Blood on the Cobblestones PT 2

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I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson.

I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them.

Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.

And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens.

Some are solved and some are cold.

Very cold.

This is Buried Bones.

Hey, Paul.

Hey, Kate.

How are you?

I'm doing well.

I'm excited to hear what you're going to think about the conclusion of this case and everything that we've talked about.

This is another one in your wheelhouse.

You love stuff like this.

For sure.

You know, and it's an interesting series.

I, of course, knew about the Boston Strangler, but the details I couldn't remember.

And so now hearing you tell, tell, you know, what has happened up to this point in time has started to cause me to think about things a little bit.

Well, I like it.

I think we learn stuff with every one of these stories.

And I'm always interested in what you and I pick up on, particularly with the serial killer story, just because

they're unusual and you sometimes can see a pattern, sometimes there's no pattern.

But I think you especially always dispel myths by the end of it that we all think they only want blondes or they're only going to kill older people, you know.

And so it's, I think it's important to know stuff like that.

Yep, for sure.

Before we continue talking about the Boston Strangler, Paul, you and I are taking a fantastic trip in October with Virgin Voyage's True Crime Voyage.

They have a huge Halloween costume party.

No, boy.

I know.

Are you a costume guy?

And you cannot say I'm going as a forensic investigator or a cold case investigator.

You're going to have to think outside the box here.

You know, I am not a costume guy.

In fact, my family gets on me because

I don't even know the last time I've ever dressed up.

Well, we're going to have to change that.

What would be your aura around costumes?

Like, what are we thinking?

Superhero?

Paul Hole, superhero?

Come on, no.

You know,

I think kind of going back to the roots and like a Sherlock Holmes type of and, you know, motif, if you will.

I got you.

So I'll be a Watson if you be the Sherlock Holmes.

Okay.

And then we'll switch costumes in the middle.

How about that?

Something like that.

All right.

You're on.

This is going to be a good costume party.

Okay.

We're in Boston, 1962.

There are seven murders between June and essentially New Year's Eve of 1962.

Some are in Boston.

I think there are three or four in Back Bay.

Some are outside of Boston.

I know one in Lynn.

And there is a kind of a different smattering of connections with different victims.

You have kind of a slew, I think it is five of older women.

There are five victims who are older, and they are all together-ish

before he takes what appears to be about a two or three-month break.

And then the next victim is not only much younger, she's 19, but she's also black.

Then on December 31st, so New Year's Eve, we have Patricia, who is 23 and white.

So, you know, we've talked about dispelling the myths of there has to be a certain race, there has to be a certain age and all of that.

Have you thought about any of this, you know, since we've talked last week?

Well, I think, you know, the first five victims are older white women ranging in age from 56 to 75.

But outside of the first woman who was 56, I mean, these other women are 65 to 75 years old.

And the photo that you sent me last week, I mean, these women do look older.

So he is purposefully choosing this type of victim.

Now, only he can say why the older women.

But then he takes a break.

And when he comes back, and this is what, early December with Sophie, the 19-year-old black female,

this is where it's like, well, is he evolving sort of like what I said last week?

And has now got the confidence to commit crimes and is now moving more into maybe the age range of what his sexual preference is?

You know, that's a possibility.

Was Sophie just an opportunity?

He's not selecting her just because, you know, she's a younger black female.

It may be, here's a woman that I can sexually assault.

She's isolated inside her residence.

So there's always that.

Anytime you see something that seems to be a deviation, you can't really say, well, he did that purposefully.

It could be just because the opportunity presented itself.

And then he comes back and now assaults Patricia, who's 23, and she's left in the bed and is covered.

So, you know, the two of the victims, Jane, who is 67 in the bathtub, was covered, and Patricia, who's 23, is in her bed and she's covered.

So I kind of pay attention to that.

Jane is significantly different in terms of a house coat being put on her in the bathtub.

With Patricia, it may just be a kind of a practical aspect.

I'm going to make it look like she's just asleep in the bed and is pulling the sheets all the way up to her chin.

Well, now we are sort of going backwards and forwards at the same time.

So two months after the last murder.

So that would have been Patricia.

Now we're in 1963, March.

And we are with a 69-year-old widow.

Her name is Mary Brown.

And I will note if these victims are not white.

We'll just say that.

Just assume everybody is white moving forward with the exception of Sophie.

So Lynn is about 30 miles outside of Back Bay.

And now we've got Mary who is in Lawrence, which is 25 miles north of Boston.

So location-wise, we're in and around Boston, especially in the Back Bay, then we're not.

What do you think about that?

Does that mean anything?

No, you know, these distances are just everyday distances that people frequently will travel because of, you know, their work,

where their family lives, et cetera.

So this is not anything unusual in a series.

You frequently see victims that are spaced, you know, 30 miles apart.

It's when you get to where now you start seeing interstate travel, where you see large distances that the offender is covering.

Now you go, okay, the offender is truly moving around.

What does that tell me about the offender's life, his occupation?

