Albert DeSalvo's Body Exhumed from Grave; DNA Testing Finally Confirms 50 Years After Heinous Crimes: DeSalvo Was The Boston Strangler but Family Still Claims His Innocence

The famous Boston Strangler murders of the early 1960s are on the verge of being solved, thanks to new DNA tests and a sample secretly collected from a relative of longtime suspect Albert DeSalvo, according to CNN.

DNA taken from a water bottle thrown away by one of DeSalvo's nephews is a "familial match" with genetic material preserved in the January 1964 killing of 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley said.

"This is good evidence, strong evidence and reliable evidence, but it's not sufficient to close the case with absolute certainty," Conley told reporters. DNA from DeSalvo's remains is needed to prove "once and for all" that the onetime handyman was Sullivan's killer -- and perhaps to close other cases to which DeSalvo confessed.

The Strangler killings terrorized Boston from mid-1962 to early 1964. DeSalvo confessed to 13 killings, including Sullivan's, but he was never charged. He was stabbed to death in 1973 while serving a life prison term for unrelated rapes.

"There was no forensic evidence to link Albert DeSalvo to Mary Sullivan's murder until today," Conley said. The new DNA match now excludes "99.9%" of the population as suspects, he said -- and now that a judge has approved DeSalvo's exhumation, the DNA match could be confirmed in "a matter of days."

As for the rest of the victims, the developments "give us a glimmer of hope that there can one day be finality, if not accountability," for their families, Conley said.

DeSalvo was about to recant his confession before he was killed, his brother, Richard DeSalvo, said in 2001. Richard DeSalvo had offered blood and saliva samples at that time in hopes of proving his brother's innocence.

"I honestly swear, on a stack of Bibles, there's no way in the world he was the Boston Strangler," Richard DeSalvo said.

Those tests had been unable to find a match between DeSalvo family DNA and the killings. But Conley discounted them Thursday, noting they weren't conducted by law enforcement.

Conley said scientists tried several times in the late 1990s and early 2000s to isolate DNA evidence from semen found in Sullivan's body and on a blanket. They resumed their efforts last year, after a laboratory successfully salvaged DNA from decades-old material, and found what they believe is the unique genetic profile of Sullivan's killer.

Despite an exhaustive search, investigators found no usable samples of DeSalvo's DNA to compare to the material from the crime scene, reports CNN. So Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said he had a detective from the police department's fugitive squad shadow DeSalvo relatives until he spotted one of the suspect's nephews throwing away a water bottle.

"That water bottle was tested, and the match came back," he said. "We've been sitting on that information for a while, so that all the reports could come back, and we could put ourselves in a position to petition the court for an exhumation order, so that we can positively close that case up."