Albert DeSalvo is the man who said he was the Boston Strangler. Between June 1962 and January 1964 a series of women were found dead in their apartments in Boston and nearby cities, most of them sexually assaulted and strangled. In 1965, while he was held at Bridgewater State Hospital on charges of attacking other women, DeSalvo confessed to 11 of those killings and to two more. He was never charged with any of them. Prosecutors had his words but no physical evidence, and in January 1967 a jury in Cambridge convicted him instead of armed robbery and sex offenses against four women who had survived. He was sentenced to life, took back his confession, and was stabbed to death at Walpole State Prison in 1973.
For four decades the case stayed unresolved, and many people, including the family of the last woman to die, came to believe he had not killed anyone. In July 2013 the Suffolk County district attorney announced that DNA from DeSalvo's exhumed remains matched evidence preserved from the 1964 rape and murder of Mary Sullivan, 19. Officials said the result left no doubt that he was responsible for her death. They also said it settled nothing about the other ten women, because no biological evidence from those cases has been found. Legally, DeSalvo died a man convicted of rape-related assaults and robbery, not of murder.
DeSalvo was born on September 3, 1931, the date given by the Suffolk County district attorney's office, and grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in deep poverty. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime, a SAGE reference edited by the criminologist Eric Hickey, says his alcoholic father neglected him and beat him severely, made the children watch while he abused their mother, and once sold Albert and a sister to a farmer for several months.
Much of what is known about his boyhood comes from records that were sealed for decades. In 2022 the journalist Dick Lehr, a former member of The Boston Globe's Spotlight team, published in the Globe what he had found in the files of a Harvard study of delinquent boys led by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck. DeSalvo was one of 1,000 boys followed from the early 1940s, and his study number was 402. Lehr had to wait for a confidentiality contract to expire before he could publish. He was approved in July 2021.
The files show a boy who had repeated second grade at the Williams School in Chelsea and was in a special fifth-grade class by the time he was sent away. His recorded IQ was 93. He told the study's investigator that his father, Frank, was abusive toward his mother, Charlotte, and that he sometimes slept in a shanty under the bridge between East Boston and Chelsea to stay away from home. He admitted to stealing and running away, to shoplifting and skipping school from about the age of 10, and at 12 to beating up newsboys and taking their money.
On November 6, 1943, he beat and robbed a paperboy of $2.85 and was put on probation. On December 28, 1943, he and a friend broke into a house on Fifth Street in Chelsea and took $27 worth of rings and bracelets. In 1944, at the age of 12, he was committed to the Lyman School for Boys in Westborough, the state reformatory. A Rorschach test given that May was read by the psychoanalyst Ernest Schachtel, who concluded that the boy felt unwanted and insecure. The investigator who interviewed him in June 1944, identified in the files only by the initials J.E.B., noted that he talked openly about his thefts, sometimes lied, and admitted it readily when caught, and he judged that the boy had little ability to restrain his impulses.
He was paroled in late 1944. When his old accomplices came home in the summer of 1946, his conduct worsened. He was convicted of joyriding in a stolen car and sent back to Lyman. In all he spent about 16 months there. When J.E.B. visited the family on Fifth Street in March 1947, Frank DeSalvo was gone and Charlotte had married again.
After Lyman, DeSalvo worked as a fruit peddler, in a shoeshine parlor in Chelsea's Bellingham Square, in a Cape Cod sandwich shop and in a laundry. On September 29, 1948, two weeks after he turned 17, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, according to the Glueck files. He was sent overseas, and the study staff reclassified him as nondelinquent in 1956.
He served in Germany, where he married a woman named Irmgard, who had been born in Wiesbaden, finished ninth grade and worked as a waitress. When J.E.B. called at his mother's home in March 1956, Charlotte DeSalvo refused to let him in and defended her son angrily. She told him Albert had married in Germany, had a child, and had been in the Army nearly eight years, and she insisted that his wife must not learn about his juvenile record. A Globe report from his 1967 trial described him as a veteran of nine years' Army service, including a tour in Germany, who had been the Army's middleweight boxing champion in Europe. He and Irmgard had two children, a daughter and a son.
Back in Massachusetts, DeSalvo drifted into crime again. The Glueck files list an attempted break-in at a Dorchester market on January 9, 1958; an attempt to pry open the rear window of a sandwich shop in East Boston on October 26, 1959; and two daytime burglaries. He received suspended sentences and served no time.
