September 17, 2025 • 56 mins
In this week's conclusion of an infamous two-parter, Paul and Kate return to Boston in the 1960s as the murders continue but the investigation doesn't seem to be uncovering any leads. Who will ultimately become known as the Boston Strangler?
Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/4buCoMc
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
True crimes, and I weigh in using modern forensic techniques
to bring new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is Buried Bones.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
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, you know, what has happened up
to this point in time has started to cause me to,
you know, think about things a.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Little bit well, I like it. I think we learned
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 you know they're
unusual and you sometimes can see a pattern. Sometimes there's
no pattern. But I think you you especially always to
spell myths by the end of it, that we all
(01:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Like that for sure.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Before we continue talking about the Boston Strangler, Paul, you
and I are taking a fantastic trip in October with
Virgin Voyage is 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 gonna have
(02:22):
to think outside the box here.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
You know, I am not a costume guy. In fact,
my family gets on me because I don't. I don't
even know the last time I've ever dressed up.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Well, we're gonna have to change that. What would be
your aura around costumes, like, what are we thinking superhero?
Paul Hohole's superhero.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Will, I got you. So I'll be a Watson if
you be a Sherlock Holmes. Okay, and then we'll switch
costumes in the middle. How about that something like that.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
All right, you're on.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
This is going to be a good costume party. Okay.
We're in Boston nineteen sixty two. There are seven murders
between June and essentially New Year's Eve of nineteen sixty two.
Some are in Boston. I think there are three or
four in Back Bay. Some are outside of Boston. I
(03:21):
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
(03:42):
to be about a two or three month break. And
then the next victim is not only much younger, she's nineteen,
but she's also black. Then on December thirty first, so
New Year's Eve, we have Patricia, who is twenty three,
and white. So you know, we've talked about the spelling,
the myths of there has to be a certain race,
(04:04):
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?
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Well, I think you know, the first five victims are
older white women, ranging in age from fifty six to
seventy five. But outside of the first woman who was
fifty six, I mean, these other women are sixty five
to seventy five 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
(04:34):
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 was Sophie, the nineteen 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
(04:56):
is now moving more into maybe the age range of
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
(05:20):
something that seems to be a deviation, you can't really say, well,
he did that purposely. It could be just because the
opportunity presented itself. And then he comes back and now
assaults Patricia, who's twenty three, and she's left in the
bed and is covered. So you know, the two of
the victims, Jane, who was sixty seven in the bathtub,
(05:43):
was covered, and Patricia, who's twenty three, 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 cope 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
(06:03):
way up to her chin.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
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 nineteen
sixty three March, and we are with a sixty nine
year old widow. Her name is Mary, brown, and I
will note if these victims are not white, we'll just
(06:26):
say that, just assume everybody is white. Moving forward with
the exception of Sophie, So Lynn is about thirty miles
outside of Back Bay, and now we've got Mary who
is in Lawrence, which is twenty five miles north of Boston.
So location wise, we're in around Boston, especially in the
Back Bay. Then we're not what do you think about that?
(06:48):
Does that mean anything?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
No, you know, these distances are just everyday distances that
people frequently will travel because of you know, their work
or where they're or family lives, et cetera. So this
is not anything unusual in a series. You frequently see
victims that are spaced, you know, thirty miles apart. It's
(07:12):
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
(07:33):
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, thirty miles away in a
couple of different directions. There may be a reason for that.
Maybe his job is taking him out there, maybe as
an anchor point, something in his life pulls him out
(07:55):
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 a law enforcement off
I'm not gathering that just yet.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Well keep gathering because there's a lot of information. You know,
now we've gone from a twenty three year old to
a sixty nine 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 looked like she was strangled with someone's
bare hands. Now, there are some articles that say that
(08:33):
Mary is fifty five, but that is the wrong age.
She's sixty nine. 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?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Well, right now, you know she's sixty nine 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 some sort of criteria that he's using
to choose the older victims.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
M hmm. Okay, So let me tell you a little
bit 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 ca So this is graphic. This is
(09:27):
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
(09:48):
and her stocking still on. So the overshoes are just
for this old school rain gear. And there's evidence that
she had been sexually assaulted, and they recover semen from
her body. Now the beating throws me off 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
(10:10):
we've seen already, especially with the fork seeking.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Out well Mary sixty nine. She is likely not able
to put up much of a fight against this offender,
so this isn't 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
(10:33):
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
(10:53):
anger out on Mary. Anytime I'm looking at a victim
who has been beat out the head, you know, that
generally suggests that there's that anger component. He's like this guy,
strangulation is core to his fantasy. There's a sexual component
(11:14):
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. He's I don't believe he's
someone that is getting sexually gratified by beating Mary this severely.
(11:37):
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
(11:59):
attacks or does he go back to more of the
types of strangulations we saw with some of the prior victims.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
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 Orne 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
(12:27):
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 shoe put up a fight. Looks
like there was a struggle. And they said, reporters just
saw the scenes, said there was blood all over the place. So,
(12:48):
you know, you were saying, when we get to the
next victims, let's see if this is continuing to be
a you know, more and more violent or whatever.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Okay, there are offenders that would track down victims keys
and then lock the door behind them on the way out.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
So we've talked about Mary. Mary was victim number eight.
