Looking for things to do this Easter Holidays in Wakefield? 

Here’s what’s on at Wakefield Museums and Castles for Saturday 1 to Monday 10 April!

Dragon Egg Week at Pontefract Castle

The Easter Dragon Egg Hunt at Pontefract Castle is back, and better than ever. Help Ilbert the Dragon find all of his eggs on a new trail available from Saturday 1 April to Monday 10 April.

Join in with different dragon activities throughout the week, including storytelling, eco-friendly crafts and the first ever Dragon Parade!

Almost all of our eggcellent Dragon Egg Week activities, including the trail, are free. 

Trail available 10am – 4pm daily from the Visitor Centre.

Click here for full information about all Dragon Egg Week activities

Castleford Changes at Castleford Museum

Monday 3, Tuesday 4 and Thursday 6* April

10am to 3pm

Free and drop-in

Have you noticed something different around town? We’re exploring how Castleford has changed over the last 100 years with a spotlight on the images from Albert Wainwright’s Castleford Sketchbook. 

Practice your sketching skills, make your mark on a community artwork, and look forward to what the next 100 years will bring! 

*Thurs 6: SEND families are welcome at all of our sessions but we are running this SEND session for those families who require a more relaxed atmosphere.

Let’s Investigate Eggs! at Wakefield Museum

Thursday 6 April

10am and 1.30pm

As Easter approaches, it’s an eggciting time to investigate eggs! Join us to explore egg related objects in the museum’s collection. 

Decorate your own excellent egg cup and take historical recipes home to make together. 

£2.50 per child. Accompanying adults free

The Wild Escape

Go on an animal adventure around our museums and make some eco-friendly crafts with The Wild Escape! 

All activities are free and drop-in.

Castleford Museum – Tues 11, Thurs 13 & Fri 14 April* (relaxed SEND day) – 10am to 3pm each day.

Pontefract Museum – Weds 12 April – 10.30am to 12.30pm and 1pm to 3pm

Wakefield Museum – Fri 14 April – 10.30am to 12.30pm and 1pm to 3.30pm

The Wild Escape is a major new project led by Art Fund uniting hundreds of museums with schools and families in a celebration of UK wildlife and creativity.

Fred the Frog Finds His Way Home at Wakefield Museum

Thursday 13 April

10.30am and 1.30pm

Free – booking required

Help Fred the Frog find his way home in this interactive storytelling, singalong and play session for 2-to-5-year-olds and their adults!

You can also make your own funny froggy friend to take home.

Let’s Sow Some Seeds! at Pontefract Castle

Thursday 13 April

10am and 1.30pm

Join us for this fun multi-sensory session where we will see, smell and sample some of the tasty herbs grown at the Castle! 

You will also get to create together, decorating your own plant pots and sowing herb seeds to grow at home. 

£2.50 per child, accompanying adults free

Click here for visitor and access information for all our sites

Click here for a printable PDF Easter Planner with all of our activities and workshops on

Growing up in Belgium, I’d hear the story of how my grandparents married during the Nazi occupation. It wasn’t a time for celebrations, particularly for Jewish families like theirs. Naively, though, they thought marriage would protect them from being separated should they be deported. In June 1942, they went to city hall with their loved ones—“decorated,” as my grandmother would say, with yellow stars.

Hearing that story as a child, I imagined them in dark clothes with shiny stars, each one a human Christmas tree—a celebratory image that only existed in my brain. Her most vivid memory of that day was the looks in people’s eyes: stares of curiosity, pity and contempt. The yellow star had transformed them, in onlookers’ eyes, from joyous newlyweds into miserable Jews.

Decades later, I completed a PhD on the history of forcing Jewish people to wear a badge. My grandmother called to congratulate me—and, I soon understood, to unburden herself of a story she’d never told before.

When the Nazis issued the law forcing Jewish Belgians to wear a yellow star in May 1942, my grandmother’s future father-in-law declared he would not wear it. The whole family tried to persuade him otherwise, fearing the consequences. In the end, my grandmother stitched the star on his coat.

