Albert De Salvo was born in 1931 in Chelsea, Massachusetts. His father was a habitual criminal who terrorized his wife and their six children with frequent beatings until his parents divorced in 1944. The man had made an indelible impression on De Salvo by then and his childhood was marked by repeated scrapes with the law. He tried the army when he was seventeen and even married a German girl and earned an honorable discharge. Even that time was marred however, as De Salvo was charged with molesting a nine-year-old girl. He escaped punishment when the girls mother refused to prosecute him. Soon he and his wife became the parents of two children which was not suprising since De Salvo possessed an insatiable sex drive.

In 1960 De Salvo was arrested by police responding to a breaking and entering call arrested him after a short foot pursuit in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They found on him all the tools of "The Measuring Man", as police called him, a culprit that had been going around to women's homes and pretending to be a representative for a modeling agency, taking the young women's measurements. He would then seduce the ladies with the promise that their sexual favors would enhance their chances of getting discovered. He was almost certainly also committing sexual assaults during this time but was never suspected. De Salvo was arrested and plead guilty to the breaking and entering charge and at the same time revealing he was also the elusive Measuring Man.

Despite his success in raping an enormous number of women and getting away with it, De Salvo moved into murder on June 14, 1962. After breaking into the Boston home of Ann Slesers, 55, he strangled the woman with the belt of her housecoat and tied it in a bow around her neck. This odd signature would become a tradmark of The Strangler's which he used on his subsequent victims. De Salvo went on to kill elderly women Mary Mullen, Nina Nichols, Helen Blake, Ida Irga, and Jane Sullivan by the end of August. Becoming bolder he killed Patricia Bissette, 23, and Sophie Clark, 20, in December. He was using his "Measuring Man" routine to gain access to the homes and if that failed he would simply force the lock.

1963 saw "The Strangler" become more violent during his attacks. On March 9 De Salvo killed Mary Brown, 69, raping her as usual but crushing her skull and stabbing her with a fork several times before strangling her. He left the fork protruding from her breast. On May 6 he killed 23-year-old Beverly Samans, tying her to her bedposts and raping her repeatedly before strangling her and finally stabbing her corpse 22 times. He left his knife in the sink at the firl's apartment but it proved no help to police. Evelyn Corbin, 58, was the next victim when she was killed on September 8. Strangely De Salvo strangled Corbin with his bare hands but still put her nylons to use, tying them in the customary bow and looping them around one of her toes.

Needless to say Boston area police were at their wit's end. A massive effort to identify "The Stangler" was underway but despite countless suspects and interrogations there were no solid suspects when De Salvo continued his killings with Joanne Graff, 23, on November 23. She was found raped with her black leotards which, of course, still hung around her neck, tied in a bow. Nineteen Mary Sullivan was next. Sullivan was tied up, raped, and strangled by hand on January 4, 1964. Even more horrifying, a broom was jammed into her vagina and a card that read "Happy New Year" was slid between her toes as a grotesque taunt to police. There seemed to be no stopping the faceless Boston Strangler.

Incredibly De Salvo basically caught himself. After raping a woman in her apartment on October 27, he got up and excused himself after telling the woman he was sorry. She gave a description of her attacker to police and De Salvo was soon arrrested, though he was not considered a suspect in the stranglings for some reason. While awaiting trial at an institution one of his fellow inmates suspected he may be The Strangler and voiced this belief to F. Lee Bailey, De Salvo's attorney. When Bailey asked his client about the killings De Salvo admitted his guilt, even telling of two murders the police had not attributed to the mystery killer.

Despite admitting his guilt in the murders of 13 women, De Salvo never served time for the killings. Amazingly, the incomparable Bailey managed a plea bargain and his killer client plead guilt only to the innumerable sexual assaults and robberies, garnering a term of life in prison. He died in 1973, the victim of a stabbing in his cell.

8/17/2001-The family of Albert DeSalvo and the family of victim Mary Sullivan have recently joined forces to attempt to cast doubt on whether DeSalvo was in fact the Boston Strangler. DeSalvo's crusaders have pointed to discrepencies between the facts of Sullivan's murder and DeSalvo's confession (which he recanted later on)and are currently attempting to have DNA analysis of existing evidence from the Sullivan murder scene tested in an attempt to prove DeSalvo innocent of the crime and thus, presumably, innocent of all the Strangler murders.