Now we're going on to victim number nine. And this
is May eighth, so about two months after Mary. And
this is a twenty six year old opera singer who
was a Boston University graduate student, and she was also
(13:39):
a music therapist and she worked in a hospital. Her
name is Beverly Sammons, 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.
(14:00):
That's not right, right, do they don't need to be broken,
do they?
Speaker 2 (14:03):
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
(14:24):
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
(14:44):
one of those diagnostic features here. The pathologists must not
be seeing any hemorrhaging in the neck muscles. There must
not be even the the larynx. The throat structures also
can be damaged during strangula, So the pathologist is not
seeing that, and he must not also be seeing let's say, PETIKIAI,
(15:05):
because when the pressure builds up during strangulation, the capillarias
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.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
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,
(15:38):
and her hands were tied behind her back, and there
is a definite cause in that she was stabbed seventeen times.
Oh okay, so it is a neither hero 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,
(15:59):
I just.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Don't think i'd put a lot of weight on. I mean,
maybe she does have strong or 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.
(16:20):
This 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, those those that soft
tissue is going to compress. And you know, fundamentally, it's
it's not so much the muscles, it's it's the closing off,
you know, the carotid arteries. And so that doesn't make
(16:43):
a lot of sense to me. Now you said that
stockings had been looped around her neck, Yeah, but not
used as a ligature.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
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 lungeung 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.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
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
(17:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Well, the police think that she let the killer in
no signs of forced entry. They say, as I said
seventeen times, they do not find the weapon, they aren't
sure what the weapon would be, and they think she
was killed after eleven pm that Sunday night because she
(18:03):
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 scene seems so similar and very violent.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
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
(18:47):
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 on why is he
moving around the way he is and going from middle
upper class type neighborhoods to like with Mary, something that
(19:09):
sounds a little bit more lower income, shabby type of environment.
But he's comfortable moving around in those types of neighborhoods.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
And again, we could be back with the healthcare connection
because I mentioned that 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
tenth victim. This is four months later, September eighth, so
(19:40):
this has now been going on for July August, a
year and three months. And we're in Salem and that
is fifty miles north of Boston. This is a fifty
eight year old woman. Her name is Evelyn Corbin. She's
in her apartment. She is discovered by her downstairs neighbor
on a Sunday afternoon. Police thinks she had been held
that same morning when she was getting ready to go
(20:03):
to mass So here are the details. She has 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
(20:25):
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 forties 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.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
You know. One of the things that just dawned on
me is that a majority and maybe all the victims
so far, they live in apartments. These aren't detached single
family houses, you know. So it's interesting from evaluating the
why is he choosing apartments when you have sort of
(21:04):
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
(21:28):
a neighborhood and choosing a victim in a house.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Why would he do that? That's so risky.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Well, that's where you know, from my perspective, the offenders
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.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
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 fifth,
So Mary is nineteen. 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
(22:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Do they think the offender brought that card?
Speaker 1 (22:37):
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 on items around her neck.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
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.
(23:22):
I think law enforcement must think that this card was
purposely placed by her foot by the offender, yeah, versus
something you know, just on the floor that was already
in her apartment.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Well, they have a couple of clues. They say that
they found with the press footprints, but you and I
can always say they're probably means 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
(23:56):
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 match 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.
(24:19):
A homicide detective tells the newspapers that a sexual aberration
that had been present as 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
(24:39):
a broom handle, and it is still in her when
her body is discovered. And that's all we know about
the series of eleven murders from the Boston Strangler until
we get a suspect.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah, so we know that on some of the earlier
victims there are suspicion that there is for an 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 residents 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,
(25:17):
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
(25:37):
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. I'm
a 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
(26:00):
like in this series there's multiple victims in which they
found semen.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
It's not clear if it's inside them though, No.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
At least the way you describe, 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
(26:32):
able to use to identify who this offender is.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Yeah, because I see for Mary Brown, who was the
woman the 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
(26:58):
suspect who has been you know, the suspect that everybody
has considered the suspect for the past. You know, more
than forty 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 a special task force and
they tried everything. They even went to a psychic, so
(27:19):
they were pretty desperate, I think, and there was no
momentum until March of nineteen sixty five. So our final victim,
Mary Sullivan, was January early January of nineteen sixty four,
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
(27:45):
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 thirty four years old. He has grown up in
various parts of New England under really horrific abuse of circumstances.
(28:05):
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
(28:27):
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
(28:50):
he's given shorter sentences throughout the fifties, 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 the upper Singer was located in Cambridge in March
of nineteen sixty one, so this would have been about
(29:11):
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,
(29:35):
and he would offer to take women's measurements under the ruse,
of course, he would engrope and harass the women who
called the police. In the end, he's found guilty only
of several breaking and entering charges, and he sentenced to
two years in prison. He gets out two months before
Anna's murder, which is our first murder, so you know,
(29:56):
he was caught breaking and entering. Albert can In fesses
to being the measuring Man, and then he serves time
in prison and he gets out right beforehand. So we
have between sixty two and sixty four this string of
murders that are attributed specifically to the Boston Strangler. Then,
starting in May of sixty four, there's a string of
(30:17):
sexual crimes in the Boston area that they're trying to
connect to Dessalvo. 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 others he enters apartments pretending to be a maintenance worker,
(30:41):
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 which is important to connect to the
(31:02):
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 Disavo is confessing to
being the measuring man, but they are also saying the
(31:23):
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 twenty
seventh of sixty four, there's a twenty year old Boston
University student named Suzanne macht. She wakes up to find
a strange man standing in her room. He says he's
(31:43):
a police detective, and he immediately backtracks and say, 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,
(32:05):
that this is hurting my hands. Please loosen the bonds,
and he does it, and then when he leaves, Susanna
escapes and calls her husband, who then calls the police. So,
based on this description, the all green clothing description, police
think that the green man is the same as the
measuring man, and DeSalvo has confessed to being the measuring man.
