Albert DeSalvo Albert DeSalvo Albert Henry DeSalvo (September 3, 1931 – November 25, 1973) was a criminal in Boston, Massachusetts, who confessed to being the "Boston Strangler", the murderer of 13 women in the Boston area from 1962 to 1964. DeSalvo was imprisoned, however, for a series of rapes. His murder confession has been disputed, and debate continues as to which crimes DeSalvo actually committed. In July 2013, a DNA match between seminal fluid found at the scene of the rape and murder of Mary Sullivan and DNA obtained from DeSalvo's nephew linked DeSalvo to that crime and excluded 99.9% of the
Serial killer Members of the Thuggee cult in India may have murdered a million people between 1740 and 1840. Thug Behram, a member of the cult, may have murdered as many as 931 victims. In his 1886 book, "Psychopathia Sexualis", psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing noted a case of a serial murderer in the 1870s, a Frenchman named Eusebius Pieydagnelle who had a sexual obsession with blood and confessed to murdering six people. The unidentified killer Jack the Ripper, who has been called the first modern serial killer, killed at least five women, and possibly more, in London in 1888. He was the