I could hear her voice trembling on the phone as she told me she still could not forgive herself. My grandparents’ wedding two weeks later would be the last time she saw her father-in-law: He died in 1945 after being released from a transit camp and a detention home for elderly Jews, spending two years in terrible conditions.

Though the yellow badge has come to symbolize Nazi cruelty, it wasn’t an original idea. For many centuries, communities throughout Europe had forced Jewish residents to mark themselves.

Yellow wheels and pointed hats

In lands under Muslim rule, non-Muslims had been required to wear identifying marks since the Pact of Umar, a ruling attributed to a seventh-century caliph, though scholars believe it originated later. For Jews, these were usually a yellow belt called zunnar or a yellow turban.

In Europe, forced markings for Jews and Muslims were introduced by Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The pope explained that the markings were a means to prevent Christians from having sex with Jews and Muslims, thereby protecting society from “such prohibited intercourse.” But he didn’t specify how Jews’ or Muslims’ dress had to be different, resulting in various distinguishing signs.

Ways to make Jews visible in the cities and towns of medieval Europe abounded, from yellow wheels in France to blue stripes in Sicily to yellow pointed hats in Germany to red capes in Hungary to white badges shaped like the Ten Commandments tablets in England. Since there were no large Muslim communities in Europe at the time, aside from in Spain, the regulation applied only to Jews in practice.

In northern Italy, Jews had to wear a round yellow badge in the 15th century and a yellow hat in the 16th century. The reason typically given was they were otherwise undistinguishable from the rest of the population. For Christian authorities, unmarked Jews were like gambling, drinking and prostitution: All represented the moral failings of Renaissance society and needed to be fixed.

Pretext for persecution

As I explain in my book, Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy: Politics, Religion and the Power of Symbols, Jews were often arrested for not wearing the yellow badge or hat, sometimes while traveling away from home in places where no one knew them.

Clearly, then, Jews were recognizable from Christians in other ways, including their accents or behaviors, as well as the distinctive headwear and earrings worn by some Jewish women. The true aim of forcing Jews to wear emblems was not merely to identify them, as authorities claimed, but to target them.

Laws imposing a badge or hat were used to threaten and extort Jewish communities. Jews were willing to pay considerable sums to retract such laws or soften their provisions. They requested exemptions for women, children or travelers. When communal negotiations failed, wealthy Jews tried to negotiate for themselves and their families on an individual basis.

Badge laws were frequently reissued, which has led scholars to conclude their enforcement was inconsistent; after all, a legal directive that is steadily applied does not need to be reimposed. But the risk of arrest and extortion hanging over the heads of Jewish communities, coupled with Jews’ willingness to pay or negotiate to avoid these consequences, meant badge laws had adverse effects on Jewish life even when not enforced.

In the Duchy of Piedmont in modern-day Italy, for example, Jewish communities banded together to pay additional taxes, sometimes several times in the same year, to receive exemptions from wearing the Jewish badge. Though the Jews’ cohesion was remarkable, it had a high cost, as these communities ended up ruined and leaving the duchy.

When Italian Jews asked authorities to cancel or at least amend badge laws, they were not primarily worried about being recognized as Jews. The problem was being mocked or attacked. Violence had accompanied badge laws since their inception: Just a few years later, Innocent III wrote to French bishops that they needed to take every possible measure to ensure the badge did not expose the Jews to the “danger of loss of life.”

Yet harassment continued. Sometime in the 1560s, for example, the governor of Milan received a letter from Lazarino Pugieto and Moyses Fereves, bankers from Genoa, explaining that bandits had robbed them after recognizing them as Jews based on their badges. In 1572, Raffaele Carmini and Lazaro Levi, representatives of the communities of Pavia and Cremona, wrote that when Jews wore the yellow hat, youngsters attacked and insulted them. And in 1595, David Sacerdote, a successful musician from Monferrato, complained that he could not play with other musicians when wearing a yellow hat.

“There was a time when nobody noticed me”

Centuries later, the yellow star had the same effect.

During the era of Jewish Emancipation, which lasted from the late 18th into the 19th century, Jews finally received equal citizenship in the European countries in which they lived. The last distinctive badge or hat laws were also abolished then.

