COM Alum’s Marathon Bombing Book Comes to the Big Screen

Casey Sherman’s path to Hollywood started with a murder five years before he was born.

Mary Sullivan was just 19 when she was strangled in her apartment at 44-A Charles Street in Boston on January 4, 1964, the last of 13 victims attributed to the Boston Strangler. Sullivan’s sister Diane, then 17, would become Sherman’s mother, and the murder’s toll on her family would drive her son to investigate the controversial case, starting with college journalism classes.

“My aunt was the reason I went to BU,” says Sherman (COM’93).

He went on to a career as a producer for WBZ-TV and an author who focuses on true crime. His first book, published in 2003, is the story of his aunt’s murder, A Rose for Mary: The Hunt for the Real Boston Strangler, which questioned the guilt of prime suspect Albert DeSalvo. Eventually, Sherman’s focus on justice expanded to include an appreciation for real-life heroes. His fifth book, 2009’s The Finest Hours, cowritten with Michael J. Tougias, describes a courageous Coast Guard rescue off Cape Cod in 1952. A film version, starring Chris Pine and Casey Affleck, was released in January 2016.

But that film was only the first Sherman had a hand in this year. Patriots Day, starring Mark Wahlberg and based in part on Sherman’s eighth book, Boston Strong: A City’s Triumph over Tragedy, published in 2015, opens on December 21. The book, written with Dave Wedge, chronicles the Boston Marathon bombings and follows the survivors as they grapple with severe physical and emotional injuries for months, and years, afterward. (A planned Boston Strong production was combined with another film on the same topic to avoid splitting the audience, a common Hollywood practice.)