On March 17, 1961, Cambridge police arrested him while he was trying to break into a home on Broadway. He then confessed to what were known as the Measuring Man cases. A man had been calling at women's apartments, saying he was a talent scout for a modeling agency, and taking their measurements with a tape while touching them. The Globe later reported that he offered $25 for measurements, or $40 in the nude. In May 1961 he was convicted of assault and battery and of breaking and entering and sent to the Billerica House of Correction. The Globe reported in 1967 that he was released in the spring of 1962.
By September 1962 he was living with Irmgard and their two children at 11 Florence Street Park in Malden, a two-story house about 75 years old. J.E.B. went there that month for what turned out to be the study's last interview. DeSalvo, then 31, showed off an $800 bathroom renovation and said he had started work as a carpenter's apprentice and had turned to crime because of money problems. Irmgard, 29, described herself as the practical one in the marriage and said her money had paid the down payment on the house. She had threatened to go back to Germany with the children if he got into trouble again. J.E.B. wrote that DeSalvo was "unstable and irresponsible" and changed his file to "serious delinquent." By the time of that visit, Lehr noted, five women had already been killed.
The Boston Globe, in a list it first published in 2002, counted 13 women whose deaths were attributed to the Boston Strangler. Prosecutors in 2013 spoke of 11 homicides linked by investigators, of women aged 19 to 67. The ages in that count leave out the two oldest women on the Globe's list. Little was reported about most of these women.
Anna Slesers, 55, was found on June 14, 1962, in her apartment at 77 Gainsborough Street, near Symphony Hall. She was a seamstress for a decorating firm on Canal Street. Her death is counted as the first in the series.
Mary Mullen, 85, was found on June 28, 1962, at 1435 Commonwealth Avenue. Her death certificate lists a heart attack, and she was not strangled. Smithsonian magazine reported that her death was tied to the series only years later, after DeSalvo confessed to it; he said she had died in his arms.
Nina Nichols, 68, a physiotherapist, was found on June 30, 1962, at 1940 Commonwealth Avenue. She was the sister-in-law of Chester Steadman, president of the Boston Bar.
Helen Blake, 65, a nurse, was found the same day at 73 Newhall Street in Lynn.
Ida Irga, 75, was found on August 19, 1962, at 7 Grove Street on Beacon Hill, where she had lived for 15 years.
Jane Sullivan, 67, a night nurse at Longwood Hospital, was found on August 21, 1962, at 435 Columbia Road in Boston.
Sophie Clark, 20, was found on December 5, 1962, at 315 Huntington Avenue. She was a hospital technician who attended classes at the Carnegie Institute of Medical Technology. Smithsonian notes that she was a Black student, and that her death marked a shift, since the women killed before her had all been older and white.
Patricia Bissette, 23 in the Globe's list and 22 in Smithsonian's, was found on December 31, 1962, at 515 Park Drive. She was a Middlebury College graduate and worked as a receptionist at an engineering company in Kenmore Square.
Mary Brown, 69, was found on March 6, 1963, at 319 Park Avenue in Lawrence. She was beaten and stabbed as well as strangled, the Globe reported.
Beverly Samans, a music graduate student at Boston University who worked as a music therapist, was found on May 6, 1963, at 4 University Road in Cambridge. The Globe gives her age as 23 and Smithsonian as 26. She was stabbed, and ligatures found on her were ruled not to be the cause of death.
Evelyn Corbin, 58, was found on September 8, 1963, at 224 Lafayette Street in Salem. She worked at Sylvania.
Joann Graff, 23, a Sunday school teacher and an artist, was found in her apartment at 54 Essex Street in Lawrence in late November 1963. The Globe's list gives the date as November 23.
Mary Sullivan was the last. She was 19, had graduated from Barnstable High School on Cape Cod in 1962, and worked at Filene's. She had moved from the Cape to an apartment at 44-A Charles Street on Beacon Hill only days before she was found there on January 4, 1964, three days before her 20th birthday, the Associated Press reported. She had been raped and strangled. Her younger sister, Diane, was 17. Diane's son, Casey Sherman, born after his aunt's death, would spend much of his adult life on her case.
