The Boston Strangler

In the early 1960s, Boston was gripped by a chilling wave of violence—a series of murders that would come to be labeled as the Boston Strangler cases. Between June 1962 and January 1964, at least thirteen women, aged between 19 and 85, were found dead in their homes throughout Greater Boston. Each had been sexually assaulted and strangled—often with their own nylon stockings or other ligatures—tied in a distinctive bow around the neck. These crimes, lacking signs of forced entry, suggested that the assailant gained victims’ trust—perhaps by posing as a repairman or delivery person—with devastating consequences for the city’s vulnerable women.

The crimes began on June 14, 1962, when the first victim, a 55-year-old seamstress, was found murdered in her Back Bay apartment. Over the following months, a total of thirteen women were killed. Victims included elderly women in their sixties and seventies in the summer of 1962, followed later by younger women in their early twenties by the end of 1962 and into 1963. The final victim was 19-year-old Mary Anne Sullivan, discovered in her Boston apartment on January 4, 1964—her body bearing the same brutal signs of assault and strangulation, with the ligature tied in that now-infamous bow. As the city trembled in fear, the Massachusetts Attorney General, Edward Brooke, intervened to coordinate the investigation. A centralized task force, often referred to as the “Strangler Bureau,” was formed under Assistant Attorney General John S. Bottomly. Although this marked one of the era’s more ambitious attempts at multi-jurisdictional investigative coordination, detectives were constrained—modern forensic tools like DNA testing were decades from becoming available, so law enforcement had to rely on witness accounts, forensic observation, and sheer investigative persistence.

The first killings in mid‑June 1962 quickly escalated. Victims included Anna Elza Slesers (55), Mary Mullen (85), Nina Nioma Nichols (68), and Helen Elizabeth Blake (65) in the summer of 1962. Later that year, older women such as Edes “Ida” Irga (75) and Jane Sullivan (67) were killed, followed by younger women—Sophie L. Clark (20) in December, Patricia Jane Bissette (23) later that same month. The pattern continued into 1963 with victims including Mary Ann Brown (69), Beverly Samans (26), Evelyn Corbin (57), and Joann Graff (23). By January 4, 1964, Mary Anne Sullivan (19) became the final victim attributed to this series of cases. In October 1964, attention turned to a man named Albert Henry DeSalvo, then held for unrelated sexual assault charges. On October 27, he entered a woman’s apartment in Cambridge under false pretenses, tied her to the bed, sexually assaulted her, then left—remarkably apologizing before he departed. The victim’s description matched a suspect in a string of assaults labeled “The Green Man” or “The Measuring Man”—nicknames tied to his claims of measuring women or posing as a modeling agent.

Once arrested in late October, DeSalvo’s photograph was released to the press—prompting multiple additional identifications by women claiming he had assaulted them. While confinement at Bridgewater State Hospital led to psychiatric evaluation, it was during this period that DeSalvo reportedly confessed to a fellow inmate, George Nassar, that he was the Boston Strangler. Nassar, in turn, shared this confession with his attorney, the prominent F. Lee Bailey, who ultimately became DeSalvo’s defense counsel. Bailey—and law enforcement—were struck by DeSalvo’s detailed recollections. He described crime scenes with precision, including apartment layouts and personal effects that had not been publicly disclosed. One striking example: DeSalvo mentioned a blue chair in a victim’s living room. The victim described it as brown, but photographs later verified that it was indeed blue—an unsettling confirmation of his intimate knowledge of the crime scene.

Despite the accuracy of some of his confessions, physical evidence tying DeSalvo to the murders was absent. Because of this, prosecutors opted not to charge him for the Strangler killings. Instead, he stood trial in 1967 for the Green Man rapes—and his legal team introduced the Strangler confession not as proof of guilt for the murders, but as support for a plea of insanity. That strategy was rejected by the jury, and DeSalvo received a life sentence for sexual assault convictions. Yet questions lingered. Skeptics noted inconsistencies and deviations in the killings and in DeSalvo’s narrative. Some investigators, including Dr. Ames Robey, the head of Bridgewater State Hospital, believed DeSalvo was “a very clever, very smooth compulsive confessor who desperately needs to be recognized,” and not necessarily the actual murderer. The variety of victims—across age, ethnicity, and circumstance—and variation in method further fueled the theory that the murders may not have been the work of a single man. A breakthrough came decades later. In July 2013, investigators used clandestine means to collect a discarded water bottle from one of DeSalvo’s nephews, extracting a Y-STR DNA profile. That profile matched preserved semen evidence from Mary Sullivan’s crime scene—DeSalvo’s last alleged victim—with odds estimated at one in 220 billion that it came from someone else. This led to exhumation of DeSalvo’s remains; DNA from his bones provided a confirmatory match, closing the loop conclusively for that case.

Despite that breakthrough, DeSalvo was never convicted for the Strangler murders. The DNA evidence was sufficient for law enforcement to invoke “exceptional clearance” under FBI guidelines—identifying the offender, but unable to prosecute due to the suspect’s death. DeSalvo was killed in prison in 1973, when he was stabbed to death in Walpole State Prison’s infirmary—his death remaining unsolved even today. As of this documentary’s production, only the Mary Sullivan case is conclusively linked to DeSalvo by physical evidence. The remaining twelve murders remain officially unsolved; debates continue over whether DeSalvo committed all, some, or none beyond Sullivan. Authorities continue to consider the possibility of multiple perpetrators—a question that may never be fully resolved.

Throughout that terrified span of Boston history, the murders left countless women shattered by fear. With each new killing, public panic mounted. Women changed their routines, bought stronger locks, carried tear gas, and often refused to open doors unless they were certain who was entering. The city’s collective sense of safety under siege is captured in period photographs and reports—women “walking home in fear,” as LIFE magazine put it. Behind the headlines were real victims: mothers, daughters, workers, elders, students. Their lives were stolen in private spaces meant to be safe. While assigning names to statistics is always fraught, we must recall each woman as a person with a story, loved and remembered. The possibility that some of their killers remain unidentified is an enduring wound.

The Boston Strangler case remains one of America’s most notorious true-crime mysteries—not just because of the brutality of the crimes, but because of the complexity of the investigation, the ambiguity of confessions, and the limits of legal closure. Albert DeSalvo confessed—he provided chilling detail—but he was never convicted of those murders. Decades later, science confirmed he was responsible for at least one victim, but the others remain shrouded in doubt. This narrative offers lessons in the nature of confession—how certainty without evidence is a dangerous thing—and in the power of evolving forensic science to revisit the cases we thought closed. It reminds us that justice and truth do not always align neatly, and that sometimes history resists tidy resolution. Most importantly, it highlights the lives taken and the prolonged grief endured by families whose loved ones remain victims of unresolved violence. In the quiet that follows the final words, let us remember: the Boston Strangler may be a name known to history, but it was thirteen women who died, and their stories—and the need for justice—deserve to persist in our memory.