The city of Boston held its breath for nearly two decades, haunted by the specter of a killer who seemed to vanish into thin air after terrorizing women from the Back Bay to the North Shore, and even now, more than forty years after his death, the truth behind Albert DeSalvo’s chilling confession remains one of the most contentious and deeply unsettling mysteries in American criminal history.
Albert DeSalvo would go down in history as the Boston Strangler, the man who confessed to the bizarre and brutal murders of thirteen women between 1962 and 1964. But the question that continues to haunt criminologists, law enforcement officers, and the families of the victims is whether this charismatic, fast-talking family man was truly a born killer, a product of a violently abusive upbringing, or a pathological liar who conned his way into infamy for money and attention.
His story begins in 1931 in a rundown neighborhood on the outskirts of Boston, where he grew up in a housing project in Chelsea, Massachusetts, an area marked by overcrowding and poverty. Despite the grim surroundings, those who knew him as a child described a pleasant enough boy, a personable little scamp who would do errands for his teachers and try to please them, showing no early signs of the monster he would later be accused of becoming.
The seeds of DeSalvo’s psychological destruction were planted in the home, where his father, Frank, ruled with an absolute and terrifying brutality. Albert’s father was an absolute brute who brought prostitutes home and forced his wife out of the bedroom to engage with them. He taught Albert how to break an ender when the boy was just five years old and arranged for Albert to be sexually initiated when he was only seven.
The 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 meted out by Frank DeSalvo was unspeakably cruel. He beat his wife relentlessly, and in one horrifying incident that would scar the children forever, he stood and broke the mother’s fingers one by one by bending them back until they snapped, all in front of the children. Albert’s younger brother Richard, who maintains Albert’s innocence to this day, recalls the violence with harrowing clarity.
Richard remembers being no more than four or five years old when his father came home drunk and violent. He watched his mother get slammed and knocked down, hitting the washing machine and splitting her head open. Albert tried to defend her and his father had him by the throat with two hands, lifting him up by his neck.
Richard jumped on a chair and then a table, clutching a spoon or a knife, screaming, “Leave my brother alone,” before getting whacked and knocked down himself.
Forensic psychologists point to these formative years as the classic example of a child being socialized into male violence. The experience gave DeSalvo a warped view of masculinity and an equally distorted understanding of who women are and how to treat them. The basic human drives of 𝒔𝒆𝒙 and aggression, which normally develop separately and in manageable places, became fused in DeSalvo’s psyche, becoming one and the same thing in his mind.
Frank DeSalvo was in constant trouble with the law, and in 1943, following a number of petty crimes, young Albert followed in his father’s footsteps. He and some other young boys attempted to hold up a cleaners with a German Luger that wasn’t real, leading to his first trouble with the law and a stint at the Lyman School for Boys. These reform schools were not nice places, and DeSalvo was forced to learn to take care of himself, watching his own back in an environment of continued violence.
In 1948, the street-smart seventeen-year-old joined the Army and was sent to Germany, where military life appeared to agree with him. He was a hard worker and a good fighter, winning several boxing matches. But postwar Germany offered other opportunities for DeSalvo, and the fast-talking, good-looking young soldier developed a vicious appetite for 𝒔𝒆𝒙, thought to have had intercourse with as many as two thousand women while stationed there as a military policeman.
While in Germany, DeSalvo met and married a local girl named Mard Beck, but on their return to the United States, he fell foul of the law again. This time the crime was far more sinister. Defense attorney James Logan, who took the case, remembers DeSalvo as a seemingly ordinary guy, sort of dull and not particularly flamboyant.
He was charged with debauching the morals of a minor, accused of sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl after entering her home posing as a rent collector.
The case was ultimately dismissed when the child’s mother decided she didn’t want her daughter to testify because of the potential embarrassment of rehashing the incident. DeSalvo was discharged from the Army and returned to Boston with his wife to start a family, slipping effortlessly back into his old community where he was well-liked, always smiling, and mingled easily with everyone he met.
The gregarious family man, however, was far from a pillar of society. He was a breaking-and-entering specialist, allegedly having been in every single apartment on Charles Street, one of the finer sections of Boston. He was simply very adept at getting in and out of buildings, a skill that would soon serve a far more sinister mission.
