A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  Brooke said he was sorry to hear that—very sorry—because word had gotten out that the Strangler Bureau was still investigating the Goldberg murder and it had turned into a political bombshell. Delaney would have to give the file back. According to Delaney, the Middlesex district attorney had gone to the State Supreme Court and complained that the attorney general’s office could not simultaneously review the Roy Smith verdict and also explore the possibility that someone else had committed the murder. It was a conflict of interest. The judges agreed and ordered Brooke to reclaim the file from Delaney.

  Still, Delaney had seen enough for him to have serious doubts about Smith’s guilt. Even though he was young, he had already seen so much rule bending in the system—by everyone from beat cops to county prosecutors—that he took nothing for granted. Such skepticism about the criminal justice system is rare in a cop, and it’s probably no coincidence that soon thereafter, he quit the police force and went on to work as an investigator for F. Lee Bailey. Decades later, he found work helping to overturn bogus rape and murder convictions with a legal aid group in New Jersey called Centurion Ministries. The misconduct that Centurion has uncovered is staggering. One prosecutor they investigated secretly paid his main witness seventy thousand dollars in exchange for crucial testimony. Another prosecutor sent a man named Jimmy Wingo to the electric chair with the unsupported testimony of a lone witness who had lied under oath. She lied, Centurion discovered, because a deputy sheriff had threatened to take her children away if she didn’t; he also coerced her into sleeping with him. In yet another case, an innocent man got a life sentence only because the prosecutor relentlessly pressured three uncooperative witnesses to lie in court. “I will eat stone,” the man told the court after being found guilty. “I will eat dust. I will eat anything…to prove my innocence. I am not the man.” Centurion eventually got the case overturned and was commended by a higher court for their work.

  That phase of Delaney’s life was still decades in his future, but when he and Andy Tuney drove out to Belmont to talk to my mother, he was already a young man keenly attuned to the idea of injustice. Tuney did not necessarily share Delaney’s idealism—or cynicism, depending on how you looked at it—but he was a seasoned investigator who could be counted on to do a thorough job. He had already talked to Russ Blomerth about the kind of worker DeSalvo was. “Couldn’t get him mad,” Tuney had written in his notes about DeSalvo. “Never got tired. Very strong. Unbelievable strength. Didn’t show any great interest re: stranglings.” Blomerth said that DeSalvo had come recommended by a man named Andy Amerault, who had worked with DeSalvo at the Monroe Shipyards. Blomerth hired him on September 4, 1962, a few days after the fifth strangling in Boston, and let him go the following August. In that time Blomerth said that DeSalvo worked briefly on another job in Belmont and then moved on to my parents’ house. He worked roughly forty hours a week but had no set schedule and occasionally spent time on his own. On February 18—the date that Erika Wilsing was attacked in her apartment—DeSalvo was not on the clock for Russ Blomerth. On March 4 and 5—two of the possible dates for the murder of Mary Brown in Lawrence—DeSalvo was also not on the clock. He worked at my parents’ house Wednesday, March 6, and Thursday, March 7, and then returned the following Monday. That was the day Bessie Goldberg was killed.

  At the knock my mother opened the front door, let the two detectives into the living room, and offered them a seat on the couch. Tuney was a tall, attention-getting man who was already a grandfather at forty-three but still managed to maintain a certain reputation around town. (“Good booze and bad broads is what keeps us going,” he once told a newspaper reporter about detective work.) Delaney was recently separated from his wife and trying to decide whether or not to continue police work. My mother brought out a calendar with the dates of the studio job marked on it and described the incident in the basement and the incident with her student, Marie. She showed them the photograph of her and Al and me and pointed out the ladder in the background that Al had been standing on when she told him about the Goldberg murder.

  My mother wanted to know what would have happened if she had gone down into the basement. The detectives agreed that DeSalvo wouldn’t have dared kill her, but they said he might have attempted a very forceful seduction. If he had killed her, they reasoned, he immediately would have become a suspect, and he was too smart for that. Delaney asked if he could keep the calendar and my mother said that that would be all right, and after half an hour or so the men got up and put on their coats and hats and said goodbye. Either that same day or the next—Delaney doesn’t remember—the two men marked their car odometer in front of my parents’ house and then drove through Belmont to Scott Road. The distance was 1.2 miles.

