Story highlights
- Albert DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler
- Authorities never definitively linked DeSalvo to the killings
- He was never charged in those crimes, and he was killed in prison in 1973
- Authorities believe they have linked DeSalvo to one killing
The remains of a man who confessed to being the Boston Strangler were exhumed Friday by authorities working to connect him to the January 1964 killing of Mary Sullivan, the last of 11 women believed killed by the serial killer.
New DNA tests on a secret sample collected from a relative of suspect Albert DeSalvo triggered the exhumation after authorities said there was a "a familial match" with genetic material preserved in the killing of 19-year-old Sullivan, Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley said Thursday.
Authorities made the match through DNA taken from a water bottle thrown away by DeSalvo's nephew, he said.
DeSalvo's remains were removed from Puritan Lawn Memorial Park in Peabody, north of Boston, to the state medical examiner's office, where DNA tests will be performed.
Authorities said they believe the results will come back quickly, perhaps in a few days.
The Strangler killings terrorized Boston from mid-1962 to early 1964. Conley said 11 killings have been attributed to DeSalvo -- who confessed to the deaths -- including Sullivan's. DeSalvo also confessed to two additional killings, which were not suspected Strangler victims.
DeSalvo was never charged with the killings. He was stabbed to death in 1973 while serving a life prison term for unrelated rapes.
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Photos: Infamous serial killers
Photos: Infamous serial killers
John Wayne Gacy killed 33 men and boys between 1972 and 1978. Many of his victims, mostly drifters and runaways, were buried in a crawlspace beneath his suburban Chicago home. Here's a look at some other notorious convicted serial killers.
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Photos: Infamous serial killers
Jeffery Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms for the murders of 17 men and boys in the Milwaukee area between 1978 and 1991. Dahmer had sex with the corpses of his victims and kept the body parts of others, some of which he ate. Dahmer and another prison inmate were beaten to death during a work detail in November 1994.
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Law enforcement officers meet in San Francisco in 1969 to compare notes on the Zodiac Killer, who is believed to have killed five people in 1968 and 1969. The killer gained notoriety by writing several letters to police boasting of the slayings. He claimed to have killed as many as 37 people and has never been caught.
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Authorities said DNA recovered from the body of Mary Sullivan matches that of her suspected killer, the confessed Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo. After a sample was secretly collected from a relative, DeSalvo's body was exhumed in July 2013 for more DNA testing. From mid-1962 to early 1964, the Boston Strangler killed at least 13 women. DeSalvo was stabbed to death in 1973 while serving a prison sentence for rape.
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Ed Gein killed at least two women and dug up the corpses of several others from a cemetery in Wisconsin, using their skin and body parts to make clothing and household objects in the 1950s.
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In 1973, Juan Corona, a California farm laborer, was sentenced to 25 consecutive life sentences for the murders of 25 people found hacked to death in shallow graves.
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Joseph Paul Franklin was convicted in 1997 of murdering Gerald Gordon outside a St. Louis synagogue in 1977. Franklin was also convicted of at least five other murders, receiving a string of life sentences, but he suggested that he was responsible for 22 murders. He was best known for shooting Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, who was paralyzed from the attack. Franklin was executed in November 2013.
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In 1977, David Berkowitz, also known as Son of Sam, confessed to the murders of six people in New York City. Berkowitz, now serving six consecutive 25-to-life sentences, claimed that a demon spoke to him through a neighbor's dog.
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Cousins Kenneth Bianchi, seen here, and Angelo Buono were charged with the murders of nine women between 1977 and 1978. Also known as the Hillside Stranglers, the cousins sexually assaulted and sometimes tortured their victims, leaving their bodies on roadsides in the hills of Southern California.
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Wayne Williams killed at least two men between 1979 and 1981, and police believed he might have been responsible for more than 20 other deaths in the Atlanta area. Williams was convicted and sentenced to two life terms in 1982.
