A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  Of all the Smith sons, Lerone was the one with the wild streak, with the knack for inviting the attention of the law. Lerone grew up stealing chickens from people’s backyards and selling them in town. Lerone was in trouble with the law so continually that he would take off running at the sight of a policeman whether he’d done anything wrong or not. There were times when Lerone had to sleep under other peoples’ houses to avoid being arrested. When Lerone was older he got a shack out in the country where he bootlegged, raised hogs, worked on old tractors, and had parties. The place was a half hour drive down a dirt road from the nearest highway, and people would show up at all hours to drink, gamble, and carry on in ways that they couldn’t in town.

  It was with Lerone, of course, that Roy had his first very serious encounter with Sheriff Boyce Bratton.

  THE LAFAYETTE COUNTY Courthouse dominates Oxford from the center of the town square. It is a whitewashed two-story building with high arched windows and four fluted columns on a second-floor veranda that looks out over huge, graceful water oaks. A four-faced clock on the roof peak theoretically gave the time to every person in town, though it was often broken. A granite statue of a Confederate soldier on the south side of the building commemorates the young men who “gave their lives in a just and holy cause.” It is worth noting that one out of three men in Mississippi’s armed forces died for that cause, and that one-fifth of the state budget went to fitting the survivors with artificial limbs. In Oxford war fever ran so high that virtually the entire student body of the University of Mississippi enlisted en masse, closing the school. Their regiment, called the University Grays, suffered a 100 percent casualty rate during the infamous Pickett’s charge at the battle of Gettysburg; every single man in the regiment was either killed, wounded, or captured before they reached the top of Seminary Ridge. Inside the double oak doors of the courthouse, through the clerk’s office on the right, in a small windowless room in the back, rows of leatherbound docket books lean haphazardly on shelves.

  The books are two feet high and broken down at the spine and embossed with gold lettering. In the volume that includes 1949, on page 312, under the date March 17, Roy Smith’s name is entered with the charge of burglary and a bail of one thousand dollars. It had been hardly a month since Roy’s last encounter with the law, and this time he was with Lerone and his half brother, Tommy Hudson. Tommy and Lerone supposedly didn’t get along very well, but they got along well enough to get arrested together.

  Lerone and Tommy were arrested first, and Roy was picked up the following day. They were arrested by Sheriff Bratton, who may have simply gone to Andy Smith’s place on South Sixteenth and told him that he wanted the boys to turn themselves in. Bratton stood only five feet eight but was so feared that he didn’t even bother to wear a gun. When he had to arrest someone, he simply showed up at their home and told them they were coming downtown; invariably they complied. The jail was a two-story brick building on the east side of the square, with a kitchen on the first floor where the jailer’s wife cooked for the inmates, and a single cell on the second floor where the inmates slept. The cell was secured by a massive door hewed from a single slab of oak that was hung on iron hinges and locked by an iron bar padlocked through two iron hasps. It still had bullet holes in it from an earlier lynching. A single window, crudely barred, gave the inmates a view of the streets in which they had just committed their crimes. “The dark limber hands would lie in the grimed interstices,” William Faulkner wrote in 1948 about the Oxford jailhouse window, “while the mellow untroubled repentless voices would shout down to the women in the aprons of cooks or nurses and the girls in their flash cheap clothes from the mail order houses or the other young men who had not been caught yet or had been caught and freed yesterday, gathered along the street.”

  Roy and Tommy and Lerone had committed the sin of stealing cotton. Tommy owned an old Packard, and the three brothers had driven it out to a farm owned by a big planter named Guy McCarty and sent Roy into the “cotton house,” where the raw cotton was stored, to drag out four or five bags. Cotton was going for fifty or sixty cents a pound back then—the war had caused cotton prices to skyrocket—and a trunk full of cotton would have been worth hundreds of dollars. It would have been an enormous amount of money for them, even split three ways—but it also put them way over the fifty-dollar limit for grand larceny. They apparently made it off the McCarty place without getting caught but immediately ran into problems back in town. Roy’s old boss, Ross Brown, had a cotton gin behind the post office, and Lerone and Tommy drove the cotton there to try to sell it. They must have been asked where the cotton came from almost as soon as they drove onto the scales.

