A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  A DEATH IN BELMONT

  ALSO BY SEBASTIAN JUNGER

  The Perfect Storm

  Fire

  SEBASTIAN

  JUNGER

  A DEATH IN BELMONT

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK • LONDON

  Copyright © 2006 by Sebastian Junger

  All rights reserved

  Photograph of Albert DeSalvo with police officers in Cambridge, Massachussetts, used

  by permission of Associated Press.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Junger, Sebastian.

  A death in Belmont / Sebastian Junger.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07737-7

  1. Murder—Massachusetts—Belmont—Case studies. 2. Smith, Roy, 1927 or 8–3. Goldberg,

  Bessie. 4. De Salvo, Albert Henry, 1931–I. Title.

  HV6534.B43J86 2006

  364.152'3097444—dc22 2006000488

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  FOR MY MOTHER,

  ELLEN SINCLAIR JUNGER

  And they said to the Prophet, “How may we stop our ears to the rant of the fool and yet show him charity?”

  And he answered, “You show yourselves charity by opening wide your ears to him. The fool in the midst of his babble shall speak truths which the minds of the wise cannot perceive.”

  —unattributed quote pinned to the office wall of a Massachusetts appellate lawyer

  Contents

  A NOTE ON QUOTES

  THE MURDER

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE TRIAL

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE CONFESSIONS

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Further Reading

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON QUOTES

  If a passage is enclosed in quotation marks in this book, it means that the person was speaking into a tape recorder or before a court stenographer. In some instances I wrote my interviews in notebooks, but that was rare; almost all my interviews were done with a tape recorder. Conversations in this book were obviously not recorded as they happened, so they never take quotation marks. As reproduced in this book, however, they do faithfully represent the recollections of the people involved. In all cases—including in some published texts—I have made grammatical changes for the sake of clarity, as well as minor edits for the sake of brevity.

  THE MURDER

  ONE

  ONE MORNING IN the fall of 1962, when I was not yet one year old, my mother, Ellen, looked out the window and saw two men in our front yard. One was in his thirties and the other was at least twice that, and they were both dressed in work clothes and seemed very interested in the place where we lived. My mother picked me up and walked outside to see what they wanted.

  They turned out to be carpenters who had stopped to look at our house because one of them—the older man—had built it. He said his name was Floyd Wiggins and that twenty years earlier he’d built our house in sections up in Maine and then brought them down by truck. He said he assembled it on-site in a single day. We lived in a placid little suburb of Boston called Belmont, and my parents had always thought that our house looked a little out of place. It had an offset salt-box roof and blue clapboard siding and stingy little sash windows that were good for conserving heat. Now it made sense: The house had been built by an old Maine carpenter who must have designed it after the farmhouses he saw all around him.

  Wiggins now lived outside Boston and worked for the younger man, who introduced himself as Russ Blomerth. He had a painting job around the corner, Blomerth said, and that was why they were in the neighborhood. My mother said that the house was wonderful but too small and that she and my father were taking bids from contractors to build a studio addition out back. She was an artist, she explained, and the studio would allow her to paint and give drawing classes at home while keeping an eye on me. Would they be interested in the job? Blomerth said that he would be, so my mother put me in his arms and ran inside to get a copy of the architectural plans.

  Blomerth’s bid was the low one, as it turned out, and within a few weeks he, Wiggins, and a younger man named Al were in the backyard laying the foundation for my mother’s studio. Some days all three men showed up, some days it was Blomerth and Wiggins, some days it was just Al. Around eight o’clock in the morning my mother would hear the bulkhead door slam, and then she’d hear footsteps in the basement as Al got his tools, and then a few minutes later she’d watch him cross the backyard to start work. Al never went into the main part of the house, but sometimes my mother would bring a sandwich out to the studio and keep him company while he ate lunch. Al talked a lot about his children and his German wife. Al had served with the American forces in postwar Germany and been the middleweight champion of the American army in Europe. Al was polite and deferential to my mother and worked hard without saying much. Al had dark hair and a powerful build and a prominent beak of a nose and was not, my mother says, an unhandsome man.

  My mother was born in Canton, Ohio, the year of the stock market crash to a nightclub and amusement park owner named Carl Sinclair and his wife, Marjorie. Canton was a conservative little city that could be stifling to a woman who wanted more than a husband and children—which, as it turned out, my mother did. She wanted to be an artist. At eighteen she moved to Boston, went to art school, and then rented a studio and started to paint. Her parents looked on with alarm. Young women of her generation did not pass up marriage for art, and that was exactly what my mother seemed to be doing. A few years went by and she hadn’t married, and a decade went by and she still hadn’t married, and by the time she met my father, Miguel, in the bar of the Ritz Hotel her parents had all but given up.

