Strangler case has DNA link
Boston suspect’s body to be dug up
BOSTON — The man who once claimed to be the Boston Strangler has been linked to one of the 11 victims by DNA evidence for the first time, leading to the planned exhumation of his remains and perhaps putting to rest some speculation that he wasn’t the notorious killer.
Albert DeSalvo’s remains will be dug up because DNA from the scene of Mary Sullivan’s rape and murder produced a “familial match” with him, Suffolk Dist. Atty. Daniel Conley said Thursday.
Police secretly followed DeSalvo’s nephew to collect DNA from a discarded water bottle to help make the connection,
officials said. Conley said the match excludes 99.9 percent of suspects, and he expects investigators to find an exact match when the evidence is compared directly with DeSalvo’s DNA.
The district attorney stressed that the evidence only applied to Sullivan’s slaying and not the other 10 homicides.
“Even among experts and law enforcement officials, there is disagreement to this day about whether they were in fact committed by the same person,” Conley said.
Sullivan, 19, had moved from her Cape Cod home to Boston just days before her death. She was found strangled in her Boston apartment in January 1964 and has long been considered the strangler’s last victim.
Eleven Boston- area women between the ages of 19 and 85 were sexually assaulted and killed between 1962 and 1964, crimes that terrorized the region and grabbed national headlines.
Thursday’s announcement represented the first forensic evidence tying DeSalvo to the case.
DeSalvo, a blue-collar worker and Army veteran who was married with children, confessed to the 11 Boston Strangler slayings, as well as two others. But he was never convicted of the Boston Strangler killings.
He had been sentenced to life in prison for a series of armed robberies and sexual assaults and was stabbed to death in the state’s maximum security prison in Walpole in 1973 — but not before he recanted his confession.
An attorney for DeSalvo’s family said Thursday they believe there’s still reasonable doubt he killed Sullivan, even if additional DNA tests show a 100 per- cent match.
The lawyer, Elaine Sharp, said previous private forensic testing of Sullivan’s remains showed other DNA from what appeared to be semen was present that didn’t match DeSalvo.
“Somebody else was there, we say,” Sharp said of the killing. “I don’t think the evidence is a hundred percent solid, as is being represented here today.”
But Donald Hayes, a forensic scientist who heads the Boston Police Department’s crime lab, said investigators’ samples were properly preserved, while the evidence used in private testing came from Sullivan’s exhumed body and was “very questionable.”
Sharp also said Thursday that the family was outraged that police followed a DeSalvo relative to get the DNA they needed for comparison.
Authorities said they’re continuing to comb through evidence files and still hope to find samples to do DNA testing in connection with the other Strangler-linked killings.
They plan to exhume DeSalvo’s body from a grave in Peabody, Mass., this week, and said it could be just a matter of days before they get results of DNA testing.