“How many women have to die before it’s a story?” is the premise set for Hulu’s latest crime thriller Boston Strangler. Starring Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon as two investigative journalists, the film is based on a true story from the 1960s, where newspaper writers researched and broke the story of nearly a dozen women murdered by an unknown man.
Between 1962 and 1964, at least 11 women in the Boston area between the ages of 19 and 85 were raped and killed in brutal murders that polarized the community and made national news.
The case has been the subject of countless novels and films, but director Matt Ruskin’s Boston Strangler is the first to focus on two reporters who tied the killings to a single person they named the Boston Strangler.
Loretta McLaughlin (Knightley) and Jean Cole (Carrie Coon) of the Record American newspaper were two women working in a man’s world, specifically the 1960s male-dominated newsrooms. One of their earliest pieces, “Two Female Reporters Study Strangler,” was published in January 1963.
Talking about the characters, Knightley said: “I think their resilience and their tenacity to go after a career and to pursue this story that had been largely ignored by the male establishment at that time, and to try to see its importance, and to recognize that they needed to highlight it for the safety of the other women in their community, I found it very inspiring.”
“I think the fact that these women weren’t seen as important, you know, that they were seen as nothing, that it wasn’t a relevant story, because who cared whether they lived or died? You know, I found that like a very poignant thing to have said,” said Knightley.
She added: “And I’d love to say that that has changed, but I don’t know that it’s changed as much as we would like it to have.”
“This story is a good place to start when you have women advocating for other women and advocating for their safety and Keira pointed out it’s very important to have women in positions of power so that the stories can be told,” said Coon.
Chris Cooper plays Jack McLean, the editor of the newspaper, who, initially, doesn’t show much interest in this murder mystery.
“He says to Loretta, well, these, these women are nobodies,” said Cooper. “Loretta turns around and says, ‘These are the people that read your paper.’ And that was a little wakeup call right there for Jack.”
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Decades after reporting on the murders, the real McLaughlin recalled that it was the fourth murder “that galvanized my attention”. She wrote: “An editor disputed the worth of a series on the four dead women, noting that they were ‘nobodies’. That was it exactly, I felt. Why should anyone murder four obscure women? That was what made them so interesting … sisters in anonymity, like all of us.”
And the fact that the struggles of two female journalists in a man’s world are being discussed parallel to the murders of several women is what sets the story apart. Gerold Frank, who wrote the book The Boston Strangler, said that McLaughlin would write “late at night at her typewriter on the dining room table under an old-fashioned Tiffany chandelier,” after putting her three children to bed each evening.
McLaughlin died aged 90 in 2018 and could not witness her story being told through a film. But her son, Mark McLaughlin, 65, admits: “Most people don’t imagine that a chapter of their parents’ career is going to be portrayed in a major film and by such a well-known actress.”
He recalls: “It was an era when a lot of women went into the workplace but a lot of them would depart as soon as they were parents. We never felt neglected. She was a terrific parent and she was also a good professional journalist.
“When we were really young she would come home from who knows what had gone on in the newspaper world that day and she would still put us to bed and sing a song. She was a real mother in addition to being a first-class journalist.”
Boston Strangler is now on Hulu and here’s how you can watch it on Hulu outside USA.