  Was it possible? Could DeSalvo have gotten into his car, driven to Scott Road, knocked on Bessie Goldberg’s door, talked his way in, raped her, killed her, and then gotten back to our house before my mother and I arrived home? The trickiest—or least likely—part of this scenario was on Scott Road, where DeSalvo would have had to slip unnoticed past the neighborhood children. He also would have had to get into and out of the Goldberg house during the forty-eight-minute window between Roy Smith’s departure and Israel Goldberg’s arrival. He would be threading an awfully small needle to do it, but it was still possible.

  Another problem was the location: According to the FBI’s analysis, all the murders DeSalvo claimed to have committed were in apartment buildings where many people came and went and residents might not be surprised if a maintenance man knocked on their door. But this was a house in the suburbs where a stranger would stand out immediately because everyone on the street knew one another by their first names. Once you have DeSalvo in the house the crime is pure Boston Strangler, but how do you get him there? And why would a killer who claimed to have developed such a perfect technique for killing women suddenly abandon it for something far riskier?

  Tuney and Delaney parked on Scott Road and walked around the Goldberg house, noting where the front and back doors were and how far Smith had to walk to get to the bus stop on Pleasant Street. One of the first things that struck Delaney was that the Goldberg house was easily approached from the back; it was a route, in fact, that neighborhood children said they used as a shortcut. If a killer wanted to enter the Goldberg house unseen from Scott Road, all he had to do was cross behind the Hartunians’ house on the corner of Pleasant Street and walk about 120 feet to the Goldbergs’ backyard. Workmen would not ordinarily use the front door of a house like the Goldbergs’, so Bessie might not be suspicious if a man knocked on her kitchen door and said, for example, that he worked for the Belmont Water Department and wanted to check her meter.

  But even that maneuver might not have been necessary. Beryl Cohen didn’t emphasize this at trial, but the children of Scott Road played in front of the Goldberg home for only part of the time that Bessie was supposedly alone inside. Roy Smith left the house shortly after three o’clock, right around the time that Dougie Dreyer, Myrna Spector, and Melissa Lovett were walking up Pleasant Street and approaching the corner of Scott Road. They remembered passing Smith on the corner, and they remembered that he seemed in a hurry. The children went to their respective homes, and Dougie told the Belmont police that he didn’t go back outside again until 3:25, which was when the school bus usually dropped Susan Faunce off at the corner. When Dougie went back out onto the street, he saw Susan standing in front of Myrna Spector’s house talking to her through an open window. The time was 3:30 p.m. From that moment on, the neighborhood children were playing kickball directly in front of the Goldberg house until Israel came home, and anyone who wanted to enter or exit unnoticed would have had to do it through the back. No one, however, was watching the Goldberg house from 3:05 to 3:25. That did not mean that Smith was innocent, but it certainly made it less sure that he was guilty.

  If Delaney was the idealist of the two, Tuney was the seasoned pragmatist. He’d been in police work long enough to know that the politics of a cas
e are everything, and that if you ignore them you’ll get nowhere. Consequently, the first thing he’d done on the way to Scott Road was to stop at the Belmont police department and let the police chief know they were in the area. It wasn’t required but it was a matter of respect, and it may have been a courtesy that paid off. Delaney is not positive where they got this information, but he believes it was from someone at the Belmont police department. Apparently a neighbor of the Goldbergs’ had seen a suspicious person on Scott Road on the afternoon of the murder and had called the Belmont police with the information, but they had not followed up on it. The lead, such as it was, now belonged to Tuney and Delaney.