By 1960, with several arrests for breaking and entering and the alleged assault of that nine-year-old girl behind him, DeSalvo embarked on a peculiar new crime spree. His tough upbringing and time in reform school and the Army had left him with the skills of a master conman. He started knocking on doors of women, claiming he was from a modeling agency looking for a certain kind of model who looked like whoever answered the door.
He would ask the women to don a leotard so he could take their measurements, spinning the fantasy of earning forty dollars an hour if their measurements were right. It was a more naive time, and most of these women fell for it. DeSalvo ended up having 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with many of them, and when no modeling contracts were forthcoming, women began reporting the bizarre sexual assaults, leading police to dub the culprit the “Phantom” or the “Measuring Man.”
In 1961, DeSalvo was arrested for breaking and entering and, while in custody, confessed that he was the Measuring Man. He was diagnosed as a sociopath and sent to prison, but soon after his release eleven months later, a series of attacks began that would shock the city of Boston to its core. In the summer of 1962, the body of Anna Slesers, a fifty-five-year-old divorcee, was discovered lying dead and naked on the floor near her bathroom, a cord from her blue housecoat tied tightly around her throat in a bow.
Days later, sixty-eight-year-old Nina Nichols was found dead with her own nylon stockings knotted around her neck, her legs spread, her housecoat pulled up to her waist. She had been sexually assaulted with a wine bottle. Then sixty-five-year-old Helen Blake was found strangled with a nylon stocking, lying face down on her bed, legs apart, naked from the waist down, sexually assaulted.
The decorative bows tied around their necks and the escalating sexual violence began to drift like a fog over the city.
The Boston Strangler’s reign of terror had begun. Over the coming months, the killer would strike again and again, adapting his methods and his victim selection with a chilling unpredictability that left police baffled. The seventh victim, twenty-one-year-old Sophie Clark, was found strangled with three of her own nylon stockings tied in a bow around her neck, her naked body on the floor with her legs spread apart.
Then came Patricia Bissette, found with the bedclothes pulled up to her neck, sodomized as well as raped.
The murders were marked by their bizarre and degrading displays. Victims were positioned so their nakedness was the first thing anyone would see upon entering the apartment, a clear sign that the murderer was proud of his activities, making no effort to leave these women with any dignity. He was showing off his work, 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 those who would find the bodies with his power to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 and evade detection.
The city of Boston began to panic. In just over two months, four elderly ladies had been brutally murdered, and then college students started to be attacked. Women would not let the postman or the milkman come to the door.
Animal rescue places were depleted of dogs, pet shops couldn’t keep enough of them, and everyone bought guns, weapons, locks, and alarm systems. There was a genuine terror in the city.
The elderly victims were often isolated and trusting, and the Boston Strangler never broke down a door. He somehow managed to get himself welcomed over the threshold, a hallmark of serial killers who are very charming people on the surface, concealing a deep interior rageful life. In the space of ten weeks, the killer had claimed the lives of five elderly women, but his reign was far from over, and it was about to take a new twist.
While police raced to identify the killer, with five police departments and three different district attorneys each investigating their own jurisdictions, one man was completely ignored. Albert DeSalvo, the hardworking, smart-talking family man, was right under their noses. But his personal life was suffering; he was highly sexed and his relationship with his wife was deteriorating.
She would use 𝒔𝒆𝒙 to punish him, refusing him when she didn’t get what she wanted.
On a wet and windy day in early December 1962, the pattern changed again. Twenty-one-year-old Sophie Clark was alone in her apartment when there was a knock at the door. Her letter was never finished.
With just two days of 1962 remaining, twenty-three-year-old Patricia Bissette became the seventh victim. Months went by before the Strangler struck again in May 1963, killing twenty-three-year-old Beverly Samans, who was stabbed twenty-two times, four in the throat and eighteen times in her left breast in the pattern of a bullseye.
On January 4, 1964, Mary Sullivan, only nineteen years old, was found in her apartment, left sitting up in bed with her legs splayed and a broomstick shoved up into her vagina. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the stranglings stopped. Months went by with no more murders, and speculation ran rampant about whether the killer had died, been arrested, or moved away.
