Boston's Double Horror

Boston was spared the major racial violence that at one time or another during the last decade flared in most major U.S. cities. But the persistent frictions of blacks and whites in close urban proximity are a fact of life in Boston as nearly everywhere. Youthful gangs of blacks and whites engaged in several street fights last summer, and recently the racial feeling in the racially mixed neighborhood of Dorchester grew so dangerous that authorities closed a public high school for two days. Yet nothing in the city's mood or texture remotely prepared Bostonians for what happened there last week: two of the most vicious, apparently racial, murders in memory.

The first victim was Evelyn Wagler, 24, a Swiss divorcee who had moved to Boston only five days earlier and was living in a small commune in the city's Roxbury ghetto with another white and four black women. While she was on her way home from a job-hunting trip, her car ran out of gasoline in the center of Roxbury's business district. Returning to it with a two-gallon refill can from a service station, the young woman was forced into a trash-filled backyard along Blue Hill Avenue by six black teenagers, beaten and ordered to douse herself with the fuel. After the terrified victim complied, one of them set her afire with a match. Before dying five hours later, she told police that three of her assailants had been part of a black group that had called her a "honky" the previous day and warned her that whites were unwelcome in Roxbury.

Appalled by the immolation murder, Boston's whites poured out rage and alarm on local talk-show radio programs. They were quickly echoed by blacks, who realize all too well that the residents of a neighborhood quickly become the primary victims of any crime rampage started there. "Everyone in the black community is upset," said State Representative Royal Bolling. "This is one of the most horrible things to ever happen in our area." Nevertheless, the tension soon found a fresh point at Andrew Square in a declining white neighborhood and near the notoriously ill-planned and ill-sited black housing project of Columbia Point. After fending off an attack by white youths, a black gang armed with clubs and knives collected around a Columbia Point school, forcing jittery authorities to close it. As a result, large groups of idle black teenagers were soon wandering the area, and in quick succession they claimed three white victims. Two of them were stabbed and robbed, and Ludivico Barba, 65, a retired contractor who was fishing off rocks at the point in his rubber waders, was stoned by a gang of about 30 youths. They then stabbed him to death and robbed him.

Boston Mayor Kevin White offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Mrs. Wagler's murderers, and police soon arrested two suspects, aged 15 and 16, in the Barba killing. The mayor made a point of keeping all Boston schools open on Friday, claiming that despite the week's double horror his city "is still the most livable, walkable, decent city in America." But many parents--both white and black--kept their children out of school, fearing that the savage eruption of violence might not yet have run its course.

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