Mary Sullivan was nineteen. She had graduated from Barnstable High School on Cape Cod in 1962 and had been living in Boston for three or four days when she was killed in her apartment at 44-A Charles Street on January 4, 1964. She had been raped and strangled with three ligatures that were still around her neck, a broom handle had been forced into her body, and a card reading "Happy New Year" had been left leaning against her left foot. Semen was recovered from her body and from a blanket in the apartment, and somebody had the sense to preserve it. That is the reason hers is the only one of the Boston stranglings that will ever be answered, and why the case of the Boston Strangler ends not with a verdict but with a single name attached to a single woman forty-nine years after she died.
Her nephew, Casey Sherman, was born after her death and spent much of his adult life arguing that Albert DeSalvo had not killed her. In 2003 he published a book saying so, A Rose for Mary. Ten years later he stood in front of the cameras and accepted that he had been wrong.
The count is the first thing to get straight, because two numbers are in circulation and only one of them comes from prosecutors. Between June 14, 1962, and January 4, 1964, thirteen women aged nineteen to eighty-five died in their homes in and around Boston, most of them sexually assaulted and strangled with articles of their own clothing, nylon stockings or the cord of a housecoat. There was no sign of forced entry at any of the scenes, so the women were assumed to have known the killer or to have let him in. Eleven of them are the figure the Suffolk County district attorney's office used throughout its 2013 announcements. Thirteen is DeSalvo's own number: he confessed to the eleven and added two more, and the two additions never fitted. Mary Mullen, eighty-five, found at 1435 Commonwealth Avenue on June 28, 1962, appears to have died of a heart attack when he seized her. Mary Brown, sixty-nine, found at 319 Park Street in Lawrence on March 6, 1963, was beaten and stabbed rather than strangled.
The eleven were Anna Slesers, fifty-five, found on June 14, 1962, at 77 Gainsborough Street; Nina Nichols, sixty-eight, on Commonwealth Avenue, and Helen Blake, sixty-five, on Newhall Street in Lynn, both found on June 30; Ida Irga, seventy-five, on Grove Street on August 19; Jane Sullivan, sixty-seven, on Columbia Road on August 21; Sophie Clark, twenty, on Huntington Avenue on December 5; Patricia Bissette, twenty-three, on Park Drive on the last day of 1962; Beverly Samans, a music student, twenty-six by most lists and twenty-three by others, in Cambridge on May 6, 1963; Evelyn Corbin, fifty-seven or fifty-eight, in Salem on September 8; Joann Graff, twenty-three, on Essex Street in Lawrence on November 25, 1963; and Mary Sullivan. One of the eleven was stabbed rather than strangled. The city went through something close to a collective breakdown. Attorney General Edward Brooke set up a Strangler Bureau, convened a committee of psychiatrists and consulted a Dutch psychic, and the Commonwealth offered a $10,000 reward that brought thousands of letters and calls from around the world. Nobody was charged with any of the eleven, then or since.
DeSalvo arrived in the case sideways. He was born in Chelsea on September 3, 1931, the third of six children of Charlotte and Frank DeSalvo. His father was a violent alcoholic who beat his wife and children; in front of the children he once knocked out all of his wife's teeth and bent her fingers back until they broke, and he brought prostitutes home and had sex with them in front of the family. As a boy Albert tortured animals, and he was in trouble with the police by early adolescence. At twelve, in 1943, he was arrested for battery and robbery and sent to the Lyman School for Boys. He was paroled in October 1944 and went to work as a delivery boy, and in August 1946, not quite fifteen, he was sent back to Lyman for stealing a car.
After his second term he joined the Army and served as a military police sergeant with the 2nd Squadron, 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment, in West Germany, where he married a German woman, Irmgard Beck. They came back to the United States after his honorable discharge and had two children, a daughter with a physical disability and a son. He reenlisted, was court-martialed over the sexual assault of a nine-year-old girl, and was honorably discharged again. During the years of the killings the family lived at 11 Florence Street Park in Malden. By 1960 he was talking his way into apartments across greater Boston claiming to scout for a modeling agency and taking women's measurements, which made him the Measuring Man; he was arrested for it in 1961. After his release he committed a very large number of sexual assaults across four states as the Green Man, named for the green work trousers he wore.
The Green Man was caught through a single woman's description. On October 27, 1964, a stranger posing as a detective got into a young woman's home in East Cambridge, tied her to her bed, sexually assaulted her, then untied her and apologized as he left. Earlier the same day a man posing as a motorist with car trouble had tried to get into a house in Bridgewater, and the homeowner, Richard Sproules, who later became police chief of Brockton, grew suspicious and fired a shotgun at him. The East Cambridge description led police to DeSalvo, and when his photograph was published, woman after woman identified him as the man who had attacked her. He was arrested and committed to Bridgewater State Hospital. Nobody at first suspected him of the stranglings.