(32:29):
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
(32:51):
make sense to you that he would also be the
Measuring Man 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.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
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, and
that is that strangulation, and he's killing these victims and
sometimes he's inflicting high levels of islands. This seems completely
(33:33):
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 residents, But that's just not a unique enough characteristic
(33:57):
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
this is a common ruse in order to be able
to get into victim's residents. So I think the just
from a fundamental type of offender, the Boston Strangler is very,
(34:21):
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 a selly about being the
(34:45):
Boston Strangler, Okay, let's hear the details. What details can
he provide about the Boston Strangler crimes?
Speaker 1 (34:51):
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 and police
officers who have interacted with DiSalvo before. And when he
says to his Sally, I'm the Boston Strangler and George
Nasa reports it, the police say bullshit. He wants to
(35:14):
be important, he likes to brag. And the medical director
at the facility, who is a guy named doctor Robi,
doesn't ever believe that DeSalvo is the strangler. He says
that DeSalvo 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,
(35:37):
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 question him for weeks
in nineteen sixty five. In addition to all the murderers
the police knew about and connected to the Strangler, he
also confesses to one other one, an eighty five years
(36:00):
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. Yeah,
so two weeks. So he's saying in between he attacked
(36:20):
an eighty five 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
has tried for being the green Man and the measuring Man.
He's found guilty, he sentenced to life in prison, and
he goes back to Bridgewater. So what you say makes sense,
(36:44):
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 sixty seven.
Next month, he and two inmates escape by stealing a
(37:04):
key to the cells and leaving the prison through an
elevator because there was a 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
(37:24):
was the strangler. So what do you think now?
Speaker 2 (37:27):
I'm sure at the time the name Albert DeSalvo was
in the headlines. 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 committed nor that he was convicted of, you know,
so I'm not surprised that he was killed in prison.
(37:51):
I need to be convinced that he truly was a
measuring man in the green Man, even though he was convicted.
You know, 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's the measuring man green Man, he's a different
(38:12):
offender than the Boston Strangler.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Well, let me tell you how this ends up. So
for forty years people have been saying, including friends of
mine who have followed the case, DiSalvo is not the
person who did this. And in ninety six 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
(38:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
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 full or
to one offender, maybe Sophie a different Okay.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
I don't know if that's based on age or the
gap in between her Sophie in the in the first
set of women, or what.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
You know. 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 we 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
(39:31):
eleven cases attributed to Boston strangler.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
I think the details and the behaviors that the offender
is exhibiting suggests it fairly strongly that it's probably a
single offender. I don't think I could say that with
one hundred percent certainty, but that's my thought just based
off of, you know, listening to the details. That might
(39:58):
change if I were to actually take a look, you know,
at the various crimes and see if there's if they
seem as consistent to my eyes as 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.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Let's get to it, Okay, So in two thousand and one,
so put your mind on the timeline of DNA two
thousand and one, 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
(40:39):
the Happy New Year, and they obviously were able to
find semen present somewhere.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
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 my which you know is inherited along the maternal
side of a family, It's passed down through the mother's side.
(41:08):
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
hedochondrial DNA.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Well, it's negative from two thousand and one. But luckily
people have your idea because now we're in twenty thirteen
and they send a different sample from Mary Sullivan is
tested first against DNA taken from a water bottle from
one of Dessalvo's relatives. No match, so hold on. They
go ahead and Azuma's body, thank goodness, he was not cremated.
(41:47):
They didn't egxzum. 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
scientists who conducted the first comparison in two thousand and
one says was he wasn't given the same sample that
was tested in twenty thirteen. I think it's just the technology, right,
(42:08):
I mean, he's saying, I didn't screw this up. Somebody
else did.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
We don't know enough about this last victim, Mary, you know,
did she have any consentual 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 mido,
you know, part of the problem with that is going
(42:33):
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
(42:53):
now thinking, yeah, DeSalvo's the Boston Strangler. He's responsible for
the entirety of the series unless there's other deal 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's committing all these
(43:14):
crimes at the same time, I mean, that is showing
White a wide range of behaviors that he's exhibiting over
the course of this two year period.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
You know, it's interesting I was reading about so the
used 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 Disalvo's a 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
(43:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
No, I think if they still have the evidence from
the other cases in which they were semen identified, I
think you have to go after that.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
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 shrangler 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
(44:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
You're right, Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
So they in essence, they exhausted what they could before
getting the exhumation order, but they went and got 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?
