A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  “MR. PIZZUTO.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you recall the first time you learned what happened to Mrs. Goldberg?”

  “Oh, I would say about five o’clock.”

  “Did you discuss it with a great many people?”

  “No, I never discussed it with anybody.”

  “Never discussed what?”

  “I didn’t know nothing about the case, didn’t discuss anything with anybody.”

  “There was no case then.”

  “Well, you are just saying that—”

  “Just let me ask the questions. If my question is worded improperly you can tell me that and don’t answer it.”

  Louis Pizzuto was one of the commonwealth’s most important witnesses because he—and he alone—claimed that Roy Smith looked agitated and nervous as he walked away from the Goldberg home. Without Pizzuto, Smith was just another man walking down the street. Pizzuto was the man who owned a sub shop called Gigi’s. Around three o’clock on the afternoon of March 11, he had seen Roy Smith walk past his shop on the opposite side of Pleasant Street. A black man was not a common sight in Belmont, so Pizzuto got up from his seat and walked to the doorway to follow Smith’s progress. He watched Smith go into the pharmacy and then emerge a few minutes later and continue walking up Pleasant Street toward the bus stop. According to Pizzuto, Smith glanced behind him continually as he walked. Sometime later, Pizzuto left his shop and walked across the street to the pharmacy.

  Pizzuto was a big man and as he testified he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and began to dab the sweat off his face.

  “You asked the kid in the drug store,” Beryl Cohen went on, “whether the colored fellow went in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what you said to him? Did you say, ‘Was there a colored fellow in there buying cigarettes?’”

  “I said, ‘Did a colored fellow come into the store?’ I didn’t ask him ‘cigarettes.’”

  “Did you say ‘colored fellow’?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was Kenneth Fitzpatrick you were talking to?”

  “I don’t know his name, he works in the drugstore.”

  “Did you say to Ken Fitzpatrick, ‘Did you see the big darkie?’”

  “No, I did not.”

  “You didn’t say that?”

  “I might have said ‘negro.’”

  “You might have said ‘negro.’ Did you say ‘nigger’?”

  “Well, I might have said ‘nigger.’”

  “You might have said ‘nigger.’ Did you say, ‘the big darkie’?”

  “I wouldn’t say it.”

  “I’m asking you whether you said it.”

  “Well, yes, I think I said it.”

  “You did say it. What did you say?”

  “‘Was that nigger in your place.’”

  “Did you say, ‘Big nigger’?”

  “No, I didn’t say no ‘big nigger.’”

  Pizzuto had alerted the Belmont police that he’d seen a black man walking down Pleasant Street, but he’d alerted them before he knew there’d been a murder nearby; he’d alerted them simply on principal after noticing police cars in the area. Everyone on Pleasant Street, it seemed, had noticed Smith walk by, and perhaps everyone on Pleasant Street had had the same thought: What’s that black guy doing out here? Not everyone, however, was as forthright about it as Pizzuto. Belmont was a sophisticated town where few people would openly say anything racist, but that didn’t mean they weren’t thinking that way. The merchants in Belmont Center or the bankers up on the Hill might have been just as suspicious of Smith as Pizzuto was, but most would never have owned up to it.

  The thing about racism, though, is that it doesn’t necessarily mean that the black guy didn’t do it, either. The commonwealth’s case against Smith advanced across a broad front that kept Cohen dashing back and forth on the parapets like a man trying to defend a fortress by himself. First came the children. All four of them were asked by Kelley whether they understood what it meant to tell the truth, and all of them answered that they did. Three of the children testified that they passed Roy Smith on their way home around three o’clock and that he looked as if he was in a hurry but not necessarily nervous. The children all testified that soon after they got home they organized a kickball game in front of the Goldberg house, and that Dougie had scored eight runs in a row by the time Mr. Goldberg got home. They testified that while they were playing no one else came or went from the house until Mr. Goldberg arrived, and that he was only inside a few minutes before he rushed back out. Susan Faunce said that when he reemerged he was screaming and crying so hard that she could barely understand him. “Why did this happen to me? Oh, my Bessie!” she understood him to say.