You know, so that's when you start diving into sort of, let's say, a geographic profile, I'm now just taking a look at these movements, going, okay, the offender seems to have a strong connection to Back Bay, Boston, but he's moving out, you know, 30 miles away in a couple of different directions.

There may be a reason for that.

Maybe his job is taking him out there.

Maybe he has an anchor point.

Something in his life pulls him out to those particular locations.

I right now would not suspect that the offender is purposely getting away from Boston in order to offend, just to throw law enforcement off.

I'm not gathering that just yet.

Well, keep gathering because there's a lot of information.

You know, now we've gone from a 23-year-old to a 69-year-old outside of Boston.

Let me tell you about what happened.

Mary had been beaten and stabbed and possibly strangled.

They said marks are found on her neck that look like she was strangled with someone's bare hands.

Now, there are some articles that say that Mary is 55, but that is the wrong age.

She's 69.

I can probably pull up one.

I guess I was just wondering if she looked younger than she actually was.

Does that matter to you at all at this point?

Well, right now, you know, she's 69 years old, and based off of the previous victims, I would not doubt that in the offender's mind, she looks like an older person.

That's fitting some sort of criteria that he's using to choose the older victims.

Okay.

So let me tell you a little bit more about what happened.

Her clothing had been ripped off her body, and her dress was in tatters, and it was found over her head.

There's a towel in her mouth.

She had been stabbed with a two-pronged meat fork.

So this is graphic.

This is found sticking out of her chest.

She's been beaten so badly that her face is unrecognizable, and she has several skull fractures.

The towel that was found in her mouth was, they said, halfway down her throat.

It's described as a towel, but, you know, it's probably more of like a hand towel.

And she's found with her rubber overshoes and her stockings still on.

So the overshoes are just sort of this old school reindeer.

And there's evidence that she had been sexually assaulted.

And they recover semen from her body.

Now, the beating throws me off.

And I know that we've talked about this before, that things change and things happen, and different situations in the serial killer's mind call for different methods.

But this seems even more violent than what we've seen already, especially with the fork sticking out.

Well, Mary's 69.

She is likely not able to put up much of a fight against this offender.

So this is in a situation where he's beating her this severely in order to get her under control, gain her compliance.

This level of violence on Mary suggests to me there is something going on in the offender's life that has made him angry.

At this point, I would, with what I am interpreting about what happened to Mary is this offender at this point is what I would call an anger retaliatory type of offender.

Something in his life has made him angry and he's using Mary.

He's taking that anger out on Mary.

Anytime I'm looking at a victim who has been beat about the head, you know, that generally suggests that there's that anger component.

These, like this guy, strangulation is core to his fantasy.

There's a sexual component for this guy about the strangulation.

Yes, he's using strangulation with other victims to kill them, but that's part of what he's doing.

He needs to do that strangulation.

The beating is a different thing.

I don't believe he's someone that is getting sexually gratified by beating Mary this severely.

And then he's also stabbing, right?

So he's taking a lot of anger out on Mary, but there is the sexual component.

He sexually assaults her, but he's ripping her clothing off in order to be able to gain access to do the sexual assault.

So it'll be interesting to see if he stays in this anger component to his attacks, or does he go back to more of the types of strangulations we saw with some of the prior victims?

Looks like Mary had been in poor health.

She was seen the day before she was murdered.

She might have gone to a hospital.

I haven't read yay or nay about that, but that's my assumption.

And I'll tell you why in a minute.

She's in a three-family tenement that is real shabby.

And, you know, it sounds like it's an apartment one or two floors above a shop on the main level.

But the door to her apartment was bolted.

They had to break down the door.

And there's no word on the windows.

I'm assuming he must have gone out a window.

And the apartment was ransacked.

It looks like there was a, she put up a fight.

It looks like there was a struggle.

And they said, reporters just saw the scene said there was blood all over the place.

So, you know, you were saying when we get to the next victims, let's see if this is continuing to be, you know, more and more violent or whatever.

Right.

And do you know that the bolt to the front door, is that something that could be undone with a key from outside the apartment?

I don't know.

I don't know if it was, you know, what I had in New York, one of those bolts that just goes right across.

Okay.

There are offenders that track down victims' keys and then lock the door behind them on the way out.

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So we've talked about Mary.

Mary was victim number eight.

Now we're going on to victim number nine.

And this is May 8th.

So about two months after Mary.

And this is a 26-year-old opera singer who was a Boston University graduate student.

And she was also a music therapist.

And she worked in a hospital.

Her name is Beverly Salmons.

And she's in Cambridge.

Let me tell you about what happens with Beverly.

She's lying on a pull-out couch.

The medical examiner does not think she was strangled because no bones in her neck are broken.

That's not right, right?

They don't need to be broken, do they?

One of the diagnostic aspects to determine manual strangulation is if the hyoid bone is broken.

The hyoid bone sits high up in the neck, kind of right underneath the jaw that the tongue attaches to.

And when somebody is compressing

with hands, that hyoid bone can't really move out of the way and it can be fractured in manual strangulation.

With a thinner ligature during ligature strangulation, the hyoid oftentimes is never contacted by the ligature.