Edmund McNamara, who became Boston police commissioner in 1962, assigned 150 detectives to the case in September of that year, according to Boston.com. More than 300 people appeared on investigators' lists of suspects over the years, the Associated Press later reported. DeSalvo was never one of them.
Two reporters at the Boston Record American, Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole, began a series in January 1963 under the headline "Two Girl Reporters Analyze Strangler." They argued that one intelligent, sexually driven man was responsible and criticized the police for feeding false information to the press and failing to share leads. Police and the medical examiner's office objected to the detail they published, and the series ended in February 1963 after about 29 articles. Boston.com credits the pair with popularizing the name "Boston Strangler." McLaughlin later became editorial page editor of The Boston Globe and died in 2018; Cole died in 2015.
In January 1964, after Mary Sullivan's death, Attorney General Edward Brooke took control of the investigation and created a task force known as the Strangler Bureau, Smithsonian reports. Brooke's office also paid the Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos to help identify a suspect, and the Record American reported in 1964 on a man Hurkos had pointed to; no one was charged. Investigators had at least six suspects at one point, the Globe reported in 2023, but none was ever tried.
While the stranglings went unsolved, a series of sexual assaults in homes across four New England states was being blamed on a man known as the Green Man, for the green slacks he wore. On October 27, 1964, a man got into a young woman's home in Cambridge by posing as a police detective. He tied her up and sexually assaulted her, then left. She reported the attack, and her description reminded police of the Measuring Man. After she reported the attack, other women came forward with similar accounts, Smithsonian reports. These women survived.
The Globe reported in 1967 that Sergeant Duncan S. McNeil of the Cambridge police arrested DeSalvo in November 1964, and a Globe clipping dated November 6, 1964, reported his arrest in another assault case. When McNeil telephoned to arrange for him to come to the station, DeSalvo was quoted as saying, "Thank God I'm stopped." He was charged with assault, breaking and entering and sex offenses. He was not charged with murder, and at first no one connected him with the Strangler.
Psychiatrists who examined him described him as "potentially suicidal and quite clearly overtly schizophrenic," and on February 4, 1965, he was committed to Bridgewater State Hospital, the state institution for the criminally insane, "until further order of the court," according to the criminologist Colin Evans's account in Great American Trials. State psychiatrists also examined him at Westborough State Hospital.
At Bridgewater DeSalvo met George Nassar. Nassar had been convicted at 15 of killing a Lawrence shopkeeper in 1948, served 13 years, and was now awaiting trial in the shooting death of Irvin Hilton, who ran a filling station in Andover, on September 29, 1964. Both men were at Bridgewater for evaluation.
Nassar later said that DeSalvo told him he was the Strangler as the two men walked a concrete hallway, describing the killings while watching his reaction. Nassar passed this to his own lawyer, the young defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, and recruited Bailey to represent DeSalvo. According to Nassar, the plan was for DeSalvo to confess, go to trial, write a book and have his family looked after. Bailey met DeSalvo, came away convinced that he knew details only the killer could know, and took what he had heard to the authorities.
DeSalvo then confessed at length to psychiatrists, to Boston police and to the attorney general's office. The main questioning, recorded on tape, was led by John S. Bottomly, whom Sherman describes as a real estate lawyer with no experience of criminal investigation. Casey Sherman, who obtained the tapes decades later from a former investigator, has said they run to about 60 hours. Evans writes that DeSalvo talked under hypnosis and with a promise of immunity. In all he confessed to the 11 killings investigators had grouped together and to two more. He described scenes in detail that convinced many of the investigators. Detective Phil DiNatale, one of the lead investigators, spent weeks checking what he said and never doubted him; his son later said, "Albert knew too much that only the Strangler could have known." Julian Soshnick, a prosecutor on the original investigation who interviewed DeSalvo twice, said in 2001 that DeSalvo had described the ligatures and how they were tied.
But no physical evidence connected DeSalvo to any of the scenes, he did not match the descriptions given by witnesses, and parts of his account were wrong. His confession to the Sullivan killing, Sherman argued in 2000, was inconsistent with the other evidence in her case. The confession was never tested in a courtroom.
The Commonwealth did not charge DeSalvo with murder. Evans writes that because the confessions were uncorroborated and DeSalvo had already been found incompetent, the state chose to try him on the Green Man offenses, while Bailey aimed to have him found insane and sent for treatment. Boston.com described the arrangement in 2023 as a deal under which the murder confession could not be used against him in court.