  “Maybe she went into town,” Myrna Spector said to Mr. Goldberg, trying to be helpful. Moments later the children heard the sirens.

  After the children came the issue of the money. Richard Kelley called a succession of taxi drivers, liquor store clerks, pharmacists, and Roy Smith’s friends to add up exactly what Smith spent in the twenty-four hours following the murder. And the amount—“Not a grand total to you…but for Roy Smith, it was blood money,” as Kelley would later tell the jury—was thirteen dollars and seventy-two cents. That was eight dollars more than he should have had, according to what Smith said he was paid at the Goldberg’s. Even more damning, the liquor store clerk said that he’d seen Smith pull a ten and five ones out of his pocket when he paid for his liquor, and Israel Goldberg testified that he’d left a ten and five ones on his Bessie’s night table before leaving that morning.

  And then there was the rape. Why did Roy Smith—who was accused of killing Bessie Goldberg so that he could get away with the robbery—also rape her? At his feet was a dying sixty-two-year-old woman. Was he overcome by lust? By rage at whites? Was he simply insane? Kelley offered no psychological or legal theory on the rape, beyond the fact that Smith was possibly drunk and essentially capable of anything. That rape had occurred, however, was beyond dispute: Dr. Arthur McBey of the state police crime laboratory testified that a vaginal smear taken from Bessie Goldberg showed “numerous intact spermatozoa.” The fact that the sperm cells were intact meant that the sex act had occurred very recently. This was not sex that had happened a day or a week earlier; this was sex that had happened at the same time as the murder. Furthermore there was a small stain on the outside of Smith’s trousers that turned out to be sperm as well, though it could not be determined how old it was. But it looked very much as if Roy Smith had raped Bessie Goldberg and then just pulled up his pants and fled.

  The final component of the commonwealth’s case was the trip to Boston to pick up Smith’s television set. Every person in the car that night testified in one way or another that Smith did not want to stop at the apartment when he saw that there were policemen outside it. Cartwright’s testimony was particularly damning: “I got to Shawmut, he asked me to slow down, then he said, ‘Go faster, they’re still here,’” he told Richard Kelley under direct examination. “I seen two gentlemen in the dark on the other side of the street.”

  This was crucial for the commonwealth. Other than Louis Pizzuto, no one who encountered Smith on the afternoon of the murder thought that he looked agitated. That was a problem. Murder upsets people; it even upsets murderers. Kelley had shown that Smith had opportunity to commit the crime and that he had too much money in his pocket; now with Cartwright he could show that Smith was avoiding arrest and was therefore aware of his own guilt. There were layers upon layers of corroborating testimony, medical testimony, meteorological testimony, but at its essence the commonwealth’s case was this: Roy Smith killed Bessie Goldberg because no one else could have. And then he acted exactly like someone who had committed a murder but did not have the resources or the imagination to actually save himself afterward. He had simply avoided the inevitable as long as possible.

  “You have the defendant here, Roy Smith, whose age is thirty-four
years, thirty-five years,” Kelley told the jury during his summation. “Five foot eleven, about 150 pounds, black hair, brown eyes, slim build, long sideburns and a moustache. And what else do we know about him? We have these pants—these clothes. There are holes in them; I ask you not to criticize the defendant at all for that; for poverty, no one can defend against. But there is nothing that a good bar of soap can’t do. I’m not criticizing his sanitary habits, but I say this: In view of his drinking, is he a man of excessives? Now Mrs. Bessie Goldberg: A very hardworking, good housewife, was thrifty, a gentlewoman, without prejudices, who opened her home to this defendant…and that was repaid by the worst ingratitude conceivable: Death.”

  Kelley worked his way through Roy Smith’s defense with the patient authority of a high school teacher grading term papers.

