A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  James Jenkins is Roy’s uncle on his mother’s side. He is a small, dignified man who lives near the airport in South Memphis with his wife, Arizona. As a teenager Arizona fasted for three days and was visited by the Lord in her own living room and started testifying on the spot, and she has been testifying ever since. She and James have had had fourteen children, though one of their sons was killed by a drug dealer who broke into his apartment and shot him with a .357 Magnum. He was trying to kill someone else.

  When Roy was young he spent some time with James in Memphis, and he immediately fell in love with Arizona’s sister. The sister was nineteen years old and spent six months making promises to Roy while simultaneously trying to keep her husband from finding out. Her husband finally tracked Roy down and had a conversation with him that involved at least one knife, and after that the affair ended and Roy left Memphis for good. Working odd jobs, Roy followed his uncle to Wayne, Michigan, and then to Detroit and finally to Chicago. Uncle and nephew wound up on the West Side living together and working in restaurants together and drinking together and fighting together. According to James, they could get into a fight just walking down the street and looking at someone wrong.

  “One time I got into a theater, and this white guy behind me put his feet up cross the seat back,” James recalls of one particularly memorable evening out with Roy. “I turned and I said, ‘I don’t think it right you putting your feet up in my face,’ and so he said, ‘I’ll tell you what—when you move ’em them I’ll let ’em be moved,’ so I looked around to see where he was at and when he wasn’t payin’ no ’tention I was on him. I jump over the seat and tried to knock his face off, but I didn’t know what I’d grabbed; he just stood up and I’d grabbed a paratrooper. Man, he was so much bigger ’n me, I could feel all that weight, and I can’t turn him loose now, and then his friends all get into it, and they turned the lights on and everything, they pulled me offa him and kicked me out. Roy said, ‘Let’s go back in there,’ and I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ That’s the way Roy was.”

  In Natchez, Mississippi, in the mid-1930s, a black murderer named Phil Williams was executed by the state for killing his wife and father-in-law. Contrary to custom Williams refused to repent, ask forgiveness, or address the Lord. He simply requested chicken dumplings and cigars for his last meal and went to the gallows without apology or remorse. It was an act that infuriated the white establishment but secretly pleased some of the blacks, who saw it as a rare act of defiance. Three sociologists in Natchez around the time of the execution interviewed a black man who explained Williams this way: “He wasn’t much good at livin’, but he knew how to die.”

  That would have been a good description of Roy, except that he wasn’t dead yet. By his midtwenties Smith had served time in one of the worst prisons in the country, had been fired from innumerable jobs, had no steady line of work or steady relationship, didn’t own property, didn’t even own a car, and had a predilection for bar-room fighting and petty theft that suggested at least a minor drinking problem if not outright alcoholism. Going back to Oxford was clearly not a good plan, and it was only a matter of time before he got himself into real trouble in Chicago. It was a measure of his situation that he decided his best option was to reenlist in the military—this time, the army. Even that didn’t go well; barely a year into his service Roy was dishonorably discharged for what his prison records described as a “fraudulent enlistment.” Other documents recorded that he had gone AWOL, noting that he was also hospitalized in Jacksonville, Florida, with a broken jaw. It was not hard to imagine that alcohol, the broken jaw, and the AWOL charge were somehow all connected on a long bad night in the bars of Jacksonville.

  Roy Smith was not one of those people who left much paper behind him; leases, electric bills, car notes are invariably in someone else’s name. The one thing he did show up regularly on, though, was police reports. If Roy Smith was anywhere for any length of time, the police seemed to know about it. Smith took his discharge in New Jersey in January 1955, and before the month was out he got into trouble across the river in New York. He was living in Harlem and working as a deliveryman for the Bailey Green Button and Buckle Company, and on January 29 he was arrested for trying to kill a woman with a pistol.

  According to his arrest file, Roy had been drinking with three friends in a Harlem apartment when he started to get out of control. His friends pushed him out of the apartment and locked the door, which prompted Roy to pull a pistol out of his pocket and empty several rounds into the door. The gun was a Smith and Wesson .32-caliber “Victoria” that he bought for three dollars from a friend. Failing to shoot his way back into the apartment, he went down to the street and walked about a block, until he arrived at a shoe store at what was then 2031 Seventh Avenue. The time was ten minutes to seven. There was only one person in the store, a woman named Sally Wright, and Roy pulled the revolver out of his pocket and asked if she knew what it was.

  In fact Sally Wright did not know what it was—the gun was so small she thought it was a toy. Smith allegedly pulled the trigger, but the pistol failed to fire, whereupon Smith slapped her across the face and continued pulling the trigger. Wright could hear the mechanism going click, click, click. Wright rushed to the window to wave for help, but she couldn’t get anyone’s attention, so she told Roy that she was going to go in back to get her dog. Unable to get the gun to fire and probably too drunk to keep Sally Wright from getting her dog—if indeed she even had one—Roy fled out the front door and walked several blocks home to his apartment in West 122nd Street.