The Nazis, however, brought these regulations back to nations they occupied. In Poland, they forced Jews to wear a white armband with a blue star, while in Western Europe, it was a yellow star with the word Jew—Jude, Juif or Jood—inside. In Belgium and France, the stars were introduced in May and June 1942, shortly before the large-scale deportation of Jews began in these countries.

Max Jacob, a French Jewish artist and poet, wrote of experiencing a vision of Christ, and he converted to Christianity in 1909. During the Nazi occupation of France, he was nonetheless classified as a Jew and forced to wear the yellow star.

In the 1950 prose poem “Love of the Neighbor,” he wrote about the deep shame he experienced.

“Who has seen the toad cross a street?” he asked. No one had noticed it, despite the animal’s clownish, grimy appearance and weak leg. Jacob added, “There was a time when nobody noticed me in the street; now the children jeer at my yellow star. Happy toad! You have no yellow star.”

The Nazi context differed significantly from Renaissance Italy’s: There were no negotiations or exceptions, not even for large payments, and the marker was just one step in a systematic campaign of genocide. But the mockery, the loss of status and the shame remained.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Note: This blog contains direct quotes with outdated language that some readers may find offensive.

Matthew Henson was the first African American to reach and stand on one of earth’s farthest reaches – the North Pole. He traveled with Robert Peary’s expeditions to venture into the desolate lands of the Arctic. In 1909, Henson, Peary, and four Indigenous natives stood at the top of the world for the first time in recorded history. Together, they faced numerous dangers, harsh landscapes, and sub-zero temperatures.

Henson understood the magnitude of the attempt to reach the North Pole, and that he represented all African American people should he be successful. In Henson’s 1912 autobiography, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912), he tells us in his own words about his experiences and the challenges he overcame that led him to his monumental polar achievement. Within the book, he describes his “strongest doubts” and remembers his journey as one filled with “toil, fatigue, and exhaustion.” Nevertheless, his story is one of perseverance, grit, and determination.

I could write about it, but wouldn’t you rather have Matthew Henson share his story? Come along with me as we follow in his own words, his epic journey to the North Pole.

Traveling on an early 20th-century ship had its charm, but also its share of discomforts. Henson describes being aboard SS Roosevelt as they made their way north toward the Arctic…

From Etah to Cape Sheridan, which was to be our last point north in the ship, consumed twenty-one days of the hardest kind of work imaginable for a ship…The constant jolting, bumping, and jarring against the ice-packs, forwards and backwards, the sudden stops and starts and the frequent storms made work and comfort aboard ship all but impossible.

And there were some important rules that had to be followed:

There is a general rule that every member of the expedition, including the sailors, must take a bath at least once a week, and it is wonderful how contagious bathing is. Even the Esquimos [sic] (now referred to as Inuit) catch it, and frequently Charley has to interrupt the upward development of some ambitious native, who has suddenly perceived the need of ablutions, and has started to scrub himself in the water that is intended for cooking purposes.

Henson, like the rest of the crew, had his assigned duties. But what did he do to pass the time while traveling for months onboard Roosevelt?

On board ship there was quite an extensive library, especially on Arctic and Antarctic topics…In my own cabin I had Dickens’ “Bleak House,” Kipling’s “Barrack Room Ballads,” and the poems of Thomas Hood; also a copy of the Holy Bible, which had been given to me by a dear old lady in Brooklyn, N. Y. I also had Peary’s books, “Northward Over the Great Ice,” and his last work “Nearest the Pole.” During the long dreary midnights of the Arctic winter, I spent many a pleasant hour with my books.

Matthew Henson was quick to give credit where credit was due. He regularly applauded the tenacity and aptitude of the Esquimos. After all, they knew the land better than anyone, having lived there for thousands of years. But Henson also regularly praised and credited the expedition’s success to the North’s unlikely hero – the dog.

Next to the Esquimos, the dogs are the most interesting subjects in the Arctic regions, and I could tell lots of tales to prove their intelligence and sagacity. These animals, more wolf than dog, have associated themselves with the human beings of this country as have their kin in more congenial places of the earth…Without the Esquimo dog, the story of the North Pole would remain untold; human ingenuity has not yet devised any other means to overcome the obstacles of cold, storm, and ice that nature has placed in the way than those that were utilized on this expedition.

