A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  As well-intentioned people on the outside did their best and gradually lost interest, Smith railed on. He fired Cohen and then rehired him a year later. He told off Ray Richards to his face during a prison visit. He fired off bombshell letters to Ackerman, to Chayet, to Delaney, to everyone but Emmanuel herself. Interspersed in the vitriol of his letters were inquiries about Emmanuel’s love life and comments on world events. Through the bars of his cell, as it were, Smith watched America go through some of the most violent upheavals of its history. In 1967 he watched the Supreme Court finally strike down laws in sixteen states holding that interracial marriage was illegal. He watched the U.S. military get dragged into a war in Vietnam, and he watched a black activist named Stokely Carmichael refuse military service by declaring famously, “Ain’t no Vietcong ever called me nigger. If I’m gonna do any fighting, it’s going to be right here at home.” (A variation of this quote was later used by boxing legend Muhammad Ali, to whom it is often attributed.) He watched National Guard units suppress a race riot in Detroit by raking the ghetto rooftops with bursts from .50-caliber machine guns. The guns were mounted in turrets atop armored personnel carriers and were identical to the weapons that were clearing jungle around Khe Sanh. Smith watched Martin Luther King get shot down on a motel balcony and Robert Kennedy get shot down outside a Los Angeles ballroom and an openly racist presidential candidate named George Wallace get shot down, but not killed, in Laurel, Maryland. He watched poorly trained National Guardsmen open fire at Kent State University and kill four white students who were protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. He watched inmates at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York take dozens of corrections officers hostage in an attempt to improve their living conditions. State troopers started shooting indiscriminately into the prison yard and killed forty-three people, including ten of the officers they were trying to save. Afterward the surviving inmates were forced to strip naked and run over broken glass while troopers beat them with clubs.

  Of all the violence going on outside the walls of Norfolk, it was the murder of Martin Luther King that hit Smith the hardest. King was killed by a single round from a 30.06 rifle that struck him in the neck while he was leaning over a balcony railing, talking to a musician named Ben Branch. The death came at a time when Roy Smith was particularly dispirited about his case and, in some ways, about the state of his country. “Nothing new about me and nothing in sight and nothing have come down about me,” he wrote in a letter one week after the murder. “I think this is only another month gone by. And on top of that the brutal slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King. This nation is sick and have a lot to answer for, but I know it’s good peoples in this world and I hope what he lived and died for will open everyone’s heart. Or we will all perish together, and until the black man get justice, it will always be hell on earth.”

  For a black man in prison around 1968, America must indeed have looked like hell on earth. Attica aside, it must have looked like a country where it was almost safer to be inside a prison—where the cops had no guns—than out.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ALBERT DESALVO, Bridgewater Correctional Institution:

  “I am not in control of myself. I know that something awful has been done, that the whole world of human beings are shocked and will be even more shocked, that people everywhere are saying, My God, is this a man? But it can’t be helped, I am what I am. I go looking around the apartment. I put out drawers, I go into the bathroom again and I throw things down on the floor, towels, I pull out the drawer in the pantry, I go into the living room and I find her pocketbook, I dump it out on the divan, I don’t think I took a thing…. I don’t know what I want.

  “Now I go back to her. She is sitting there on the bed. I put the stocking around her throat and knot it twice, good and tight, then I put a loose pink and white thing around and tie it into a big bow. It’s hard to talk about what I did then. I think, looking back on it, that it had something to do with a killing that was a mark, something like the end of something, you understand me? I went into the kitchen. I don’t know why I did this. I get a broom and I go back into the bedroom. Well, she was on the bed and she had these things around her neck and this stocking and this scarf and the other thing. I was just a different person altogether, these things were going on and the feeling after I got out of the apartment was that it never happened. But now I stood there with the broom and looking at her I begin to get angry, she make me angry, just to look at her, I don’t know why.

  “I go over to the bed and I take the broom handle and put it into her, I push it into her but not so far as to hurt her. You say it is funny that I worry about hurting her when she is already dead, but that is the truth…I don’t want to hurt her. I leave it there and she look like a woman with things being done to her. I stand there and look, then go around the apartment again. I find this card, it says, ‘Happy New Year.’ I go back to her and put it at her right foot, I lean it against her foot.