  He must finally have gotten the gun to work, because police responded to a report of shots fired in the hallway of the building, and Roy was arrested outside his apartment with the gun in his right-hand coat pocket. He was taken back to the Twenty-eighth Precinct House in Harlem, where he was booked for illegal possession of a weapon, carrying a concealed weapon and first-and second-degree assault. Roy admitted to firing shots into his friends’ apartment—an indiscretion that he attributed to too much alcohol—but he denied any involvement in the assault at the shoe store. Sally Wright positively identified Smith, however, and a ballistics expert found one live round in his revolver that had been dented by the gun’s firing mechanism. Someone tried to fire that round, in other words, but it failed to go off. Bullets recovered from the apartment door were also examined, and a handwritten sentence at the bottom of the arrest file notes, “Ballistics supposed to have reported that [the bullets] were fired from defendant’s gun.”

  On the face of it, if one believes the arrest report, Roy tried to kill someone and was prevented only by bad ammunition in a cheap gun. By all rights Sally Wright should have been dead with a bullet hole in her forehead. There were some odd things about the crime, though. First of all there was no explanation—and no legal reason—for why Roy was not charged with attempted murder. He put a gun to a woman’s head and pulled the trigger; the fact that it didn’t fire had no bearing whatsoever on his intention to take a human life. Second, there was no explanation for why the ballistics results were added to the crime report in longhand and couched in such uncertain terms. (Eight years later Roy’s criminal records in Massachusetts stated, inexplicably, that the gun he used in the New York assault was made of wood.)

  To confuse matters still further, Roy told police that he had two children and a wife named Dorothy, and that he had served in the army continuously since 1947. Both were straight-out lies and probably just an attempt to elicit the sympathy of the court; they didn’t. Roy pleaded guilty to second-degree assault, and the Court of General Sessions sentenced Roy to one-to-six years in Sing Sing. He served almost his full sentance before being released on parole and returning to his apartment and his old job at Bailey Green. He managed to avoid the attention of the authorities for almost a year before surfacing in Boston, where he had been thrown into the Billerica House of Corrections for ten days for “threatening” behavior. Now Roy was living in Roxbury—Boston’s version of Harlem—and working a
variety of jobs, including as a cleaning man in a candy store and as a “lube man” at an auto shop. He was making sixty-five dollars a week and living from apartment to apartment, possibly because his utilities and back rent kept catching up with him.

  He was also starting to show up more and more frequently on police blotters, though some of the crimes—a 1958 arrest for adultery that could have gotten him three years in prison—more reflected the times than the man. The adultery charge cost him only twenty-five dollars, but still, Roy Smith was clearly a man not fully in control of his life. Shortly after the adultery incident, Roy was arrested for assaulting someone with a bottle opener. The charges were eventually dropped, but his troubles didn’t end there. Over the next few years he was charged with public drunkenness, for not being properly licensed to drive, for not properly registering his car, for attaching his plates to another car, for driving without car insurance, for driving under the influence, for driving with a suspended license—twice—for driving away from an accident, and again for public drunkenness. It was during this era of petty crime and bad judgment that Roy met a young black woman named Carol Bell and got her pregnant.

  Carol Bell was from Plainfield, New Jersey, and worked for the Plymouth Coat Company in Boston. In Roy’s arrest file she was described as his “paramour.” Carol Bell was twenty-six years old and very pretty and had never had a child before. The young couple moved into a small apartment near Central Square, Cambridge, and in late November 1959, Carol gave birth to a son named Thomas. His nickname would be Scooter. What might have introduced a new era of stability and responsibility in Roy’s life instead seemed just to have opened up another arena for legal trouble. Not even a year after his son’s birth, Roy was picked up for “illegitimacy.” At the time of his arrest, illegitimacy was defined as having a child out of wedlock, and it was a crime that only men could be charged with. There was a provision of the law, though, that required the man to provide financially for the mother of his illegitimate child, and it was under that provision that Roy was charged and put on probation. He managed to make it for about six months before getting picked up again for the same crime, and this time the courts got serious. Roy was sentenced to one year in Billerica prison.

  By now Roy had been in the system so many times that the judges, the bailiffs, the prison guards must have started to recognize him. It is hard to know what to make of someone who sabotaged himself so expertly and regularly. The assault in New York aside—and the police report is sufficiently puzzling that it’s ultimately unclear what really happened that night—Roy was not a habitually violent man, and he was certainly no career criminal. These were not calculated crimes, like robbery; these were crimes of convenience, committed by someone who couldn’t afford to register and insure his car but still wanted to drive. These were the crimes of someone who was so chronically broke that he had to shortcut the system, but he did it so sloppily that he kept getting caught. Each arrest cost him money, which put him even farther behind than he was before. Roy was in an awful ratchet mechanism that seemed only to click downward.

  It is not hard to see a drinking problem in Roy’s endless situations, but there was more to it than that. Roy was different from Carol and most of his other friends in that he was from the South. He was from a part of the country where a black man driving a nice car was automatically pulled over because every sheriff in Mississippi knew there was no way he could’ve earned that kind of money legally, and they were probably right. The North was supposed to be different, and in some ways it was—you couldn’t get lynched, for example—but you could still work your whole life and die almost as badly off as when you started. So why even try? Why even embark on the whole wretched enterprise?

