Boston Strangler

• 1. Introduction

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  The Boston Strangler is the name given to the person who murdered 13 women in Greater Boston in the early 1960s. On the 8th of July 1962, the Sunday Herald ran a headline that read "Mad Strangler Kills Four Women in Boston." The article warned its readers that a mad strangler was loose in the city. Nobody yet knew how many more women would die. Nobody knew whether one man was responsible at all. That question would stay open for decades, through a detailed confession, a death behind prison walls and a laboratory result. Who was the killer, and how did a frightened city respond? What does it take to settle a case that the police themselves could never close?

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• 2. What They Called Him

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  Before the killer had a famous name, newspapers gave him several. Early on, the crimes were assumed to be the work of one unknown man, and he was dubbed the Mad Strangler of Boston. Others called him the Phantom Fiend or the Phantom Strangler, because women appeared willing to let him into their apartments.

  In 1963, two investigative reporters at the Record American, Jean Cole and Loretta McLaughlin, wrote a four-part series about the killer. They called him the Boston Strangler, and the name stuck. By the time a confession was aired in open court, it had become part of crime lore. The murders are also sometimes called the Silk Stocking Murders.

  The nickname had arrived with an assumption built in. Much of the public believed one man was behind the killings, yet the police were not convinced.

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• 3. A City Locks Its Doors

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  Between the 14th of June 1962 and the 4th of January 1964, single women aged from 19 to 85 were murdered across the Boston area. Most were sexually assaulted and strangled in their own apartments. Investigators found no damage to the doors, so they concluded the women had let the visitor in. Perhaps they knew him. Perhaps they took him for a service provider.

  Extensive publicity after the first few murders did not stop the attacks. Residents bought tear gas and fitted new locks and deadbolts. Some women moved away from the area altogether.

  The killings crossed city lines, which complicated how prosecutors could oversee the crimes. Massachusetts Attorney General Edward W. Brooke stepped in to coordinate the separate police forces. He also allowed the parapsychologist Peter Hurkos to apply his claimed extrasensory perception to the cases. Hurkos insisted that a single person was responsible. What he delivered, according to critics, was a "minutely detailed description of the wrong person." The press ridiculed Brooke, and the decision remained controversial.

  Talk of the victims' apparent connections to hospitals also spread widely. It pushed attention back to the women themselves.

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• 4. The Women

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  Anna Elza Slesers, aged 55, was the first, murdered on the 14th of June 1962 at 77 Gainsborough Street in Boston. Mary Mullen, aged 85, died on the 28th of June on Commonwealth Avenue. On the 30th of June, two more women died. Nina Nioma Nichols, aged 68, was killed in Boston, and Helen Elizabeth Blake, aged 65, in Lynn.

  In August 1962, Edes "Ida" Irga, aged 75, died on the 19th, and Jane Sullivan, aged 67, on the 21st. Younger women followed. Sophie L. Clark, aged 20, was killed on the 5th of December 1962 on Huntington Avenue. Patricia Jane Bissette, aged 23, died on the 31st of December on Park Drive.

  The murders then moved beyond Boston. Mary Ann Brown, aged 69, died in Lawrence on the 6th of March 1963. Beverly Florence Samans, aged 23, died in Cambridge on the 8th of May. Marie Evelina "Evelyn" Corbin, aged 57, died in Salem on the 8th of September. Joann Marie Graff, aged 23, died in Lawrence on the 23rd of November.

  The last was Mary Anne Sullivan, aged 19. On the 4th of January 1964, she was raped and strangled in her apartment at 44-A Charles Street in Boston. Three ligatures were wrapped around her neck. The killer left a card reading "Happy New Year" leaning against her left foot.

  Her case would be reopened decades later, in a courtroom and a laboratory.

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• 5. The Confession

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  On the 27th of October 1964, a stranger posing as a detective entered a young woman's home. He tied her to her bed, assaulted her, and left abruptly, saying "I'm sorry" as he went. Her description led police to Albert DeSalvo. When his photograph was published, many women identified him as the man who had assaulted them.

  Earlier that same day, DeSalvo had posed as a motorist with car trouble and tried to enter a home in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The homeowner was Richard Sproules, later a Brockton police chief. He grew suspicious and fired a shotgun at DeSalvo.

  Nobody suspected DeSalvo of the strangling murders at first. After he was charged with rape, he gave a detailed confession. He first told a fellow inmate, George Nassar, who passed it to his attorney, F. Lee Bailey. Bailey took on DeSalvo's defense. Police were impressed by how accurately DeSalvo described the crime scenes. He cited details that had never been made public, though some of his account did not match.

  Bailey later wrote about one example in his 1971 book, The Defense Never Rests. DeSalvo described a blue chair in a victim's living room. The woman insisted it was brown, but photographs proved DeSalvo right.

  No physical evidence backed the confession. So DeSalvo was tried instead for earlier robbery and sexual offenses, committed under the nicknames "The Green Man" and "The Measuring Man," respectively. Bailey raised the confession at trial, hoping to win a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge ruled it inadmissible.