So that's how a pathologist can go, oh, it looks like there's manual strangulation, even though there's a ligature that's been applied.

That's one of those diagnostic features.

Here, the pathologist must not be seeing any hemorrhaging in the neck muscles.

There must not be even the, you know, the larynx, the throat structures also can be damaged during strangulation.

So the pathologist is not seeing that.

And he must not also be seeing, let's say, peticiae, because when the pressure builds up during strangulation, the capillaries in your blood and other aspects of the upper part of your body can burst.

And so you start seeing these little blood bursts.

in the eyes as an example.

Some investigators actually said that because Beverly was an opera singer, her throat muscles were exceptionally well developed, which might have made it harder for someone to strangle her.

But pause a second before you say anything.

There were two scarves and a nylon stocking found looped around her neck, and her hands were tied behind her back.

And there is a definite cause in that she was stabbed 17 times.

Oh, okay.

So it was a neither here nor there.

I mean, I think, you know, they're just trying to go through with the strangling part at this point.

So what do you think about the throat muscles being developed?

But there's obviously something wrapped around her neck.

You know, I just don't think I'd put a lot of weight on.

I mean, maybe

she does have stronger neck muscles.

You know, I just don't see how that is going to make it that much more difficult.

particularly in a ligature strangulation for somebody to be successful.

I mean, it's the neck,

that's all soft tissue.

And we're talking about with whether even you have a man with strong hands or you have a ligature encircling the neck,

that soft tissue is going to compress.

And

fundamentally,

it's not so much the muscles, it's the closing off the carotid arteries.

And so that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Now, you said that stockings had been looped around her neck,

but not used as a ligature.

Yeah, that's why they're not convinced that she's been strangled.

Yeah, and it says a lot of the stab wounds are concentrated through her left lung, and there were four slashes in her throat, two on each side.

I wonder if she was fighting so hard he couldn't strangle her, and he hadn't, you know, he had a knife.

I don't know.

Yeah, but he's still taking the time to loop the stockings around her neck.

You know, I'd want to evaluate the, you know, the crime scene to see exactly if I could sequence what happened.

But the way that I am interpreting things is that these stockings have been placed by the offender probably after she's dead.

I've seen this.

This is where this offender has a compulsion.

This is where there's that fantasy component to where he has a need to put these stockings around her neck, even though he's not using them as a ligature.

Well, the police think that

she let the killer in.

No signs of forced entry, they say.

As I said, 17 times, they do not find the weapon.

They aren't sure what the weapon would be.

And they think she was killed after 11 p.m.

that Sunday night because she didn't show up at choir practice.

So, you know, we're kind of left with that.

We can't talk about affluent versus not, but, you know, you have Mary who's in a shabby tenement outside of the city.

You've got this woman who has apparently a nice apartment in Cambridge, you know, right across the river from the city.

It's odd, but the scenes seem so similar and very violent.

Yeah.

Right now, the only pattern that is possibly present in terms of shared characteristics of the victims seems to be this medical aspect.

Even though Mary is sort of in a shabby area, you know,

how is he selecting these victims?

Is he following them?

Or is he just going to a location and finding somebody that fits what he needs?

You know, that's always a possibility.

So it's kind of hard right now to be able to say, you know, what is going on?

Why is he moving around the way he is and going from middle, upper class type neighborhoods to, like with Mary, something that sounds a little bit more

lower income, shabby type of environment.

But he's comfortable moving around in those types of neighborhoods.

And again, we could be back with the healthcare connection because I mentioned that Beverly Beverly worked in a hospital at one point as a music therapist, but she also worked part-time as a counselor in a psychiatric facility.

So now we're moving on to, I think this is our 10th victim.

This is four months later, September 8th.

So this has now been going on for July, August, a year and three months.

And we're in Salem.

And that is 50 miles north of Boston.

This is a 58-year-old woman.

Her name is Evelyn Corbyn.

She's She's in her apartment.

She is discovered by her downstairs neighbor on a Sunday afternoon.

Police think she had been killed that same morning when she was getting ready to go to Mass.

So here are the details.

She is found sprawled across her bed in her bedroom.

She is dressed in a robe, which sounds very much like Anna, and they're about the same age.

I'm not trying to make anything out of anything, but she had a blue nightgown and socks on, and she had been strangled by several different nylon stockings that are found around her neck.

Blood is in her ears.

They find a bruise on her chest, and they cannot determine if she had been sexually assaulted.

The police are questioning a man in his 40s who is described as an acquaintance of Evelyn's, and other people have been questioned, but there were no arrests and no connection with the victims.

And I don't see a mention of a hospital anywhere.

You know, one of the things that just dawned on me is that a majority and maybe all the victims so far

live in apartments.

These aren't detached single-family houses.

You know, so it's interesting from evaluating the offender, why is he choosing apartments when you have sort of a concentration of residents?

You've got a parking lot, you've got residents that are kind of coming and going all the time that you can't control when somebody can pop up out of their apartment as you're walking up to the victim's location, as the offender's walking up to the victim's location.

