DeSalvo's Early Years and Psychological Analysis
Albert Henry DeSalvo was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on September 3rd, 1931 to an Irish mother and a violent alcoholic father. He was in and out of trouble with the police at an early age. Its believed that his father forced DeSalvo and his siblings to watch him have sex with prostitutes. By the time he was 12, he had been arrested for robbery, assault, and battery. DeSalvo is thought to have committed a string of murders from June 14th, 1962 to January 4th, 1964. He allegedly raped, strangled, and killed 13 women, and was known as the Boston Strangler. But was this really the case?
Albert DeSalvo was abused as a child, but there were no signs of brain damage ever detected. Later on he was evaluated by Dr. Harry Kozol and he deemed DeSalvo free of mental illness. According to the video we watched, "Most Evil", the equation to becoming a serial killer is abuse, brain damage, and mental illness. DeSalvo only had one third of the equation. We believe Albert DeSalvo started attacking, raping, and murdering women because of the way his father treated his siblings, mother, and himself. DeSalvo probably started killing women because he longed for a stable mother figure in his life which he never had throughout his childhood. The sexual nature of the attacks was most like also affected by his childhood. The trauma that his father put him through by forcing DeSalvo to watch him sleep with prostitutes would have led him to have a very skewed view of what sex should be, and how he should interact with women.