Speaker 1 (45:14):
It sounds like yes, okay, And then they both matched
to sal though.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
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, you know. So they, from my perspective, need
to do whatever they can to track down potential DNA
(45:40):
evidence from any of these other cases and see if
it's all de Salvo.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
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 Zuma's body. They
(46:05):
have a family attorney the d Salvo 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
(46:27):
there was sperm recovered from her pubic area that was
not a match for d Salvo. 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 Dsalva's family kind of wants all this to stop,
is what it sounds like to me.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
You know, first, it's not uncommon to find different DNA
donors from victims just because they have a life, you know,
And so this is where it's evaluating the sample as
to what one is, you know, likely from the offender.
The DNA evidence is I think is very strong that
DeSalvo is Mary's killer, and then you know, the circumstances
(47:11):
suggest that he's also responsible for the ten other victims
attributed to the strangler. I just don't think I would
want to dismiss pursuing DNA from those 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.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
And I can't see whether they've done that or not.
I can't imagine that they wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
But it's a money issue too. When you think about
it from law enforcement perspective, is that, well, nobody's ever
going to be prosecuted, right the guy's dead. The money
side there, they're 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 a I
(47:58):
think from a do 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 close the door with you know,
a final answer, is DeSalvo truly responsible for all eleven victims?
(48:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Well, I would be remiss to say that sort of
there's floating out there another theory that Albert's former cellmate,
George Nasa, the one he confessed to, is the actual
Boston strangler. So George has a lawyer you may have
never heard of before named E. Flee Bailey who secures
(48:52):
a 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 Shepherd, that's one of the big ones that I
and I know there are more, that's right, yep, Okay.
So Efleie Bailey had secured a book deal and he
was representing both Albert and George, and George was in
(49:18):
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 of 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
(49:39):
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. Obviously, if that
were true, didn't work because DeSalvo didn't convince anybody. But
George denied until his death in twenty eighteen that he
(49:59):
was a Boston strangler. There's a biographer in twenty twenty
four who said that he thought he was George's biographer,
saying the guy was out there. He was on parole
when all of these cases happened. But it seems pretty
undeniable about Dissalvo being connected to Mary Sullivan, no matter
what the family attorney might say.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Yeah, no, I mean, you're not finding Nasser's DNA on Mary.
You're finding Disalvo's DNA on Mary. I mean that's to me,
that's a no brainer. It's just yeah, you know, and
evaluating the entirety of the cases attributed to DeSalvo, I
think that's that's a fascinating study. You know, this is
(50:41):
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, you know, what the
(51:04):
offender is doing in these cases. And this from my perspective,
it is like, oh, that's interesting. You know, for an
offender committing the types of Boston Strangler homicides, with the
behaviors he's exhibiting, there can also almost de escalate and
commit these other almost silly type crimes. That would be
(51:24):
a fascinating study. And I'm assuming that I know they
interviewed DiSalvo for a couple of weeks but do they
have the recordings of those interviews.
Speaker 1 (51:33):
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 make sure we're clear that the strangler
killings ended in January of sixty four there and there's
a break and the sexual crimes a measuring man come
up in May. So it's almost like if it's DiSalvo
for all of us it is. It's weird. It's a
(51:54):
clean break and then a totally different set of crimes.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
Yeah, and that's where you know that I think for
me to be convinced that to Salvo is both the
measuring man as well as the boss and 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 to Salvo's
a strangler based on the DNA and as responsible for
all eleven of those homicides. Is he really the measuring
(52:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
Well, listen, it could be something that we look at
and you make phone calls and you're good at those
and seeing what's left of the measuring man. Are there
Is there any stuff that's been collected, you know, from
the measuring man or from the green man for that matter.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Yeah, well, and that's 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 and
which the agency would have kept the evidence to maybe
get you know, 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
(53:10):
interesting to me.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
Well, listen, the victims of the measuring man in the
Green Man are likely many of them are likely still alive.
If you're talking about women in their twenties, they would
have been born in the forties, you know, I mean
that would be my mom's age seventies eighties. So if
one of them had looked at the news and saw
everything about DeSalvo and said to the police or said
(53:35):
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 his
photo and she puts them together. Would that be convincing
(53:55):
to you if one of these women said, I know
it's DiSalvo. You know who grow to me?
Speaker 2 (54:00):
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
Desalva and go that's the guy, but never never called
in law enforcement to say yep, but maybe they had
some of these victims testify.
Speaker 1 (54:22):
The serial killer cases, of course, are really fascinating to me,
and there were different things about the Richard Cottingham case
than this case. These are sort of in the I
know Cottingham was with seventies, but you know, 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
(54:43):
very end.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
For me.
Speaker 1 (54:43):
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 Di
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.
Speaker 2 (55:01):
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
(55:26):
this that are not answered.
Speaker 1 (55:28):
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 am
quite sure, and I'll be excited to bring it to you.
Speaker 2 (55:42):
Okay, well, once again, I'm looking forward to it me too.
Speaker 1 (55:49):
This has been an exactly right production for our sources
and show notes go to exactly Rightmedia dot com slash
Buried Bones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Emirosi.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Research by Alison Trumble and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (56:03):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 2 (56:05):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (56:10):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1 (56:15):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Buried Bones pod.
Speaker 2 (56:20):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now.