  No reason to, Roy must have decided early on—judging, at least, by the results. No life, it seems, could get driven downward that fast by bad luck alone.

  TEN

  BILL HAGMAIER, FORMER director of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime:

  “The classic serial killer is a true predator that sits and plans and fantasizes and even goes out and rehearses sometimes. When a serial killer is evolving, sometimes his first murder is almost an accident, or an act of violence that is really a displaced aggression; he’s mad at someone else or something else and he kills and then says, ‘Oh no, what have I done?’ After a while he gets away with it, he feels comfortable, and he starts to rationalize: ‘That person deserved it. I shouldn’t have done it, but it was their fault, not mine.’ And then he gets into a thing where the motivation is no longer sex or frustration—though that’s part of it—the real motivation is control. He plays God. And he’s not just playing God with the victims, he’s playing God with the newspaper reporters, the police officers, the author who’s going to come along later.”

  The National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime is a department within the FBI that is devoted to understanding the mind of the serial killer. One of its founders was a former FBI agent named Robert Ressler, who conducted prison interviews with numerous multiple murderers to understand what drove them to kill. Ressler used the term “serial killer” to describe sexually sadistic murderers who did not seem to be able to stop killing. Whoever was strangling older women in Boston in the summer of 1962, he fit the profile of a classic serial killer almost perfectly. Furthermore he was almost certainly an “organized” killer, meaning that he was in control of his actions. Disorganized killers are often paranoid schizophrenics who have trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy—people who kill because voices command them to, for example, or because an outside force threatens to destroy them, and so they strike first. These people are not choosing to kill so much as—at least in their own minds—trying to survive. Because disorganized killers are often afflicted with full-blown psychosis, they tend to live alone or with their parents and have difficulty passing for “normal” in society. They pick their victims more randomly, often from their own neighborhood or social group, and leave behind crime scenes that, as Ressler says, “display the confusion of the killer’s mind.”

  If the most terrifying thing about disorganized killers is that they’re criminally insane, the most terrifying thing about organized killers is that they’re not. This is how serial killer Ted Bundy described the moment of death: “You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes…a person in that situation is God. You then possess them and they shall forever be a part of you. And the grounds where you kill them or leave them become sacred to you, and you will always be drawn back to them.”

  Those words are clearly not the product of a disorderly mind; they are the product of a superbly articulate person who has spent a lot of time thinking about what it feels like to take a human life. Ted Bundy admitted to killing thirty women and hinted that he may have killed three or four times that number. If one could design a machine for murdering young women, it would look a lot like Ted Bundy. He was classically good-looking, clean-cut, well educated—in psychology and law—and very, very angry. It was an anger that seemed to have been there since his childhood, when he was caught with a steak knife climbing into bed with his aunt. Most sexual predators choose highly vulnerable women as their prey—young girls, older women, prostitutes—but in his arrogance, Bundy did the opposite. He preyed on the smartest, most attractive women he could find, reveling in the fact that he could get them to trust him enough to allow him to kill them.

  Bundy’s description of what it felt like for him to choke a woman to death occurred during one of his many interviews with Special Agent Hagmaier, shortly before Bundy was executed by the state of Florida in 1989. Bundy had grown close to Hagmaier over the course of their interviews, and even requested that Hagmaier be present at his execution. He told Hagmaier toward the end that he could have avoided the death penalty if he’d gone along with his lawyers in an insanity defense. “I’m not crazy—you know I’m not crazy,” Bundy said. “My ego killed me. If I’d pretended to be crazy like the psychiatris
ts and lawyers wanted me to be, I’d still be alive.”

  That distinction is the crux of a debate in the justice system. One could argue that anyone who tortures and kills human beings for sexual gratification is by definition insane, so any attempt to prosecute them must ultimately result in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The legal definition of an “insane” act, however, rests on a concept called the “irresistible impulse.” A disorganized killer who is driven to kill and dismember young women because he believes he needs their blood to survive, for example, could reasonably be seen to be at the mercy of forces beyond his control—and therefore innocent. At some point, however, an irresistible impulse simply becomes an impulse that a person chooses not to resist, and that is when murderers become accountable for their actions.

  Determining that point varies from state to state, but generally a person is legally accountable if he is both rational and understands that what he is doing is wrong. This is called the McNaughten rule, or the “policeman at the elbow” test. If the accused had a policeman standing next to him, the courts ask, would he still have committed the crime? A disorganized killer who murders with no stealth or planning and makes no attempt to hide evidence or conceal his identity might well commit murder whether a policeman is there or not. An organized killer, on the other hand, would refrain from killing because he would not want to get caught. Although organized killers are capable of the kind of butchery that characterizes a disorganized crime scene, their violence is not that of unrestrained savagery; rather it is a calm, sadistic process than can go on for days. Organized killers plan their murders in advance, assemble “murder kits” of implements that they’ll need—knives, duct tape, handcuffs—and take great pains to cleanse the crime scene of evidence. As a result organized killers can go for years or decades without getting caught. They are engaged in a chess game not only with their victims but with the authorities, and it’s a game they wouldn’t be playing if they didn’t think they would win.