PEABODY — The remains of the man who confessed to being the Boston Strangler but later recanted were exhumed Friday in a bid to use forensic evidence to connect him to the death of the woman believed to be the serial killer's final victim.
Boston police confirmed Friday that they had dug up the grave of Albert DeSalvo, the suspect in the death of Mary Sullivan. Tissue or bone samples will be taken at the state medical examiner's office, a spokesman for the Suffolk District Attorney's office said.
Authorities said Thursday that for the first time they have DNA evidence tying DeSalvo to Sullivan's death.
DeSalvo confessed to being the Strangler, who was believed to have killed 11 women over two years in the 1960s in a homicidal rampage that terrorized the Boston area. DeSalvo later took back his confession; he was stabbed to death in prison as he served a life sentence for other crimes.
Now, Sullivan's family could be just days away from getting answers about her slaying after decades of wondering if police pinned it on the right man.
Casey Sherman struggled to hold back tears for his late aunt as he joined law enforcement officers to talk about a case that gained public notoriety but always has been a source of private pain for his family.
Nineteen-year-old Sullivan, whom Sherman called "the joy of her Irish Catholic family," left the quiet of Cape Cod for the bustle of life in Boston in January 1964. A few days later she was dead — raped and strangled in the apartment into which she had just moved.
"I've lived with Mary's memory every day, my whole life. And I didn't know, nor did my mother know, that other people were living with her memory as well," Sherman said of the aunt who died before he was born.
"And it's amazing to me today to understand that people really did care about what happened to my aunt."
Authorities exhumed DeSalvo's remains because testing of DNA from the scene of Sullivan's rape and murder produced a "familial match" with him, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley said. It happened after scientific advances that only became possible recently, and after police secretly followed DeSalvo's nephew to collect DNA from a discarded water bottle to help make the connection.
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.
Eleven women between the ages of 19 and 85 were sexually assaulted and killed in the Boston area between 1962 and 1964, crimes that terrorized the region and grabbed national headlines.
DeSalvo, a blue-collar worker and Army veteran who was married with children, confessed to the 11 Boston Strangler slayings and two others. But he was never convicted of the Strangler slayings.
He went to prison for a series of armed robberies and sexual assaults before his death in Massachusetts' maximum security prison in Walpole in 1973.
A lawyer for DeSalvo's family said Thursday they believe there's still reasonable doubt he killed Sullivan, even if additional DNA tests show a 100 percent 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 did not 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.
But Sherman, who previously wrote a book on the case pointing to other possible suspects, acknowledged the new findings point to the man he had defended.
Sherman said the DNA evidence against DeSalvo appeared to be overwhelming.
"I only go where the evidence leads," he said, thanking police and praising them "for their incredible persistence."
Sherman also expressed sympathy for the DeSalvo family, with whom he had joined in the past in a shared belief that DeSalvo didn't kill his aunt. That belief was based on DeSalvo's confession, which Sherman previously said was inconsistent with other evidence.
The families of DeSalvo and Sullivan had jointly sued the state for release of evidence while pursuing their own investigation.
They had Sullivan's body exhumed in 1999 for private DNA testing as part of the effort.
Authorities said they're continuing to comb through evidence files and still are hoping to find samples to do DNA testing in connection with the other Strangler-linked killings.
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