What does one pack to wear to the frigid Arctic tundra? Furs, of course. But fresh furs have to stay clean because if they get too dirty, they become infested with vermin.

It is easy to become vermin-infested, and when all forms of life but man and dog seem to have disappeared, the bedbug still remains. Each person had taken a good hot bath with plenty of soap and water before we left the ship, and we had given each other what we called a “prize-fighter’s hair-cut.” We ran the clippers from forehead back, all over the head, and we looked like a precious bunch…

The Arctic is no easy place to endure. Ice forms that shift under your feet. Blinding ice storms and dense fogs. Henson reminds us that traveling to earth’s farthest reaches was no simple feat:

These floes were hardly thick enough to hold a dog safely, but, there being no other way, we were obliged to cross on them. We set out with jaws squared by anxiety. A false step by any one would mean the end…For the next five hours our trail lay over heavy pressure ridges, in some places sixty feet high. We had to make a trail over the mountains of ice and then come back for the sledges. A difficult climb began. Pushing from our very toes, straining every muscle

It was during the march of the 3d of April that I endured an instant of hideous horror. We were crossing a lane of moving ice…when the block of ice I was using as a support slipped from underneath my feet, and before I knew it the sledge was out of my grasp, and I was floundering in the water of the lead. I did the best I could. I tore my hood from off my head and struggled frantically. My hands were gloved and I could not take hold of the ice, but before I could give the “Grand Hailing Sigh of Distress,” faithful old Ootah had grabbed me by the nape of the neck, the same as he would have grabbed a dog, and with one hand he pulled me out of the water, and with the other hurried the team across. He had saved my life.

The loss of life – especially that of his friend Professor Ross G. Marvin – weighed on Henson:

My good, kind friend was never again to see us, or talk with us. It is sad to write this. He went back to his death, drowned in the cold, black water of the Big Lead. In unmarked, unmarbled grave, he sleeps his last, long sleep.

As they neared their intended Polar destination, Matthew Henson begins describing the anxious excitement as they pressed onward:

Commander Peary and I were alone (save for the four Esquimos), the same as we had been so often in the past years, and as we looked at each other we realized our position and we knew without speaking that the time had come for us to demonstrate that we were the men who, it had been ordained, should unlock the door which held the mystery of the Arctic.

But the most evident feeling of pride came when they reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909:

A thrill of patriotism ran through me and I raised my voice to cheer the starry emblem of my native land. It was about ten or ten-thirty a. m., on the 7th of April, 1909, that the Commander gave the order to build a snow-shield to protect him from the flying drift of the surface-snow. I knew that he was about to take an observation, and while we worked I was nervously apprehensive, for I felt that the end of our journey had come….I was sure that he was satisfied, and I was confident that the journey had ended. Feeling that the time had come, I ungloved my right hand and went forward to congratulate him on the success of our eighteen years of effort…The Commander gave the word, “We will plant the stars and stripes—at the North Pole!” and it was done; on the peak of a huge paleocrystic floeberg the glorious banner was unfurled to the breeze, and as it snapped and crackled with the wind, I felt a savage joy and exultation.

Matthew Henson was aware that his contribution alongside Peary was a major accomplishment to all people of his race. His words demonstrate that he understood he would now have a place in history, alongside the great triumphs of other people of color:

Another world’s accomplishment was done and finished, and as in the past, from the beginning of history, wherever the world’s work was done by a white man, he had been accompanied by a colored man. From the building of the pyramids and the journey to the Cross, to the discovery of the new world and the discovery of the North Pole, the Negro had been the faithful and constant companion of the Caucasian, and I felt all that it was possible for me to feel, that it was I, a lowly member of my race, who had been chosen by fate to represent it, at this, almost the last of the world’s great work.

As Henson’s words reach the end of his book and his journey back home concluded, his final thoughts are of a bittersweet longing. There is pride in what he had done mixed with a yearning to be back in the Arctic lands, where friendships were made and historic feats completed:

To-day there is a more general knowledge of Commander Peary, his work and his success, and a vague understanding of the fact that Commander Peary’s sole companion from the realm of civilization, when he stood at the North Pole, was Matthew A. Henson, a Colored Man…

And now my story is ended; it is a tale that is told.