  When my mother finally got married at age twenty-nine it was welcome news, but my father could not have been exactly what her parents had envisioned. The son of a Russian-born journalist who wrote in French, and a beautiful Austrian socialite, he had come to the United States during the war to escape the Nazis and study physics at Harvard. He spoke five languages, he could recite the names of most of the Roman emperors, and he had no idea how the game of baseball was played. He also had made it to age thirty-seven without getting married, which alarmed any number of my mother’s female friends. Against their advice she eloped with him to San Francisco, and they were married by a judge at the city hall. A year later my mother got pregnant with me, and they bought a house in a pretty little suburb called Belmont.

  The studio they built, when it was finally finished, had a high cement foundation set into a slight hill and end walls of fir planks with
a steep-pitched shingle roof that came down almost to the ground. There was a Plexiglas skylight at the roof peak that poured light onto the tile floors, and there was a raised flagstone landing that my mother populated with large plants. The job was completed in the spring of 1963; by then Blomerth and Wiggins had moved on to other work, and Al was left by himself to finish up the last details and paint the trim. On one of those last days of the job, my mother dropped me off at my baby-sitter’s and went into town to do some errands and then picked me up at the end of the day. We weren’t home twenty minutes when the phone rang. It was the baby-sitter, an Irishwoman I knew as Ani, and she was in a panic. Lock up the house, Ani told my mother. The Boston Strangler just killed someone in Belmont.

  The victim’s name was Bessie Goldberg, and she had been found by her husband raped and strangled in their home on Scott Road. Several days earlier, a sixty-eight-year-old woman named Mary Brown had been raped and bludgeoned to death in the small town of Lawrence, north of Boston. They were the eighth and ninth sex murders in the Boston area in almost a year, and the city was in a state of terror. My mother rushed out to the studio where Al was painting on a ladder and told him the news. It’s so scary, my mother remembers telling him. I mean, here he is in Belmont, for God’s sake! Al shook his head and said how terrible it was, and he and my mother talked about it for a while, and eventually she went back into the house to start dinner.

  My mother didn’t see Al again until the next day. He showed up with Blomerth and Wiggins because the job was almost done and they had to start packing their tools and cleaning up the site. Blomerth had brought a camera for the occasion, and he arranged us all inside the studio and took a photograph. I’m looking straight at Blomerth—no doubt because he said something to get my attention—and my mother, seated on a maplewood bench, is looking down at me, her firstborn child, rather than up at the camera. She is thirty-four years old, and her dark brown hair is pinned high on her head and she wears a paisley shirt with the sleeves neatly rolled up and she appears primarily interested in the baby on her lap. Behind my mother and off her right shoulder is old Mister Wiggins standing politely in a sweater-vest with his hands clasped behind his back and a claw hammer jammed headfirst into his front pocket. His shirt is buttoned right up to his chin, and he looks like he’s at least seventy-five years old. Standing next to Wiggins and directly behind my mother is Al.

  Al and I are the only people looking directly at the camera, and whereas I have an infant’s expression of puzzled amazement, Al wears an odd smirk. His dark hair is greased up in a pompadour, and he is clean-shaven but unmistakably rough looking, and he has placed across his stomach one enormous, outspread hand. The hand is visible only because my mother is leaning forward to look at me. The hand is at the exact center of the photograph, as if it were the true subject around which the rest of us have been arranged.

  TWO

  IT WASN’T UNTIL Israel Goldberg started putting the food away in the kitchen that he realized something was wrong. His wife, Bessie, had asked him to pick up frozen vegetables and cheese on his way home from work, but when he pushed open the front door and called out her name, all he heard was the radio. That was odd; Bessie had hired a cleaning man to help get the house ready for a dinner party that night, and Israel had expected to find them both at work when he arrived home. Instead, the house was deserted and there wasn’t even a note. Bess! he shouted from the kitchen, but still no one answered, and that was when his puzzlement turned to fear. He dropped his overcoat on the floor and ran upstairs, calling his wife’s name as he went. He checked thir bedroom. He checked their closets. He checked the spare bedroom. He checked their daughter’s old bedroom: no one.

  Outside, Israel could hear the shouts of children playing kickball on the street; a boy named Dougie Dreyer was single-handedly scoring run after run against an assemblage of neighborhood girls. John F. Kennedy was president, America was not yet at war, and Belmont, Massachusetts, where he and his wife had moved ten years earlier, was arguably the epitome of all that was safe and peaceful in the world. There were no bars or liquor stores in Belmont. There were no poor people in Belmont. 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. There had never been a murder in Belmont. It was—until the moment Israel Goldberg went back downstairs and finally glanced into the living room—the ideal place to live.