The trial opened in Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge in January 1967 before Judge Cornelius J. Moynihan. A sanity hearing on January 10 found him competent. The prosecutor was Donald L. Conn. DeSalvo was tried on eight indictments charging assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon, unnatural acts, breaking and entering, larceny and armed robbery, for attacks on four women in the summer and early fall of 1964. All four testified. Evans describes the charges as 10 counts; the Supreme Judicial Court's opinion speaks of eight indictments.
The defense was insanity, and DeSalvo did not testify. The trial was about the Green Man offenses, but the stranglings came into it through the defense. Bailey called Dr. James A. Brussel, a New York psychiatrist, who testified that DeSalvo had "schizophrenia of the paranoid type" and recounted what DeSalvo had told him: that he had killed women with nylon stockings or scarves, and that he had once stopped an attack after seeing the woman's face in a mirror. Judge Moynihan told the jury that this was admitted only as the history the defendant had given the doctor, not as proof. Bailey described the killings to the jury as acts by "a completely uncontrollable vegetable walking around in a human body." The prosecution asked for the word "homicide" to be struck from the record; the judge refused.
Dr. Robert R. Mezer, a Boston psychiatrist, also testified for the defense. The Commonwealth called three experts, among them Dr. Samuel Tartakoff and Dr. Samuel Allen. Dr. Ames Robey, the former medical director at Bridgewater, answered "I'm afraid so" when Bailey asked him on cross-examination whether DeSalvo had conned him. Stanley Setterlund, an inmate at Bridgewater, testified that DeSalvo had planned to confess, hire a lawyer and fake insanity. In his 2023 obituary of Nassar, reprinted in the Globe, The New York Times said Setterlund also testified that DeSalvo had confessed to the murders and laughed. Conn told the jury that DeSalvo was a calculating criminal, and warned them, "Don't let this man con you right out of your shoes!" Judge Moynihan instructed the jurors to put the Boston Strangler out of their minds and decide the case before them.
On January 18, 1967, the jury found DeSalvo sane and guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison. "Massachusetts has burned another witch," Bailey told reporters, according to Evans.
Bailey appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which heard argument on November 6, 1967, and affirmed the judgments on January 4, 1968, in Commonwealth v. DeSalvo, 353 Mass. 476. Justice Whittemore wrote for the court.
The opinion records that all the experts agreed DeSalvo was mentally ill and dangerous, and differed only on whether he acted under impulses he could not control. It notes that the stranglings were not part of the case: the jury heard that he had said he "had committed sexual attacks on and had murdered a number of women in the period from June, 1962, to January, 1964," but only as part of what he told examining psychiatrists, with a limiting instruction that it was not proof of those crimes. The court upheld the trial judge's refusal to let a former assistant attorney general describe his interviews with DeSalvo, calling it inadmissible evidence offered to bolster the experts' opinions. It rejected the claim that the evidence compelled a finding of insanity: the experts had differed, as was to be expected in a borderline case, and that was a question for the jury.
On February 24, 1967, a few weeks after the verdict, DeSalvo escaped from Bridgewater with two other inmates, Frederick E. Erickson and George W. Harrisson. The other two were caught that day. DeSalvo was arrested the next day, February 25, in a clothing store in Lynn, Evans writes. An Associated Press photograph shows him minutes after his capture, and a WBUR caption gives his age then as 35. He was moved to the maximum-security state prison at Walpole. About eight months later he received an additional sentence of 7 to 10 years for the escape, and his brothers Richard and Joseph each received one-year suspended sentences for helping him, Evans writes.
At Walpole, DeSalvo corresponded with Detective DiNatale in 1967 and 1968. In one letter he compared himself to "a radiator in a room without a safety valve," and in another he wished that people "would wake up and realize it could happen to any one of them," CBS Boston reported in 2013 after DiNatale's son showed the letters. Thomas C. Troy, who represented him after Bailey, called the confession a matter of convenience and called him a liar.
At some point in prison DeSalvo took back his confession. Accounts differ on when: Smithsonian says shortly before his death, and an Associated Press account in 2013 dated the recantation to 1973. Sherman later found about 40 letters DeSalvo wrote to a Massachusetts family who visited inmates at Walpole; in them, Sherman has said, DeSalvo wrote that he planned to recant in front of a New York Times reporter.