I long to see them all again! the brave, cheery companions of the trail of the North….the lure of the Arctic is tugging at my heart, to me the trail is calling!

To read more about Henson’s early life and work with Robert Peary, please read the blog post “Matthew Henson: An Arctic Explorer”, by Liz Williams, The Mariners’ registrar.

Even after his capture, confession and incarceration, the identity of the “Boston Strangler” remained contested.

Skeptics both then and now claimed the man who had confessed to the crimes, Albert DeSalvo, couldn’t have committed all 13 of the murders attributed to him. Even in the local police department, some refused to believe the killings that haunted Boston in the early 1960s were the work of a lone individual. According to these critics, one killer may have been responsible for some of the murders, but copycats likely capitalized on the terror, too, drawing on detailed newspaper coverage of the crimes to replicate the strangler’s M.O.

The speculation surrounding the serial killer is now getting the Hollywood treatment, with a particular focus on two women journalists who doggedly reported on the murders of single women across the Boston area. Premiering on Hulu and Disney+ on March 17, Boston Strangler stars Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon as reporters Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole, respectively. The pair’s investigations for the Boston Record American (a forebearer of the Boston Herald) offered scrupulous insights on the murders and advanced the theory that the crimes were the work of a single killer, whom they dubbed the “Boston Strangler.”

The new film charts the women’s attempts to report on the escalating crimes while navigating sexism in the workplace and police recalcitrance prompted by the depth of their reporting. In the summer of 1962, toward the start of the killing spree, “an editor disputed the worth of a series on the four dead women, noting that they were ‘nobodies,’” McLaughlin later recalled. “Why should anyone murder four obscure women? That was what made them so interesting … sisters in anonymity, like all of us.”

McLaughlin and Cole’s reporting sparked controversy both in the newsroom and beyond. Their first major story together, published in January 1963, was headlined “Two Girl Reporters Analyze Strangler”—a title that ignored the pair’s journalistic achievements and the fact that they were then in their 30s. Authorities were angry at the level of detail the Record American revealed to the public, and they rejected the pair’s suggestion that one man was responsible for terrorizing the women of the city. The police also tried to suppress key information, including excerpts from files leaked by the medical examiner’s office.

Today, some still view the Record American’s coverage of the killings as damaging. Casey Sherman, author of A Rose for Mary: The Hunt for the Real Boston Strangler, says, “If you despised a woman in the 1960s, you had a blueprint on how to commit a Boston Strangler-style murder, because all of the grisly details were printed.” Knightley, meanwhile, tells Screen Rant the two reporters were simply providing information that needed to be public “to keep [the] women of Boston safe.”

The Boston Strangler is credited with the killings of 13 women between June 1962 and January 1964. Ranging in age from 19 to 85, most of the victims were sexually assaulted in their homes, then strangled to death with articles of clothing. (Exceptions included 26-year-old Beverly Samans, who was stabbed to death, and 85-year-old Mary Mullen, who seemingly died of a heart attack during the assault.)

The first victim, 55-year-old Anna Slesers, was found strangled with her bathrobe belt on the kitchen floor of her apartment on June 14, 1962. Within a few weeks, two women in their 60s were also found sexually assaulted and strangled. A pattern was emerging of a madman brutalizing unmarried older women in their homes.

By late August, the number of victims was up to six: Slesers, Mullen, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Ida Irga and Jane Sullivan. (Authorities only attributed Mullen’s death to the Boston Strangler years later, when DeSalvo confessed to attacking her.) Local newspapers carried breathless coverage of the killings, accusing a “phantom strangler” of unleashing a “maniacal spree of violence [that has] gripped in terror thousands of Greater Boston women who live alone,” as the Boston Globe put it.

What unnerved so many was that these women had been attacked in their own homes after apparently voluntarily allowing the killer inside. To protect themselves, some women began carrying pepper and ammonia, tear gas guns, or hatpins. Police advised women who lived alone to lock all of their doors and windows and “let no one into an apartment until positive identification is established.”