  “Now, gentlemen, let us assume for the purposes of argument that what Roy Smith said at the police station is true; that he arrived at the Goldberg residence at quarter to twelve and left at quarter to four. The question is, then, who do you believe? Roy Smith at a quarter to twelve, or [witnesses] John Walsh, Antone Marcos and Robert Fitzgerald? They came here and were cross-examined and you heard their testimony…are they all in one grand conspiracy? Then let me ask you to consider in the light of that, the vile inferences that have been made about Mr. Goldberg. In addition to believing that Roy Smith did all that work in two hours, you have got to believe—and you have got to proclaim to the public—that Mr. Goldberg took time to find Mrs. Goldberg. Took time to throw her on the floor. Took time…to push her slip up. Took time to rip her pants and took time to have intercourse. Took time to put that stocking around her neck. Took time to hold it there, hold it, hold it until she was dead. And then after that, took time to move the sofa over. Took time to move the table away from the wall. Took time to put the various cleaning items, the brush, the cloths, on the bricbrac table. And then took time to leave. And they, the defense, make their vile inferences…”

  Richard Kelley had served with the navy in the Pacific during World War II and was slated, along with his father, to be part of the force that was to attack mainland Japan. Richard Kelley was a man who was very clear—all law aside—on the concept of duty, on the concept of right and wrong. “Can any one of us go into the mind of a person that commits any crime of this nature and compare their standards of conduct with yours?” he asked. “Your standards, your backgrounds, your experiences are distant. Roy Smith had no money to go anyplace else. Was there anyone in the world that this man befriended enough to turn to? Much has been said through the whole trial that he wasn’t nervous. Who is to say if he is nervous? Some people may be as cold as ice. Is this defendant in that category? Does he sit quietly and stoically in the box there without any show of emotion? If he is a man of little self-control, would he not stop at the first place for cigarettes after such an undertaking? It is a circumstantial case, gentlemen, and your duty is not an easy one. But I ask you this—”

  No one on the jury knew what a difficult moment this must have been for Richard Kelley. He was from Boston. He was Irish. The terrible news had come into the courthouse just hours earlier, and he had delivered his entire summation knowing something that almost no one else in the room knew.

  “I ask you this: In these times, do not be lacking in courage. Be true to yourselves, then you will be true to the defendant. You will be true to the people of the Commonwealth. You will be true to the laws we should all uphold. You sit in the capacity of fact-finders, and I urge each one of you that you leave here with the satisfaction that you will never look back and say, ‘I did not perform the duty that was called upon me.’”

  Richard Kelley sat down, and Judge Bolster turned to face Roy Smith. He told him that, since this was a capital case—one in which he could be put to death—he had the right to address the jury. “The privilege is yours,” Judge Bolster said, “if you wish to avail yourself of it.”

  Roy Smith rose from his seat in the defendant’s box. He had shaved his moustache and his sideburns and stood before the jury in his new suit under the high vaulted ceilings. Outside was a dull overcast day, waiting to rain, and the trees were already stripped of their leaves. Smith must have drawn a deep breath. He must have heard his voice shaking as he spoke his few words into the huge room. They would be the only words he would speak during the trial, and they would be perhaps the most important words of his life: “I would like to say to the court and jury,” Smith said, “that I did not kill Mrs. Goldberg, or rob her, or rape her. She was alive when I left. Thank you.”

  The jury had been sequestered in a hotel for over two weeks, as was the custom at the time. They knew little of the recent events of the world and absolutely nothing of the events of that day. Judge Bolster turned in his seat to address the jury and spoke with all the solemnity of a judge and all the sorrow of an American: “Now I have a very sad duty, gentlemen; I don’t know whether you have heard. Early this afternoon one or more assassins in Texas, apparently from high up in a building, fired shots at some of our officials. They hit the president, the vice president, and the governor of Texas, and the president, early this afternoon, died. I ask everyone in the room to rise.”

  The jury rose. Some were crying, others were simply in shock. Not only were half the jurors Irish, they were from Kennedy’s original congressional district. It was as though they’d just learned that someone had killed their brother.

