It all started with a sentence, tucked into the bottom corner of the Globe’s front page a half century ago.

“An attractive divorcee was found strangled in her third-floor apartment at 77 Gainsborough St., Back Bay, at 7:45 last night.”

Anna Slesers, a 55-year-old Latvian seamstress, lived alone. On June 14, 1962, she was discovered by her son — blue taffeta bathrobe ripped open, the garment’s sash tightened around her neck, ends tucked up in a bow.

It took months before Slesers’ killer was matched with the moniker that prompted terror around the region and captivates people still: “the Boston Strangler.”

“In my short life, I had never known anything like that,” recalled James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, who was 11 years old when the killings began. “People were much more used to keeping doors unlocked and not worried about strangers, much less stranglers.”

The tally: 13 murders in 19 months. They took place in Boston, Lawrence, Cambridge, and Salem. Most victims, but not all, were strangled with their own possessions, like nylon stockings, a pillow case, a bra. Most, but not all, were sexually ­assaulted, sometimes with an object. Some were left in grotesque poses. The oldest victim was 85; the youngest, 19. One was black, a fact that puzzled ­investigators at the time.

And there was the accused: Albert DeSalvo, imprisoned on other charges, confessed to the killings but was never convicted. In 1973, the 42-year-old was stabbed to death in his cell as he slept. Many remain unconvinced of his guilt. DNA evidence from the last supposed Boston Strangler victim, ­exhumed in 2001, did not match DeSalvo.

The case remains one of America’s great whodunits, a constant source of fascination for those obsessed with the was-he-or-wasn’t-he details of DeSalvo’s confession.