  “When I go out of there it was like it never happened. I mean, it is just as if I was coming out of something, you understand me? I go out and I got downstairs and, as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t me. I can’t explain it to you any other way. It’s just so unreal. I was there. It was done. I don’t deny it. And yet if you talked to me an hour later, it didn’t mean nothing. Now I go down and out of that place and when I get to Charles Street it is dark. I even stand for a minute in the doorway and already the whole thing is fading out in my mind, but I want to tell you, too, that something important has happened to me here. I don’t know what—that is not for guys like me to figure, which is why I have been saying that I need help for so long. But I feel it. And just for a minute I stand there, then I go along into the darkness of the Back Bay. And it seems to me that no more women will ever see the Boston Strangler again.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  AT 10:00 A.M. ON February 24, 1967, the FBI office in Boston issued an urgent teletype that three inmates had escaped from Bridgewater prison, a facility that served as a mental hospital for criminals. All three men worked in the kitchen and were supposed to wake up half an hour before the rest of the inmates to help prepare breakfast, but when a guard stopped at their adjoining cells at 6:20 that morning, they were gone. One of the men had gotten hold of a skeleton key and had reached through a slot in his solid wooden door and opened it from the outside. The locks were massive brass mechanisms installed in 1888, but the company that built them had gone out of business, so the prison staff had to keep them in repair with improvised parts. They were not hard locks to breach.

  The three men proceeded down their cell block corridor, unlocking any doors that blocked their passage, and then climbed into an elevator shaft that had been knocked open for repairs. From the elevator shaft they were able to make it outside the building and onto the top of a twenty-foot-high brick wall. They walked northward along the top of the wall until it hit the outer walls of the prison, and then they jumped down to the ground. Police found three sets of footprints in the snow that led across the old farm fields surrounding the prison and then hopped across a small creek. From there they disappeared into the dense pine woods that lay beyond the fields. One of the escapees was a forty-year-old man named Frederick Erickson who was serving a life sentence for killing his wife. The second was an armed robber named George Harrison who had a reputation for being trigger-happy. The third was Albert DeSalvo.

  Erickson and Harrison wound up at a cocktail lounge in Waltham later that day, where they called a lawyer and waited for the police to pick them up. They said that after escaping from the prison in the middle of the night they had walked to Bridgewater State College, stolen a car, and dropped DeSalvo off in Boston before driving north. They ran out of gas in the town of Everett, abandoned the car, and made their way back toward Boston. DeSalvo seemed to show a little more determination: “De Salvo indicated intention of going to Ontario, Canada by plane to get a ‘nose job,’” an FBI teletype warned the following day, undoubtedly based on informati
on provided by Erickson and Harrison. “After which he would kill the doctor performing the operation. De Salvo alleged to be armed with an eight shot thirty-two caliber Beretta. De Salvo carries gun in rectum and plans to use if necessary.”

  Why DeSalvo would carry the Beretta in his rectum—or how he planned to extract it in an emergency—was not explained. The information was obviously made up, but the FBI alerted both Canada and Mexico, and then started searching for DeSalvo in the small town of Lynn, north of Boston. The focus on Lynn was based on a tip that Erickson and Harrison had actually dropped DeSalvo off there rather than in Boston. The police also arrested DeSalvo’s two brothers and accused them of complicity in the escape, though that may just have been a way of putting pressure on him. At two o’clock the following afternoon, Lynn police got a call from the owner of Simmons Uniform Store, who said that DeSalvo was in his store and wanted to give himself up. He’d walked in wearing an ill-fitting sailor’s uniform that he’d stolen from a private home the previous night, and he had asked to use the store phone to call his lawyer. The store owner asked if he was Albert DeSalvo, DeSalvo said that he was, and the owner frisked him and then led him into the back of the store. He let DeSalvo use the phone while he made him a cup of coffee, and DeSalvo had just taken his first sip when the police came in and put the cuffs on.

  Word got out almost immediately that DeSalvo had been caught, and a crowd of two thousand people massed around the Lynn police station to see him. They were held in check by state troopers with shotguns. “Maybe people will know what it means to be mentally ill,” DeSalvo told the crowd as he was led inside. At an impromptu press conference he went on to tell reporters that he had escaped only to draw attention to the fact that he wasn’t getting the psychological help he’d been promised. “I didn’t mean no harm to nobody,” he said. “I did it to bring it back to the attention of the public that a man has a mental illness and hires a lawyer, and no one does anything about it.”