So it seems like this would be elevated risk by choosing these types of locations versus going into a neighborhood and choosing a victim in a house.

Why would he do that?

That's so risky.

Well, that's where, you know, from my perspective, the offender's showing a level of comfort with this type of location.

Now, why does he have that?

Maybe he has an occupation that causes him to do a lot of work within apartments.

There's something about that, though, that I think will be significant.

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We are now to our final victim that we know of.

The final canonical Boston strangler victim.

It's another Mary.

Her name is Mary Sullivan.

She's found on Sunday, January 5th.

So, Mary is 19.

She's found in her apartment in Beacon Hill, which means we're back in Boston.

No sign of forced entry.

in the apartment.

She had been, they said, sexually molested.

They said semen is found on Mary's body and on a nearby blanket.

There's a card that says Happy New Year that is found by her foot, but the press is not reporting that.

So it sounds like maybe the police had withheld that information.

Do they think the offender brought that card?

I don't know.

Or maybe that was going to be the way to test whether they had found the right offender or not.

But found right by her foot.

She's found by her roommates.

She had just moved into the apartment three days prior.

She's found naked in her bedroom, strangled with her own nylon stockings and two nylon scarves around her neck.

So four nylon items around her neck.

Why does the offender need to do that?

Anytime the offender does something that is unnecessary, you have to pay attention to it.

Again, he's got a compulsion about ligature strangulation.

This is core.

to the fantasy that he is trying to live out by attacking these victims.

It just dawned on me this Happy New Year's card by her foot.

I I think law enforcement must think that this card was purposefully placed by her foot by the offender.

Yeah.

Versus something, you know, just on the floor that was already in her apartment.

Well, they have a couple of clues.

They say that they found, the press says footprints, but you and I can always say they probably mean shoe prints in the snow on a neighboring rooftop, which is right below Mary's kitchen window.

So they think maybe that's how he gained access to her.

Okay.

She's on the second floor, and it sounds like the building next to her is just one story.

They also find fingerprints in the apartment.

They had also found fingerprints in Anna's apartment, but we don't see reporting or in the police files about whether or not they matched those two fingerprints together.

Here's the upsetting sexual assault description.

So I'm glad this is the last thing we're talking about.

So this was the extra trigger warning.

A homicide detective tells the newspapers that a sexual aberration that had been present at some of the previous crime scenes, the earlier ones we talked about, was also present at this one.

But that, you know, it doesn't seem like this is something that was really widely reported.

So Mary, according to the medical examiner, had been sexually assaulted with a broom handle, and it is still in her when her body is discovered.

And that's all we know.

about the series of 11 murders from the Boston Strangler until we get a suspect.

Yeah, so we know that on some of the earlier victims, there was suspicion that there was foreign object insertion

vaginally.

And it's possible that that object was either the offender took it with him or it was present inside the victim's other victim's residence and they just didn't recognize it had been used.

Let's say a broom handle had been used, you know, but wasn't near the body, wasn't left in the body like in Mary's case.

The offender is doing this for shock value.

If he's purposely putting that Happy New Year's card by her foot and he's putting this broom handle into her vagina and leaving it there, he is taunting.

That's what he's doing with those actions.

And the Happy New Year card, I'm assuming that that's something that probably was inside Mary's residence and he saw it and probably chuckled a little bit.

Happy New Year, investigators.

I'm still here.

The stockings,

he has the compulsion to do that.

That's part of his fantasy, as I've mentioned before.

But it does sound like in this series, there's multiple victims in which they found semen.

It's not clear if it's inside them, though.

No, at least the way you describe it, because they say semen on the body.

And it's possible he's ejaculating outside the body.

He's masturbating over the victims' bodies.

We have the, with Sophie, you know, the semen stain that was found near her body, but outside, it was on the floor.

Right.

There's a strong sexual component, but there's also strong physical evidence in some of these cases to today that we would be able to use to identify who this offender is.

Yeah, because I see for Mary

Brown, who was the woman

in Lawrence, in the tenement type, the shabby type, semen recovered from her body.

And then you've got this Mary here where it says it was found on Mary's body and on a nearby blanket.

So, this is our final victim, and now we're going to get to a suspect who has been, you know, the suspect that everybody has considered the suspect for the past, you know, more than 40 years.

After the death of Mary, the whole case goes cold.

There is actually a strangler task force.

I don't know if that's what they called themselves.

They must have.

So, there was the special task force, and they tried everything.

They even went to a psychic, so they were pretty desperate, I think.

And there was no momentum until March of 1965.

So our final victim, Mary Sullivan, was January, early January of 1964.

So a year and a couple months later.

So two years after all of this started.

There's an inmate at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute, Bridgewater, which is a psychiatric facility for sex offenders.

And he confesses to the murders.

And his name is Albert DeSalvo, which is now at this point a very famous name for anybody who's into true crime, at least historical true crime.

Let me tell you about him.

He's 34 years old.

He has grown up in various parts of New England under really horrific abusive circumstances.

So at one point, he was sold by his father as a laborer to a farmer in Maine.

