Following the identification of the Boston Strangler as Albert DeSalvo, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for an unrelated crime in 1967, Loretta McLaughlin left the world of traditional journalism, seeing out the end of the 1960s in working for various scientific institutions.
She first joined Harvard University as a science writer, a position that would arguably come to define the direction of her writing career for the rest of her life. Despite being part of a prestigious university, Loretta McLaughlin only stayed in the role for a short time. Pivoting to the private sector, she next took a position at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, where she exploited her talent with words and maintaining her readers’ attention to serve as their executive director of public relations.
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But she couldn’t stay away from newspapers for long. As her son Mark McLaughlin, who himself later worked for the Boston Globe, told the Boston Globe: “I couldn’t really picture her doing anything else. She needed to be around ideas, and writing, and arguing in the best sense of the word — that ‘What do you think?’ Journalism provided her with a mental satisfaction and engagement that she couldn’t find elsewhere … [it] was a natural thing for her.”