A brief respite arrived in fall 1962, with no new killings reported until December. The break helped authorities better mobilize to investigate the murders and improve communication between units from the various municipalities in which the crimes took place.

Initially, the assailant was believed to be targeting middle-aged or elderly women. Then, on December 5, Sophie Clark, a 20-year-old African American student at the Carnegie Institute of Medical Technology, was found strangled with a pair of stockings in the foyer of her apartment.

The police investigation took a sharp turn. The murders were no longer limited to older white women, and the killer—or killers, as some posited—was becoming more brazen in his attacks, leaving semen at a crime scene for the first time. Another young woman, 22-year-old Patricia Bissette, turned up dead in her apartment, a white blouse and three stockings tied around her neck, on New Year’s Eve.

After reports of the fourth killing broke that summer, McLaughlin urged her editor at the Record American to give her the space to probe the unsolved murders. She and Cole were already accomplished investigative journalists: McLaughlin had earned recognition for her medical stories, while Cole was known for a yearslong exposé on nursing homes in Massachusetts.

Beginning in January 1963, the pair wrote a major investigative series on the strangler, “in which they not only reconstructed the crimes themselves but dissected the police investigations as well,” writes Susan Kelly in her book The Boston Stranglers, originally published in 1995.

McLaughlin and Cole were among the most vocal critics of the investigation’s inefficiencies and oversights. In tense meetings with the attorney general’s office, the pair argued that the Boston Police Department had fed false information to the press and failed to exchange the names of suspects with other law enforcement agencies, among other examples of mismanagement.

All of the duo’s articles were meticulous and unsparing in their details. In a January 14 report about Blake, for instance, McLaughlin and Cole recounted how the killer had apparently sifted through the 65-year-old’s belongings:

Some drawers are pulled out of a desk and a bureau. Others are removed completely and set on the floor. … Helen’s watches have all been examined and placed on the bureau. Her jewelry boxes have been opened and are on the floor. Her pocketbooks have been gone through. Even the sugar bowl and teapot have been looked into.

Authorities were livid that such extensive detail had filtered out to the public, arguing that anyone could confess to or imitate the murders based on this information. As Kelly notes, a January 23 article furthered these fears, listing the names, ages, employers and hobbies of the suspected victims, as well as their times of death, when their bodies were found, their causes of death, what they were wearing when they were killed, the probability of sexual assault and whether their apartment had been ransacked.

In articles like “Strangler Strong, Calm, Cold Killer,” McLaughlin and Cole argued the murders were the work of a single, intelligent psychopath with a history of sexually deviant behavior. Beyond the fact that all of the victims were single women, they found compelling connections between the attacks. According to Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler, published in 1966, the reporters noted that each victim was “orderly, well-groomed, self-sufficient, respectable.” The murders often involved “strangling, using a personal article of the victim,” and the assailant usually spent time “inspecting the victim’s belongings” after the attack. The sexual assaults were “peculiarly incomplete.”

After publishing 29 articles in just one month, McLaughlin and Cole’s carte blanche reporting freedom came to a screeching halt. Enormous external political pressure, plus internal newspaper politics, shut down their efforts in February 1963. Critics, among them the women’s editors, the police and the senior medical examiner, considered the pair meddling reporters who weren’t actually helping the investigation. Detective James Mellon refused to read the series, telling a friend, “I want to be sure that what I know comes from the case itself, not from someone’s typewriter.”

Four more murders attributed to the Boston Strangler took place in 1963, confounding investigators and leaving the public convinced there was no end to the killings in sight. Joann Graff, 22, was the youngest of the four new victims, while 69-year-old Mary Brown was the oldest. Brown had been stabbed multiple times but died of strangulation; another victim, 26-year-old Samans, died of stab wounds but was found with scarves and a stocking tied around her neck. The killer’s final victim, 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, was murdered on January 4, 1964.

Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke took control of the investigation a few days later, launching a major task force commonly referred to as the “Strangler Bureau.” He promised to centralize competing investigations in different municipalities and dedicate new resources to capturing this phantom killer.

