[Pink.]

Investigators are on the verge of solving the last of the Boston Strangler killings of the 1960s, thanks to new DNA tests and a sample secretly collected from a relative of longtime suspect Albert DeSalvo.


DNA taken from a water bottle thrown away by one of DeSalvo's nephews is a "familial match" with genetic material preserved in the January 1964 killing of 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley said Thursday.

"This is good evidence, strong evidence and reliable evidence, but it's not sufficient to close the case with absolute certainty," Conley told reporters. DNA from DeSalvo's remains is needed to prove "once and for all" that the onetime handyman was Sullivan's killer -- and perhaps to close other cases to which DeSalvo confessed.

The Strangler killings terrorized Boston from mid-1962 to early 1964. DeSalvo confessed to 13 killings, including Sullivan's, but he was never charged. He was stabbed to death in 1973 while serving a life prison term for unrelated rapes.
"There was no forensic evidence to link Albert DeSalvo to Mary Sullivan's murder until today," Conley said. The new DNA match now excludes "99.9%" of the population as suspects, he said -- and now that a judge has approved DeSalvo's exhumation, the DNA match could be confirmed in "a matter of days."


As for the rest of the victims, the developments "give us a glimmer of hope that there can one day be finality, if not accountability," for their families, Conley said.

The news has convinced Sullivan's nephew, Casey Sherman, who wrote a 2001 book in which he argued another man may have been behind the Strangler killings. He said Thursday that he was surprised his aunt's slaying was still being investigated and told reporters, "I go where the evidence leads."

"It's taken 49 years for police to legitimately say they got their man, and they'll probably be able to say that very soon," Sherman said.
He spoke emotionally of the closure the news will bring to him and his mother, Diane Dodd, Sullivan's younger sister.



"It's amazing to me today to understand that people really did care what happened to my aunt, a 19-year-old girl heinously murdered in 1964," he said.
But a lawyer for the DeSalvos told CNN the family was "outraged, disgusted and offended" by the decision to secretly take a DNA sample one of its members, a move she called "unnecessary and creepy."

"They feel victimized by this process," the attorney, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, said. "This was an unwarranted invasion of privacy by a government agency. We have offered them DNA as recently as last year, there was no reason to sneak around to get it."

Conley said scientists tried several times in the late 1990s and early 2000s to isolate DNA evidence from semen found in Sullivan's body and on a blanket. They resumed their efforts last year, after a laboratory successfully salvaged DNA from decades-old material, and found what they believe is the unique genetic profile of Sullivan's killer.

Despite an exhaustive search, investigators found no usable samples of DeSalvo's DNA to compare to the material from the crime scene. So Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said he had a detective from the police department's fugitive squad shadow DeSalvo relatives until he spotted one of the suspect's nephews throwing away a water bottle.
"That water bottle was tested, and the match came back," he said. "We've been sitting on that information for a while, so that all the reports could come back, and we could put ourselves in a position to petition the court for an exhumation order, so that we can positively close that case up."

The nephew was working at an outdoor construction site when he threw away the plastic bottle, which was retrieved by plainclothes investigators, according to a law enforcement source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Conley said authorities didn't ask the DeSalvo family for their cooperation, but he defended the secret collection of their DNA as "a fair and legal and ethical method." He said they "did nothing wrong," but "found themselves in the shadow of accusations that could never be fully proven or discounted."

"We would probably have given them a lot of anxiety, perhaps, if we had approached them directly," he said. "If this familial examination pointed us in a different directions, then we wouldn't have even have had to involve them any further."

DeSalvo's brother, Richard DeSalvo, offered blood and saliva samples at that time in hopes of proving his brother's innocence in 2001. Those tests had been unable to find a match between DeSalvo family DNA and the killings, but Conley discounted them Thursday because they weren't conducted by law enforcement.

Sharp said Richard DeSalvo's DNA would have been a closer match than the nephew's, she said. And the family offered samples of Albert DeSalvo's DNA that are in control of an independent forensic scientist, she said.
"They said they would get back to us and they never did," she said. "Instead, they went sneaking around."

[Bunnny]

I'm excited to finally get the answer to this mystery. Cool news!

[Darkest Angel]

The first serial killer I ever read about.

[JustifiableHomicide]

Yeah I'm bored, not Boston Strangler bored though.

