The Giggler: The forgotten serial killer who haunted Boston's South Station

Boston’s South Station was less than 70 years old in 1969 but seemed much older. It certainly lacked the glamour of nearby North Station, home to the Boston Garden, where the city’s basketball and hockey teams played and where the Rolling Stones and James Brown performed for screaming teenagers. In comparison, the South Station stop on 700 Atlantic Avenue was a dreary place for tired daily commuters on their way to the suburbs of the South Shore. With its high-domed ceiling and rickety escalators built during the Depression era, South Station managed to be both enormous and decrepit, a sickly old giant in need of urgent care. As the Boston Globe said a few years later, the once thriving railroad stop was “now staggering along in the last stages of neglect.”

Yet even as it faced the threat of the wrecking ball, the station remained busy, particularly at holiday time. On Friday, December 26, a 9-year-old Dorchester boy named Kenny Martin wandered into the station with a friend, Thomas Lydon. It was the day after Christmas and Kenny, who had come into Downtown Boston to buy some Boy Scout equipment, spent the afternoon horsing around with Lydon at the station. They’d chased each other up and down the escalators, running through the crowd of postholiday shoppers. As the afternoon came to an end, Lydon departed, while Kenny planned to take the train back home.

In his brown-checked jacket with fur collar, blue bell-bottom pants, and orange work boots, Kenny was a typical Dorchester boy, coming home from a day of fun. He was the youngest of four children, small for his age at less than 50 pounds. It might seem odd for a boy so young to be alone in the city, but Boston kids learned to use the subways early in those days. They often traveled on their own from one side of the city to the other.

The platform where he would’ve waited for the Dorchester train was cold and drafty, for there are few places colder than a Boston subway platform in late December. One could only stand and shiver, waiting for the sound of a faraway bell to warn people of approaching trains. Perhaps Kenny looked down the long, dark tunnel for the sign of a subway car’s light, usually visible long before the car was in the station. The tunnels were foreboding; there were stories of people accidentally getting electrocuted on the infamous “third rail” and of huge rodents living in the underground network. Meanwhile, pigeons, bats, and owls roosted in the rafters, occasionally swooping down to frighten the commuters.

There was no shortage of urban legends around South Station, of how people committed suicide by jumping in front of moving trains and how homeless men wandered in the dark tunnels to sleep underneath cardboard coverings. In time, stories of vagrants evolved into stories of trolls living in the tunnels, trolls who only came out after midnight when the station was closed. This was fantasy stuff, tales told by older kids to tease younger ones.

Of course, the station had its good points. It was a historical landmark, after all, opening for business in 1899 as the largest station in the country, a majestic building made of pink granite. There was also the railroad chapel, Our Lady of the Railways. Built in the 1950s, it was the first of its kind in America. Organ music played during every Sunday service, and Boston’s Archbishop Cushing held special masses and Easter vigils, perfect for travelers who couldn’t get home in time to worship. There was a lunch counter, a newsstand, the Sidecar Bar-Grill, a bakery, and a barbershop. A Paramount film crew had been to South Station earlier in the year to shoot a scene for a Jack Lemmon movie, The Out of Towners. For a few days, the dilapidated old station was enlivened by the buzz of Hollywood energy and curious crowds. Despite these occasional bright spots, the atmosphere remained glum and ramshackle. When the crowds thinned out after the rush hour, all that remained were boarded-up areas that always seemed to be “under construction” and weary cleaning crews wiping out the messes of the day.

At some point in the afternoon of December 26, Kenny met a pudgy, dark-haired man with a round face. The man seemed different from the other people hurrying around the station. He was rumpled. He needed a shave and a bath. It turned out the man was also named Kenneth. What they talked about, or how they spent their next few hours together, is unknown. History would reveal that the unshaven man knew all about the secret tunnels in South Station and knew all the special places where people could hide. He may have offered to show Kenny around the old building, an irresistible prospect for a 9-year-old boy.

Kenny’s body was found eleven days later. He’d been strangled to death. His body was hidden in one of the station’s underground passageways. Someone had wrapped it in a canvas bag and covered it with debris. A search team consisting of police from two districts, as well as city engineers, had spent the day exploring sewers and tunnels around the station. The search ended in an abandoned transit tunnel, a ghostly location that had once been used to transport cargo to the surface cars. It was a dingy place for a little boy to wind up, cold and dark and airless.

He could’ve been lured there only by one of the station’s trolls.

Security guards patrolled South Station and routinely tossed out vagrants and drunks, shoving them out the door onto Atlantic Avenue. These scenes were unpleasant, but the guards were under orders to keep the winos and grifters out. The raggedy station only looked worse if pitiful old drunks were lounging on the wooden benches. Yet Kenneth Harrison, the pudgy man, had been living in the place for nearly a year, like a hermit hiding in a cave. He didn’t have to compete for a bed at one of the nearby shelters, not when he could hunker down in one of the abandoned offices beneath the station.