In 1971 a Texas legislator, Representative Tom Moore Jr. of Waco, filed a House resolution honoring DeSalvo for his work in "population control" and "applied psychology." It passed. Moore said it was an April Fool's joke meant to show that members did not read the resolutions they voted on, the Austin public radio station KUT reported in 2015.
DeSalvo was stabbed to death at Walpole in late November 1973, while serving his life sentence. The Globe reported the killing on November 26, 1973. A Fox News photo caption gives the date as November 25, and Evans gives November 26. Accounts differ on whether he died in his cell or in a bed in the prison hospital; the Times obituary of Nassar, as printed in the Globe, says his hospital bed. When his body was examined again in 2001, the autopsy team examined 16 stab wounds, the Associated Press reported.
Three inmates were tried in his death. One jury could not reach a verdict, and another trial ended in a mistrial, the Associated Press reported in 2001; prosecutors believed the men had wanted to keep DeSalvo out of the prison drug trade. Boston.com named one defendant as Robert Wilson, a man linked to the Winter Hill Gang. No one was convicted. DeSalvo was buried in Peabody, at Puritan Lawn Memorial Park.
Gerold Frank's book The Boston Strangler was published in 1966, and Twentieth Century-Fox made it into a film, directed by Richard Fleischer, that opened in New York on October 16, 1968. Tony Curtis played DeSalvo and Henry Fonda played the lead investigator. Bottomly and DiNatale were credited as technical advisers, according to the American Film Institute catalog. In 2023 a new film, Boston Strangler, starring Keira Knightley as Loretta McLaughlin and Carrie Coon as Jean Cole, was released by Hulu.
The writer Susan Kelly published The Boston Stranglers in 1995. She argued that DeSalvo could have learned the details of the killings from newspapers or from the real killer in prison, that he made up his story, and that several men were responsible. "The newspapers were an excellent source of information," she said in 2001, pointing out that DeSalvo's errors matched errors in the press. Robert Ressler, the former FBI profiler, said it was "inconceivable behaviorally that all these could fit one individual."
In July 1999 Boston police announced that they were using DNA technology on the case; scientists in the department's Cold Case Squad had begun, the previous summer, to examine 14 boxes of evidence from two of the victims. The early tests were inconclusive. Case logs described samples swabbed from some victims, but police could not find them, and the chief pathologist and many of the lead investigators had died. F. Lee Bailey, who still believed DeSalvo was guilty and insane at the time, said that if DeSalvo proved not to be the Strangler, "you've got a real news story, because every cop and the attorney general bought into his story." Casey Sherman said then, "Our family believes Albert DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler."
Donald Hayes, the civilian director of the Boston police crime laboratory, read deeply on the case and searched old evidence bins and archives. He found DNA on a blanket from Mary Sullivan's apartment. He could not get a conclusive result with the methods of the time, so he preserved it, the Globe reported in a 2013 editorial crediting his foresight.
The Sullivan and DeSalvo families, by then allies, went to court. On September 14, 2000, they sued state and local authorities for the crime scene evidence, which they believed would clear DeSalvo. They were represented by the lawyers Elaine Whitfield Sharp and Dan Sharp. On October 14, 2000, Mary Sullivan's remains were exhumed for private testing, and on October 20 Attorney General Thomas Reilly said his office would run new DNA tests of its own. Reilly's inquiry stalled when Richard DeSalvo, Albert's brother, refused to give a DNA sample unless the attorney general shared the crime scene evidence.
On October 26, 2001, DeSalvo's own body was exhumed in Peabody, and a team led by James E. Starrs, a professor of forensic science and law at George Washington University, examined it at a laboratory at York College in Pennsylvania. Michael DeSalvo, Albert's son, then 41, said, "So many different detectives have said he didn't do it." On December 6, 2001, Starrs announced that material from Sullivan's remains and clothing contained DNA from two people other than her, and that neither was DeSalvo. "We have found evidence and the evidence does not and cannot be associated with Albert DeSalvo," he said. "I, as a juror, would acquit him with no questions asked." Michael DeSalvo said, "I'm convinced my father wasn't a killer now." Reilly said the findings did not settle whether DeSalvo killed Sullivan. On December 24, 2001, a judge ruled that the state did not have to share its evidence with the families because the investigation was still open.