And, you know, his father was incredibly violent toward his mother when Albert was there.

And he regularly brought sex workers home while the family was in the house.

And the mother eventually divorced the father, but then remarries another man who also physically abuses the children.

And as a teenager, Albert starts having brushes with the law for theft.

So before we talk about the confessions, what he says happened, you know, I wanted to kind of lay out where he was coming from.

Albert joins the military, gets married, he has two kids, but he keeps getting arrested for stuff.

And he's given shorter sentences throughout the 50s, Breaking and entering, larceny.

He is convicted of sexually abusing a child in New Jersey.

I don't know the circumstances, but he is trying to break into a house in Cambridge, which is where one of our opera singers was located in Cambridge in March of 1961.

So this would have been about a year and a half before that incident happened in Cambridge.

He's brought in for questioning, and Albert tells the police that he had been connected to a string of other crimes, not the strangler crimes, but there was a man who was nicknamed the measuring man.

He had been going door to door in Cambridge, claiming to be a modeling scout.

And he would offer to take women's measurements.

Under the ruse, of course, he would then grope and harass the women who called the police.

In the end, he's found guilty only of several breaking and entering charges, and he's sentenced to two years in prison.

He gets out two months before Anna's murder, which is her first murder.

So, you know, he was caught breaking and entering.

He can, Albert, confesses to being the measuring man, and then he serves time in prison and then he gets out right beforehand.

So we have between 62 and 64, this string of murders that are attributed specifically to the Boston Strangler.

Then starting in May of 64, there's a string of sexual crimes in the Boston area that they're trying to connect to Salvo.

So, DeSalvo is not yet in this prison for sexual offenders.

He's out and about, and this is not murder, but these are sexual crimes.

In some, the man breaks into the house when the women are sleeping, and in others, he enters apartments pretending to be a maintenance worker, like what happened with Sophie, usually saying there's a leak in the building, although I think hers was a painter.

In some cases, he ties the women up with clothing found in the apartment.

And in some cases, also, he asks them for money.

Some of the women are groped and some are forced to perform oral sex, but nobody is strangled or beaten, which is important to connect to the other cases.

The victims' ages varied greatly.

And in some of the cases, the man wears a dark green shirt and pants, they think possibly meant to resemble a maintenance worker.

I think what's happening is Albert DeSalvo is confessing to being the measuring man, but they are also saying the measuring man is the same person as what they're calling the green man.

That's the guy who dresses up like a maintenance worker.

So in the morning of October 27th of 64, there's a 20-year-old Boston University student named Suzanne mocked.

She wakes up to find a strange man standing in her room.

He says he's a police detective, and he immediately backtracks and says, oh, well, actually, I'm wanted by the police.

Before she can do anything, he ties her hands up and her feet.

He has a knife.

He says, I'm not going to hurt you.

He blindfolds her and gropes her, then asks her to not tell his mother what he's done.

And she says, please, this is hurting my hands.

Please loosen the bonds.

And he does it.

And then when he leaves, Suzanne escapes and calls her husband, who then calls the police.

So based on this description, the all-green clothing description, police think that that the green man is the same as the measuring man, and DeSalvo has confessed to being the measuring man.

So he's arrested and held for observation.

And when he's there, he confesses to a cellmate named George Nasser to being the Boston strangler.

We can talk about Albert DeSalvo and why the police aren't so sure that he was the Boston strangler to begin with.

But if he is the strangler and we've seen all of this violence, does it make sense to you that he would also be the measuring man or and the green man who is, while doing terrible things, groping women against their will, forcing them to do some things, seems very different than what's happening with the Boston Strangler case?

No, I agree.

As we walked through each of the Boston Strangler victims, I keyed in on those specific types of behaviors that

he has a compulsion to do, that is that strangulation.

And he's killing these victims, and sometimes he's inflicting high levels of violence.

This seems completely different than what's happening in the Measuring Man series or the Green Man.

Now, there might be some overlap, like with Sophie, you have the ear witness that overhears a man posing as a painter, presumably to get access into Sophie's residence.

But that's just not a unique enough characteristic to say, well, if you've got this green man that's posing as, you know, a maintenance man in order to gain access, it must be the same guy.

No, this is a common ruse in order to be able to get into victims' residence.

So I think the just from a fundamental type of offender, the boss and strangler is very, very different than the measuring Man and or Green Man.

And these series are overlapping.

Boston Strangler victims are overlapping with this Measuring Man, Green Man

series.

I think you have two different offenders.

And this is where now this confession that DeSalvo makes to Acelli about being the Boston Strangler.

Okay, let's hear the details.

What details can he provide about the Boston Strangler crimes?

And when he talks about this, he is bringing up several things that you have talked about in the past.

So let me tell you, there have been police officers who have interacted with DeSalvo before.

And when he says to his Sally, I'm the Boston Strangler, and George Nasser reports it, the police say, bullshit.

He wants to be important.

He likes to brag.

And the medical director at the facility, who is a guy named Dr.

Roby, doesn't ever believe that De Salvo is the strangler.

