Albert Henry DeSalvo was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on September 3, 1931, to a violent father who was eventually imprisoned for beating his wife. He served in the Army in Germany, married, and returned to Massachusetts with a record that grew steadily through the 1950s. By 1960 he was talking his way into apartments across greater Boston posing as a talent scout and taking women's measurements, which earned him the name the Measuring Man. He was arrested for it in 1961. After his release he committed hundreds of sexual assaults across four states as the man the press called the Green Man, for the work trousers he wore.
Between June 1962 and January 1964, thirteen women aged nineteen to eighty-five were strangled in their own homes in the Boston area, most with their own stockings, often left in a deliberate posture. The city was gripped by it. A special Strangler Bureau was formed and Attorney General Edward Brooke brought in psychics and a committee of psychiatrists. No one was ever charged.
The thirteen were Anna Slesers, fifty-five; Mary Mullen, eighty-five; Nina Nichols, sixty-eight; Helen Blake, sixty-five; Ida Irga, seventy-five; Jane Sullivan, sixty-seven; Sophie Clark, twenty; Patricia Bissette, twenty-three; Mary Brown, sixty-nine; Beverly Samans, twenty-three; Evelyn Corbin, fifty-eight; Joann Graff, twenty-three; and Mary Sullivan, nineteen.
DeSalvo was arrested in late 1964 on the Green Man rapes and committed to Bridgewater State Hospital. There, in 1965, he confessed to the thirteen stranglings, first to a fellow inmate, George Nassar, and then in long taped sessions. He knew a great deal about the crime scenes. He also got things wrong, and had every incentive to claim the case: he expected to be committed for life anyway and hoped to sell his story for his family. The state judged the confession too unreliable to charge on.
He was never tried for any murder. In January 1967 he was convicted of the Green Man robberies and sexual assaults, with F. Lee Bailey defending, and sentenced to life. He escaped from Bridgewater briefly the following month and gave himself up. On November 25, 1973, he was found stabbed to death in the infirmary at Walpole state prison. Nobody was convicted of it.
In 2013 investigators matched seminal fluid preserved from the scene of the last of the thirteen killings, that of nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan on January 4, 1964, to a DNA sample taken surreptitiously from DeSalvo's nephew, then confirmed it by exhuming DeSalvo. That evidence establishes he was there and it settles Mary Sullivan's case. It settles nothing about the other twelve. Investigators and writers on the case have long argued that the pattern of the murders, which shifted markedly in victim age and method, points to more than one killer, and the Boston Strangler as a single person may never have existed.