[DLESS]

When i was a kid my first job was working at my stepfathers bar in chelsea, mass..a place called maxi's. the old drunks that had been coming there for years as well as my stepfather said desalvo did not do it. Turns out albert desalvo used to do his drinking at maxi's. My stepfather as well as a few of the regulars rubbed elbows with him there and said he was a bullshitter wanna be..that a local mob guy had paid desalvo to take the rap with the promise to take care of him and his family..saying they would get him a good lawyer and a mental case plea getting him out early and no death penalty.
I guess this shoots that down.

[Bunnny]

I want to see Albert DeSalvo's corpse.

[Viking64]

I want to see Jennifer Lopez' corpse. Soon.

[Bunnny]

Originally Posted by Viking64 ↗

I want to see Jennifer Lopez' corpse. Soon.

Naked? Just a guess....

[Viking64]

Originally Posted by Bunnny ↗

Naked? Just a guess....

Absolutely not. There is nothing sexually appealing about her to me at all. I just want the satisfaction of knowing that she is dead. And we might as well chuck Angelina Jolie's skeletal corpse beside her and have a bonfire.

[GODREKR]

Investigators have unearthed the remains of a man who once confessed to being the Boston Strangler in a bid to use forensic evidence to connect him to the death of a woman believed to be the serial killer's last victim.

A bevy of law enforcement officials surrounded Albert DeSalvo's grave on a grassy plot near a lake for the exhumation, which lasted about an hour.

DeSalvo admitting killing Mary Sullivan and 10 other women in the Boston area between 1962 and 1964 in a series of slayings that became known as the Boston Strangler case. But he recanted in 1973 before dying in prison, where he was serving a life sentence for other crimes.

Authorities said that they would take DeSalvo's remains from Peabody to the medical examiner's office in nearby Boston, where they'd take tissue or bone samples for DNA testing.

Police and prosecutors said that, for the first time, they had DNA evidence linking DeSalvo to Sullivan's death.

With a search warrant, authorities dug up DeSalvo's remains because testing of DNA from the scene of Sullivan's rape and murder had produced a match with him that excluded 99.9 percent of suspects. They are after a perfect match.

The breakthrough happened after scientific advances that authorities said became possible only recently. Police secretly followed DeSalvo's nephew to collect DNA from a discarded water bottle to help make the connection.

Sullivan grew up on Cape Cod before moving to Boston when she was 19. A few days later, she was dead — raped and strangled in her new apartment.

Sullivan's nephew, Casey Sherman, spent part of his life believing in DeSalvo's innocence. But he said that the latest evidence points a different way.

Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley said the new evidence applies only to Sullivan's homicide and not to the other Strangler-linked killings. He said some law enforcement officials still disagree about whether one person committed all 11 slayings.

Retired state trooper David Raymond and his friend Andy Brancato, whose late father knew DeSalvo and is buried in a nearby plot, watched the digging operation for about 15 minutes before authorities shooed them away.

"My father went to school with him," Brancato said of DeSalvo. "He always said he was a little crazy but innocent."

Raymond said seeing the digging brought him back to what he'd witnessed as a child, when he saw a crowd swarming in his neighborhood as police arrested DeSalvo.

"Coming from a police background, maybe we'll have a case solved," Raymond said.

DeSalvo, a blue-collar worker and Army veteran who was married with children, was never convicted of the Strangler slayings.

His relatives were "very emotionally distressed" by the exhumation, family attorney Elaine Sharp said.

"They didn't even tell us when they were going to do it," the attorney said. "They didn't even extend us the courtesy of an invitation."

Sharp has said that the family believes there still will be reasonable doubt that DeSalvo killed Sullivan, even if additional DNA tests show a 100 percent match. She has said private testing of Sullivan's remains showed other male DNA was present.

The attorney said that DeSalvo's family also has doubts about how police handled the evidence they're relying on now. Police have called the evidence the family used in private testing "very questionable."

This Feb. 25, 1967, file photo shows self-confessed Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo minutes after his capture in Boston. DeSalvo confessed to the string of 1960s killings but was never convicted. He died in prison in the 1970s. Massachusetts officials said Thursday, July 11, 2013, that DNA technology led to a breakthrough, putting them in a position to formally charge the Boston Strangler with the murder of Mary Sullivan, last of the slayings attributed to the Boston Strangler.