The Herald News | Taunton Gazette | Daily News Transcript | Daily News Tribune | The Enterprise | MetroWest Daily News | Milford Daily News | Patriot Ledger | Wicked Local
Who was responsible for “A Death in Belmont?”
GateHouse News Service
Wed Aug 01, 2007, 05:26 PM EDT
Clinton -
Between June 14, 1962, and Jan. 4, 1964, the city of Boston was shadowed under a cloud of terror and mayhem. During that 18-month span, 13 women were sexually assaulted and strangled in their homes, and Boston police investigators had scant evidence and few leads as to who the killer — or killers — might be.
This horrific crime wave became known as the “Boston Stranglings.” And although there was not consensus among the members of the “Strangler Bureau,” established in 1964, by Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke to centralize the nine jurisdictions investigating the attacks, that these murders were the work of one highly skilled serial killer, a manhunt to find the “Boston Strangler” was underway.
On March 11, 1963, in the town of Belmont, seven miles northwest of Boston, 63-year-old Bessie Goldberg was found by her husband, Israel, lying on their living room floor raped and strangled. Goldberg’s murder was Belmont’s first, and it was the ninth in the Boston area in almost a year. Could it be that the Boston Strangler had come to peaceful, ideal Belmont and killed one of its ordinary citizens, this housewife and mother of one?
As Sebastian Junger — author of the celebrated “The Perfect Storm” (1997) and former resident of Belmont — details in his multidimensional “A Death in Belmont,” Bessie Goldberg’s death hit literally close to home. Junger’s boyhood home sat a little over a mile away from the Goldberg’s residence on Scott Road. Junger was a year old at the time, and the story of the murder became a Junger-family oft-told tale, one that reached folkloric proportion and roused speculation.
However, there were three critical components of the tale that ensured its enduring intrigue. One was that the man who would later confess to being the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, was working a construction job on the Junger house the day the Belmont murder was committed. The second was a disquieting incident that occurred between Junger’s mother, Ellen, and DeSalvo. And the third was that a 35-year-old black man named Roy Smith, who was the last person to see Bessie Goldberg alive, was prosecuted — perhaps wrongfully — for her murder.
Like the detectives who were building a case against Smith for Goldberg’s murder in 1963, Junger reexamines Smith’s every move on March 11 to ascertain if the evidence against Smith was solid enough to warrant a murder charge. Junger finds that Smith was contracted by the Massachusetts Employment Security Office to help Goldberg clean her house for a dinner party she and Israel were hosting that night. Children in the neighborhood saw Smith leaving the Goldberg residence. He walked through town, stopped at a store to buy cigarettes and then walked to the bus station. In 1963, it was rare to see a black man striding the streets of Belmont, and people took notice. Fifty minutes later, Israel arrived home and found Bessie dead, and by the end of the day Smith was arrested for her murder.
Junger also researches the life and times of Roy Smith, a native of Oxford, Miss., who knew full well what could happen to a black man in the deep South if he were suspected of having any type of contact with a white woman. (Smith tries to explain this to Boston police investigators during his 12-hour interrogation to no avail.) Yet Smith is no innocent either. His rap sheet is long, and he’s been in and out of jail for the better part of his life. Junger writes about Smith’s six-month lockup for burglary at Mississippi’s Parchman Farm, a prison reputed to be “the closest thing to slavery that the South had seen since the Civil War.” He includes a quasi-history of lynchings in the South, citing a case in 1899, and another in 1937 —the viciousness of which is incomprehensible. He brings readers into the courtroom as Smith is brought to trial.
At the same time, Junger interweaves the saga of the Boston Stranglings and the controversy that surrounded the stymied investigation as well as the comings and goings, crimes and rants of the mysterious and unstable Albert Desalvo, who confessed to being the Boston Strangler in 1965. (If readers are unfamiliar with the case of the Boston Strangler, Junger’s is a succinct primer. For more in-depth analysis, he suggests several books, including “The Boston Strangler” by Gerold Frank [1996] and “The Boston Stranglers” by Susan Kelly [1995].)
The majority of “A Death in Belmont” is written in straightforward reportage, the pace of which sustains reader interest. Some of the book’s high points include Junger’s biography of Roy Smith and the story of his life after trial. There are, however, instances when Junger lapses into prolonged, unessential narration. He reiterates the known facts of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and writes a lengthy section on the “homicide pyramid.”
And, it seems, for the purpose of adding flair and drama to his prose, Junger utilizes a writing technique in which three or four sentences grouped together repeat the same key phrase. It begins early on page nine — “There were no homeless people in Belmont. There were no dangerous parts of Belmont, or poor parts of Belmont, or even ugly parts of Belmont.”— and culminates on page 256, with “[Smith] … didn’t get rid of Bessie Goldberg’s address in his coat pocket, he didn’t flee the area, he didn’t even avoid walking past the police station in Central Square. He didn’t … do any of the things that most criminals do to avoid getting caught.” This construct becomes vexing.
Junger raises some interesting hypotheses regarding DeSalvo’s motivations. But ultimately, “A Death in Belmont” is “‘a book about ambiguity,’” as Junger himself has said, and questions about the entire affair may never be answered.
“One of the conceits of my profession is that … it can pry open the world in all its complexity and contradiction and find out exactly what happened in a certain place on a certain day,” Junger writes. “But often the truth simply isn’t knowable. … As I did my research I came to understand that not only was this story far messier than the one that I’d grown up with, but that I would never know for sure what … happened in the Goldberg house that day. Without DNA evidence Smith’s guilt or innocence would always be a matter of conjecture. By extension DeSalvo’s possible role in the murder would also be a matter of conjecture. … But maybe the truth isn’t even the most interesting thing about some stories, I thought; maybe the most interesting thing about some stories is all the things that could be true. And maybe it’s in the pursuit of those things that you understand the world in its deepest, most profound sense.”
“One of the conceits of my profession is that … it can pry open the world in all its complexity and contradiction and find out exactly what happened in a certain place on a certain day,” Junger writes. “But often the truth simply isn’t knowable. … As I did my research I came to understand that not only was this story far messier than the one that I’d grown up with, but that I would never know for sure what … happened in the Goldberg house that day. Without DNA evidence Smith’s guilt or innocence would always be a matter of conjecture. By extension DeSalvo’s possible role in the murder would also be a matter of conjecture. … But maybe the truth isn’t even the most interesting thing about some stories, I thought; maybe the most interesting thing about some stories is all the things that could be true. And maybe it’s in the pursuit of those things that you understand the world in its deepest, most profound sense.”
This text refers to the hardcover edition. Amy O’Loughlin is a regular contributor to MotherTown.
Original content available for non-commercial use
under a Creative Commons license,
except where noted.
under a Creative Commons license,
except where noted.
Copyright © 2006–2009 GateHouse Media, Inc. Some Rights Reserved.