The morning after he’d killed Kenny Martin, Harrison slouched out into the daylight, searching for a rooming house where he could find a bed and lie low. The sidewalk was still slippery from the previous night’s rain and sleet. It would have been a nice day to hang out at the station, yet Harrison felt it was time to go. Hanging around was too risky, even if the dead boy was buried deeper than an old bone.

Harrison had grown up in Roxbury’s Mission Hill neighborhood and had dropped out of school after the eighth grade. Now, at 31, he was an unemployed restaurant worker, living a vagabond’s existence and spending what little money he had on alcohol. He’d become one of life’s losers, a degenerate barfly with no future. He was virtually indistinguishable from dozens of others in his situation. The difference was that Harrison murdered children.

Kenny Martin, whose face would soon be featured in local newspapers, was Harrison’s second young victim. Two-and-a-half years earlier, Harrison had killed a 6-year-old girl named Lucy Palmarin. She’d been cashing in an empty tonic bottle at a store. Witnesses saw her climbing into the car of an unknown man. She was found floating among the garbage in South Boston’s Fort Point Channel, a mile from her home. Since the medical examiner found no signs of injury or foul play, Lucy’s death was ruled an accidental drowning. Lucy’s disappearance created a flurry of activity in South Boston. Posters with her picture were distributed throughout the community. Her poor mother waited up nights, clutching a book of old photographs of the missing girl. Three weeks into the search, the Boston police called in the FBI for assistance. They suspected a kidnapping, but the truth was worse.

On April 15, 1967, Harrison was driving a cab, among his many odd jobs. He would later tell a judge that he had dropped off a fare near the D Street housing project where Lucy lived. He saw her walking and offered to give her a ride. Instead of taking her home, he drove to the channel where he tossed her in the city’s notoriously dirty water.

In another version of the confession, Harrison said the little girl asked him for a quarter, which led to him giving her a piggyback ride. Once she was up on his back, he easily pitched her into the water. So he said. His confessions sounded ludicrous. Lucy’s family was Puerto Rican and new to America. The girl didn’t speak English. In between the two child murders, Harrison had killed two adults. There’d been a barroom beef with a fellow named Joseph Breen, an ex-marine and water company employee. Harrison and Breen had been drinking at the Novelty Bar in Boston’s Combat Zone, a dank neighborhood of nudie bars and X-rated theaters.

Later, after an argument over money, Harrison beat Breen to death with a rock.

Inexplicably, Harrison called the police that night, telling them they could find Breen’s body floating in an excavation pit on Kneeland Street near Chinatown. When the police asked who was calling, Harrison felt a laugh coming up his throat, like an eruption.

“This is the giggler,” he said.

Then, he giggled. And hung up the phone.

It was a time when killers were becoming celebrities, with memorable names and trademarks, like the Boston Strangler or the Zodiac in California. Why couldn’t Harrison be “The Giggler?”

Harrison must’ve felt as elusive as the Zodiac, because he’d actually returned to the Novelty a short time later. A couple of Breen’s friends were there and recognized him as the man who had been with Breen the night he was killed. Breen’s friends called the police, but by the time they arrived, Harrison was gone again, no doubt back at the train station, hiding in plain sight.

Then, just a month before killing Kenny Martin, Harrison had murdered an old woman, 75-year-old Clovis Parker of South Boston. As he’d done with the little girl, he left Clovis floating in Fort Point Channel, a mere five-minute walk from Harrison’s South Station hideout. He’d tell investigators that he had met the old woman on a bridge, and she’d asked for help getting across. Without giving a reason, Harrison said that he’d simply kicked Clovis Parker’s cane from under her and then tossed her over the guardrail. The unfortunate woman’s death hadn’t even made it to the newspapers.

A few days after killing Kenny Martin, Harrison called his sister, Eileen. He confessed that he had killed a boy and told her where the body was hidden. On January 6, the day Kenny’s body was found, Harrison boarded a train at South Station and left Boston.

Eileen consulted a lawyer and then called the police. They followed her tip to find the body, and then a quartet of detectives armed with an arrest warrant traced Harrison to Providence. They arrested him without incident and held him without bail in Suffolk County.

While detectives questioned him about Kenny Martin’s death, Harrison interrupted.

“As long as I’m here,” he said, “I might as well tell you about a few more.”

He told them about Lucy Palmarin, Joseph Breen, and Clovis Parker. Investigators were stunned. Harrison was confessing to four murders committed over a span of thirty-two months.

When he talked about Kenny Martin, Harrison said he’d had “an urge to kill” but didn’t remember doing anything. He merely woke up the next morning and saw the boy with a rope around his neck.

Harrison showed little emotion as he spoke, but he seemed comfortable talking about his crimes. He even took a liking to the detectives interrogating him. Later, when he learned that one of the detectives had retired, Harrison sent a card.

Yet his frankness about the murders and his friendship with the detectives masked a fragile mind.

Excerpted from New England’s Wickedest Killers, by Don Stradley. Copyright 2026. Published by Bloomsbury Academic. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Featured image: South Station, 1970, Daniel Brody.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.