At Bridgewater in 1965 he confessed, first to another inmate, George Nassar, whose attorney was F. Lee Bailey. Bailey came to hear it and took over DeSalvo's defense. The detailed confessions came after DeSalvo had been charged with rape, on two tracks: under hypnosis induced by William Joseph Bryan, and in long taped interviews, without hypnosis, with Assistant Attorney General John Bottomly. DeSalvo knew details of the scenes that had never been made public. He also got things wrong. He said he had strangled Mary Sullivan with his bare hands, when she had been strangled with ligatures, and he misstated the time of death in several of the killings. His incentives were plain: he expected to be held for life on the Green Man offenses whatever happened, and he hoped the story would bring money for his wife and children, and fame. The prison psychiatrist Ames Robey, who examined both men, later testified that "Albert so badly wanted to be the Strangler." Police found no physical evidence to back the confession. The Commonwealth concluded it was too unreliable to charge on, and it was never tested in a courtroom.
So in January 1967 he was tried for the Green Man robberies and sexual assaults, with Bailey defending. He had been evaluated for the trial by Harry Kozol, the neurologist who had set up the first treatment center for sex offenders in Massachusetts. Bailey's strategy was to secure a finding of guilt that kept the death penalty off the table and left room for an insanity defense, and he was angered when DeSalvo was sentenced to life. "My goal was to see the Strangler wind up in a hospital, where doctors could try to find out what made him kill," he said.
In February 1967 DeSalvo escaped from Bridgewater with two other inmates and set off a manhunt. He left a note on his bunk for the superintendent saying he had escaped to draw attention to conditions in the hospital and to his own situation. He called his lawyer to give himself up, and Bailey sent police to pick him up in Lynn; an Associated Press photograph of him minutes after the capture is dated February 25, though some accounts say three days had passed. He was moved to the maximum security prison at Walpole, and there he recanted the Strangler confessions. In prison he made jewelry and leatherwork that he sent as gifts to the Bailey family; his papers, mostly correspondence with the Baileys, are held by the Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. In 1971, while he was there, the Texas House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution honoring him for his work in population control; the Waco representative who wrote it, Tom Moore Jr., then withdrew it and explained that it was an April Fool's joke meant to show that his colleagues voted on bills they had not read.
On November 25, 1973, he was found stabbed to death in the Walpole infirmary. He was forty-two. Robert Wilson, a man associated with the Winter Hill Gang, was tried for the murder, and the case ended in a hung jury; a second trial of two men for conspiring to kill him ended in a mistrial in March 1975. No one was ever convicted of killing him.
For thirty years afterward the argument ran the other way. Gerold Frank's 1966 book The Boston Strangler took DeSalvo's guilt for granted, and the 1968 film made from it, with Tony Curtis, portrayed him as a man with multiple personalities, a condition he was never diagnosed with or suspected of having. Susan Kelly, who had access to the Strangler Bureau files, argued in 1995 that the murders were the work of several killers. The former FBI profiler Robert Ressler said that so many different patterns could not plausibly belong to one man. Robey considered Nassar, who was serving life for shooting a gas station attendant in Andover in 1967, a far likelier suspect, and some followers of the case believed Nassar had fed DeSalvo the details so that the two could split the reward. Nassar denied it. "I had nothing to do with it," he told The Boston Globe in 1999, and said the speculation had destroyed his chances of parole. His appeals were turned down by the Supreme Judicial Court in 2008 and 2009 and by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011.
In 2000 Elaine Whitfield Sharp, a Marblehead lawyer who specialized in forensic cases, began representing both the DeSalvo and Sullivan families, which were for a time allies. They sued the Commonwealth for access to the evidence and obtained court approval to exhume both Mary Sullivan and DeSalvo for private testing, and Sullivan's body was exhumed. In December 2001 James Starrs, a professor of forensic science at George Washington University, told a news conference that a semen-like substance on her body did not match DeSalvo's DNA. Boston police later said that privately tested material was very questionable, while the samples they had kept were properly preserved.
The DNA that settled it came in two stages, and the first was done by following a man to a bin. Investigators could not compel a sample from DeSalvo's relatives, so they put surveillance on his nephew and recovered a water bottle he threw away. On July 11, 2013, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley announced that testing it against the Sullivan evidence had produced a familial match that excluded 99.9 percent of possible suspects. On that basis a court ordered DeSalvo exhumed, and the next day his remains were lifted from Puritan Lawn Memorial Park in Peabody and taken to the state medical examiner.
The direct comparison was announced on July 19. In a joint statement, Conley, Attorney General Martha Coakley and Police Commissioner Edward Davis said the result left no doubt that DeSalvo was responsible for Mary Sullivan's murder, and put the odds that a white male other than DeSalvo had left the evidence at one in 220 billion; about 3.2 billion people were alive when she was killed. Conley was careful in the same breath to say what the finding did not cover: it applied to her murder and to none of the other ten. Sherman accepted it. "I only go where the evidence leads," he said, and thanked the police for their persistence. The DeSalvo family was angry about the method, and its attorney objected publicly to detectives following a relative to obtain his DNA.
What all of this establishes is narrow and solid: Albert DeSalvo raped and killed Mary Sullivan. It does not establish that one man committed the other ten. The victims ranged from nineteen to seventy-five, the method shifted, and the two extra killings DeSalvo claimed were not stranglings at all. A nickname invented by newspapers in 1962 had organized eleven unsolved murders into one story, and that story has outlived every attempt to take it apart. Ten of the eleven remain unsolved.