BOSTON TABLOID

This true-crime book revisits Boston’s 1980s-era “professor and the prostitute” murder case, catnip to the media at the time.

Boston-based author Stradley focuses on a particularly attention-grabbing slaying in the city: the 1983 murder of 21-year-old sex worker Robin Benedict by Tufts professor William Douglas. The work early on details the discovery of a bloody hammer and clothing found in the trash by some bottle collectors after Benedict disappeared. The account then traces how overweight porn addict Douglas came to meet up with Benedict, recently jilted by her New England Patriots boyfriend, in Boston’s Combat Zone red-light district. The couple’s transactional relationship soon led to Douglas’ putting Benedict on the Tufts payroll and embezzling some $67,000 (over $215,000 today) in university funds, ultimately leading to his dismissal. Douglas ended up confessing to Benedict’s murder as part of a plea deal to serve time only for manslaughter. The deal followed investigations uncovering damning evidence, including brain matter on clothing in the professor’s home and a treasure trove of obsessive letters, turned over by Benedict’s pimp, that Douglas wrote to the sex worker. While a condition of Douglas’ plea was to tell investigators where he dumped Benedict’s body, his recollections were, intentionally or unintentionally, hazy, and her remains were never found.

This thorough book includes some recent interviews, including a 2021 conversation with the state trooper first assigned to the case, and concludes with the coda of Douglas’ rather surprising post-prison period and how “it is possible that he spent the last years of his life with no memory at all of Robin Benedict.” This ironic ending for Douglas, who died in 2015, is just one of the ways that Stradley weaves engrossing new details and dimensions into this account of a rather well-known true-crime story. The author acknowledges that the case has already been extensively covered, including in Linda Wolfe’s The Professor and the Prostitute (1986) and Teresa Carpenter’s Missing Beauty (1988) as well as a TV movie and several documentaries. Yet, as this volume also notes, “nothing quite captured the electricity of reading about it each morning.” Stradley’s story effectively conjures this kind of drama as it tracks the strange moments of the case, including when Douglas napped during the police search of his home, likely to hide in plain sight the bed where the slaying took place. The author convincingly argues that this event gave rise to the modern tabloid era: “Even the Boston Globe, that stuffy fortress of good taste, benefitted from articles about bloodstains and prostitutes.” The book also provides a striking sketch of Douglas’ childhood, making the murderer’s creepy, sneaky persona somewhat understandable. Sadly, Benedict remains more of an enigma, with her parents, for example, finding out only following her disappearance that their “good girl” student had become a sex worker as early as high school.

A thoughtful, compelling reexamination of an intriguing story of fatal obsession and its enduring mysteries.