Albert DeSalvo

• 1. Introduction

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  Albert DeSalvo went by two nicknames, the Green Man and the Measuring Man, and history remembers him by a third: the Boston Strangler. He confessed to being that killer. Yet no court ever tried him for those murders.

  He was an American rapist and murderer who was active around Boston, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s. The crimes he was convicted of were a different set of attacks. The killings he claimed were left to the realm of confession, argument and doubt.

  Who was this man, and what made a confession so hard to prove or disprove? Did one person really commit every murder pinned on the Strangler? And what could science say about it, decades after the fact?

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• 2. A Violent Household

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  Albert Henry DeSalvo was born on the 3rd of September 1931 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the third of six children of Charlotte and Frank DeSalvo. His father was a violent alcoholic who beat his wife and children, often in front of the family. The father also brought prostitutes home and had sex with them while the children were present.

  As a child, DeSalvo tortured animals. By early adolescence he was stealing and shoplifting often enough to meet the police again and again. In 1943, at the age of 12, he was arrested for battery and robbery and sent to the Lyman School for Boys.

  He was paroled in October 1944 and took a job as a delivery boy. In August 1946, when he was nearly 15, a conviction for auto theft returned him to the Lyman School.

  After that second sentence, DeSalvo joined the United States Army. He served as a Military Police sergeant with the 2nd Squadron, 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment. During his first tour in West Germany he married Irmgard Beck, a German national, and he brought her home to the United States after an honorable discharge. The couple had two children, a girl and a boy. The girl had a physical disability.

  DeSalvo later re-enlisted. He was court martialed for the sexual assault of a nine-year-old girl, yet he was honorably discharged a second time.

  When the killings began, the family lived at 11 Florence Street Park in Malden, Massachusetts, across the street from the junction of Florence and Clement streets.

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• 3. Thirteen Women

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  Thirteen single women, aged from 19 to 85, were murdered in the Boston area between 1962 and 1964. Investigators eventually tied their deaths to one serial killer, whom the press dubbed the Boston Strangler. Most of the women were sexually assaulted in their own apartments and then strangled with articles of clothing.

  The first body, that of 55-year-old Anna Slesers, was found on the 14th of June 1962 at 77 Gainsborough Street in Boston. Two more women followed within a fortnight. Mary Mullen, 85, was discovered on the 28th of June, and Nina Nichols, 68, on the 30th. Helen Blake, 65, was found the same day as Nichols, in Lynn.

  The oldest victim died of a heart attack. Two others were stabbed to death, and one of them was also badly beaten.

  The victims were not confined to one city. The list of discovery sites runs through Boston, Lynn, Lawrence, Cambridge and Salem. Two women, Sophie Clark and Patricia Bissette, were just 20 and 23. In the summer of 1962, Edes Irga, 75, and Jane Sullivan, 67, were found two days apart in August.

  None of the dwellings showed signs of forced entry. Police assumed the women either knew their killer or let him in willingly.

  The last victim was 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, killed in her Boston apartment on the 4th of January 1964. She was raped and strangled, with three ligatures around her neck. The killer left a card reading "Happy New Year" propped against her left foot.

  By then, Boston police were chasing a second case that looked entirely separate.

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• 4. The Green Man

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  On the 27th of October 1964, a man pulled up to a house in Bridgewater and posed as a motorist with car trouble. The owner, Richard Sproules, grew suspicious. Sproules, who later became police chief of Brockton, fired a shotgun at the stranger, who fled.

  That same day, a man walked into a young woman's home in East Cambridge and claimed to be a detective. He tied her to her bed and sexually assaulted her. Then he undid her restraints and left, apologizing as he went.

  The woman's description led police to DeSalvo. When his photograph was published, many other women recognized him as the man who had attacked them. These were the rapes that police had been calling the Green Man attacks.

  Nobody suspected him of the Strangler murders at the time of his arrest. He was held for the rapes alone.

  That changed because of a conversation in a jail cell.

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• 5. Confession and Bargain

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  A fellow inmate named George Nassar heard DeSalvo claim to be the Strangler. Nassar passed the story to his own attorney, F. Lee Bailey, and Bailey took over DeSalvo's defense.

  The account had inconsistencies, but DeSalvo cited details of the case that had never been made public. Police still found no physical evidence to back him up. Only after he was charged with rape did he give a full confession. He did so twice. Once was under hypnosis, induced by William Joseph Bryan. The other was without hypnosis, in interviews with Assistant Attorney General John Bottomly.

  Before the 1967 trial, which concerned the rapes, DeSalvo was evaluated by Harry Kozol. Kozol was a neurologist who had founded the first sex offender treatment center in Massachusetts.

  Bailey negotiated a plea bargain. DeSalvo's guilt would be fixed in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table. Bailey also wanted to keep alive the chance of an eventual insanity plea.

