Eight years after the solution of the "Boston Strangler" case, Massachusetts co-eds were terrorized by a new series of brutal rape -murders. Unlike one strangler's crimes, all victims in the latest series were young, between 18 and 22 years of age, and none were killed in their homes. As bodies were retrieved and evidence compiled, it soon became apparent that Boston's new slayer was preying on attractive hitchhikers, selecting his victims as random "targets of opportunity."

The killer claimed his first two victims in late September 1972, picking off 18-year-old Kathleen Randall a week after she enrolled at Boston University. Last seen thumbing rides near the campus, she was found two weeks later, raped and strangled in rural New Hampshire. Two days after Randall's disappearance, 19-year-old Debra Stevens was raped and strangled to death at Lynn, Massachusetts, her body discarded within 50 yards of home.

Victim Ellen Reich was another habitual hitchhiker. A 19-year-old sophomore at Emerson College, she lived off campus in the Back Bay area, traveling by thumb in preference to laying out the money for a car. The practice cost her life on November 9. Strangled and stabbed several times, she had been dead at least four days when searchers found her body on November 14, nailed inside the closet of an abandoned house in Boston's Roxbury district.

Sandra Ehramjian, age 21, also liked to hitchhike when she wasn't earning money as a Boston taxi driver. A resident of Cambridge, she vanished November 27, en route to a dentist's appointment, her strangled corpse found the next day in a culvert near Waldo Lake, in suburban Brockton. Two days later, honor student Synge Gillespie vanished while thumbing rides in Boston. A telephone ransom demand for $25,000 brought relatives no closer to recovery of their loved one, and the Boston slayer had claimed three more victims by Christmas, all strangled or suffocated, with some stabbed for good measure.

Police got their break on December 26, when 33-year-old Anthony Jackson was arrested following a high-speed chase and shootout with Cambridge patrolmen. Booked on charges of assault with a deadly weapon, operating an automobile to endanger, and illegal possession of firearms, he was indicted for the Gillespie murder on February 3, 1973. A blood-soaked Cadillac, discovered in a Brockton junkyard, was believed to be the murder scene, and while evidence would remain elusive in several cases, investigators noted that the co-ed killings stopped abruptly with Jackson's arrest.