  “They probably tried to pass themselves off as sharecroppers,” says John Bounds, an Oxford insurance agent who knew the Smith family very well. “Sharecroppers could bring cotton in, but most of the time it would be the farmer. They would have gotten all kinds of questions. ‘Where is your land?’ ‘Which place do you share on?’ If you don’t have a cotton allotment from the government you can’t sell cotton, you can’t grow cotton. And the buyer would know every farmer in the county. It wouldn’t have taken long for them to ask someone whether Tommy and Lerone were sharecropping for them that year.”

  Andy raised the thousand-dollar bond to get Roy released, and Roy made an appointment with JWT Falkner to represent him in court. The office was above a barbershop on the town square and was rigged with a water hose to disperse loiterers from the front steps. When Roy walked in he would have found himself standing in front of a simple wood desk with tooled hardwood legs on iron casters. JWT faced him across the desk in a straight-backed slatted swivel chair that was also on casters. The office had old hardwood floors and dented steel filing cabinets and a stamped tin ceiling with magnesium lights and two floor-to-ceiling windows that filtered the daylight through cheap louvered blinds. Falkner probably told Roy that his not-guilty plea didn’t have a chance in hell and that the most he, Falkner, could do for him was to minimize his prison time. By prison he would have meant Parchman Farm, a notorious state-run plantation a hundred miles west in the Mississippi Delta. That service would have cost Roy about five hundred dollars, which would have been money well spent. Parchman Farm operated at a profit, in part because it was known for—quite literally—working its inmates to death.

  It took almost a year for Roy’s case to be heard by Judge Taylor McElroy. An article in the Oxford Eagle on March 23, 1950, commented that justice had been served at the circuit court that week despite the fact that not a single jury had been convened and not a single witness had been put on the stand. “Just about every defendant pled guilty without a trial,” the newspaper gloated, “and are now at Parchman serving their sentence.” Twenty-three men—ranging from James Lester, who got eighteen months for operating a whiskey still, to Eugene Chatham, who got natural life for killing his wife on the streets of Oxford—decided not to annoy Judge McElroy by insisting on a trial. Guilty pleas were common in Mississippi courts, by innocent and guilty alike, but clearing an entire slate was remarkable even by the standards of the time. “Roy Smith, colored,” the Eagle noted in the very last court entry, identifying his race, as was customary. “Burglary, six months.”

  Roy was now an inmate of the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm.

  FOUR

  THE BELMONT POLICE had never investigated a murder before—their notes were typed on forms that read “Traffic Bureau Report” at the top—so three additional detectives were sent by the state police. They arrived within an hour of the discovery of Bessie Goldberg’s body and immediately began assembling evidence that Roy Smith had committed the crime. Unlike most murders involving strangers, the fact that Smith had been at the Goldbergs’ that day wasn’t enough to convict him; Smith was supposed to have been there. The very thing that made him a suspect also explained his presence adequately. The detectives needed either a plausible motive for Smith to kill, or they needed physical evidence linking him to the dead
body.

  At ten-thirty that night—after the murder scene had been photographed, dusted for fingerprints, and sketched and Bessie Goldberg’s body had been removed for autopsy—a Belmont police officer named Alfred King interviewed the stricken Israel Goldberg. With King were state police lieutenant John Cahalane and Sgt. Leo McNulty. Israel Goldberg, of course, was both a witness and—theoretically, anyway—a suspect, though it must have been clear to all of the detectives that this frail sixty-eight-year-old man could not possibly have murdered his wife in the two-minute period between his entering the house and rushing back outside in a panic. Goldberg stated that their regular cleaning man could not come that day, so his wife had called the Massachusetts Employment Security office, and they had sent Roy Smith over. Israel said he had left a ten-dollar bill and five singles with his wife to pay for the work, but none of that money had been found in the house, and neither had the little snap purse that Bessie would have kept it in. The most that Bessie would have paid Smith was six dollars for the work that he had done, plus a little more for bus fare. That meant that eight dollars or so—and a purse—were unaccounted for. If the police could place the purse in Smith’s hands, or somehow show that he had more money than he should, a senseless crime would have an obvious logic that any jury could understand. Roy Smith had killed someone for eight dollars and change.