  The first thing he noticed was his wife’s feet, which protruded from behind the corner of the wall. Israel stepped into the living room to investigate. A standing lamp had been knocked over, and its pedestal was now propped on the arm of the divan. Between the lampshade and the knocked-over lamp lay the immobile body of his wife.

  Bessie Goldberg was on her back with her skirt and apron pulled up and her legs exposed. One of her stockings had been wound around her neck, and her eyes were open, and there was a little bit of blood on her lip. The first thought that went through Israel Goldberg’s mind was that he’d never seen his wife wearing a scarf before. An instant later he realized that her head was at the wrong angle, that her face looked puffy and that she wasn’t breathing. According to the children on the street, Israel Goldberg was inside less than a couple of minutes before he screamed and ran back out and demanded to know if they had seen anyone leave the house. They hadn’t, though they would later remember a black man passing them on the sidewalk as they walked home from school. A black man was not a common sight in Belmont in 1963, and virtually every good citizen who had seen him walking down Pleasant Street that afternoon remembered him.

  In hindsight—Belmont now forever marred by its first murder—some witnesses agreed that the black man might have looked like he was in a hurry. He had glanced back several times. He had walked fast, hands in his coat pockets, and had almost walked into some bushes as he passed Dougie Dreyer and two neighborhood girls on their way home from school. A sub-shop owner named Louis Pizzuto caught sight of him from behind his restaurant counter and was sufficiently curious to step around to the doorway to watch him pass. The black man had stopped in at the Pleasant Street Pharmacy across the street and then reemerged a few minutes later with a pack of cigarettes. The teenage boy who worked at the pharmacy said that he had bought a pack of Pall Malls for twenty-eight cents but had not seemed nervous. A middle-aged woman said that he hadn’t seemed nervous but that the skin of his face was “pocky.” Sometime later Louis Pizzuto walked into the pharmacy to make sure everything was okay. So what did the big darkie want?—or something much like that—he asked the boy behind the counter.

  Not much, it seemed, except the cigarettes. The black man was tall and thin and wore brown checked pants and a black overcoat. Some remembered him wearing a dark hat and sunglasses, and some remembered that he had a moustache and sideburns. Soon it would be known that he crossed the street to the bus stop and boarded the first bus that came, which, unfortunately, was going in the wrong direction. Instead of getting off, he stayed on it to Park Circle, smoked a cigarette with the bus driver during the five-minute layover and then continued back toward Cambridge. He stepped off the bus in Harvard Square at nineteen minutes to four and walked past Out-of-Town News to the closest bar he could find. He would have been sitting at the bar counter ordering a ten-cent beer just as Israel Goldberg opened the door of his strangely quiet home. He would have been in a taxicab heading toward a friend’s apartment in Central Square when police cruisers began converging on Scott Road. And he would have been walking around Central Square looking for his girlfriend—who had left him several days earlier—when Leah Goldberg, Bessie and Israel’s twenty-four-year-old daughter, arrived at the murder scene and was led by a police officer to her stunned and grief-struck father.

  Leah chose not to look at her mother’s body; the last time she’d seen her mother was at dinner the night before, and she wanted to keep it that way. She did cast around the house, though, and spotted on the kitchen counter a piece of paper that the police officers
had missed. It was from the Massachusetts Employment Security Office on Huntington Avenue in Boston, and it had a name written on it. Shortly after that discovery the phone rang, and a woman named Mrs. Martin asked for Israel Goldberg. Mrs. Martin said she was calling from the Massachusetts Division of Employment Security and just wanted to know how the new cleaning man had worked out.

  He murdered my wife, that’s how he worked out! Israel Goldberg screamed into the phone.

  The name on the employment stub was Roy Smith. Smith was originally from Oxford, Mississippi, but his records at Employment Security had him living at 441 Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury. That wasn’t true; he really lived with his girlfriend at 175 Northampton Street in Boston. The landlady, however, told the police that Smith’s girlfriend had moved out four or five days earlier. Two plainclothes officers stayed on Northampton Street while word went out to the Cambridge police station that Smith might be in the area looking for his girlfriend. At 11:13 p.m. the police issued a bulletin, accompanied by Roy Smith’s mug shots and fingerprint data from a previous arrest, announcing that he was wanted for murder in the town of Belmont. Bessie Goldberg was the ninth Boston-area woman to be raped and strangled in less than a year, and many of the victims had been elderly. If Roy Smith had indeed killed Bessie Goldberg—and by now the authorities knew that his criminal history included grand larceny, assault with a dangerous weapon, and public drunkenness—they had their first break in a series of murders that had virtually paralyzed the city of Boston.