The ice-cream place was conveniently located a couple doors down from a laundromat

Apparently they turned into a chain in the 1970's, with a store "at the bottom of beacon hill"
https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums...

...when Charles Street actually looked like that. There was a Mister Donut right near there also. I liked them so much better than Dunkins.

My post above ("I remember that!") was written before Adam posted his detailed research about Fred's ice cream, but somehow my post got put far below Adam's. (Maybe because I've never set up a UHub account, and my posts always have to wait for moderation.) As Adam has pointed out, the Baskin-Robbins owner was indeed involved in the arson attack on his competitor. My apologies for the mismemory.

Now that I think about it, though, I seem to recall that there was another similar arson attack on another ice cream store, somewhere in the Boston-Cambridge area, at about the same time. So maybe my mismemory was the result of confusing two unrelated but similar crimes in the same era.

By 1975 I had pretty much stopped going to Baskin-Robbins and was instead patronizing the higher-end shops around town. And maybe that explains why the Baskin-Robbins owner was getting desperate.

The Boston Strangler victim above the Paramount was Mary Sullivan, age 19, killed on Saturday, January 4, 1964. She had just started working at a bank on Franklin Street on January 2, and had moved into the apartment on January 1. Her two roommates worked at Filene's, so they were working on Saturday. They thought Mary was sleeping when they came home, but found her body when they tried to wake her for dinner.

Some of the Strangler's victims were nurses, but all were alone in their houses when they were murdered. Many of them lived by themselves. If they had roommates, as Mary did, the roommates were away at the time of the crime. So there were never any witnesses.

Albert DeSalvo was caught when he attacked a woman in Cambridge, but apparently had second thoughts during the attack, and didn't kill her. The description she provided led to his arrest. He was well known to the police for a large number of burglaries and the like, but until then he hadn't been linked to any murders or sexual assaults.

For many years Mary Sullivan's family claimed that she'd been murdered by someone other than Albert DeSalvo. One of her relatives even wrote a book about the case. About 5 or 6 years ago, DeSalvo's body was disinterred, and DNA evidence proved that he had assaulted her.

Mary Sullivan was the last woman killed by the Boston Strangler.