  Over the next several days police officers scoured local sewers and street gutters for the missing purse. They checked the Goldberg house as well as the garage of the house next door. They tracked down everyone who lived or worked in the immediate area and took statements from them, and as word of the murder spread, they started to receive calls at the police station from people who thought they could “shed some light” on the matter. Mrs. Lillian Cutliffe, who worked at the Laundromat on Pleasant Street, stated that “she saw a negro walk in front of the shop between 11:30 and 12:00 noon, wearing glasses.” Smith also caught the eye of Louis Pizzuto, who owned Gigi’s Sub Shop, around 2:30 and 3:00 p.m. “The colored man was in his mid-twenties,” Pizzuto told the police, “and wearing a long dark coat that hung below his knees…and walked continually looking back.” Smith had his hands in his coat pockets, so Pizzuto couldn’t tell if he was carrying anything.

  Unfortunately no one in the pharmacy saw Smith carrying a purse either, though Smith had bought a pack of Pall Malls for twenty-eight cents. The bus driver who picked Smith up didn’t see him carrying a coin purse, and neither did the neighborhood children who passed him on their way home. The children all agreed that he had looked as if he was in a hurry, but their estimates varied on what time it had been. The later Smith left the house, the less time there would be for someone else plausibly to have committed the murder; a time of 3:30 would pretty much nail his case shut. Unfortunately for the police, adult witnesses placed the time around three o’clock, which left a substantial gap—fifty minutes—during which someone else could have killed Bessie Goldberg. It was unlikely, but it was possible, and any good defense attorney could turn a case upside down with the merely possible.

  Meanwhile investigators were not getting much help from the body. State police detectives stated in their report that Bessie Goldberg was found on her back in the living room near a divan with a stocking wrapped tightly, but unknotted, around her neck. Her right arm was flung out straight from the shoulder, and her left arm lay across her chest in the same direction. She was fully clothed but for her left shoe, which was lying next to her, and for her left stocking, which was around her neck. Her blouse was pulled halfway open, apparently popping off a button that landed on the divan next to where she lay. Her skirt and underclothes were pulled up in the front, and, as the report put it delicately, “the central portion of her white pants appeared to have been torn out of them completely, exposing her person.” Her face was the plum blue of death by strangulation, and there was a spot of blood on the right corner of her mouth. She was still wearing her eyeglasses.

  An autopsy was performed several hours later by Dr. Edwin Hill of the Harvard School of Legal Medicine, with Middlesex County medical examiner David Dow looking on. Hill concluded that Bessie Goldberg “came to her death as a result of asphyxia by ligature.” Not only was her neck deeply furrowed by the stocking that had strangled her, but her skin and eyelids were covered with numerous pinpoint hemorrhages called petechiae, which are nearly always present in stranglings. Blood cannot drain from the head because of the pressure applied to the neck arteries, so the delicate capillaries near the surface of the tissue eventually burst. Dr. Hill, however, could not find any outward signs of injury to Bessie Goldberg’s body. This was mildly unusual but not unheard of. According to a Swedish study, roughly half of strangulation victims have visible wounds on them, mostly bruises and fingernail imprints in the throat. Presumably the weaker—or older—the victim, the less force is necessary to kill them and the fewer injuries they have.