A major development in the case arrived on October 27, 1964, when DeSalvo—later described by the Boston Herald as an “erstwhile … handyman”—conned his way into a woman’s home by posing as a police detective. In a break from the Boston Strangler’s established pattern, DeSalvo raped the woman, apologized to her and then left. She reported him to the police, who picked him up based on her description. When DeSalvo’s photograph appeared in the newspapers, other women came forward to say he’d attacked them, too.

DeSalvo was charged with assault, burglary and sex offenses—but not murder. While awaiting trial for a different set of attacks known as the “Green Man” crimes in late 1965, he told a fellow inmate he was also responsible for the Boston Strangler killings. The inmate then relayed this intelligence to his attorney.

Subsequent conversations with police seemingly confirmed DeSalvo’s guilt. He knew specific details of the murders, such as the color of the furniture in some of the victims’ apartments and the identity of a victim whose photograph had never been previously published. His confession helped convince the people of Boston the serial killer had finally been caught. But doubts lingered, as no physical evidence linked DeSalvo to the crimes.

DeSalvo stood trial for the Green Man assaults in January 1967. The Record American covered the trial, using Cole and a string of other reporters to keep readers updated, but didn’t revisit the 1963 series.

DeSalvo’s attorney, F. Lee Bailey (who later defended Patty Hearst and O.J. Simpson), argued for his client to end up in a hospital, “where doctors could try to find out what made him kill.” Instead, DeSalvo was sentenced to life in prison—a result that led Bailey to declare, “Society is deprived of a study that might help deter other mass killers who lived among us, waiting for the trigger to go off inside them.”

DeSalvo was never tried for the Boston Strangler murders. Besides a February 1967 jailbreak that sparked a statewide manhunt, he spent the remainder of his life in prison. He was stabbed to death in a prison infirmary in November 1973, shortly after recanting his confession.

Debates over DeSalvo’s guilt continue to this day, despite a 2013 DNA analysis that convincingly connected him to Sullivan’s murder. Investigators concluded that DeSalvo was “most likely” responsible for the other Boston Strangler killings, too. But some dispute this point, emphasizing that the DNA only links DeSalvo to one of the murders and speculating that multiple killers were responsible for the rest of the crimes. Kelly, for instance, sticks to her original conclusion that “there was not one Boston Strangler, but rather a bare minimum of six and much more likely eight or nine.”

Certain contemporary observers also remain unconvinced that McLaughlin and Cole’s work was in the public interest. They “helped to create and feed the narrative that there was a sole serial killer stalking the women of Boston from 1962 [to] 1964,” says Sherman, who is Sullivan’s nephew. “By doing so, they did a disservice to investigators working for the Boston Strangler Task Force, [which] identified at least six suspects who they believed had committed the murders independently from each other.” (Decades after the murders, McLaughlin remained adamant that DeSalvo was the assailant, writing, “People still ask if Albert DeSalvo was really the Boston Strangler. Yes, he was.”)

Others give credit where credit is due. In her book, Kelly argues that the pair’s reporting was “brilliant investigative journalism” and the work of “two extraordinarily resourceful and tenacious reporters.” Still, she qualifies her praise by writing, “The template for homicide provided by the Record American’s ‘Strangle Worksheet’ no doubt influenced [other criminals] as well.”

In a 1991 op-ed, McLaughlin recalled how editors undermined her reporting because of her gender: “Being a female reporter was often semi-apologetically noted for the readers. … Among my newsclips are several with a headline stating, ‘Girl reporter covers’ whatever it was, from murder to presidential elections.” After covering the Boston Strangler murders, however, both McLaughlin and Cole went on to have storied careers in investigative journalism.

McLaughlin focused on health and medicine, particularly emerging public health issues like the AIDS epidemic. She reported on the “mysterious new disorder” as early as 1982. Later, as an editorial page editor at the Boston Globe, she used her position to blast “the federal government for its failure to respond forcefully to the [AIDS] crisis,” said colleague Marjorie Pritchard in her obituary. McLaughlin died in 2018 at age 90.

