In October of 1964, a Cambridge woman reported her sexual assault to the police. She helped police develop a sketch of the attacker, and police quickly noticed similarities between him and another criminal who had a history of sexual deviance.
The man was Albert DeSalvo, who posed as a modeling scout, ask to take women's measurements and fondle them while doing so. In 1960, cops arrested DeSalvo while he was breaking into a woman’s home, and he admitted to his crimes.
Police then ran DeSalvo's photo in the paper, and several more women came forward to identify DeSalvo as their attacker.
DeSalvo was sent to Bridgewater State Hospital and while in the hospital’s psychiatric ward, DeSalvo admitted on tape to being the Boston Strangler.
"The psychiatrist, Dr. James A. Brussel, associate commissioner of the Department of Mental Health of New York state, testified that DeSalvo described to him how he strangled women while wracked by mental torment," the Boston Globe reported at the time.