Who Was the Boston Strangler? Inside Albert DeSalvo's Confession to 13 Gruesome Strangulations (and Why Some Still Don't Believe Him) By Jane LaCroix

Someone was terrorizing the quiet neighborhoods of Boston — single women, quietly getting ready for bed, turning into victims of a nighttime predator who left no easy clues behind.

In the early ‘60s, 13 women were sexually assaulted and strangled, and the city was gripped by fear. The man who confessed to those murders, Albert DeSalvo, became known as the Boston Strangler — but the story didn’t end with his admission. While DNA evidence later linked DeSalvo to the final victim, Mary Sullivan, in 2013, he was never charged with the other murders, per the New York Daily News.

“That confession has been the subject of skepticism and controversy from almost the moment it was given,” Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said in July 2013, according to The New York Times.

Law enforcement and forensic experts long argued the Boston Strangler murders couldn’t all have been committed by a single person, as the victims varied widely in age and circumstances, and the methods shifted over time. As decades passed, multiple killer theories persisted, keeping one of Boston’s darkest chapters shrouded in uncertainty.

Complicating his case further, DeSalvo was murdered in prison in 1973. The horrific killings are being re-examined in Oxygen’s The Boston Strangler: Unheard Confessions, which premiered on Oct. 26.

So who was the Boston Strangler — and why does doubt still linger about his confession so many years later?

Who is Albert DeSalvo?

DeSalvo was born on Sept. 3, 1931, in Chelsea, Mass., the third of six children. Growing up in a home marked by violence, his father, Frank DeSalvo, was an alcoholic who was allegedly physically and sexually abusive, per History.

From an early age, DeSalvo exhibited troubling behavior. He began torturing animals, and by age 12, he had been arrested for battery and theft and sent to the Lyman School for Boys, according to Gerold Frank’s 1966 book The Boston Strangler.

Despite his troubled childhood, DeSalvo married a German woman named Irmgard Beck, whom he met while stationed overseas, and the couple went on to have two children together. He fought in the U.S. Army, becoming an “exemplary” military police sergeant with the 2nd Squadron, 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment.

But after his discharge in 1956, he returned home and had a string of arrests for shoplifting, auto theft and other crimes.

One of his lawyers later described him in court as being consumed by “one of the most crushing sexual drives that psychiatric science has ever encountered,” according to The Boston Globe.

When did Albert DeSalvo commit his first murder?

Although DeSalvo confessed to being the infamous Boston Strangler, pinpointing his first killing remains difficult.

According to records, the string of murders he’s associated with began on June 14, 1962. The victim that day was 55-year-old Anna Elza Slesers, who was found strangled to death in her Boston apartment.

How many people did Albert DeSalvo kill?

The number of murders attributed to the Boston Strangler has long hovered around 13 women, killed between June 14, 1962, and January 1964, all in the greater Boston area.

Even after DNA evidence in 2013 linked DeSalvo to Sullivan with “99.9 percent certainty,” major doubts remain about his connection to the other killings. Sullivan’s nephew, Casey Sullivan, has long said that he doesn’t believe DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, even writing a book proposing other suspects called A Rose for Mary: The Hunt for the Real Boston Strangler. He also appeared in Oxygen’s October 2025 documentary.

His attorney, F. Lee Bailey, disagreed. “They had the right guy, beyond question,” he argued, per Unsolved. “No one has ever come up with anything meaningful to contradict that.”

Meanwhile, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Ames Robey offered a different view, noting, “Albert became the Boston Strangler because he wanted so much to be the Boston Strangler … For somebody that felt all his life that he was a nobody, all of a sudden he could become world-renowned.”

There’s also the theory that more than one killer may have been at work, making the actual tally of murders by DeSalvo alone impossible to confirm with certainty.

How was Albert DeSalvo caught?

DeSalvo’s arrest was not the result of a direct link to the Boston Strangler murders — but rather a case of his own compulsive criminal behavior catching up with him.

In 1964, police arrested DeSalvo after a young woman identified him as her attacker during a string of sexual assaults across Massachusetts. Dubbed the “Measuring Man” and later the “Green Man” for posing as a modeling scout and repairman to gain access to women’s homes, DeSalvo admitted to many rapes and break-ins.

While being held at Bridgewater State Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, DeSalvo was placed in the same ward as George Nassar, who later claimed DeSalvo had privately confessed to being the Boston Strangler. Later, Nassar and DeSalvo were accused of organizing the confession in hopes of splitting potential reward money, per Frank’s book.

When investigators questioned DeSalvo, he was able to recount details of several murder scenes that had never been made public, sparking widespread belief that he might be the Boston Strangler. Still, without physical evidence, prosecutors could only charge him with the sexual assaults.

In 1967, he was sentenced to life in prison — his confession to the 13 strangulations remaining legally untested.

What are the theories about Albert DeSalvo?

Some major questions linger over whether DeSalvo acted alone or even committed all of the killings. One key point of contention is that the victims varied widely in age, manner of death and circumstance of entry — features uncharacteristic of a single serial killer profile.

Prison psychiatrist Robey dismissed DeSalvo’s claims in 1968, calling him “a very clever, very smooth compulsive confessor who desperately needs to be recognized.” Former FBI profiler Robert Ressler stated to CBS in 2001, “You’re putting together so many different patterns … that it’s inconceivable behaviorally that all these could fit one individual.”

Another prominent theory involves Nassar, who some claim could have coached DeSalvo to provide details of the crime scenes. He denied allegations that he was involved in the Boston Strangler murders.

What happened to Albert DeSalvo after his conviction?

DeSalvo never lived to see his name officially cleared — or confirmed — in connection with the murders. In 1973, six years after his conviction for sexual assault, DeSalvo was stabbed to death in the infirmary of Walpole State Prison (now MCI–Cedar Junction) in Massachusetts. He was 42 years old.

According to prison officials, DeSalvo had told family members and his attorney just days before that he planned to publicly recant his confession to the murders. “He was very frightened,” his attorney Bailey later recalled. 

DeSalvo was buried in Puritan Lawn Memorial Park in Peabody, Mass., though his remains were exhumed in 2013 to obtain DNA samples as part of renewed testing in the Sullivan case.