Cole, meanwhile, stayed on the crime beat. In the mid-1960s, she reported on criminal activity in a downtown Boston district known for its sex work and underage drinking. She and her colleagues at the Record American coined a popular nickname for the neighborhood: the “Combat Zone.” Cole worked at the Record American’s successor publication, the Boston Herald American, until her retirement in 1981. She died in 2015 at age 89.

Reminiscing about Cole to the Boston Herald earlier this year, her brother, photographer Kevin Cole, described her as “very tough. She did the stories women didn’t do—murders included.”

As an eager high school thespian and a lifelong lover of theater, I was so excited to discover an interesting group of Official US Army photographs that are among the tens of thousands in The Mariners’ Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation World War II collection. I really wondered what stories these wartime images could tell. So, sit back and enjoy what I learned.  

Imagine. You are Margalo Gillmore. Respected British actress of stage and screen, coming from four generations of actors and artists. Here you are, standing next to Katharine Cornell – a dynamic woman whom you have worked with twice prior to this venture, both times on Broadway. Her stoic, stern demeanor and arched eyebrows are somehow calming. You are not nervous, but the weight of the situation is heavy. But it is only a simulation. A drill to prepare for the possibility of being subjected to those vicious chemicals being used in the war. The reality is: this is a daunting task. She looks at you, smirks, and straps on her gas mask turning toward the door of the gas chamber behind you. 

Katharine Cornell is a tenacious and passionate performer, regarded as one of the leading ladies on Broadway. She earned the nickname “The First Lady of the American Theater” by critic Alexander Woollcott. Getting her start in minor roles and failed acting auditions for the Washington Square Players, Cornell eventually went on to find success as part of a touring company. With her acclaimed performance as Jo March in a London production of Little Women, Cornell established herself as a leading lady. 

She was even one of the three women to win the first-ever Tony Award for Lead Actress (Dramatic). She is unabashedly theatrical, perfect for the stage. She made an entree into television later in her career and her only film credit was a two-minute bit in Stage Door Canteen, where she played herself, handing out food to soldiers during World War II. 

How Cornell and Gillmore came into contact with a gas chamber is pretty simple yet fascinating. In order to bring enjoyment to the troops – without being as potentially provocative the way a USO show can be – leading actors and actresses from the American Theatre Wing in New York banded together to create a theater company for the Allied troops during the Second World War.  

The stage is set: The Barretts of Wimpole Street. The audience: troops stationed in Italy. All the cast needed to do was go from being Broadway performers to military-trained thespians! 

Training began with an early morning wake up at Camp Patrick Henry (present-day Newport News/Williamsburg International Airport), breakfast, military training involving hiking and scaling abandoned-ship drills, and concluding with rehearsals for the play. The usual day for a thespian-in-training in this wartime troupe.

Katharine and her troupe would soon land on the Italian war front. Initially, some actors were nervous that the war-weary troops would not want to listen to a three-hour drama about poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for example, but rather prefer a USO show with lots of dancing and little-to-no plot. As the legend goes, during one performance, the audience started to become rowdy. A few actors were worried the audience would walk out. Cornell, on the other hand, stayed in character, waiting for the ruckus to subside.  She continued with the performance, and the audience was so enraptured with her they gave the cast a standing ovation at the play’s conclusion. 

Cornell would return to Broadway a year after the war ended, appearing in the 1946 production of Antigone and the production of Candida a few months later. She would refrain from moving to television and film until her television appearance in 1956 in The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

Bibliography

Ennis, Thomas W. “Margalo Gillmore, An Actress on Stage and on the Screen.” The New York 

Times. July 2, 1986. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/02/obituaries/margalo-gillmore-an-actress-on-the-stage-and-on-screen.html. 

“Katharine Cornell: Biography.” IMDb.com. 2023. 

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0180263/bio/?ref_=nm_ql_1.

“Katharine Cornell (Performer).” Playbill. Accessed February 22, 2023. 

https://www.playbill.com/person/katharine-cornell-vault-0000026456.

Whitman, Alden. “Katharine Cornell Is Dead at 81.” June 10, 1974. The New York Times. 

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/10/archives/katharine-cornell-is-dead-at-81-katharine-cornell-dies-on-marthas.html.