The Boston police cold case squad paid for the new testing with money from the National Institute of Justice's Solving Cold Cases with DNA program, under which the city received grants in 2009 and 2012, the institute reported. Late in 2012 the director of the crime laboratory retrieved slides of evidence from Sullivan's autopsy and cuttings from the blanket on which she was found. Bode Technology extracted a DNA profile from the slides, and Orchid Cellmark in Dallas extracted one from the blanket; the two profiles matched each other. Run through the national CODIS database, the profile produced no hit.
The laboratory then used Y-STR testing, which reads markers on the male Y chromosome that pass from father to son and are shared by male relatives on the father's side. To get a sample from DeSalvo's paternal line without asking the family, Police Commissioner Edward Davis assigned a detective trained in surveillance to follow one of DeSalvo's nephews, a son of Richard DeSalvo. When the nephew drank from a plastic water bottle and threw it away, the detective collected it. Earlier in 2013 its DNA produced a Y-chromosome match to the crime scene evidence that excluded 99.9 percent of the male population, according to the district attorney.
On July 11, 2013, District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, Attorney General Martha Coakley and Davis announced what they called a familial match. "There was no forensic evidence to link Albert DeSalvo to Mary Sullivan's murder until today," Conley said. "For almost five decades, the only link between DeSalvo was his confession." He said he expected an exact match once DeSalvo's remains were tested, and he was careful about the other cases: "We don't claim DeSalvo is a suspect in each of them," he said. Coakley said that solving Sullivan's case might settle the long doubts about DeSalvo's guilt.
The DeSalvo family was angry. Elaine Whitfield Sharp, the family's lawyer, said the nephew was "shocked, disgusted, angry and offended," called the surveillance "unnecessary, creepy," and said the family would have given DNA if asked. Jake Wark, a spokesman for Conley, answered that the family had offered DNA about ten years earlier only on condition that it receive the physical evidence. "We were unwilling to barter away evidence in a homicide investigation," he said. Sharp also argued that a match would show only that DeSalvo had been with Sullivan shortly before her death, not that he killed her, pointed to the other male DNA found in the 2001 testing, and said: "It does not prove he killed any of the other women." Police said the material used in the private testing was very questionable, while their own evidence had been preserved in a laboratory.
F. Lee Bailey, by then living in Yarmouth, Maine, said he expected the announcement to end the speculation. "It was a very challenging case," he said.
Under a search warrant, DeSalvo's grave at Puritan Lawn Memorial Park in Peabody was opened on the afternoon of Friday, July 12, 2013, with shovels and a backhoe. The digging took about an hour. His remains were taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, sampled and reburied. The family said it received no notice. Two onlookers were asked to leave: a retired state trooper, David Raymond, who said he had watched police arrest DeSalvo when he was a boy, and Andy Brancato, whose late father had known DeSalvo and called him "a little crazy but innocent."
DNA from a femur and three teeth gave the confirming match, the National Institute of Justice reported. On July 19, 2013, Conley, Coakley and Davis announced the result: the chance that a white male other than DeSalvo had left the seminal fluid at the scene was one in 220 billion. "We now have an unprecedented level of certainty that Albert DeSalvo raped and murdered Mary Sullivan," Conley said. Coakley said, "This leaves no doubt that Albert DeSalvo was responsible for the brutal murder of Mary Sullivan," and added that he was "most likely" responsible for the other murders he had confessed to. "The ability to provide closure to a family after 50 years is a remarkable thing," Davis said.
The district attorney's release said investigators had found his account of Sullivan's death accurate to a high but not perfect degree. It also said what the finding could not do. DeSalvo had confessed and recanted and "was never convicted of any of them," and no biological evidence had been found in the other cases. Conley said he wanted investigators to look closely at whether DeSalvo had committed at least some of the other killings he confessed to.
Casey Sherman accepted the result. "I only go where the evidence leads," he said, thanking the police and offering sympathy to the DeSalvo family. "Despite 49 years of questions and mystery, modern science brought the final answer," he wrote. Donald Hayes said the method could not be used in the other Strangler cases, because no samples from them remain.