He says that De Salvo has a desperate need to be someone important.

He does seem to know some details about the crimes that had not been reported, but on the other hand, the police say he gets things wrong.

that the press had also gotten wrong.

So it's clear he's also been reading things about the press.

They questioned him for weeks in 1965.

In addition to all the murders the police knew about and connected to the strangler, he also confesses to one other one, an 85-year-old woman named Mary Mullen, who police were never able to connect to the strangler.

He says that he attacked her about a week after Anna.

And I think there was a two-week gap between Anna and Nina, Nichols.

Yes, so two weeks.

So he's saying in between,

he attacked an 85-year-old woman, but that she died of a heart attack before he could strangle her.

Ultimately, they don't ever try him for being the strangler.

He is tried for being the green man and the measuring man.

He's found guilty.

He's sentenced to life in prison, and he goes back to Bridgewater.

So, what you say makes sense, and there's more to the story, so don't give up just yet on me because we do have an update, but let's get through his ending.

So he's given, as I said, life in prison in January of 67.

The next month, he and two inmates escape by stealing a key to the cells and leaving the prison through an elevator because

it was under construction.

But he turns himself in the next day and he's transferred to a maximum security facility, which will be literally the death of him because he dies after being stabbed in the prison infirmary.

But people still don't believe that he was the strangler.

So what do you think now?

I'm sure at the time the name Albert DeSalvo was in the headlines.

Oh yeah.

So he is a very high profile inmate.

And so of course he's going to be a target in the prison system, not only because of the high profile nature, but the types of crimes that he was committing or that he was convicted of.

You know, so I'm not surprised that he was killed in prison.

I'd need to be convinced that he truly was the measuring man and the green man, even though he was convicted.

I'd like to know the details of the case that was actually made against him in those in order to kind of further firm up my opinion that if DeSalvo is the measuring man, green man, he's a different offender than the Boston Strangler.

Well, let me tell you how this ends up.

So for 40 years, people have been saying, including friends of mine who have followed the the case, DeSalvo is not the person who did this.

And in 96, I told you there's an author named Susan Kelly, who it sounds like I need to get onto my other show,

who wrote The Boston Stranglers.

Her theory was that multiple people committed the crimes that Albert took credit for, but that the police believe strongly at least the first four older women.

could have been and probably were committed by the same person.

So this author is saying that the homicide victims that have been attributed to this Boston strangler, there's actually multiple offenders that committed some of the crimes.

First four to one offender, maybe Sophie, a different, okay.

I don't know if that's based on age or the gap in between her, Sophie, and the, and the first set of women or what.

You know, I've, I've, I've personally experienced, you know, thinking that, you know, a whole bunch of cases were committed by one offender and digging into those, you know, ultimately showed that multiple offenders were at work.

So it's not outside the realm of possibility.

I'm just thinking about the details across the cases.

And I believe it was, what, 11 cases attributed to Boston Strangler.

I think the details and the behaviors that the offender is

exhibiting suggest fairly strongly that it's probably a single offender.

I don't think I could say that with 100%

certainty, but that's my thought, just based off of, you know, listening to the details.

That might change if I were to actually take a look, you know, at the various crimes and see if

they seem as consistent to my eyes as what I'm hearing.

But this is where, you know, my hope is, is that you have some DNA results and let's

see where that points, right?

Let's get to it.

Okay.

So in 2001, so put your mind on the timeline of DNA.

2001, investigators compare a sample of mitochondrial DNA from Albert's brother to a sample of what is believed to be semen taken off of Mary Sullivan's body.

Mary Sullivan is the last victim.

She's the one that had the Happy New Year.

And they obviously were able to find semen present somewhere.

It's just interesting that they're relying on mitochondrial DNA.

Tells me that they don't have a reference standard from DeSalvo.

And so, you know, my question, of course, would be: was he buried?

Was he cremated?

Why go to the using mito, which, you know, is an inherited along the maternal side of a family.

It's passed down through the mother's side.

If it is the same as the semen off of Mary, then the next step should be dig Albert up and do a direct comparison because multiple people possess that same mitochondrial DNA.

Well, it's negative from 2001, but luckily people have your idea because now we're in 2013.

And they send a different sample from Mary Sullivan is tested first against DNA taken from a water bottle from one of DeSalvo's relatives.

No match.

So hold on.

They go ahead and exhume his body.

Thank goodness he was not cremated.

They exhume his body.

DNA is found to be a match from Mary Sullivan, the final victim of what's believed to be the Boston Strangler.

And what the forensic scientist who conducted the first comparison in 2001 says was that he wasn't given the same sample that was tested in 2013.

I think it's just the technology, right?

I mean, he's saying, I didn't screw this up.

Somebody else did.

We don't know enough about this last victim, Mary.

You know, did she have any consensual partners?

You know, could she have a semen that was collected during the processing that was from you know, a consensual partner and not from the killer.

But now that you, and so this, the mito, you know, part of the

problem with that is going to be, is this brother truly the biologic brother of Albert de Salvo?

You know, and that could cause things to be negative, but that's irrelevant at this point.