Speaker 1 (56:26):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life Solving America's
Cold Cases is also available now.
Speaker 2 (56:33):
Listen to Baried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
True crimes, and I weigh in using modern forensic techniques
to bring new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is Buried Bones.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
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, you know, what has happened up
to this point in time has started to cause me to,
you know, think about things a.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Little bit well, I like it. I think we learned
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 you know they're
unusual and you sometimes can see a pattern. Sometimes there's
no pattern. But I think you you especially always to
spell myths by the end of it, that we all
(01:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Like that for sure.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Before we continue talking about the Boston Strangler, Paul, you
and I are taking a fantastic trip in October with
Virgin Voyage is 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 gonna have
(02:22):
to think outside the box here.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
You know, I am not a costume guy. In fact,
my family gets on me because I don't. I don't
even know the last time I've ever dressed up.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Well, we're gonna have to change that. What would be
your aura around costumes, like, what are we thinking superhero?
Paul Hohole's superhero.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Will, I got you. So I'll be a Watson if
you be a Sherlock Holmes. Okay, and then we'll switch
costumes in the middle. How about that something like that.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
All right, you're on.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
This is going to be a good costume party. Okay.
We're in Boston nineteen sixty two. There are seven murders
between June and essentially New Year's Eve of nineteen sixty two.
Some are in Boston. I think there are three or
four in Back Bay. Some are outside of Boston. I
(03:21):
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
(03:42):
to be about a two or three month break. And
then the next victim is not only much younger, she's nineteen,
but she's also black. Then on December thirty first, so
New Year's Eve, we have Patricia, who is twenty three,
and white. So you know, we've talked about the spelling,
the myths of there has to be a certain race,
(04:04):
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?
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Well, I think you know, the first five victims are
older white women, ranging in age from fifty six to
seventy five. But outside of the first woman who was
fifty six, I mean, these other women are sixty five
to seventy five 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
(04:34):
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 was Sophie, the nineteen 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
(04:56):
is now moving more into maybe the age range of
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
(05:20):
something that seems to be a deviation, you can't really say, well,
he did that purposely. It could be just because the
opportunity presented itself. And then he comes back and now
assaults Patricia, who's twenty three, and she's left in the
bed and is covered. So you know, the two of
the victims, Jane, who was sixty seven in the bathtub,
(05:43):
was covered, and Patricia, who's twenty three, 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 cope 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
(06:03):
way up to her chin.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
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 nineteen
sixty three March, and we are with a sixty nine
year old widow. Her name is Mary, brown, and I
will note if these victims are not white, we'll just
(06:26):
say that, just assume everybody is white. Moving forward with
the exception of Sophie, So Lynn is about thirty miles
outside of Back Bay, and now we've got Mary who
is in Lawrence, which is twenty five miles north of Boston.
So location wise, we're in around Boston, especially in the
Back Bay. Then we're not what do you think about that?
(06:48):
Does that mean anything?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
No, you know, these distances are just everyday distances that
people frequently will travel because of you know, their work
or where they're or family lives, et cetera. So this
is not anything unusual in a series. You frequently see
victims that are spaced, you know, thirty miles apart. It's
(07:12):
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
(07:33):
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, thirty miles away in a
couple of different directions. There may be a reason for that.
Maybe his job is taking him out there, maybe as
an anchor point, something in his life pulls him out
(07:55):
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 a law enforcement off
I'm not gathering that just yet.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Well keep gathering because there's a lot of information. You know,
now we've gone from a twenty three year old to
a sixty nine 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 looked like she was strangled with someone's
bare hands. Now, there are some articles that say that
(08:33):
Mary is fifty five, but that is the wrong age.
She's sixty nine. 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?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Well, right now, you know she's sixty nine 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 some sort of criteria that he's using
to choose the older victims.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
M hmm. Okay, So let me tell you a little
bit 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 ca So this is graphic. This is
(09:27):
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
(09:48):
and her stocking still on. So the overshoes are just
for this old school rain gear. And there's evidence that
she had been sexually assaulted, and they recover semen from
her body. Now the beating throws me off 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
(10:10):
we've seen already, especially with the fork seeking.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Out well Mary sixty nine. She is likely not able
to put up much of a fight against this offender,
so this isn't 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
(10:33):
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
(10:53):
anger out on Mary. Anytime I'm looking at a victim
who has been beat out the head, you know, that
generally suggests that there's that anger component. He's like this guy,
strangulation is core to his fantasy. There's a sexual component
(11:14):
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. He's I don't believe he's
someone that is getting sexually gratified by beating Mary this severely.
(11:37):
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
(11:59):
attacks or does he go back to more of the
types of strangulations we saw with some of the prior victims.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
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 Orne 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
(12:27):
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 shoe put up a fight. Looks
like there was a struggle. And they said, reporters just
saw the scenes, said there was blood all over the place. So,
(12:48):
you know, you were saying, when we get to the
next victims, let's see if this is continuing to be
a you know, more and more violent or whatever.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Okay, there are offenders that would track down victims keys
and then lock the door behind them on the way out.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
So we've talked about Mary. Mary was victim number eight.
Now we're going on to victim number nine. And this
is May eighth, so about two months after Mary. And
this is a twenty six year old opera singer who
was a Boston University graduate student, and she was also
(13:39):
a music therapist and she worked in a hospital. Her
name is Beverly Sammons, 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.