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After serving 15 years for murdering his mother, Henry Lee Lucas was convicted in 1985 in nine more murders. Lucas was the only inmate spared from execution by Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
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Richard Ramirez, also known as the Night Stalker, was convicted of 13 murders and sentenced to death in California in 1989. The self-proclaimed devil worshiper found his victims in quiet neighborhoods and entered their homes through unlocked windows and doors.
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During a routine traffic stop, a police officer found a dead U.S. Marine in the front seat of a car driven by Randy Steven Kraft. Kraft was linked to 45 murders and sentenced to death in 1989. He would pick up hitchhikers, give them drugs and alcohol, sexually assault them and then mutilate and strangle them.
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Ted Bundy raped and killed at least 16 young women in the early to mid-1970s before he was executed in 1989. A crowd of several hundred gathered outside the prison where he was executed, and they cheered at the news of his death.
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Joel David Rifkin was stopped by police for driving without a license plate when a body was found in his pickup. Rifkin killed 17 women in New York between 1991 and 1993 and was sentenced to life in prison.
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Charles Ng, seen here, and accomplice Leonard Lake tortured, killed and buried 11 people in northern California between 1984 and 1985. After the men were arrested for shoplifting, police found bullets and a silencer in their car and took them into the police station for questioning. Lake killed himself there with a cyanide pill. Ng was later sentenced to death.
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Robert Lee Yates Jr. killed 15 people, most of them between 1996 and 1998. He buried one of them in a flower bed by his house in the Spokane, Washington, area. Most of his victims were prostitutes or drug addicts he killed in his van. He is on Washington's death row.
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Gary Leon Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer, confessed to 48 killings after his DNA was linked to a few of his victims. Remains of his victims, mostly runaways and prostitutes, turned up in ravines, rivers, airports and freeways in the Pacific Northwest.
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Aileen Wuornos was executed in Florida in 2002 for the murders of seven men whom she had lured by posing as a prostitute or a distressed traveler.
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Derrick Todd Lee was accused of raping and killing six women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, between 2001 and 2003. He was arrested in Atlanta for the murder of Charlotte Murray Pace, convicted in 2004 and sentenced to death.
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Danny Rolling pleaded guilty to the 1990 murders of five students he raped, tortured and mutilated in Gainesville, Florida. Rolling was also found responsible for a 1991 triple homicide in Shreveport, Louisiana, and was executed in 2006.
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Angel Maturino Resendez, also known as the Railway Killer, was a drifter from Mexico. During the 1990s, he would rob and kill his victims near railroad tracks on both sides of the border and then hop rail cars to escape. Resendez was executed in 2006.
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Pig farmer Robert Pickton was charged with 26 counts of murder after police found the bodies of young women on his farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. He was convicted of six murders in 2007, and he is serving a life sentence.
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The BTK Strangler, Dennis Rader, killed 10 people between 1977 and 1991 in the Wichita, Kansas, area. He was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms in 2005. Rader named himself BTK, short for "bind, torture, kill."
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Police found the decomposing and buried bodies of 10 women and the skull of another woman at the Cleveland home of ex-Marine Anthony Sowell. He was convicted and given the death penalty in 2011.
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Chester Dewayne Turner was sentenced to death for murdering 14 women and one victim's unborn fetus in the Los Angeles area between 1987 and 1998. Turner was later convicted and sentenced to death for four more murders.
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The news has convinced Sullivan's nephew, Casey Sherman, who wrote a 2001 book in which he argued that another man may have been behind the Strangler killings. He said Thursday that he was surprised his aunt's slaying was still being investigated.
"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.
But a lawyer for the DeSalvos told CNN the family was "outraged, disgusted and offended" by the decision to secretly take a DNA sample of one of its members, a move she called "unnecessary and creepy."
"They feel victimized by this process," said the attorney, Elaine Whitfield Sharp. "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."
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, authorities said. 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 with 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.
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."
DeSalvo's brother, Richard DeSalvo, offered blood and saliva samples 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.
