After Show: The Salem Strangler

Elaine, such a pleasure to meet you.

Oh, pleasure to meet you as well.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for being with us, and I say meet you, to see you again I should say, because you were already in our 20/20 story on, on Friday night and, um, you, you brought such heart and passion, of course, to the story.

But I wanna start off by talking a little bit about you.

I am always so intrigued when I have an opportunity to, to meet female detectives because many of you started during a time where there weren't many of you in law enforcement, and you've been in law enforcement now for 40 years.

You were commanding the investigative unit in Essex County before you retired, and I'm just really curious about you because at that time you weren't that much older than Claire Gravel when you had, when you started this case.

Yeah, that's true.

It is true.

I came on to the state police in Massachusetts in 1982 and, um, I was 20 years old when I went to the State Police Academy.

And so, uh, when the homicide happened, when Claire was killed, I'd been on the job for about four years-

Mm-hmm

... and, um, had recently moved into the investigative unit, uh, that would oversee, uh, working on homicides in that county.

Well, take me back to 1986 because the world was a very different place, of course, you know, technology.

We didn't have cell phones, um, and as I said, there weren't a lot of, uh, women in, um, investigative units like this.

Was this your very first homicide, or had you worked others before?

This was my very first.

I had investigated other sudden or unattended deaths that took place in the county while in the unit and investigated other cases as well and assisted in other homicide investigations, but this was the first where I ultimately ended up as the primary investigator.

And take me back to you at that moment.

So this young woman is found murdered, strangled, disheveled, alongside, um, a roadway.

She's not much older than you but, of course, you've gotta go into work mode.

Where did you begin, and what did, what, what emotions do you remember?

So when we got the call, uh, our office was in Salem as well, and we got the call, uh, the report of the, of a body found on the highway on Route 128 in Beverly.

When we first arrived at the scene, our objective was obviously to try to figure out, figure out how she got to this location.

And so, uh, we spoke to some individuals that were at the scene who actually found Claire's body and then made our observations, spent quite a while, uh, observing the scene and seeing what we could glean from any evidence there.