  The neighbor turned out to be an elderly man with a bedridden wife, and Delaney has a memory of standing back while Tuney asked the man to repeat his story. On the afternoon that Bessie Goldberg was killed, the neighbor said, he’d been approached by a man in work clothes who had offered to paint his house as a side job on weekends. The man was white and probably in his thirties and—in Delaney’s mind, at least—roughly matched a description of DeSalvo. The old man said he declined the work offer by saying that a private nurse he’d hired to help his wife needed him back in the house. The incident had stuck in his mind, though, and an hour later—when he saw police cars and an ambulance on Scott Road—he’d called the police department.

  By then, however, every cop in Massachusetts was already looking for Roy Smith, and a white man walking around a white neighborhood knocking on doors would have meant absolutely nothing. That was, however, something that DeSalvo said he often did to find weekend work. Maybe he knocked on Goldberg’s door and Bessie opened, Delaney thought. Maybe she let him in. Maybe he said he needed to check her water meter or offered to paint her living room. Maybe she just turned away for a moment and he was on her. It was a classic Boston Strangling except that DeSalvo never confessed to it and Roy Smith was convicted of it; in every other respect it was identical to the thirteen murders he claimed to have committed.

  Delaney and Tuney finished up on Scott Road and drove back to Boston without anything concrete to report. It was a delicate line of inquiry anyway—what with Smith’s case under appeal and the attorney general himself warned away from making any awkward comparisons to other murders. It was a case, however, that Delaney never managed to get out of his head.

  TWENTY-THREE

  GEORGE NASSAR, MCI–Cedar Junction (formerly Walpole State Prison):

  “Al’s reason for killing his victims was so they wouldn’t be witnesses. It was a rational criminal decision because he had already been convicted on eyewitness testimony. His first victim he had in a stranglehold, and it happened to be in her bedroom, and there was a large mirror, and he saw himself strangling her and he stopped. He made sure never to do it in front of a mirror again. When he had a stranglehold on a woman he would block her carotid artery. He did it to me once, he was playing with me one day and he put his thumb and forefinger on the carotid artery and I nearly passed out—it was only a matter of seconds. Once he got you in that stranglehold, one arm became the fulcrum for the other hand, and then he’d fall backward onto the floor. After the other person lost consciousness, only then would he apply the ligature. He said his sex urges would come over him suddenly and uncontrollably; he’d be walking down the street, and it would just come over him. It was not the woman herself, it was the opportunity. If the situation—not her—looked good, he acted. It was truly the free floating of the diabolic.”

  Nassar met DeSalvo in 1965 at MCI-Bridgewater, where they were both being evaluated by a state psychologist to determine if they were legally sane. DeSalvo was awaiting trial for four sexual assaults around Boston, and Nassar had been charged with shooting and stabbing a gas station attendant during a holdup in Andover, Massachusetts. He was also charged with trying to kill a woman and her fourteen-year-old daughter who had witnessed the murder; they survived only because the gun misfired. Nassar, now four decades into a life sentence, plays chess and speaks Russian and reads dictionaries and is rumored to have an IQ in excess of 150. It has also been reported that he is a diagnosed schizophrenic and sociopath with zero empathy for others.

  “Al was insistent that Wiggins was the most important and fondly regarded male figure of his life,” says Nassar, referring to the old master carpenter on Blomerth’s crew. “Al was so repetitive and mawkish about it that I was cloyed by it. I remember he either wanted to, tried to, or succeeded in a contact—through his brother, I think—after his exposure. And he seemed to hope beyond hope that Wiggins’s wife, as I understood it, would still be warm to him. So I’m reconfirmed that that man and woman were his ideal surrogate parents, and now that I see the photo you sent, that that woman and her child would be ideally Al’s wife and son.”

  The photograph Nassar was referring to was the one that Blomerth took in the studio the day before the job was finished. Floyd Wiggins, who lived near DeSalvo in Malden, stands off his right shoulder with a claw hammer shoved in his front pocket. My mother and I are sitting in front of the two men. If Nassar is correct, that photograph represents DeSalvo’s life as it could have been: A gentle father, a loving wife, a healthy child. Instead, DeSalvo got a father who was a violent drunk, a wife who refused to have sex with him, and a daughter who was crippled from birth. That, DeSalvo told Nassar, was why his life had gone so wrong; that was why he was driven to kill.

