Besieged in Suburbia

When her surgeon husband found her body one morning last week, Mrs. Alice Hochhausler, 50, lay sprawled by the family's blue Triumph sports car in the garage next to their home in Cincinnati's suburb of Clifton. Some time during the night before, she had returned home from her daughter's nearby apartment. When she got out of her station wagon, she was clubbed on the head so hard that her dental plate popped out in the driveway. She was dragged by the heels into the garage. She was strangled with the cord of the red bathrobe she wore. She was raped, and her limp body was carefully arranged in a position of obscene exhibitionism.

The Fourth. To Cincinnatians, every horrifying detail was already all too familiar. Mrs. Hochhausler, mother of nine, was the fourth middle-aged woman to die in similar fashion in the same seemingly safe suburban surroundings. Last Dec. 2, Mrs. Emogene D. Harringon, 56, wife of a University of Cincinnati professor, was strangled with a length of knotted plastic clothesline in the basement of her apartment building; she was raped. On April 3, Mrs. Lois Dant, 58, was bludgeoned, strangled with her own stocking, and raped in the living room of her first-floor apartment. On June 10, Mrs. Jeanette M. Messer, 60, a widow, was beaten, strangled with a blue and red Paisley necktie, and raped in a quiet park where she had walked her dog every morning for years.

Last week fear was tangible in Cincinnati. The demand for tear-gas pens, door chains and bolts, pistols, pocket knives, karate instruction and watchdogs was unprecedented. One ad to sell three German shepherds brought 75 phone calls in two hours. Newspapers have run police-prepared instructions on how women should defend themselves by biting, kicking, screaming or scratching. A grocery chain imported 100,000 plastic whistles to give to its customers. Deliverymen have set up complex systems of passwords with hundreds of housewives who feel as if they are under siege.

Call "Station X." The city council put up $100,000 as a contingency fund to bankroll a massive man hunt. Police went on an emergency no-days-off basis, beefed up the homicide division by transferring the entire vice squad to that duty. A special "Station X" was set up at police headquarters to receive calls about the strangler; 900 came during the first eight hours it was in service last week.

Cincinnati police were convinced that one man had committed all four murders. But all they knew was that he is probably a Negro (negroid hair was found on one victim), that he has O-type blood (determined through tests on the rapist's semen), and that he may drive a bronze and cream 1959 Chevrolet (which was spotted near the areas where Mrs. Hochhausler and Mrs. Messer were killed). Understandably, jittery Cincinnati was beginning to wonder if it is in for a reign of terror like the killing spree that had Boston women besieged for two years.

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