A Rose for Mary: The Hunt for the Real Boston Strangler [Hardcover]

Casey Sherman (Author), Dick Lehr (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 18, 2003

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 in the early 1960s. 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In January 1964, 19-year-old Mary Sullivan became the last victim in the so-called Boston Strangler case. Nearly 40 years after her murder (for which no one has ever been charged), her nephew, a broadcast journalist, takes a fresh look at her death and at the strangler case. While many of the author's revelations are not blindingly original, the story is rich in detail. Few people today believe that Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to all of the murders, actually committed any of them, but Sherman shows why experts' thinking has changed, and he makes a compelling case that there was more than one murderer. His portrait of DeSalvo as a pathetic braggart is strangely reassuring (somehow we want him to be pathetic), and his presentation of the authorities as (mostly) eager to let this hapless fellow shoulder the blame for the murders is depressing if chillingly realistic. Exhaustively researched, this is a must-read for true-crime aficionados. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Publisher

26 illus.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 220 pages
• Publisher: Northeastern University Press (September 18, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155553578X
• ISBN-13: 978-1555535780
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #691,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Casey Sherman was born in Hyannis, Massachusetts in 1969.
Sherman is a graduate of Fryeburg Academy (Fryeburg, Me.) and Boston University. An award winning journalist, Sherman gained international headlines with his re-investigation of the notorious Boston Strangler case.
He later chronicled the case in his true crime bestseller A Rose for Mary.
Sherman landed back on the bestseller list in 2009 with his sea epic The Finest Hours (co-authored by Michael Tougias). Sherman has appeared on dozens of television programs including The Today Show, Dateline NBC, CBS 48 Hours Mysteries, America's Most Wanted, and The View.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for anyone interested in the truth, October 6, 2003

By 

Frank (Boston, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Rose for Mary: The Hunt for the Real Boston Strangler (Hardcover)

The author does a great job of summarizing a criminal case of national notoriety and informing the reader that the truth is different than what has previously been communicated. The facts presented indicate that Casey has done an abundant amount of research in order to prove his point.
As a reader of many crime and murder based books, this book does not inundate the reader with unnecessary technical details in order to make a point. Enough technical and medical terms are used to substantiate the facts but not overwhelm the reader. There is also an appropriate amount of balance between the case and the author's life so a perspective of what it is like to be the relative of a victim can be learned. Instead of reading like a typical True Crime novel, there is an underlying theme of family and the pursuit of truth that a lot of murder investigation books lack. This difference might be explained by the closeness the author realizes as part of the investigation.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to others interested in this case.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must - Read!!!, October 10, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: A Rose for Mary: The Hunt for the Real Boston Strangler (Hardcover)

I read this book because it was recommended on Ann Rule's website. I had always thought the way the case was handled was bizarre.There was no apparent physical evidence, only a confession, and De Salvo's death in a highly protected infirmary was strange, to say the least. I had never believed half the psycho-babble in Gerold Frank's book, either. This book proves that the 'confessions' were not consistant with the physical evidence at autopsy in several cases, and the obvious feeding of facts by the police to De Salvo and the multiple accounts in newspapers of the day meant that there was very little he could not have gleaned elsewhere, and when he did make statements about facts, such as the floor the flat was on, or the colour of clothes worn by 'his' victims he was wrong. Several of the cases had features that were inconsistant with there being only one possible killer , such as Patricia Bissette,Beverley Samans and Sophie Clark. There are strong alternative suspects in at least these three cases, as well as in Mary Sullivan's. DNA evidence proves that De Salvo did not do what he claimed to have done to Mary and that evidence strongly implicates another police suspect of the day. Casey Sherman has written a wonderful book, which frees his family from knowing that De Salvo had not killed their loved one, instead of feeling that the case had been mishandled (as indeed do several other families) and frees De Salvo's family from being shamed by their family name. All credit to Casey Sherman for taking on this establishment conspiracy, and for finding the real truth of his aunt's death and helping the De Salvo's clear Albert's name.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars victim's rites, December 31, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: A Rose for Mary: The Hunt for the Real Boston Strangler (Hardcover)

Re-examining the decades-old strangulation murder of his late Aunt Mary, a 19-year-old career girl widely believed to be the last victim of self-confessed "Boston Strangler" Albert DeSalvo, author Casey Sherman makes a fairly compelling case that the killer was actually someone else and that DeSalvo was simply a convenient fall guy for baffled cops and stymied politicos. Unfortunately for Sherman, writer Susan Kelly presented a far more compelling (and far more professional) case in "The Boston Stranglers" nearly 10 years ago. Perhaps too close to the story for his own good, Sherman whitewashes, sidesteps and simply ignores the more unsavory aspects of the victim's life (all detailed in Kelly's book in a non-judgemental fashion), in the process unwittingly stripping the deeply-troubled young woman of any recognizable humanity and turning her into an unbelievable martyr-like cipher who never comes alive for the reader. Ardent true crime buffs will also be see the non-conclusive nature of this story a mile away; Sherman telegraphs the ending by pointedly assigning a fake name to a key suspect early on, always a tip-off that the cops couldn't make a case. Amateurish as this is (when he isn't pushing for exhumations and DNA tests, Sherman actually communes with his late aunt's ghost!), anyone seriously interested in the Strangler case will find this book intriguing, especially after comparing it to the considerably meatier account in Kelly's book--which actually names the suspect in question.