  Now he was facing hard time in prison, and the only thing he had going for him was an explosive secret—or lie—about his past. Nassar was savvy about the world in a way that DeSalvo was not, and DeSalvo eventually turned to him for advice. Could a man who claimed to be the Strangler, he wanted to know, make a lot of money off book and movie rights to his life story? Nassar said he’d find out, and the next time he saw F. Lee Bailey, his lawyer, he put the question to him. Bailey said that a man who confessed to being the Boston Strangler would go straight to the electric chair, movie deal or no movie deal, unless he had first-rate legal representation. Within days Bailey was sitting down with DeSalvo in a visiting room in Bridgewater State Prison.

  True or not, DeSalvo’s confessions promised to pay everyone quite well. DeSalvo hoped to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars from book, magazine, and movie deals, which he would then use to support his family. Bailey would be paid off for his services from what was left over. And George Nassar would attempt to collect reward money that had been offered by the governor of the state. The idea that a murderer, a rapist, and a high-profile lawyer were going to make enormous amounts of money on a series of gruesome sex murders was bound to arouse suspicion, however, and a rumor started that Nassar was the real Boston Strangler. He supposedly spent his time in Bridgewater tutoring DeSalvo in the details of the crimes, and DeSalvo retained almost all of it because he was thought to have a “photographic” memory.

  This theory was particularly popular in the Cambridge police department, which had always chafed under the authority of the attorney general’s office. Cambridge believed that the one murder that happened in their jurisdiction—Beverly Samans, in early May 1963, was an independent incident, and it infuriated them that Ed Brooke’s Strangler Bureau had come in and just taken it over. What these rumors about Nassar did not address, however, was whether a man who was capable of one kind of violence would be predisposed toward another. Nassar was twice convicted of murdering men in cold blood, but there was absolutely no sexual violence in his past. It was not at all clear that Nassar’s apparent willingness to shoot a man in the chest during a robbery would make him, psychologically, a more likely candidate for raping and strangling old women. DeSalvo’s past, by contrast, was a textbook case of how sex offenders are created. He grew up in an extremely violent household, he was exposed to deviant sex at a very young age, and he went on to develop a voyeuristic obsession with women that quickly escalated to assault and rape. None of this proved he was the Boston Strangler, but it certainly made him a good candidate.

  And it also made for a great insanity defense. I
n January 1967 DeSalvo was put on trial for what were known as his “Green Man” crimes—his rapes and sexual assaults in Massachusetts—and out of DeSalvo’s sordid past Bailey devised an odd and ingenious strategy. DeSalvo was innocent, Bailey would argue, because he was driven to commit his crimes by an “irresistible impulse,” which was the core of any insanity defense. The proof of that impulse, according to Bailey, was that he had murdered thirteen women, but DeSalvo could not be prosecuted for those crimes because he had confessed under condition of immunity. Bailey, in other words, wanted to use testimony that was beyond the reach of the law to reach back into the law and exonerate his client. During a pretrial hearing, Bailey put DeSalvo on the stand and asked him whether he understood that he could be given a life sentence. DeSalvo said that he did.

  “Mr. DeSalvo,” Bailey said. “Is it your purpose in this trial to deny the commission of these offenses?”

  “No, sir, it isn’t,” DeSalvo answered.

  “And do you understand what defense will be raised in your behalf?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What will that be? Can you tell the court?”

  “For the purpose that I hired you in the first place: Not to deny these charges but to somehow explain the truth and tell the truth of all this happening. I would like to know myself why all this took place.”

  To give some backbone to his insanity defense, Bailey brought in a renowned psychologist named Dr. James Brussel, who had helped solve a famous serial bomber case case in New York City in the 1950s. Brussel had already seen service on the Strangler Bureau and was one of the few psychologists who thought that the stranglings were the work of one man. He had interviewed DeSalvo in depth about his compulsion to murder, and under direct examination by Bailey, he repeated what he’d heard.