Turns out George Nassar (witness in Boston Strangler case) died in 2018

[J.D. Baldwin]

It has only now been reported that George Nassar died in December of
2018, at the age of 86.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/28/us/george-nassar-dead.html

George Nassar, 86, Killer Who Heard Confession in Strangler Case,
Is Dead

By Richard Sandomir
March 28, 2023

George Nassar, a twice-convicted murderer who said that his former
cellmate Albert DeSalvo had confessed to him that he had killed
the 13 women whose deaths in the early 1960s were widely
attributed to the Boston Strangler, died on Dec. 3, 2018 --
largely out of view of the outside world -- in a prison hospital
in Boston. He was 86.

His death, at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital Correctional Unit, was
caused by prostate cancer, Samantha Higgins, a spokeswoman for the
Massachusetts Department of Correction, said in an email on
Monday.

His death was not publicly reported at the time.

[...]

A new movie about the case, "Boston Strangler," which stars Keira
Knightley and Carrie Coon and in which Mr. Nassar is played by
Greg Vrotsos, asserts in a postscript that "George Nassar is still
in prison in Massachusetts."

That claim intrigued Sarah Weinman, a crime journalist and the
Crime & Mystery columnist for The New York Times Book Review. "If
he was indeed alive, Nassar would be nearing 90," she wrote in an
email. "Considering he'd revealed a diagnosis of terminal cancer
when last interviewed in 2018, the likelihood that he still lived
seemed minuscule."

A call by her to the Massachusetts corrections department
confirmed his death, though the details were not immediately
provided.

The prison confession Mr. DeSalvo made to Mr. Nassar, in 1965, was
one of several by him, making Mr. DeSalvo the primary suspect in
the Boston Strangler case, though he was never charged with those
crimes. Mr. Nassar publicly told his story about the confession at
least twice.

In 1995, Mr. Nassar recalled in an interview with The Boston Globe
that Mr. DeSalvo had described the killings 30 years earlier as
they walked along a concrete hallway at Bridgewater State Hospital
in Massachusetts, where both men were incarcerated and undergoing
mental health evaluations. Mr. DeSalvo was being held on unrelated
charges of armed robbery, assault and sex offenses involving four
women.

[...]
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / bal...@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it.-T. Lehrer
***~~~~----------------------------------------------------------------------

[radioacti...@gmail.com]

Quite enlightening; appreciate your taking the trouble to find this, J.D.!

(This has always had a special interest to me--not just because I found the Tony Curtis film a pretty good take on the complex case, but also because DeSalvo was stabbed to death on Monday, November 26,1973 in nearby Walpole Prison just three months after I first arrived on-campus as a Boston University freshman.)

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida