Nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan was the last, and youngest, victim in the sensational Boston Strangler case that panicked a city and riveted the nation. Fourteen months after Mary's brutal killing on January 4, 1964, handyman Albert DeSalvo, in jail on an unrelated sexual assault charge, told authorities he was the Boston Strangler and confessed to the gruesome murders of thirteen women. Prosecutors led the public and the press to believe the Strangler was behind bars, yet DeSalvo, later stabbed to death in prison while serving time for a different crime, was never charged with or tried for any of the killings because no physical evidence linked him to the slayings and many key investigators and psychiatrists discounted his implausible and coached confession. And the anguished Sullivan family never believed that the so-called Strangler murdered their beloved Mary.
Now Mary's nephew, Casey Sherman, exposes the truth behind her death and unravels the mysteries surrounding the Boston Strangler murders. A Rose for Mary is the gripping story of his ten-year quest to find the real killer of the aunt he never knew. It is also the deeply personal story of an ordinary family caught up in extraordinary circumstances.
Drawing on interviews with major figures in the Strangler case and exhaustive research, Sherman reexamines the crime scenes, initial police investigations, prime suspects, and DeSalvo's shocking confession tapes, which have never been made public. He reveals the political motivations of the Boston Strangler Task Force and uncovers the role of flamboyant defense attorney F. Lee Bailey in manipulating DeSalvo's confession. Sherman also presents compelling new DNA evidence, and he discloses how his reinvestigation led to an unlikely alliance with the DeSalvo family, relating how the relatives of the victim and her self-confessed killer are together battling powerful law enforcement officials in Massachusetts to exonerate Albert DeSalvo and reopen Mary Sullivan's officially unsolved murder.
Sherman's dramatic account of his decade-long search for justice for Mary and the Sullivan family unmasks his aunt's real murderer and provides startling new revelations about the other notorious Boston Strangler serial killings.
