Boston Strangler - Albert DeSalvo FBI Files, Civil Action Documents, Newspaper Articles

Boston Strangler - Albert DeSalvo FBI Files, Civil Action Documents, Newspaper Articles

This set contains a total of 1,279 pages.

Albert DeSalvo

On January 5, 1955, DeSalvo was arrested for child molestation, but the charges were dropped in December of that year. On January 8, February 15th, and April 18th, 1958, DeSalvo was arrested for breaking and entering. He was given a suspended sentence. On October 26, 1959, he was arrested again for breaking and entering and again received a suspended sentence. On March 17, 1961, the Cambridge Police Department arrested DeSalvo for breaking and entering. He confessed to a series of sexual assaults committed by a man impersonating a model agency scout. DeSalvo was sent to Westborough State Psychiatric Hospital and was diagnosed as a sociopath. On May 3rd, 1961, Albert DeSalvo was sentenced to two years for assault and battery and breaking and entering. His sentence was reduced, and he was released in April 1962. On June 14, 1962, the first murder attributed to the Boston Strangler occurred.

In 1964 he was arrested for the Boston area "Green Man" rapes. In September 1965, DeSalvo confessed to the Boston Strangler murders, plus two additional murders. In 1967 DeSalvo was convicted of the "Green Man" rapes and sentenced to life in prison. DeSalvo was found stabbed through the heart in a prison infirmary in 1973. DeSalvo was never put on trial for the Boston Strangler murders.

 
FBI Files

156 pages of files copied from FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., covering Albert DeSalvo AKA The Boston Strangler. Between June 14, 1962, and January 4, 1964, thirteen single women in the Boston area were assaulted and strangled to death with an item of clothing.

Much of the file reflect DeSalvo as the subject of an FBI unlawful flight to avoid confinement investigation when he escaped from a Massachusetts state mental hospital on February 24, 1967. DeSalvo was being held at the hospital pending appeal of a life sentence for numerous rapes. Local authorities apprehended DeSalvo in Lynn, Massachusetts, the following day. Files contain background information on DeSalvo. A 1961 memo documents an arrest when DeSalvo was known as the "Tapester." At that time, he was accused of posing as a talent scout for a modeling agency. He would ring doorbells looking for young women who he would offer a modeling job, if they passed a measuring test.

 
DeSalvo, Albert vs. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

This file unit consists of 1.106 pages of files related to the civil case of Albert DeSalvo vs. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. DeSalvo brought the case to prevent the distribution and exhibition of the film "The Boston Strangler." 

The case was initially brought before the Superior Court of Massachusetts as Equity Case Number 89074 on September 29th, 1968, but was removed to the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts on October 1st, 1968. DeSalvo maintained there existed no prior approval, consent, or waiver from him to make or release the film. DeSalvo said the film was slanderous and libelous, falsely naming him as the Boston Strangler and depicting him as a vicious and depraved individual. 

Additionally, he claimed the making and releasing of the film was a violation and invasion of his personal and private rights and would adversely affect and prejudice DeSalvo in his present and future attempts to secure a fair trial for his release from confinement. 

During the trial, The Walter Reade Organization, Inc., the licensed distributor for the film, joined Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation as a defendant. In the Memorandum of Opinion, the court ruled that DeSalvo, by a written agreement, had released all rights to all literary and biographical materials to Gerold Frank, which allowed Frank to subsequently assign the rights to the production of a motion picture to the defendants. Additionally, the judge ruled that the extensive publicity and public interest in the "Boston Strangler" and in DeSalvo as a possible "Boston Strangler," particularly pending and during his criminal trial on the criminal charges on which he was convicted and was presently confined, precluded maintenance of an action by him for defamation or invasion of privacy unless he could prove publication that was knowingly false or falsely made with reckless disregard for the truth. 

The judge ruled that DeSalvo had not met the burden of proof necessary to prove that the portrayal of himself as the "Boston Strangler" in the film of that name was knowingly false or was falsely made with a reckless disregard for the truth. Finally, the court ruled that DeSalvo had unreasonably delayed the commencement of the court case without a justifiable excuse. The case favored the defendants, allowing them to continue to exhibit the film. A subsequent appeal to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals was denied on February 16th, 1970, as the court ruled that DeSalvo had not pursued the case in a timely manner.