  What was odd, though, was the complete lack of injury to Roy Smith. When he was picked up by the Cambridge police, Smith had a small amount of old blood on his pants but no wounds on either of his hands. According to the Swedish study, this is almost unheard of. The study focused on fourteen attacks on adults in which the victim was neither drunk, retarded, nor otherwise incapacitated, and in only one case out of fourteen did the victim fail to wound the attacker before dying. Most of these wounds were fingernail imprints in the forearms, fingers, and thumbs. “Against an attack with hands one defends oneself with hands,” the study explains. “The thumb grip is the strongest and most active part of the hand even in the act of strangulation and is therefore often subject to self-defense injuries.”

  The lack of injuries to both parties, then, probably meant that Bessie Goldberg had lost consciousness too quickly to put up much resistance—or to require much force to subdue. Whoever killed Bessie Goldberg must first have incapacitated her and then gone on to the uglier business of rape and strangulation. There is one very easy way to do that. It is called, among other things, the carotid takedown. When a person dies by strangulation—either by hanging, ligature, or manual compression of the neck—they usually do not die because the air supply to their lungs has been cut off; they die because blood supply to their brain has been cut off. This is merciful; at any given moment there are a couple of minutes’ worth of air in the lungs, and death by asphyxiation is a slow and desperate process that can leave both victim and attacker covered in lacerations.

  There is far less oxygen in the brain, however, and death by cerebral hypoxia—lack of oxygen to the brain—is correspondingly fast. Oxygen-bearing blood reaches the brain via the carotid arteries in the neck and leaves primarily through the jugular veins. Only eleven pounds of pressure to the carotid arteries are necessary to stop blood flow to the brain, and once the blood flow has stopped, the person loses consciousness in an average of ten seconds. A person who has lost consciousness because of constricted carotid arteries will regain consciousness in another ten seconds or so if the pressure is released. If pressure is not released, however, the unconscious person dies within minutes. As a result people have killed themselves by strangulation in the most benign-looking circumstances. They have hanged themselves from a bedpost while lying next to their sleeping spouse. (The weight of the head against the noose is enough to block the carotid artery.) They have hanged themselves while sitting on the floor. They have hanged themselves despite having a permanent tracheostomy—a breathing hole in their throat—that allowed a full supply of air to the lungs.

  One can imagine that in order to tie a stocking around Bessie Goldberg’s neck without sustaining wounds to his arms and face, the killer had to incapacitate her first, probably by cutting off blood flow in her carotid. He may have done this deliberately, or he may have done it unknowingly and been surprised by how quickly she lost consciousness. It takes considerable strength to crush someone’s trachea, but it takes almost no effort to block their carotid arteries; the fact that Bessie Goldberg died with her glasses on suggests the la
tter. A small bone in her neck called the hyoid was also unbroken, which is extremely rare in elderly strangulation victims. In all likelihood, then, very little force was used to kill Bessie Goldberg. The killer almost certainly put her in a headlock from behind and squeezed her neck until she went limp.

  The problem with the carotid takedown is that it works too well; numerous people have inadvertently been killed by police officers who were following proper procedure but didn’t release their suspect in time. If Bessie Goldberg died in this way, it would have happened so quickly and silently that even someone in the next room might not have known. There is no history of sexual predation in Smith’s past, and if he did indeed kill Bessie Goldberg, the experience may have been nearly as confusing to him as it was to her. Minutes earlier he was cleaning a white woman’s house in suburban Belmont; now she was dead at his feet. His life as he knew it was over and another—undoubtedly worse—one was about to begin.

  FIVE

  THE FIRST ONE was found dead in her small Boston apartment on the evening of June 14, 1962. Her name was Anna Slesers, and she’d been clubbed on the back of the head and then strangled with the belt from her blue taffeta housecoat. No one knew that her murder would be the first of many, so her story merited only a few paragraphs in the Boston Globe. “An attractive divorcee was found strangled in her third-floor apartment at 77 Gainsboro Street [sic],” the article began. “Her son found Mrs. Anna Slesers, 55, on the kitchen floor when he came to take her to church. A cord was tightly knotted around her neck.”