Now you have semen from Albert de Salvo off of Mary's body, proven by DNA.

Okay, so this now suggests, okay, I'm now thinking, yeah, DeSalvo's the Boston Strangler.

He's responsible for the entirety of the series, unless there's other DNA that differentiates it.

But is he truly the measuring man and the green man?

You know, that's what's throwing me is such disparate types of offenders.

If DeSalvo is committing all these crimes at the same time, I mean, that is showing quite a wide range of behaviors that he's exhibiting over the course of this two-year period.

You know, it's interesting.

I was reading about, so the U.S.

Department of Justice has a write-up about what they did, the funding that they used and, you know, all of that.

And they used one of DeSalvo's e femur and extracted DNA from a femur and three teeth to get the match.

So, you know, with Mary Sullivan, would they not have had DNA from the other cases that they say had DNA?

I wonder if they were going to, if they're just assuming that if he killed her, that he was responsible for the whole series.

No, I think if they still have the evidence from the other cases in which there were semen identified, I think you have to go after that.

Okay, here it is, Paul.

And this is what answers my question.

They went on a search.

So they've been looking.

They went on a search for any other evidence that might contain DeSalvo's DNA in the Boston Strangler cases.

And they said that everywhere they looked that had suitable samples, like the Department of Corrections or Massachusetts State Police, they didn't have samples that would work for them is what it says.

So it sounds like they've searched out and could not find any other sample that would work in any of these other cases.

So you feel like we could presume that perhaps, you know, DeSalvo is responsible for all of them if he's responsible for Mary Sullivan?

Well, I think, well, two things.

When you said that they were searching like Department of Corrections looking for a suitable sample, that sounds like they were looking for a reference standard for DeSalvo.

You're right.

Yeah, you're right.

so they in essence they exhausted what they could before getting the exhumation order but they went and got a direct sample from his remains and it matches the semen sample from mary now did the semen from mary were those both from the same donor the blanket and from her body It sounds like yes.

Okay.

And then they both matched de Salvo.

She's the one that had the Happy New Year's card by her foot and the stocking strangled with stocking.

You know, with the details, I think all of those cases are related.

Now, this is where I've been burned by that in the past.

I know.

So they, from my perspective, need to do whatever they can to track down potential DNA evidence from any of these other cases and see if it's all de salvo.

They went through, it seems like every avenue.

I'm just pulling out details I think are interesting.

They

used a sample of his DNA that was on a letter that he had sent.

They, you know, followed members of his family, as I had said before, and tested several times before they got a judge to agree to exhume his body.

They have a family attorney, the DeSalvo family, and she says, well, just because the DNA is on her body doesn't mean there's not enough proof that he killed her.

I mean, the attorney says, I have not read this anywhere else, but the family attorney says that the sperm that came from her mouth was consistent with DeSalvo, her client, but there was sperm recovered from her pubic area that was not a match for DeSalvo.

She's saying, so he could have had sex with them or raped them and didn't kill them.

I don't know.

I mean, this is just, it's so interesting how all of this goes, but they're very, DeSalvo's family kind of wants all this to stop is what it sounds like to me.

You know, first, it's not uncommon to find different DNA donors from victims just because they have a life.

And so this is where it's evaluating the sample as to which one is

likely from the offender.

The DNA evidence is, I think, is very strong that DeSalvo is Mary's killer.

And then

the circumstances suggest that he's also responsible for the 10 other victims attributed to the strangler.

I just don't think I would want to dismiss pursuing DNA from those other cases.

I think you have to do it in order to show that, yes, he is responsible for the entirety of this series.

And I can't see whether they've done that or not.

I can't imagine that they wouldn't.

But it's a money issue, too.

When you think about it from law enforcement's perspective, is that, well, nobody's ever going to be prosecuted.

Right.

Right.

The guy's dead.

The money side,

their operating budget is finite.

And so why spend the money where we can spend it on other casework to solve other cases right

but from from a

i think from a due diligence for this particular series it's such a high-profile series is that okay let's see if there is funding available somewhere in order to be able to in essence uh close the door with you know a final answer is de salvo truly responsible for all 11 victims or did he have a one-off?

I know he's, I'm confident he killed Mary, the last one.

Yeah.

You know, and then you have somebody else that escaped justice.

Well, I would be remiss to say that sort of there's floating out there another theory that Albert's former cellmate, George Nasser, the one he confessed to, is the actual Boston Strangler.

So George has a lawyer you may have never heard of before named Effley Bailey, who secures a book very famous.

And I mean, I, for my generation, it would be O.J.

Simpson, but for previous generations, God, who else is he represented?

I mean, just huge people.

Oh, Sam Shepard.

That's one of the big ones that I, and I know there are more.

That's right.

Yep.

Okay.

So Effley Bailey had secured a book deal, and he was representing both Albert and George.

And George was in prison for two murders that I can tell you have zero to do with anything that happened with the Boston Strangler.

Nothing at all.

No sexual component, no women even involved with this.

So the theory is that George coached Albert on what to say so that he knew the details.