(14:00):
That's not right, right, do they don't need to be broken,
do they?
Speaker 2 (14:03):
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
(14:24):
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
(14:44):
one of those diagnostic features here. The pathologists must not
be seeing any hemorrhaging in the neck muscles. There must
not be even the the larynx. The throat structures also
can be damaged during strangula, So the pathologist is not
seeing that, and he must not also be seeing let's say, PETIKIAI,
(15:05):
because when the pressure builds up during strangulation, the capillarias
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.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
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,
(15:38):
and her hands were tied behind her back, and there
is a definite cause in that she was stabbed seventeen times.
Oh okay, so it is a neither hero 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,
(15:59):
I just.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Don't think i'd put a lot of weight on. I mean,
maybe she does have strong or 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.
(16:20):
This 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, those those that soft
tissue is going to compress. And you know, fundamentally, it's
it's not so much the muscles, it's it's the closing off,
you know, the carotid arteries. And so that doesn't make
(16:43):
a lot of sense to me. Now you said that
stockings had been looped around her neck, Yeah, but not
used as a ligature.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
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 lungeung 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.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
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
(17:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Well, the police think that she let the killer in
no signs of forced entry. They say, as I said
seventeen times, they do not find the weapon, they aren't
sure what the weapon would be, and they think she
was killed after eleven pm that Sunday night because she
(18:03):
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 scene seems so similar and very violent.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
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
(18:47):
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 on why is he
moving around the way he is and going from middle
upper class type neighborhoods to like with Mary, something that
(19:09):
sounds a little bit more lower income, shabby type of environment.
But he's comfortable moving around in those types of neighborhoods.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
And again, we could be back with the healthcare connection
because I mentioned that 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
tenth victim. This is four months later, September eighth, so
(19:40):
this has now been going on for July August, a
year and three months. And we're in Salem and that
is fifty miles north of Boston. This is a fifty
eight year old woman. Her name is Evelyn Corbin. She's
in her apartment. She is discovered by her downstairs neighbor
on a Sunday afternoon. Police thinks she had been held
that same morning when she was getting ready to go
(20:03):
to mass So here are the details. She has 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
(20:25):
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 forties 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.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
You know. One of the things that just dawned on
me is that a majority and maybe all the victims
so far, they live in apartments. These aren't detached single
family houses, you know. So it's interesting from evaluating the
why is he choosing apartments when you have sort of
(21:04):
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
(21:28):
a neighborhood and choosing a victim in a house.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Why would he do that? That's so risky.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Well, that's where you know, from my perspective, the offenders
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.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
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 fifth,
So Mary is nineteen. 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
(22:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Do they think the offender brought that card?
Speaker 1 (22:37):
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 on items around her neck.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
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.
(23:22):
I think law enforcement must think that this card was
purposely placed by her foot by the offender, yeah, versus
something you know, just on the floor that was already
in her apartment.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Well, they have a couple of clues. They say that
they found with the press footprints, but you and I
can always say they're probably means 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
(23:56):
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 match 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.
(24:19):
A homicide detective tells the newspapers that a sexual aberration
that had been present as 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
(24:39):
a broom handle, and it is still in her when
her body is discovered. And that's all we know about
the series of eleven murders from the Boston Strangler until
we get a suspect.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah, so we know that on some of the earlier
victims there are suspicion that there is for an 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 residents 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,
(25:17):
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
(25:37):
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. I'm
a 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
(26:00):
like in this series there's multiple victims in which they
found semen.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
It's not clear if it's inside them though, No.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
At least the way you describe, 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
(26:32):
able to use to identify who this offender is.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Yeah, because I see for Mary Brown, who was the
woman the 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
(26:58):
suspect who has been you know, the suspect that everybody
has considered the suspect for the past. You know, more
than forty 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 a special task force and
they tried everything. They even went to a psychic, so
(27:19):
they were pretty desperate, I think, and there was no
momentum until March of nineteen sixty five. So our final victim,
Mary Sullivan, was January early January of nineteen sixty four,
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
(27:45):
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 thirty four years old. He has grown up in
various parts of New England under really horrific abuse of circumstances.
(28:05):
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
(28:27):
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
(28:50):
he's given shorter sentences throughout the fifties, 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 the upper Singer was located in Cambridge in March
of nineteen sixty one, so this would have been about
(29:11):
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,
(29:35):
and he would offer to take women's measurements under the ruse,
of course, he would engrope and harass the women who
called the police. In the end, he's found guilty only
of several breaking and entering charges, and he sentenced to
two years in prison. He gets out two months before
Anna's murder, which is our first murder, so you know,
(29:56):
he was caught breaking and entering. Albert can In fesses
to being the measuring Man, and then he serves time
in prison and he gets out right beforehand. So we
have between sixty two and sixty four this string of
murders that are attributed specifically to the Boston Strangler. Then,
starting in May of sixty four, there's a string of
(30:17):
sexual crimes in the Boston area that they're trying to
connect to Dessalvo. 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 others he enters apartments pretending to be a maintenance worker,
(30:41):
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 which is important to connect to the
(31:02):
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 Disavo is confessing to
being the measuring man, but they are also saying the
(31:23):
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 twenty
seventh of sixty four, there's a twenty year old Boston
University student named Suzanne macht. She wakes up to find
a strange man standing in her room. He says he's
(31:43):
a police detective, and he immediately backtracks and say, 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,
(32:05):
that this is hurting my hands. Please loosen the bonds,
and he does it, and then when he leaves, Susanna
escapes and calls her husband, who then calls the police. So,
based on this description, the all green clothing description, police
think that the green man is the same as the
measuring man, and DeSalvo has confessed to being the measuring man.
