Albert DeSalvo

What the record shows

Albert DeSalvo was a Massachusetts laborer and Army veteran who confessed to the 13 killings attributed to the Boston Strangler, a series of sexual assaults and strangulations of women in Boston, Cambridge, Lynn, Lawrence and Salem between June 1962 and January 1964. He was never charged with or tried for any of the murders. Instead, he was convicted on January 18, 1967, of unrelated armed robbery and sexual assault offenses and sentenced to life in prison. In November 1973 he was stabbed to death at Walpole State Prison. In 2013, DNA evidence linked him to the last of the killings, the murder of 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, but whether he committed the other 12 remains disputed.

The murders began on June 14, 1962, and ended on January 4, 1964, when Sullivan was found raped and murdered in her apartment on Charles Street in Boston. According to CBS Boston, the women were aged 19 to 85. Authorities at the time attributed 11 of the deaths to the Strangler, CBS Boston reported in 2013; DeSalvo's confession covered those 11 and two more. According to Associated Press reporting in 2017, investigators compiled lists of more than 300 suspects, and DeSalvo was never on them.

DeSalvo came to the attention of police through a different series of crimes. In late 1964, Boston-area police were investigating sexual assaults by an intruder known as the Green Man or the Measuring Man. According to the Wikipedia article, an East Cambridge woman assaulted on October 27, 1964, by a man posing as a detective gave a description that led police to DeSalvo, and after his photograph was published many women identified him as their attacker. He was sent to Bridgewater State Hospital, the state facility for the criminally insane, for evaluation.

At Bridgewater in 1965, DeSalvo described the Strangler killings to a fellow patient, George Nassar, whose attorney, F. Lee Bailey, then took on DeSalvo's case. According to the Wikipedia article, DeSalvo then gave detailed confessions to Assistant Attorney General John Bottomly. CBS News reported in 2001 that because the confession was made while he was a mental patient it could not be used against him, and CBS Boston reported in 2013 that it had been ruled inadmissible. With no hard evidence connecting him to the murders, prosecutors tried him only on the Green Man assaults and robberies. After a January 1967 trial he was convicted and sentenced to life. According to the Wikipedia article, in February 1967 he escaped from Bridgewater with two other inmates and surrendered through his lawyer three days later, after which he was moved to the maximum-security prison at Walpole.

At Walpole, DeSalvo recanted his confession. He was found stabbed to death in the prison in November 1973; the Wikipedia article gives the date as November 25 and says a trial of an inmate for the killing ended in a hung jury. CBS Boston reported in 2018 that no one was ever convicted of his death.

Doubts about the confession are a substantial part of the record. The author Susan Kelly, who believes DeSalvo fabricated his account, and the former FBI profiler Robert Ressler both doubted that one person committed all the murders, CBS News reported in 2001; Kelly believes several killers were involved. Sullivan's family, including her nephew Casey Sherman, argued in 2003 that DeSalvo's account did not fit her death: he said he strangled her with his hands, while she was strangled with ligatures, and DNA found on her body after a 2001 exhumation did not match him, CBS News reported. Associated Press reporting in 2017 added that he did not match witness descriptions. Nassar has also been named as a possible suspect, which he denies; in a 2018 interview with CBS Boston he said he had no doubt DeSalvo was the Strangler.

In July 2013, the Boston Police Department and Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley announced that a Y-chromosome profile from a water bottle used by a DeSalvo nephew was a familial match to semen preserved from the Sullivan scene. DeSalvo's remains were exhumed, and according to the National Institute of Justice, DNA from his femur and teeth matched, leaving no doubt that he raped and murdered Sullivan. Officials stressed that no DNA was known to exist for the other killings, so his responsibility for the remaining 12 deaths rests on his recanted confession.