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22 May 1959. He wrote to his father, talking of repentance and his hopes of staying alive. The execution was delayed by a federal judge, then rescheduled for 25 June.
    When the prison guards came for him, he asked: ‘What’s your hurry?’ Then, in a new shirt and jeans, he swaggered ahead of them to the electric chair with his hands in his pockets. Outside, gangs of teenagers cruised the streets, playing rock ’n’ roll on their car radios. Fifteen years later the Starkweather story was retold in the 1974 cult film Badlands , starring Martin Sheen and Cissy Spacek. The story then formed the basis of Oliver Stone’s controversial 1994 film Natural Born Killers , starring Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis.
     

Chapter 2
    The Boston Strangler
     
    Name: Albert DeSalvo
    Nationality: American
    Number of victims: 13 killed
    Favoured method of killing: strangulation – he always tied the ligature in a bow on the victim’s body
    Born: 1931
    Reign of terror: 1962–64
    Final note: he was never caught or formally identified
     
    No one was ever prosecuted for the murders committed by the Boston Strangler, who terrorised the women of New England between 1962 and 1964. However, the Boston Police Department named the main suspect who they believed had brutally murdered 13 young women. His name was Albert DeSalvo.
    DeSalvo was the son of a vicious drunk. When he was 11, DeSalvo watched his father knock his mother’s teeth out then bend her fingers back until they snapped. This was nothing unusual in the DeSalvo household.
    When they were just children, Albert and his two sisters were sold to a farmer in Maine for nine dollars, but later escaped. After he got back home, his father taught him how to shoplift, taking him to the store and showing him what to take. His father would also bring prostitutes back to the apartment and make the children watch while he had sex with them.
    Soon the young DeSalvo developed a lively interest in sex, making many early conquests among the neighbourhood girls, as well as earning a healthy living from the local gay community who would pay him for his services. In the army, DeSalvo continued his sexual adventuring, until he met Irmgaard, the daughter of a respectable Catholic family in Frankfurt. They married and returned to the US in 1954, where DeSalvo was dishonourably discharged from the army for sexually molesting a nine-year-old girl. Criminal charges were not brought because the girl’s mother feared the publicity.
    DeSalvo pursued a career in breaking and entering, but at home he was the perfect family man. However, his sexual appetite was more than his wife could cope with. He demanded sex five or six times a day. This annoyed Irmgaard and finally repelled her. So DeSalvo found an outlet as the ‘Measuring Man’.
    He began hanging around the student areas of Boston, looking for apartments shared by young women. He would knock on the door with a clipboard, saying that he was the representative of a modelling agency, and ask whether he could take their measurements. Sometimes his charm succeeded in seducing the women – sometimes they would seduce him. Other times he would just take their measurements, clothed or naked, and promise that a female representative would call later. He never assaulted any of the girls. The only complaints were that no one came on a follow-up visit.
    About that time, DeSalvo was caught housebreaking and sent to jail for two years. The experience left him frustrated. When he was released he started a new career, breaking into houses throughout New England and tying up and raping women. At that time, he was known as the ‘Green Man’ because he wore a green shirt and trousers. The police in Connecticut and Massachusetts put the number of his assault in the hundreds. DeSalvo himself claimed more than a thousand – bragging that he had tied up and raped six women in one morning.
    DeSalvo confined his activities to Boston and added murder to his repertoire,