Suspected Boston Strangler's Body To Be Exhumed

By Bret Silverberg and Roberto Scalese

Officials today cited a technological breakthrough allowing them to identify Albert DeSalvo as the killer of Mary Sullivan, the last murder in a string of 1960s killings by the "Boston Strangler."

Yet the new evidence is highly unlikely to open the case of a murdered Belmont woman half a century ago that a well-known author who grew up in Belmont suggesting that she could have been a victim of DeSalvo's.

Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley said at a Thursday press conference officials took a sample from a water bottle a male DeSalvo family member drank from and were able to match this with a Y chromosome of DeSalvo's father. This evidence was matched with a sample taken from blankets at the scene of Sullivan's murder.

This match allowed police to obtain a warrant to exhume DeSalvo's remains this week to further prove the case, Conley said.

Officials have tried since the 1960s to find a match to Sullivan's grisly murder Jan. 4, 1964, but were unable to prove a match until now.

"We are 99.9 percent" positive of the match, Conley said.

DeSalvo confessed to the killings while in prison, marking himself as the worst serial killer in city history.

The murders began in 1962, when Anna E. Slessers was found dead in her Gainsborough Street apartment. Police found a grotesque scene, with Slessers body posed lewdly on the bathroom floor. She had been sexually assaulted with an object and then strangled with her bathrobe’s belt. The belt had been tied in a bow.

Soon more murders followed, some with accompanying sexual assaults, some with the bodies placed in disgusting poses, and all with some sort of strangling. As the bodies mounted and some details made it to the press, Boston became aware it had a serial killer on its hands. The Boston Sunday Herald was the first to give him his name, calling the killer “the Mad Strangler of Boston.”

There were initially 11 cases connected to the Boston Strangler, and two more connected years later. The ages of the victims spanned from 19 to 85. While most of the killings occurred in Boston, others happened in Lynn, Salem and Lawrence.

DeSalvo himself was already in jail on an unrelated rape conviction when he confessed to the stranglings. His attorney, the famed F. Lee Bailey, had offered the confession on the condition it could not be used against him in court, according to the Boston Globe. 

Not everyone was convinced by that confession, however, and many have speculated it was DeSalvo’s cellmate, George Nassar, who did the actual killings and then fed DeSalvo the details. Police were initially impressed by DeSalvo’s knowledge of undisclosed details from the Strangler murders, but noted some discrepancies from his supposed memories and the facts on the ground. 

DeSalvo was working in Belmont as a day laborer when a local resident, Bessie Goldberg, was raped and murdered in 1963, 50 years ago. Author Sebastian Junger wrote about it in a 2006 book called A Death in Belmont.

Yet Junger's assumptions that Roy Smith, the man convicted in November 1963 as Goldberg's murderer was targeted by police and prosecutors because he was black, is vehemently contested by Goldberg's daughter, Leah Scheuerman, while law enforcement and prosecutors today believe that Smith was the assailant. 

In addition, DeSalvo never mentioned the Goldberg murder when he confessed to his myriad of crimes.

DeSalvo later recanted his confession while in Walpole Correctional facility. He was stabbed to death in prison in 1973.