DNA helps investigators make breakthrough in Boston Strangler case 50 years later

It has been 50 years since the Boston Strangler, but new DNA tools have helped investigators make a breakthrough in the case. That has lead to the body of Albert DeSalvo, the man who confessed to the murders, being exhumed.

According to The Boston Globe, the DNA may link DeSalvo to the Jan. 4, 1964 murder of Mary Sullivan in her apartment. Her murder is the last one attributed to the Boston Strangler.

Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said that DNA found at the scene had a “familial match” to DeSalvo. He has asked Suffolk Superior Court to have DeSalvo’s boy exhumed so another test can be taken. Conley predicts that this will prove “once and for all” that DeSalvo was Sullivan’s murderer.

Still, Conley stressed that they wouldn’t be able to link DeSalvo to all 11 murders attributed to the Boston Strangler. “At this point in time, 50 years removed from those deaths and without the biological evidence that we have in the Sullivan case, that is a question that we cannot answer,” he told the media. “But these developments give us a glimmer of hope that there can be one day finality, if not accountability, for the families of the ten other women murdered so cruelly in Boston, Cambridge, Lawrence, Lynn and Salem.”

The Associated Press reports that the Boston Strangler murders occurred between 1962 and 1964, with the victims being sexually assaulted and murdered. DeSalvo confessed to the murders, but he was never convicted. Instead, he spent his life in prison for armed robberies and sexual assaults. He later recanted and died in a Walpole, Mass. prison in 1973.

Casey Sherman, Sullivan’s nephew, was one of those who attended today’s press conference. In 2003, he wrote a book claiming that DeSalvo couldn't have killed Sullivan. Today, he said, “I only go where the evidence leads” and thanked officials for still pursuing the case.

Attorney Elaine Whitfield Sharp, who represented the DeSalvo family, said, “It is strong evidence. But it is not definitive. But, in the interests of pursuing the truth, one more suspect needs to be ruled out as the killer.”