**SPOILERS** The film "Boston Strangler: The Untold Story" doesn't take for granted that Albert De Salvo, David Faustina,is in fact that infamous serial murderer who terrorized the city of Boston from June 1962 to January 1964 murdering 13 women, ranging from 19 to 85, in the process.
We get to see De Salvo as a petty criminal who got caught up with the frenzy of the strangler murders long after they stopped. Having been arrested for a series of crimes from attempted rape to breaking and entering and robbery De Salvo got influenced by his cell-mate convicted murderer Frank Asarian, Kostas Sommers, who convinced De Salvo that there was big bucks in him confessing to the strangler murders. ***SPOILER ALERT***It was then that a weak willed and desperate, in taking care of his family, Albert De Salvo fell hook line and sinker for it which eventually, in making himself a marked man behind bars, lead to his murder.
We get to see De Salvo and Asarian cook up a number false claims and phony evidence in trying to prove that De Salvo was actually the notorious Boston Strangler. De Salvo who claimed that he had a photographic memory crammed all the evidence he could find, with the help of cell-mate Asarian, in his not so accurate mind that had him make a total fool of himself when he was asked by a state appointed psychiatrist to recreate the events.
It's later in the film after De Savlo was given a life sentence for his rape and robbery convictions that he soon realized in talking with his, and Asarian,lawyer Stuart Whitmore, Corin Nemec, what a total mess he made for himself. Even though De Salvo was never tried or convicted, or in fact even indited, for the Boston Strangler killings the fact that he tried so hard to take credit, as well as make himself rich, for them influenced his jury to give him the ultra harsh sentence that he untimely received!
We already see where De Salvo is going at the very beginning of the movie in his attempt, through the prison psychiatrist, to come clean and tell the truth about his involvement or non involvement in the killings that he so readily took credit for. As we all know De Salvo never lived to tell the story in him being found murdered in the maximum security Walpol Prison infirmary on the morning of November 25, 1973; De Salvo who took the secret of the strangler murders, and what he had or had not to do with them, to his grave was only 42 years old.
Even though it's nowhere as well known or effective as the far more popular 1968 blockbuster version of "The Boston Strangler" staring Tony Curtis as Albert De Salvo this straight to DVD treatment of the story is more accurate given all the evidence that came to light, like DNA evidence disputing at last one of De Salvo's murder claims, over the last 35 or so years after De Salvo death. Nobody on the case ever took De Salvo's claims in being the infamous serial killer seriously especially the man in charge of the case Det. Jon Marsden, Andrew Divoff.
It seemed that De Salvo was the perfect pasty in his willingness to take responsibly in the stranglers murders and the higher ups in both the Boston Police Department and City Government, in order to cover their behinds in them not being able to solve the case, gladly went along with him. If in fact De Salvo wasn't the Boston Strangler, as the movie claims, then who was? And if so did he, the real Boston Strangle, not only escape ultimate justice but kept on committing more horrendous crimes that escaped the eye of both the Boston Police and the local and National News media?
3 out of 10 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
