Albert Henry DeSalvo (September 3, 1931 – November 25, 1973) was an American murderer and rapist who was active in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s.

Due to physical evidence, DeSalvo's confession was believed, yet he was only prosecuted in 1967 for a series of unrelated rapes, for which he was convicted and imprisoned until his death in 1973.

In July 2013, an analysis of semen found around the body of Mary Sullivan, the last of the Strangler's victims, was matched to DNA obtained from DeSalvo's nephew.

Because men who are descended from a common male ancestor carry the same y-DNA, investigators believed that this finding linked DeSalvo to the killing of Sullivan.

[4] DeSalvo's father was a violent alcoholic who abused his wife; in one of the many times he attacked her in front of the children, he knocked out all her teeth and bent her fingers back until they broke.

Robert Wilson, who was associated with the Winter Hill Gang, was tried for DeSalvo's murder, but the trial ended in a hung jury.

[citation needed] DeSalvo's papers are housed in the Lloyd Sealy Library Special Collections at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

[21] On July 11, 2013, Boston law enforcement officials announced that DNA evidence had linked DeSalvo to the rape and murder of 19-year-old Mary Sullivan.

[3] Though DeSalvo was conclusively linked to Mary Sullivan's murder, doubts remain as to whether he committed all of the Boston Strangler homicides — and whether another killer could still be at large.

It was also noted that the women allegedly killed by "The Strangler" were of widely varying ages, social status and ethnicities, and that their deaths involved inconsistent modi operandi.

[citation needed] Susan Kelly, an author who has had access to the files of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' "Strangler Bureau", argued in her book that the murders were the work of several killers, rather than that of a single individual.

[23] Another author, former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, has said, "You're putting together so many different patterns [regarding the Boston Strangler murders] that it's inconceivable behaviorally that all these could fit one individual.

"[24] In 2000, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, an attorney specializing in forensic cases from Marblehead, Massachusetts, began representing the families of DeSalvo and of Mary A. Sullivan, a 19-year-old who was among the Strangler's final victims in 1964.

Finally, James Starrs, professor of forensic science at George Washington University, told a news conference that a semen-like substance on her body did not match DeSalvo's DNA and could not associate him with her murder.

[25] The victim's nephew, Casey Sherman, wrote a book, A Rose for Mary (2003), in which he expanded upon the evidence—and leads from Kelly's book—to conclude that DeSalvo could not be responsible for her death, and to try to determine her killer's identity.

[30][31] In 2006, Nassar argued in court filings that he had been unable to make his case in a previous appeal, because he was in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, in the 1980s and therefore did not have access to Massachusetts legal resources.

[30] Nassar also filed a motion for a new trial in Essex County, which was denied,[32] as was his 2011 petition to the United States Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari.

"[34] In 1971, the Texas legislature unanimously passed a resolution honoring DeSalvo for his work in "population control"—after the vote, Waco Representative Tom Moore Jr. admitted that he had submitted the legislation as an April Fool's Day joke against his colleagues—his declared intent was to prove that they pass legislation with no due diligence given to researching the issues beforehand.