Faced with almost a dozen unsolved murders, the state’s attorney general formed a dedicated Strangler Bureau. Officer Steve Delaney was tasked with making sense of the crimes and noticed something peculiar about the crime scene photos: some clearly matched the elderly ladies with the same MO, while others pointed to the younger victims, making it seem as though there might be more than one killer. The bizarre sequence had everyone baffled.
Then the police became embroiled in a new crime wave. A serial rapist known as the Green Man, wearing green workman’s clothes, was loose on the streets, tying women up and raping them in a spectacular fashion. In 1964, a sketch of the attacker was created, and detectives immediately recognized him as the former Measuring Man, Albert DeSalvo.
He was arrested and sent to Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane.
Richard DeSalvo, however, was convinced his brother was not a vicious man, describing him as calm, never hollering or screaming. He recalled an incident where a woman told Albert he had tied her up too tight, and Albert went right back in and loosened the binds before leaving. The Green Man rapes revealed a power-reassurance rapist, someone who was raping and then fondling, kissing, and apologizing to his victims, seeking reassurance about his own masculinity and sexual performance.
In 1965, while held at Bridgewater awaiting trial for his Green Man crimes, Albert DeSalvo made an astonishing claim: he was the Boston Strangler. Renowned lawyer F. Lee Bailey received word that DeSalvo wanted to speak with him.
Bailey was initially skeptical, but armed himself with questions only a cop would know the answer to, not the press. When he read DeSalvo’s answers, he knew something had touched a hot pot.
DeSalvo was interviewed under hypnosis by Dr. William Bryan, and his recollections were pretty convincing and pretty frightening. Officer Delaney got a chilling insight into a possible motive during DeSalvo’s recollection of the Beverly Samans murder.
DeSalvo described how she had made him promise not to have intercourse, and when she started screaming and yelling, “You promised, you promised, you promised,” DeSalvo pounded his fist on the bed, screaming, “Had to shut her up, had to shut her up,” just like his wife’s piercing scream. Rejection was his trigger.
DeSalvo would be questioned repeatedly, describing each apartment in detail, drawing pictures, describing carvings on a headboard, and telling investigators what women had on their bureaus. Crucially, he confessed to a killing that had never been reported, claiming an elderly woman had died in his arms of fright around the time of the first strangling. His confession checked out, laying out chapter and verse things that only the killer could have known.
He also explained how he gained entry, even at the height of the hysteria. He told women the landlord had sent him up because they were entitled to a new refrigerator, or a paint job, anything that was a benefit and unexpected. If they hesitated, he’d say it wasn’t necessary and start to leave, at which point they figured he wasn’t the Strangler, because he would have hit them by now, so they’d invite him back in.
However, there was no physical evidence linking DeSalvo to the crimes, and Bailey had secured a commitment that the confessions could not be used against him in court. In 1967, DeSalvo was found guilty on ten counts of indecent assault and armed robbery and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was never tried or charged with any of the stranglings.
Richard DeSalvo is convinced his brother was innocent of all the murders, believing Albert was enticed to confess by the possibility of a ten-thousand-dollar reward and lucrative book and movie deals. He describes Albert as a conman who got conned. In November 1973, Albert called Richard and said he had something explosive to tell the world, that heads were going to roll and there would be red faces.
The next morning, Albert DeSalvo was found stabbed to death in his locked cell. No one was ever convicted of his murder.
So was Albert DeSalvo a born killer, a product of his environment, or a misguided hustler innocent of the most famous crime spree in Boston’s history? After more than forty years, opinion is still divided. Some experts argue that socialization is a powerful phenomenon, and a boy socialized for years in that kind of abusive environment would begin to see that 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 as normal, almost desirable.
Others are convinced he was a serial killer, with the physical evidence today suggesting no connection between him and the killings.
The truth may never be fully known. What remains is a portrait of a deeply disturbed man, forged in a crucible of unimaginable violence and 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, who either committed some of the most horrific murders in American history, or was disturbed enough to want to take on that persona and that infamy because there is status that comes with doing horrendous, horrible things. His background was enough to have taken an angel and made him into a psychopath just to survive, and his father’s brutality may well have planted a bad seed that grew into the monster known as the Boston Strangler.
