Doubts
Doubts remain as to whether DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. At the time he confessed, people who knew him personally did not believe him capable of the vicious crimes. It was also noted that the women killed by "The Strangler" came from different age and ethnic groups, and that there were different modi operandi.
DeSalvo's attorney Bailey believed that his client was the killer, describing the case in Defense Never Rests (1995). Susan Kelly, author of the 1996 book The Boston Stranglers, accessed the files of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts "Strangler Bureau". She argues that the stranglings were the work of several killers rather than a single individual. Another author, former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, said that "You're putting together so many different patterns that it's inconceivable behaviorally that all these could fit one individual."
John E. Douglas, the former FBI special agent who was one of the of the first criminal profilers, wrote that he doubted that DeSalvo was The Boston Strangler. In his book The Cases That Haunt Us, he identified DeSavlo as a "power-assurance" motivated rapist. While such a rapist is unlikely to kill in the manner of crimes attributed to The Boston Strangler, a power-assurance motivated rapist would be prone to taking credit for the crimes.
In 2000, attorney Elaine Sharp took up the cause of the DeSalvo family and that of the family of Mary Sullivan. Sullivan was publicized as being the final victim in 1964, although other stranglings occurred after that date. A former print journalist, Sharp assisted the families in their media campaign to clear DeSalvo's name, to assist in organizing and arranging the exhumations of Mary Sullivan and Albert H. DeSalvo, in filing various lawsuits in attempts to obtain information and trace evidence (e.g., DNA) from the government and to work with various producers to create documentaries to explain the facts to the public. Sharp pointed out various inconsistencies between DeSalvo's confessions and the crime scene information (which she obtained). For example, she observed that, contrary to DeSalvo's confession to Sullivan's murder, there was no semen in her vagina and that she was not strangled manually, but by ligature. Forensic pathologist Michael Baden observed that DeSalvo also got the time of death wrong — a common inconsistency with several of the murders pointed out by Susan Kelly. She continues to work on the case for the DeSalvo family.
In the case of Mary Sullivan, murdered January 4, 1964 at age 19, DNA other forensic evidence were used by Casey Sherman to try to track down her presumed real killer. Sherman wrote about this in his book A Rose for Mary (2003), stated that DeSalvo was not responsible for her death. For example, DeSalvo confessed to sexually penetrating Sullivan, yet the forensic investigation revealed no evidence of sexual activity.
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