The 2013 result is the only physical evidence linking DeSalvo to any of the killings attributed to the Boston Strangler. It connects him to one case, the rape and murder of Mary Sullivan. Because he was long dead, it was never presented to a court, and he was never charged in her death. The other ten killings in the prosecutors' count, and the two further deaths on the Globe's list, remain officially unsolved.
Officials have described the link with care. Conley spoke of an "unprecedented level of certainty" in the Sullivan case and declined to extend it to the others. Coakley went further and called DeSalvo "most likely" responsible for the deaths he confessed to. Britannica's current entry says authorities concluded he "most likely" committed the murders and calls his guilt controversial because of inconsistencies in his statements and the lack of physical evidence tying him to all the scenes.
Some who doubted DeSalvo looked at the man who first heard his confession. Nassar's first conviction for the murder of Irvin Hilton was reversed by the Supreme Judicial Court in 1966 because jurors heard that he had been arrested for murder before; the Times obituary says he was convicted of first-degree murder in that killing, and he remained in custody until his death. Dr. Robey, who treated both men at Bridgewater, believed DeSalvo was a compulsive confessor and later told Sherman he did not think DeSalvo capable of homicide. John Henning, a former WBZ-TV anchor, has said investigators thought Nassar may have committed some of the killings, and at least two women who escaped attacks identified Nassar rather than DeSalvo, the Globe reported. Sherman and others have suggested that Nassar coached DeSalvo so the two could share a reward, a theory for which no conclusive evidence has been found.
Nassar always denied it. He told the Globe in 1995 that he "had nothing to do with it." In 2018 he told Cheryl Fiandaca of WBZ-TV that DeSalvo's detailed descriptions had convinced him, and that had he known DeSalvo was killing women he would have given him a quick, painless death. Asked whether he was the Strangler, he said, "Of course not." The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear one of his later petitions in 2011. Nassar died on December 3, 2018, at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital correctional unit in Boston, at 86, of prostate cancer. His death was not reported publicly until 2023.
In 2024 David Robitaille, a Springfield man who said he had corresponded with Nassar and helped write his autobiography, told CBS Boston that he had given police evidence pointing to Nassar and believed Nassar had arranged DeSalvo's death. "I think he had him killed," he said. CBS Boston reported his claims without independent confirmation.
Sherman's view has moved more than once. He argued for years that DeSalvo did not kill his aunt and published A Rose for Mary in 2003. In 2013 he accepted the DNA result. By 2025 he had grown skeptical again of how the evidence was presented and interpreted. That year he hosted an Oxygen documentary, The Boston Strangler: Unheard Confession, using parts of the confession tapes. Sherman says he interviewed about 50 witnesses and task force members, one of whom believed the authorities blamed the wrong man. He says the tapes show Bottomly asking leading questions and showing DeSalvo crime scene photographs. Sherman calls DeSalvo a sexual predator, a con man and a thief, but not a murderer. These are Sherman's claims; Fox News, which reported them, said there was no conclusive evidence for the Nassar theory, and Bailey's view, quoted in the same report, was that "they had the right guy, beyond question."
Those who believe DeSalvo was the Strangler point to the detail in his confessions and, since 2013, to the DNA. Those who do not point to the variety among the victims, who ranged from 19 to 85, to the differences in method, to his absence from the suspect lists, to his errors and to the leading way he was questioned. Kelly concluded there were at least six killers and likely eight or nine. Loretta McLaughlin maintained until her death that DeSalvo was the killer.
DeSalvo died in 1973. No one has been charged in any of the killings attributed to the Boston Strangler, and no one was convicted of killing DeSalvo. CBS Boston reported in October 2024 that Boston police were said to be still investigating. Sherman notes that Massachusetts has no statute of limitations on murder. No new charge, finding or official announcement in the case had been reported by October 20, 2026.
Proven in court: DeSalvo's 1967 convictions on eight indictments for armed robbery, assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon, unnatural acts, breaking and entering and larceny, involving four women, affirmed in 1968; his 1961 convictions in the Measuring Man cases; and his escape.
Confessed but never charged or tried: the 11 killings grouped as the Strangler series, and two more deaths. He later recanted.
Linked by DNA, never tried: the rape and murder of Mary Sullivan, announced by prosecutors on July 19, 2013. The 2001 private testing that found other male DNA has not been reconciled with the 2013 result in any public finding; police called the material used in 2001 very questionable.