(32:29):
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
(32:51):
make sense to you that he would also be the
Measuring Man 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.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
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, and
that is that strangulation, and he's killing these victims and
sometimes he's inflicting high levels of islands. This seems completely
(33:33):
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 residents, But that's just not a unique enough characteristic
(33:57):
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
this is a common ruse in order to be able
to get into victim's residents. So I think the just
from a fundamental type of offender, the Boston Strangler is very,
(34:21):
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 a selly about being the
(34:45):
Boston Strangler, Okay, let's hear the details. What details can
he provide about the Boston Strangler crimes?
Speaker 1 (34:51):
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 and police
officers who have interacted with DiSalvo before. And when he
says to his Sally, I'm the Boston Strangler and George
Nasa reports it, the police say bullshit. He wants to
(35:14):
be important, he likes to brag. And the medical director
at the facility, who is a guy named doctor Robi,
doesn't ever believe that DeSalvo is the strangler. He says
that DeSalvo 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,
(35:37):
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 question him for weeks
in nineteen sixty five. In addition to all the murderers
the police knew about and connected to the Strangler, he
also confesses to one other one, an eighty five years
(36:00):
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. Yeah,
so two weeks. So he's saying in between he attacked
(36:20):
an eighty five 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
has tried for being the green Man and the measuring Man.
He's found guilty, he sentenced to life in prison, and
he goes back to Bridgewater. So what you say makes sense,
(36:44):
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 sixty seven.
Next month, he and two inmates escape by stealing a
(37:04):
key to the cells and leaving the prison through an
elevator because there was a 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
(37:24):
was the strangler. So what do you think now?
Speaker 2 (37:27):
I'm sure at the time the name Albert DeSalvo was
in the headlines. 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 committed nor that he was convicted of, you know,
so I'm not surprised that he was killed in prison.
(37:51):
I need to be convinced that he truly was a
measuring man in the green Man, even though he was convicted.
You know, 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's the measuring man green Man, he's a different
(38:12):
offender than the Boston Strangler.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Well, let me tell you how this ends up. So
for forty years people have been saying, including friends of
mine who have followed the case, DiSalvo is not the
person who did this. And in ninety six 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
(38:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
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 full or
to one offender, maybe Sophie a different Okay.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
I don't know if that's based on age or the
gap in between her Sophie in the in the first
set of women, or what.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
You know. 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 we 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
(39:31):
eleven cases attributed to Boston strangler.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
I think the details and the behaviors that the offender
is exhibiting suggests it fairly strongly that it's probably a
single offender. I don't think I could say that with
one hundred percent certainty, but that's my thought just based
off of, you know, listening to the details. That might
(39:58):
change if I were to actually take a look, you know,
at the various crimes and see if there's if they
seem as consistent to my eyes as 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.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Let's get to it, Okay, So in two thousand and one,
so put your mind on the timeline of DNA two
thousand and one, 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
(40:39):
the Happy New Year, and they obviously were able to
find semen present somewhere.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
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 my which you know is inherited along the maternal
side of a family, It's passed down through the mother's side.
(41:08):
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
hedochondrial DNA.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Well, it's negative from two thousand and one. But luckily
people have your idea because now we're in twenty thirteen
and they send a different sample from Mary Sullivan is
tested first against DNA taken from a water bottle from
one of Dessalvo's relatives. No match, so hold on. They
go ahead and Azuma's body, thank goodness, he was not cremated.
(41:47):
They didn't egxzum. 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
scientists who conducted the first comparison in two thousand and
one says was he wasn't given the same sample that
was tested in twenty thirteen. I think it's just the technology, right,
(42:08):
I mean, he's saying, I didn't screw this up. Somebody
else did.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
We don't know enough about this last victim, Mary, you know,
did she have any consentual 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 mido,
you know, part of the problem with that is going
(42:33):
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
(42:53):
now thinking, yeah, DeSalvo's the Boston Strangler. He's responsible for
the entirety of the series unless there's other deal 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's committing all these
(43:14):
crimes at the same time, I mean, that is showing
White a wide range of behaviors that he's exhibiting over
the course of this two year period.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
You know, it's interesting I was reading about so the
used 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 Disalvo's a 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
(43:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
No, I think if they still have the evidence from
the other cases in which they were semen identified, I
think you have to go after that.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
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 shrangler 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
(44:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
You're right, Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
So they in essence, they exhausted what they could before
getting the exhumation order, but they went and got 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?
