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as a burglar. The police thought that the ‘Measuring Man’ act was a device for entering apartments and houses he intended to rob later.
    When he got out of prison, after serving an eleven-month term, DeSalvos’ wife, as her own form of punishment, denied him all sexual contact. So DeSalvo was forced to take on a new identity, this time that of the ‘Green Man’. The ‘Green Man’ got his name from the green trousers he liked to wear when talking his way or breaking into women’s houses. He’d strip some of his victims at knifepoint and then kiss them all over; others he would tie up and rape. He boasted of having ‘had’ six women in a single morning.
    In 1962, another and yet more sinister character appeared on the scene, one that was to terrorize Boston for eighteen months: The Boston Strangler. In June of that year, the naked body of a middle-aged woman was found in her apartment, clubbed, raped and strangled. Her legs had been spreadeagled and the cord from her housecoat had been wound round her neck, then tied beneath her chin in a bow. The necktie, the bow and the spreadeagling were all to become, as the months dragged on, horrifyingly familiar.
    Two weeks later, the Strangler struck twice. Both victims were women in their sixties. Two more were murdered in August 1962, one 75, one 67. Then, in December, he struck once more – and from then on no woman in Boston felt safe, for she was only 25. Sophie Clark was strangled and raped, and her body carried all the marks of the Strangler.
    The killings went on, with increasing violence, until January 1964. There was no particular pattern, apart from the spreadeagling, the bow, the ligature. The youngest victim was 19, the oldest 69. As the number of dead mounted up, panic increasingly gripped the city. But Albert DeSalvo was never even interviewed.
    Then, the killings stopped. After January 1964 the Strangler seemed to disappear – even though the ‘Green Man’ was still at work. For that autumn a young married student gave a description of the ‘Green Man’ that tallied with that of the ‘Measuring Man,’ and DeSalvo was arrested. DeSalvo was sent to Bridgewater mental hospital for routine observation.
    It was at Bridgewater that the controversy that still surrounds DeSalvo began. A fellow prisoner called George Nassar, who’d been arrested for murder, claimed that DeSalvo told him details of the crimes of the Boston Strangler. Nassar told his lawyer, F. Lee Bailey. In a deal engineered by Bailey, DeSalvo stood trial only for the ‘Green Man’ offences. He was sentenced to life imprisonment; and is said to have confessed in detail to the Boston Strangler’s crimes in 1965.
    Even so there remain some doubts. For DeSalvo as the ‘Measuring Man’ and the ‘Green Man’ invariably chose younger women. Witnesses who’d actually seen the Strangler failed to identify him. So could the Boston Strangler have really been George Nassar, who’d somehow fed DeSalvo details of the crimes in Bridgewater and then persuaded him to confess? We shall never know. For DeSalvo was stabbed to death in Walpole State Prison in 1975. The inmate who knifed him through the heart was never identified.

    Alberto DeSalvo became known as the Measuring Man.

The Jackal Strikes
    Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, was once one of the most feared terrorists in the world. During his career of crime, which spanned the 1970s and 1980s, he committed a horrifying series of brutal terrorist attacks across Europe. Most disturbingly, as his trail of carnage increased, he seemed to show that he was no longer fighting for a cause, but was simply enjoying the violence and revelling in his notoriety. He was eventually handed over to the French authorities and imprisoned for life. Today, several cases are still pending against him, and he has yet to be tried for the majority of the crimes he committed.
    Sanchez was born in 1949 in Caracas, Venezuela, the son of a