  “I thought fast,” Judge Bolster went on. “I am willing to take the responsibility. You have been here almost three weeks. I venture to think that if the president were here…he would do what I am doing. We are going ahead, but we are going ahead in a thoughtful sorrow about what has transpired. I have watched you gentlemen, and I think you are men of sufficient mental integrity not to let this influence you in any way in the decision of this case. This case is on its own evidence and on the arguments that have been ably presented to you, and so we are going forward. And will you please make every effort to be sure that your decision in this case is in no way tainted by the national disaster that has struck us. So you may retire, Mr. Foreman, and gentlemen, and we start at 8:30 in the morning.”

  With that, the trial of Roy Smith was over. Smith returned to his cell at Billerica House of Corrections and the jury returned to their hotel rooms and Judge Bolster and Beryl Cohen and Richard Kelley returned to their homes and their children and their wives. Each man waited out the long night with his particular worries or fears, but they all had one thing in common: The president of the United States was dead, and no one knew what would happen next.

  FOURTEEN

  THE PRESIDENT WAS hit in the neck and head by two bullets while riding in a motorcade through the city of Dallas, Texas. Seconds earlier the wife of the governor of Texas had turned to him and said, “You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” The shots were fired from a 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight that Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, had bought for twenty-one dollars and change from a mail-order catalog. A spectator said that an “awful look” crossed the president’s face when he was hit before he collapsed across the back of his open limo. Jackie crouched over him protectively, spattered in blood, as the motorcade raced for Parkland Memorial Hospital.

  Doctors at Parkland gave the dying president blood and oxygen and even opened up his throat with a tracheotomy, but to no avail; around half an hour after the attack, Jackie kissed her husband on the lips for the last time and told the priest to pray over him. Father Oscar Huber commended the president’s soul to God and then Kennedy was placed in a sealed bronze casket and loaded into a military ambulance. The ambulance pulled away with the drapes drawn shut and Jacqueline riding next to her dead husband. Ninety minutes had passed since they were waving happily to the crowds in downtown Dallas.

  Kennedy was the youngest American president ever elected, the first American president born in the twentieth century, and the first American president to tackle aggressively what was effectively a sys
tem of apartheid in the southern states. He published a book the same year he graduated cum laude from Harvard University; he was nearly killed when a Japanese destroyer sliced his PT boat in half in the South Pacific during World War II; and he went on to publish a Pulitzer Prize–winning book before being elected president of the United States. He was so widely beloved that even in Moscow, women screamed in the streets when they heard the news of his death.

  Vice President Lyndon Johnson, whom Kennedy had defeated in the Democratic primaries in 1960, had been riding two cars behind Kennedy when the shooting started. He was immediately driven to safety and then put on the presidential jet, where he was sworn in as president by a female judge who wept openly while administering the oath. Johnson’s wife and Jackie Kennedy stood by his side as he raised his right hand and repeated the words that shifted the duties of the president onto him. The jet landed at Andrews Air Force Base at six o’clock that night, and Johnson stepped off the plane to face a throng of news reporters on the tarmac.

  “I will do my best. That is all I can do,” Johnson told reporters on the tarmac. “I ask for your help, and God’s.”

  The casket bearing Kennedy’s body was delivered from Bethesda Naval Hospital to the White House at four thirty the next morning. Hundreds of spectators who had stood vigil all night watched a blue-gray navy hearse pull up to the north portico in a heavy mist and stop in front of a detail of marines at present-arms. Jackie Kennedy stepped out of the hearse, her clothing still speckled with her husband’s blood, and accompanied the casket with its marine escort into the White House. The casket was placed in the East Room atop a black-draped catafalque with a lit candle at each corner. Four servicemen representing each branch of the armed forces stood at attention with fixed bayonets. The casket was opened for Jackie to pay her last respects to her husband and then closed to receive the statesmen and dignitaries who had begun pouring into Washington from across the country and the world.