  DeSalvo was sentenced to life in prison in 1967. That February, he escaped with two fellow inmates from Bridgewater State Hospital, and a full-scale manhunt began. A note on his bunk, addressed to the superintendent, said he had escaped to draw attention to the hospital's conditions and to his own situation. He disguised himself as a U.S. Navy Petty Officer Third Class, but he surrendered the next day.

  He was moved to the maximum security Walpole State Prison. Six years later, he was found stabbed to death in the prison infirmary. His killer or killers were never identified, and only his confession and the doubts around it remained.

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• 6. Doubts and Doubters

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  In 1968, Dr. Ames Robey, medical director of Bridgewater State Hospital, insisted that DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler. He described the prisoner as "a very clever, very smooth compulsive confessor who desperately needs to be recognized." Middlesex District Attorney John J. Droney and Bridgewater Superintendent Charles Gaughan agreed. So did George W. Harrison, a former fellow inmate, who claimed he had overheard another convict coaching DeSalvo on details of the murders.

  People who knew DeSalvo personally could not picture him committing such vicious crimes. The pattern of victims also troubled investigators. Serial killers typically favor a certain type of victim and a consistent method. The women killed by the Strangler came from varied age and ethnic groups and were killed in more than one way.

  Susan Kelly, author of The Boston Stranglers in 1996, drew on files from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts "Strangler Bureau." She argued that several killers were responsible. Former FBI profiler Robert Ressler agreed, saying: "You're putting together so many different patterns regarding the Boston Strangler murders that it's inconceivable behaviorally that all these could fit one individual."

  John E. Douglas, another former FBI special agent and one of the first criminal profilers, reached a similar view in his book The Cases That Haunt Us. He classed DeSalvo as a "power-assurance" rapist. Such a man, Douglas argued, is unlikely to kill in the manner attributed to the Strangler. He would, however, be prone to taking credit for the crimes. Bailey, for his part, always believed his client was the killer.

  In 2000, attorney and former print journalist Elaine Sharp took up the cause of the DeSalvo family and the family of Mary Sullivan. She helped them campaign in the media to clear DeSalvo's name. She helped arrange the exhumations of Mary Sullivan and of Albert H. DeSalvo. She also filed lawsuits seeking information and trace evidence from the government and worked with producers on documentaries.

  Sharp noted that Sullivan's body contradicted DeSalvo's confession. Sullivan had been strangled by ligature, not by hand, and no semen was found. Forensic pathologist Michael Baden observed that DeSalvo had the time of death wrong, a flaw Kelly also saw in several of the murders. Sharp also stressed that Sullivan had been publicized as the final victim in 1964, although other strangling murders occurred after that date.

  The families wanted trace evidence, and DNA was the kind they were chasing.

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• 7. What the DNA Said

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  On the 11th of July 2013, the Boston Police Department announced a breakthrough in the Sullivan case. DNA recovered at the scene was a "near certain match" to Y-DNA taken from a nephew of DeSalvo. Y-DNA passes down the male line with little change, so it can link men who share a paternal-line ancestor.

  A court then ordered the exhumation of DeSalvo's body so that his own DNA could be tested directly. On the 19th of July 2013, three officials announced the result: Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley and Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis. Their finding was that DeSalvo was the source of seminal fluid recovered at the scene of Mary Sullivan's 1964 murder.

  The test spoke to one scene only. Long before any laboratory weighed in, the killings had already entered songs, films and novels.

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• 8. Echoes in Culture

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  In 1965, the band The Standells put the Strangler into a Boston-themed song, "Dirty Water." Its lines include "have you heard about the Strangler?" and "I'm the man, I'm the man." The Rolling Stones followed in 1969 with "Midnight Rambler" on the album Let It Bleed, a song loosely based on the killer.

  Film took up the case early. The 1964 film The Strangler was inspired by the unsolved killings. William Goldman's 1964 novel No Way to Treat a Lady, and its 1968 film adaptation, were inspired by the multiple-killer theories. The 1968 film The Boston Strangler starred Tony Curtis as Albert DeSalvo, with Henry Fonda as a co-star.

  The name even migrated into sport. Philadelphia 76ers player Andrew Toney was nicknamed "the Boston Strangler" for his outstanding games against the Boston Celtics, notably Game 7 of the 1982 Eastern Conference Finals.

  Two 2007 novels returned to the case. The Strangler by William Landay depicts the family of an attorney on the Strangler task force. Strangled by Brian McGrory follows a Boston newspaper reporter who receives evidence and notes from a possible killer more than 40 years later.

  A 2016 podcast titled Stranglers drew on clips of the DeSalvo confession tapes. It also featured interviews with relatives of key figures, including the sons of chief investigator Phil DiNatale.

  The most recent retelling is Boston Strangler, a 2023 film starring Keira Knightley, Carrie Coon, Alessandro Nivola, Chris Cooper and David Dastmalchian. It was shot in the Boston area and released in the United States on Hulu in March 2023.

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