Not linked by any physical evidence: the other ten deaths in the prosecutors' count and the two further deaths on the Globe's list.
Details that vary between sources: the number of victims (11 in the prosecutors' count; 13 in the Globe and Smithsonian lists); the victims' age range (19 to 67 in the district attorney's release; 19 to 85 in AP and CBS reports); the ages of Patricia Bissette (22 or 23) and Beverly Samans (23 or 26); the counts at his 1967 trial (eight indictments in the court opinion; 10 counts in Evans); the year Mary Sullivan was first exhumed (October 2000 in the AP timeline; 1999 and 2001 in other reports); the date of his death (November 25 or 26, 1973) and whether he died in his cell or in the prison hospital; when he recanted; and whether his killer was "never found" (Britannica, Evans) or tried without a verdict (AP, Boston.com). Reports that DeSalvo was "convicted" of the Strangler killings, or that officials had enough to "posthumously convict" him, are wrong: he was never charged with any of them.
September 3, 1931: Albert Henry DeSalvo is born; he grows up in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
November 6, 1943: robs a paperboy and is put on probation.
December 28, 1943: breaks into a house in Chelsea with a friend.
1944: committed to the Lyman School for Boys at 12; becomes Boy 402 in the Glueck study.
1946: returned to Lyman after joyriding in a stolen car.
September 29, 1948: enlists in the U.S. Army; later serves in Germany and marries Irmgard.
1958 to 1959: attempted break-ins in Dorchester and East Boston; suspended sentences.
March 17, 1961: arrested in Cambridge and confesses to the Measuring Man cases.
May 1961: convicted and sent to the Billerica House of Correction; released in spring 1962.
June 14, 1962: Anna Slesers is found dead at 77 Gainsborough Street.
June 28 to August 21, 1962: Mary Mullen, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Ida Irga and Jane Sullivan are found dead.
September 1962: Commissioner McNamara assigns 150 detectives; the Glueck investigator's last interview with DeSalvo in Malden.
December 5 and 31, 1962: Sophie Clark and Patricia Bissette are found dead.
January to February 1963: the Record American series by McLaughlin and Cole.
March 6 to November 1963: Mary Brown, Beverly Samans, Evelyn Corbin and Joann Graff are found dead.
January 4, 1964: Mary Sullivan, 19, is found dead at 44-A Charles Street.
January 1964: Attorney General Edward Brooke creates the Strangler Bureau.
October 27, 1964: the Cambridge attack that leads police to DeSalvo.
November 1964: arrested by Cambridge police.
February 4, 1965: committed to Bridgewater State Hospital.
1965: confesses to 11 Strangler killings and two more.
January 10, 1967: found competent to stand trial.
January 18, 1967: convicted in Middlesex Superior Court and sentenced to life.
February 24 and 25, 1967: escapes from Bridgewater and is caught in Lynn; moved to Walpole.
After the escape: sentenced to 7 to 10 more years for it.
January 4, 1968: Supreme Judicial Court affirms the judgments.
October 16, 1968: the film The Boston Strangler opens.
1971: Texas House resolution passed as an April Fool's joke.
November 1973: stabbed to death at Walpole.
1995: Susan Kelly's The Boston Stranglers is published.
July 1999: Boston police announce DNA testing in the case.
September 14, 2000: the Sullivan and DeSalvo families sue for the evidence.
October 14, 2000: Mary Sullivan's remains are exhumed.
October 26, 2001: DeSalvo's remains are exhumed.
December 6, 2001: Starrs announces that DNA from Sullivan's remains does not match DeSalvo.
December 24, 2001: a judge rules the state need not share its evidence.
2003: Casey Sherman's A Rose for Mary is published.
July 11, 2013: prosecutors announce a familial DNA match through a nephew's water bottle.
July 12, 2013: DeSalvo's remains are exhumed in Peabody.
July 19, 2013: authorities announce a direct match, one in 220 billion.
December 3, 2018: George Nassar dies in custody.
March 2023: the film Boston Strangler is released; Nassar's death is reported.
October 2024: CBS Boston reports new claims about Nassar.
November 2025: Oxygen broadcasts Sherman's documentary using the confession tapes.
October 20, 2026: no one charged in any Strangler killing; no new development found.