Speaker 1 (45:14):
It sounds like yes, okay, And then they both matched
to sal though.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
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, you know. So they, from my perspective, need
to do whatever they can to track down potential DNA
(45:40):
evidence from any of these other cases and see if
it's all de Salvo.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
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 Zuma's body. They
(46:05):
have a family attorney the d Salvo 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
(46:27):
there was sperm recovered from her pubic area that was
not a match for d Salvo. 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 Dsalva's family kind of wants all this to stop,
is what it sounds like to me.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
You know, first, it's not uncommon to find different DNA
donors from victims just because they have a life, you know,
And so this is where it's evaluating the sample as
to what one is, you know, likely from the offender.
The DNA evidence is I think is very strong that
DeSalvo is Mary's killer, and then you know, the circumstances
(47:11):
suggest that he's also responsible for the ten other victims
attributed to the strangler. I just don't think I would
want to dismiss pursuing DNA from those 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.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
And I can't see whether they've done that or not.
I can't imagine that they wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
But it's a money issue too. When you think about
it from law enforcement perspective, is that, well, nobody's ever
going to be prosecuted, right the guy's dead. The money
side there, they're 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 a I
(47:58):
think from a do 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 close the door with you know,
a final answer, is DeSalvo truly responsible for all eleven victims?
(48:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Well, I would be remiss to say that sort of
there's floating out there another theory that Albert's former cellmate,
George Nasa, the one he confessed to, is the actual
Boston strangler. So George has a lawyer you may have
never heard of before named E. Flee Bailey who secures
(48:52):
a 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 Shepherd, that's one of the big ones that I
and I know there are more, that's right, yep, Okay.
So Efleie Bailey had secured a book deal and he
was representing both Albert and George, and George was in
(49:18):
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 of 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
(49:39):
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. Obviously, if that
were true, didn't work because DeSalvo didn't convince anybody. But
George denied until his death in twenty eighteen that he
(49:59):
was a Boston strangler. There's a biographer in twenty twenty
four who said that he thought he was George's biographer,
saying the guy was out there. He was on parole
when all of these cases happened. But it seems pretty
undeniable about Dissalvo being connected to Mary Sullivan, no matter
what the family attorney might say.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Yeah, no, I mean, you're not finding Nasser's DNA on Mary.
You're finding Disalvo's DNA on Mary. I mean that's to me,
that's a no brainer. It's just yeah, you know, and
evaluating the entirety of the cases attributed to DeSalvo, I
think that's that's a fascinating study. You know, this is
(50:41):
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, you know, what the
(51:04):
offender is doing in these cases. And this from my perspective,
it is like, oh, that's interesting. You know, for an
offender committing the types of Boston Strangler homicides, with the
behaviors he's exhibiting, there can also almost de escalate and
commit these other almost silly type crimes. That would be
(51:24):
a fascinating study. And I'm assuming that I know they
interviewed DiSalvo for a couple of weeks but do they
have the recordings of those interviews.
Speaker 1 (51:33):
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 make sure we're clear that the strangler
killings ended in January of sixty four there and there's
a break and the sexual crimes a measuring man come
up in May. So it's almost like if it's DiSalvo
for all of us it is. It's weird. It's a
(51:54):
clean break and then a totally different set of crimes.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
Yeah, and that's where you know that I think for
me to be convinced that to Salvo is both the
measuring man as well as the boss and 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 to Salvo's
a strangler based on the DNA and as responsible for
all eleven of those homicides. Is he really the measuring
(52:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
Well, listen, it could be something that we look at
and you make phone calls and you're good at those
and seeing what's left of the measuring man. Are there
Is there any stuff that's been collected, you know, from
the measuring man or from the green man for that matter.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Yeah, well, and that's 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 and
which the agency would have kept the evidence to maybe
get you know, 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
(53:10):
interesting to me.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
Well, listen, the victims of the measuring man in the
Green Man are likely many of them are likely still alive.
If you're talking about women in their twenties, they would
have been born in the forties, you know, I mean
that would be my mom's age seventies eighties. So if
one of them had looked at the news and saw
everything about DeSalvo and said to the police or said
(53:35):
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 his
photo and she puts them together. Would that be convincing
(53:55):
to you if one of these women said, I know
it's DiSalvo. You know who grow to me?
Speaker 2 (54:00):
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
Desalva and go that's the guy, but never never called
in law enforcement to say yep, but maybe they had
some of these victims testify.
Speaker 1 (54:22):
The serial killer cases, of course, are really fascinating to me,
and there were different things about the Richard Cottingham case
than this case. These are sort of in the I
know Cottingham was with seventies, but you know, 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
(54:43):
very end.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
For me.
Speaker 1 (54:43):
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 Di
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.
Speaker 2 (55:01):
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
(55:26):
this that are not answered.
Speaker 1 (55:28):
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 am
quite sure, and I'll be excited to bring it to you.
Speaker 2 (55:42):
Okay, well, once again, I'm looking forward to it me too.
Speaker 1 (55:49):
This has been an exactly right production for our sources
and show notes go to exactly Rightmedia dot com slash
Buried Bones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Emirosi.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Research by Alison Trumble and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (56:03):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 2 (56:05):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (56:10):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1 (56:15):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Buried Bones pod.
Speaker 2 (56:20):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now.
Speaker 1 (56:26):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life Solving America's
Cold Cases is also available now.
Speaker 2 (56:33):
Listen to Baried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts
Hosts And Creators
Kate Winkler Dawson
Paul Holes
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.