  The jury instead sentenced DeSalvo to life imprisonment without parole, and Bailey was furious. He said: "My goal was to see the Strangler wind up in a hospital, where doctors could try to find out what made him kill. Society is deprived of a study that might help deter other mass killers who lived among us, waiting for the trigger to go off inside them."

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• 6. Escape and Murder

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  In February 1967, DeSalvo and two fellow inmates escaped from Bridgewater State Hospital, and a full-scale manhunt followed. Searchers found a note on his bunk addressed to the superintendent. In it, he said he had run to draw attention to the conditions in the hospital and to his own situation.

  Three days later he phoned his lawyer to give himself up. The lawyer sent police to arrest him in Lynn, Massachusetts.

  After the escape, DeSalvo was moved to a maximum security prison then known as Walpole. It was there that he took back his confessions to the Strangler murders.

  On the 25th of November 1973, he was found stabbed to death in the prison infirmary. Robert Wilson, who was associated with the Winter Hill Gang, was tried for the killing. The jury could not agree on a verdict.

  Bailey later offered his own explanation. He said DeSalvo was killed for selling amphetamines inside the prison at less than the price the inmates' own syndicate demanded.

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• 7. Doubts and Suspects

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  When DeSalvo confessed, people who knew him personally did not believe he could have done it. Critics also pointed to the victims themselves. The women varied widely in age, social status and ethnicity, and the killings showed inconsistent methods.

  Susan Kelly, an author with access to the files of the state's "Strangler Bureau", argues that several killers were responsible, not one. Robert Ressler, a former FBI profiler, put it bluntly: "You're putting together so many different patterns regarding the Strangler murders that it's inconceivable behaviorally that all these could fit one individual."

  In 2000, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, a forensic attorney from Marblehead and a former print journalist, began representing the families of DeSalvo and Sullivan. She won court approval to exhume both for DNA testing and filed several actions to obtain evidence from the government. She also worked with film producers on documentaries to inform the public.

  Sharp identified several gaps between DeSalvo's confessions and the crime scene evidence. DeSalvo claimed to have strangled Sullivan with his bare hands, but she was strangled with a ligature. Forensic pathologist Michael Baden noted that DeSalvo gave the wrong time of death for her. Kelly says he got that detail wrong in several of the murders.

  Casey Sherman, Mary Sullivan's nephew, took the argument further in his 2003 book A Rose for Mary. Drawing on Kelly's leads, he concluded that DeSalvo could not have killed his aunt, and he tried to work out who had.

  George Nassar, the inmate who first heard the confession, became a suspect himself. In 1967 he received a life sentence for shooting an Andover gas station attendant. Ames Robey, a former prison psychiatrist who analyzed both men, called Nassar a misogynistic, psychopathic killer and a far likelier Strangler than DeSalvo.

  Some followers of the case went further. They suggested Nassar fed DeSalvo the details, and that the two planned to split reward money to support DeSalvo's wife and two children. Another motive was DeSalvo's craving for notoriety. Robey testified: "Albert so badly wanted to be the Strangler."

  In a 1999 interview with The Boston Globe, Nassar denied any part in the murders. "I had nothing to do with it," he said. "I'm convicted under the table, behind the scenes."

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• 8. DNA and Afterlife

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  On the 11th of July 2013, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley announced a breakthrough. Semen found around the body of Mary Sullivan matched DNA taken from DeSalvo's nephew. Men descended from a common male ancestor carry the same y-DNA, so the match pointed to DeSalvo. It excluded 99.9% of the remaining population.

  Investigators exhumed DeSalvo's body. Nine days after the first announcement, they said the comparison "leaves no doubt that Albert DeSalvo was responsible for the brutal murder of Mary Sullivan."

  That result overturned an earlier claim by James Starrs, a forensic science professor at George Washington University. He had told a news conference that a semen-like substance on Sullivan did not match DeSalvo.

  The finding settles one killing. Doubts remain over whether DeSalvo committed all the Strangler homicides, and over whether another killer could still be at large.

  In 1971, the Texas legislature unanimously passed a resolution honoring DeSalvo for his work in "population control". Waco Representative Tom Moore Jr. later admitted the measure was an April Fool's joke. He wanted to show that his colleagues passed bills without researching them. Having made his point, he withdrew it.

  Filmmakers turned to the case early. The 1968 Hollywood film The Boston Strangler starred Tony Curtis as DeSalvo, with Henry Fonda and George Kennedy as the detectives. It was highly fictionalized and portrayed DeSalvo as suffering from multiple personality disorder. He was never diagnosed with it, or even suspected of having it. The Rolling Stones released "Midnight Rambler" in 1968, a song loosely based on the murders.

  DeSalvo's own papers survive at the Lloyd Sealy Library Special Collections at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. They include his letters, mostly to members of the Bailey family, and jewelry and leatherwork he made in prison and sent to the Baileys as gifts.

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