Boston Strangler film a love letter to female investigative journalists, says Keira Knightley

LOS ANGELES – Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole were trailblazing investigative reporters who broke the story of the infamous Boston Strangler serial killings in the 1960s, more than a decade before the term “serial killer” was even coined.

But their groundbreaking work – which led to them being the first journalists to see links between some of the 13 attacks committed by rapist and murderer Albert DeSalvo – has been largely overlooked.

And that is why two-time Oscar nominee Keira Knightley and film-maker Matt Ruskin wanted to set the record straight in the historical crime thriller Boston Strangler.

Debuting on Disney+ on Friday, the film casts Knightley as McLaughlin and Carrie Coon as Cole, the reporters who investigated and then publicised the sensational case in a series of articles for a Boston newspaper in 1963.

Says Knightley at a Zoom press conference: “I had heard of the Boston Strangler, but I really didn’t know anything about (the case).”

“So I came to it from Matt’s wonderful script and thought it was a really interesting way of telling the story of a serial killer, but through the point of view of these two female journalists,” says the 37-year-old English actress, who was Oscar-nominated for the period romance Pride & Prejudice (2005) and historical drama The Imitation Game (2014).

“The fact that you’ve got a case where most people didn’t know that it was two women who broke the story – and that they’ve largely been erased from the history of this case – was really interesting.”

Writer-director Ruskin, 43, grew up in Boston and had, of course, heard of the murders, which saw a string of women sexually assaulted and strangled in their apartments in the 1960s.

But he, too, knew nothing of the late McLaughlin and Cole’s contributions until he began reading about the case in depth “and discovered this incredibly layered murder mystery that was full of twists and turns”.

“And I found out that they were (among) the first reporters to connect the murders. They actually gave the Boston Strangler his name during the course of their reporting,” says Ruskin, who wrote and directed the true-crime drama Crown Heights (2017).

Despite resistance from their male editors at the paper as well as the police, the pair doggedly pressed forward in what was a groundbreaking investigation in many ways.

“You have to remember this is a decade before the term ‘serial killer’ even came into existence,’’ Ruskin notes.

“The Boston police department was very much a blunt instrument at the time and the field of criminology was in its infancy. So interviewing psychiatrists to try and create a psychological profile was very much a forward-thinking thing that was outside of the norm.”

But there was little information available on McLaughlin and Cole when he started researching them.

Ruskin eventually tracked down one of Cole’s daughters online and, when he looked her up on Facebook, there happened to be a photo of her standing next to an old friend of his.

“I called up my friend and said, ‘How do you know this woman?’, and she explained that that was her mother. And Jean Cole was her grandmother and someone she absolutely revered before she passed away. So she introduced me to both families.

“And the more I got to know about these women and reporters, the more I grew to admire them and just felt incredibly compelled to try to tell their story.”

For Knightley, “the whole film is really a love song to female investigative journalists”.

“And it really highlights how important it is to have women in positions of power in storytelling because it was these two women that really went, ‘This is an important story. This is information that needs to be in the public in order to keep the women of Boston safe,’” the actress says.

She added that it was a story that had been largely ignored by the male establishment.

“I don’t know that their male colleagues would have seen the importance of it.

“So I think it’s wonderful to be part of something that is really highlighting how important it is to have as many good female journalists as you can for the safety of our communities.”

Boston Strangler debuts on Disney+ on Friday.