If George is the Boston Strangler, he could feed Albert some of these details because, you know, he is the Boston Strangler.

And that, you know, he could say there were some things that weren't shared with the press.

And here are those things to legitimize himself.

It obviously, if that were true, didn't work because DeSalvo didn't convince anybody.

But George denied until his death in 2018 that he was a Boston strangler.

There's a biographer in 2024 who said that he thought he was.

George's biographer is saying the guy was out there.

He was on parole when all of these cases happened.

But it seems pretty undeniable about DeSalvo being connected to Mary Sullivan, no matter what the family attorney might say.

Yeah, no.

I mean, you're not finding Nasser's DNA on Mary.

You're finding DeSalvo's DNA on Mary.

I mean, that's

to me, that's a no-brainer.

It's just,

you know, in evaluating the entirety of

the cases attributed to DeSalvo, I think that's a fascinating study.

You know, this is where I'd want to know more details about the cases of the measuring man, the green man, to see is there actual

behavioral indicators that show that are consistent with the Boston Strangler?

Because,

you know, right now, the way I understand each of those series is that it really is

very disparate in terms of what the offender is doing in these cases.

And this, from my perspective, is like, oh, that's interesting.

You know, for an offender committing the types of Boston Strangler homicides with all the behaviors he's exhibiting there can also almost de-escalate and commit these other almost silly type crimes.

That would be a fascinating study.

And I'm assuming that I know they interviewed DeSalvo for a couple of weeks, but do they have the recordings of those interviews?

I don't know.

I haven't read that.

I mean, that's something we would have to dig into.

And also, you know, just to make sure we're clear that the Strangler killings ended in January of 64.

Then there's a break.

And the sexual crimes of Measuring Man come up in May.

So it's almost like if it's DeSalvo for all of us, it is.

It's weird.

It's a clean break and then a totally different set of crimes.

Yeah.

And that's where, you know, that I think for me to be convinced that de salvo is both the measuring man as well as the Boston Strangler, you know, I need to know the details about the measuring man.

That's, it's, it's like, okay, I'm pretty convinced de Salvo is the strangler based on the DNA and is responsible for all 11 of those homicides.

Is he really the measuring man or did they get the wrong guy on that?

And if he really is, and to me, that's a fascinating study of an offender who, in essence, de-escalates and starts committing another series where he's groping women.

Well, listen, it could be something that we look at and you make phone calls.

I know you're good at those.

And seeing what's left of the measuring man,

is there any stuff that's been collected

from the measuring man or from the green man for that matter?

Yeah.

Well, and that's really what it would take.

Is there DNA from any of those cases?

Well, it doesn't sound like those cases are of the type in which the agency would have kept the evidence.

To maybe get

the true DNA-based answer is probably not possible.

But most certainly, I think the disparate nature of the types of cases in each series is very interesting to me.

Well, listen, the victims...

of the measuring man and the green man are likely, many of them are likely still alive.

If you're talking about women in their 20s, they would have been born in the 40s.

You know, I mean, that would be my mom's age, 70s, 80s.

So if one of them had looked at the news and saw everything about DeSalvo and said to the police or said to you,

this is the guy.

He is the measuring man.

I know the trauma that women who are experiencing sexual assault go through.

Is it dependent on not the credibility of the woman, but I mean,

how do we know that the trauma hasn't taken over and she sees this photo and she puts them together?

Would that be convincing to you if one of these women said, I know it's DeSalvo, you know, who groped me?

You know, I think that would be hard just because of the high-profile nature of DeSalvo being out there and the elasticity of human memory.

It would not surprise me that there could be measuring man victims who saw de Salvo and go, that's the guy, but never

called in law enforcement to say, yep, but maybe they had some of these victims testify.

The serial killer cases, of course, are really fascinating to me.

And there were different things about the Richard Cottingham case than this case.

Those are these are sort of in the, I know Cottingham was

70s, but

we're still seeing similarities and differences.

So I learned a lot from these cases, but they're overwhelming, and it's sad.

At the very end for me, it's always sad to think about all of these women, you know, and whether or not who is responsible will never be brought to justice if we think it's de Salvo or probably anybody at this point.

But still, to not know what happened definitively, I know must be difficult.

So I'm glad one family has an answer, the Sullivan family.

When you say it's sad, what always strikes me is that you have innocent people whose lives were taken away in brutal fashion.

And for what reason?

It's for the self-gratification of the offender.

And it's a very selfish type of crime.

It's always frustrating to have cases like this that are not answered.

I agree.

I'm done with Boston for now.

I've had enough of Albert DeSalvo and all of this stuff.

But next week, we'll have a very different case, I'm quite sure.

And I'll be excited to bring it to you.

Okay.

Well, once again, I'm looking forward to it.

Me too.

This has been an Exactly Right Production.

For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com/slash buried bones sources.

Our senior producer is Alexis Emerosi.

Research by Allison Trouble and Kate Winkler-Dawson.

Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

Our theme song is by Tom Breifogel.

Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod.

Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decoat the Criminal Mind, is available now.

And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.

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