Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [14]
Chapter 2
The Boston Strangler
Name: Albert DeSalvo
Nationality: American
Number of victims: 13 killed
Favoured method of killing: strangulation – he always tied the ligature in a bow on the victim’s body
Born: 1931
Reign of terror: 1962–64
Final note: he was never caught or formally identified
No one was ever prosecuted for the murders committed by the Boston Strangler, who terrorised the women of New England between 1962 and 1964. However, the Boston Police Department named the main suspect who they believed had brutally murdered 13 young women. His name was Albert DeSalvo.
DeSalvo was the son of a vicious drunk. When he was 11, DeSalvo watched his father knock his mother’s teeth out then bend her fingers back until they snapped. This was nothing unusual in the DeSalvo household.
When they were just children, Albert and his two sisters were sold to a farmer in Maine for nine dollars, but later escaped. After he got back home, his father taught him how to shoplift, taking him to the store and showing him what to take. His father would also bring prostitutes back to the apartment and make the children watch while he had sex with them.
Soon the young DeSalvo developed a lively interest in sex, making many early conquests among the neighbourhood girls, as well as earning a healthy living from the local gay community who would pay him for his services. In the army, DeSalvo continued his sexual adventuring, until he met Irmgaard, the daughter of a respectable Catholic family in Frankfurt. They married and returned to the US in 1954, where DeSalvo was dishonourably discharged from the army for sexually molesting a nine-year-old girl. Criminal charges were not brought because the girl’s mother feared the publicity.
DeSalvo pursued a career in breaking and entering, but at home he was the perfect family man. However, his sexual appetite was more than his wife could cope with. He demanded sex five or six times a day. This annoyed Irmgaard and finally repelled her. So DeSalvo found an outlet as the ‘Measuring Man’.
He began hanging around the student areas of Boston, looking for apartments shared by young women. He would knock on the door with a clipboard, saying that he was the representative of a modelling agency, and ask whether he could take their measurements. Sometimes his charm succeeded in seducing the women – sometimes they would seduce him. Other times he would just take their measurements, clothed or naked, and promise that a female representative would call later. He never assaulted any of the girls. The only complaints were that no one came on a follow-up visit.
About that time, DeSalvo was caught housebreaking and sent to jail for two years. The experience left him frustrated. When he was released he started a new career, breaking into houses throughout New England and tying up and raping women. At that time, he was known as the ‘Green Man’ because he wore a green shirt and trousers. The police in Connecticut and Massachusetts put the number of his assault in the hundreds. DeSalvo himself claimed more than a thousand – bragging that he had tied up and raped six women in one morning.
DeSalvo confined his activities to Boston and added murder to his repertoire, killing 55-year-old Anna Slesers in her apartment on 14 June 1962. DeSalvo had left her body in an obscene pose, with the cord he had used to strangle her tied in a bow around her neck. This was to become his trademark.
Over the next month he raped and strangled five women, including 85-year-old Mary Mullen, even though he said she reminded him of his grandmother, and 65-year-old nurse Helen Blake. Within two days he killed 75-year-old Ida Irga and 67-year-old Jane Sullivan. By this time, the Boston police force had realised that they had a serious maniac on their hands and had begun questioning all known sexual deviants. But DeSalvo was overlooked because he only had a record for burglary and housebreaking.