities into the 1970s, acting as a pimp for several underage prostitutes with whom he lived at 154 Washington Street in Dorchester. In the Boston criminal underworld, he used the alias "Wayne Eubank". In March 1972, he was arrested under this alias for the assault of a 19-year-old woman named Leona Berendson, who accused him of beating her with a coat hanger, dog chain, and steel strip after an argument at her apartment in Fall River. Jackson was charged and held under a $3,000 bond for this crime, but it is unclear what happened afterwards.
Murders Confirmed Between November 9 and December 1972, Jackson is known to have sexually assaulted and murdered at least three female university students who hitchhiked to class or work. All the victims were strangled, with at least one additionally being stabbed and another shot; were attractive, middle-class white women; aged between 18 and 23 at the time of their deaths; and either lived in the college town of Cambridge, Boston, or the surrounding areas.
At the time, newspapers drew comparisons to the killings committed by the Boston Strangler.
Ellen Reich Jackson's first known victim was 19-year-old Ellen Ann Reich, a native of Hackensack, New Jersey who was studying to become an attorney. Friends and relatives described her as a studious young woman with excellent communication skills that loved meeting new people and was not afraid to hitchhike by herself. On November 9, 1972, Reich left her apartment on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to hitch a ride to her to her university, but failed to appear. Four days later, her body was found inside a closet in an apartment in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, after former tenant Mary Lee Cobb and her friend Belin McArthur went inside to collect personal items noticed that the closet was nailed shut. Initially, the medical examiner stated that Reich had been suffocated and stabbed multiple times, but later revised his statement after determining that the supposed wounds were actually from a firearm.
The murder caused a shock throughout the area, but despite this, young women continued to hitchhike. Some of them gave interviews to the media in which they opined that the fear of potential harm was overblown and that they had never felt in danger. In response to the murder, the Boston City Council started considering tougher anti-hitchhiking ordinances consisting of fining both hitchhikers and motorists who pick them up.
Shortly after Reich's murder, public speculation tentatively linked her case to two previous similar murders that had occurred months prior, as well as a series of rapes and attempted sexual assaults around Boston. Police started searching for a potential person of interest, described as an unshaven man with dark complexion and wearing dirtied clothing who was seen picking up female hitchhikers on Commonwealth Avenue and talking obscenely to them.
Police eventually admitted that they were lacking any real leads, and sought to locate a taxi driver they believed had picked up Reich on Marlboro Street for questioning about the case.
Synge Gillispie A little more than two weeks later, on November 29, 21-year-old Damaris Synge Gillispie of Bedford, New York left her apartment on Peters Street in Cambridge to hitch a ride to her job at the Jazz Workshop café in Boston, where she worked as a waitress. She never arrived at the location, and was reported missing. At the time of her disappearance, Gillispie just three days away from her 22nd birthday and just one month away from graduating from Boston University, where she was studying art history and was an honors student. Immediately after her disappearance, her family, together with local police, launched a massive search effort, including setting up a hotline and distributing flyers with her photo and description at colleges and universities around Boston and Cambridge.
Several days afterward, Gillispie's mother appeared on national television to plead for her daughter's safe return. Not long after, the family started receiving phone calls from across the country from people claiming to be the kidnapper and demanding ransom money, many of which were determined to be hoaxes. Between December 6 and 7, the hotline received several calls from who police believed to a middle-aged man making sarcastic remarks about supposedly knowing where Gillispie was located and accurately describing the clothing she was wearing. This led them to believe that the caller was the kidnapper, who promised to call again in a few days.
On December 10, the police received another call demanding that a $25,000 ransom be placed at a telephone booth near a supermarket in Springfield. On the next day, the same person called again repeating their demand – however, this time they managed to track it down and identified the caller as a 16-year-old teenage girl from Sanford, Maine who had a history of calling in fake emergencies such as fire alarms and bomb scares. With the help from the police in her home city, the teenager was arrested and arraigned on attempted extortion charges. It is unknown what happened to her afterwards.
Ruth Hamilton The last confirmed victim was 23-year-old teacher Ruth Abagail Hamilton, whose body was discovered on December 24 under her roommate's bed at their rented apartment in Cambridge. Her concerned parents contacted the police after they had been unable to reach her for the previous three days, and the roommate was on vacation in Puerto Rico.
At the time her body was found, Hamilton was clad only in her underwear and bra, and had been asphyxiated to death. Since there were no apparent signs of forced entry or a struggle, police assumed that Hamilton knew her killer and let them in.
Suspected Aside from his three confirmed victims, Jackson was believed to be responsible for at least four other murders committed in the area throughout the year. He was charged with one of these killings but was later acquitted, while he never faced charges in the other cases. These were the following:
Kathleen Ann O'Gorman (19): Went missing from her home in Brockton after waiting to catch a bus to work on July 3. Six days later, her naked and severely bruised body was found on the grounds of the Blue Hills Reservation, a state park in the southern suburbs of Boston. Unlike the other confirmed and suspected victims, O'Gorman did not the profile of Jackon's victims, as she never hitchhiked and kept to herself due to her lack of communication skills and introverted nature.
Initially, police in Brockton suspected that she might have been killed in a botched kidnapping plot to rob the bank she worked at, but this theory was never substantiated. Days after her body was discovered, police admitted that they had no viable suspects, and it would remain that way until Jackson's arrest.
Kathleen Ann Randall (18): Went missing from the grounds of the Boston University campus on September 13, just nine days after the start of her first semester. She was reported missing by her roommate six days later, after she failed to attend classes and appointments with friends over the previous few days. When informed of the situation, her parents immediately suspected that she had met with foul play due to the fact that all of her clothing and personal items were left behind.
A few weeks later, on October 1, her body was found by two hunters near a farm in Nashua, New Hampshire, nearly 80 kilometers away from where she was last seen. Due to severe decomposition, the coroner was unable to determine if she was sexually assaulted or how exactly she had been murdered, but strongly suspected that she was indeed the victim of a homicide. Randall was tentatively linked to the murder of Debra Stevens (see below) due to the fact that both were outgoing and frequently hitchhiked. In an attempt to gather more clues, police started distributing fliers around the campus of the Boston University, appealing for any information that could lead to a break in the case.
Debra Rae Stevens (19): A student at the Boston University, Stevens went missing on September 15. A few days later, a man walking his dog in Lynn found her body, which was nude from the waist down, in some lilac bushes. An autopsy concluded that she had been strangled, but there were no signs of sexual assault. On the same day that she was discovered, officers found a car belonging to Stevens' sister, Andrea, parked in front of a driveway just two blocks away from where her body was found. Upon closer inspection, two bullet holes were found inside the car; however, there were no traces of blood inside the vehicle, on the ground or on Stevens' body, leading to the conclusion that she likely been killed elsewhere. In the course of the investigation, Stevens' former roommate at the dormitory told police that the pair often hitchhiked to class without any concerns, but on the day of her disappearance, Debra borrowed her sister's car to attend evening classes. The police's theory was that Stevens picked up a hitchhiker who later killed her.
Sandra J. Ehramjian (19): Went missing on November 27 after leaving her apartment on Putnam Avenue in Cambridge to hitchhike back home to East Meadow, New York. On the following day, a body was found in Brockton's D.W. Field Park that was identified as belonging to Ehramjian after a photograph of the victim was posted in the newspaper. Like Jackson's confirmed victims, she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. At the time of her death, she was living with friends in Cambridge, working part-time as a taxi driver, and was described as a charismatic and outgoing young woman who was popular with men and easily made new friends.
Investigation and public reaction