How Albert DeSalvo From Hulu’s “Boston Strangler” Died
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Content warning: This article contains references to murder and sexual assault some may find upsetting. Reader discretion is advised.
Between 1962 and 1964, 13 women were killed in the Boston area by a notorious serial killer known as the Boston Strangler. The assailant targeted single women, aged 19 to 85, in their homes and apartments in Boston and its surrounding towns. City police and homicide detectives hadn’t uncovered the killer until March 6, 1965, when Massachusetts native and convicted criminal Albert DeSalvo confessed to the murders.
Hulu’s latest true crime thriller, Boston Strangler, recounts the infamous killings that terrorized the city for years. The film places a specific focus on the two Record-American investigative reporters, Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole, who connected the murders and gave the killer his moniker, “Boston Strangler.”
But the Boston Strangler case didn’t close in the 1960s. Although he confessed, DeSalvo was never charged for the gruesome murders of the 13 women, who were sexually assaulted and strangled to death with stockings, ropes, and cords in their homes. According to ABC News, DeSalvo couldn’t be prosecuted due to a lack of physical evidence. And before his death in 1973, he recanted his confession, according to USA Today.
When he claimed to be the Boston Strangler, DeSalvo was serving time for a separate series of crimes, including sexual assault and burglaries against four other women, according to The New York Times. He was arrested in November 1964 and imprisoned at Bridgewater State Hospital, a medium-security facility in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, the Boston Herald reported.
Psychiatrist Dr. Robert R. Mezer said that, during an examination for trial, DeSalvo had confessed to the killings of the 13 women. “DeSalvo told me he was the strangler . . . He told me he strangled 13 women . . . and he went into details of some of them, telling me some of the most intimate acts he committed,” he said, per The New York Times.
Still, DeSalvo was not tried for the murders. But he was convicted for the aforementioned crimes in January 1967 and was sentenced to life in prison. “With DeSalvo sentenced to prison for life, with an appeal to a higher court pending, and with the convicted man already in a mental hospital of the maximum security type as Bridgewater, it is doubtful that any prosecutor in the three counties involved — Suffolk, Middlesex and Essex — will take immediate steps to indict DeSalvo for the stranglings, in the opinion of most legal observers,” the Boston Herald wrote in a January 19, 1967 report.
How did Albert DiSalvo die?
On November 27, 1973, while serving his life sentence at Walpole State Prison in eastern Massachusetts, Albert DeSalvo was stabbed to death by another prisoner. “The prison authorities said the 40-year-old inmate's body was discovered in his cell bed in the prison's hospital wing at 7 o'clock,” The New York Times reported at the time. Police said that a possible suspect had been questioned, but no one was ever arrested for DeSalvo’s death.
In 2013, nearly 50 years after the stranglings, DNA evidence linked DeSalvo to the death of his alleged last victim, 19-year-old Mary Sullivan. The DNA was recovered from a water bottle left at a construction site by DeSalvo’s nephew, according to ABC News.
“This is good evidence. This is strong evidence. This is reliable evidence,” Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley said at the time, at which Massachusetts law enforcement affirmed that the DNA from Sullivan can be connected with “99.9 percent certainty” to DeSalvo.
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