  The reason he was not getting psychological help was because Bridgewater was closer to a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum than to a mental hospital. On most days there was only one doctor on duty to care for more than six hundred inmates. Until recently seventy-five inmates had been jammed into an old boiler room with a dirt floor that turned white with frost in the winter. A third of the inmates had completed their criminal sentences but were still behind bars because the state didn’t know what to do with them. One of these unfortunates had been picked up for vagrancy in 1905 and was still trying to get out. Conditions were so unspeakable that men charged with crimes were pleading guilty and doing their time at Walpole rather than risking a psychological evaluation at Bridgewater.

  DeSalvo’s escape got him seven more years and a transfer to Walpole. Bridgewater was the only prison in the state that could make Walpole feel like a relief. The word on the cell blocks, though, was that DeSalvo was going to be killed as soon as he got there, so he was put in the hospital ward under twenty-four-hour guard. Eventually he was transferred to maximum security and finally to the general inmate population. It was a dramatic start to his life sentence, but DeSalvo was both tough and likable, and it did not take long for him to carve out a place for himself in the violent, racially charged world of Walpole prison.

  “Organized crime, they were their own group,” says a former state trooper named Ted Harvey about the power structure at Walpole. Harvey had been part of the trooper detail that had broken up the riots that swept through Walpole in the early seventies. “And in those days the Muslims were in big, big time; they stayed right with themselves. There was an Irish mafia that stayed by themselves, and the Italian mafia, and if you killed a little boy or a little girl, you’d have to be in protective custody because they’d kill you. Let’s say I wasn’t a state trooper, let’s just say I was Teddy Harvey from Salem and got involved in some shit, well, they size you up in about thirty seconds. You get a Dorchester kid or a Charlestown kid, you ain’t gonna bother him, you’ll leave him alone ’cause he’ll kill you. He’ll take his beating and then he’ll just get you, that’s all. You get guys like you or me that never did anything wrong in their lives, we end up in prison, we ain’t gonna make it.”

  They get turned into punks, Harvey said, which was prison slang for sexual slaves. They became more and more effeminate and subservient until they were completely destroyed psychologically.

  According to Harvey, DeSalvo got by in prison because he eventually secured a job in the prison dispensary where he was able to steal—or buy from the guards—pharmaceuticals that went for a high price on the cell blocks. With that money he made friends or bought himself protection or just turned himself into someone whom no one wanted as an enemy. He also made necklaces and sold them at the prison gift shop under the name, “Chokers by DeSalvo.” They sold for as much as ten dollars each and were so in demand that DeSalvo was clearing up to three thousand dollars a year. A photograph taken at Walpole after the riots shows DeSalvo—palms up, mouth open in midsentence—talking to reporters in front of a group of much younger inmates. He’s been there eight years at this point, and his broad shoulders have shrunk a bit, his handsome face has gotten puffier, sadder, a little ruined around the eyes. But he’s the one talking. The other men stand patiently around him with their arms folded across their chests because—or so it appears—they are content to let DeSalvo do their speaking for them.

  It was around this same time that DeSalvo received a request for an interview from Steve Delaney, the private detective who had talked to my mother about his work at out house. Delaney was now drawing a paycheck from the Roy Smith Defense Fund and trying to uncover evidence that Smith was innocent. That inevitably meant pursuing the idea that DeSalvo could have committed the Goldberg murder. In November 1970 Delaney showed up at Walpole and met with DeSalvo in a small visiting room. The guard who let Delaney in told him that the door would be locked behind him and added sarcastically, Enjoy your interview.

  DeSalvo knew why Delaney was there because Delaney was required to declare his intentions in a letter before the visit. You’re wasting your time, I didn’t do the Bessie Goldberg murder, DeSalvo told Delaney as soon as he stepped into the room. Delaney had just gotten his private investigator’s license a year earlier, but he was a skillful interviewer with a phenomenal mind for details, and he was not thrown by DeSalvo’s declaration. He sat down and started asking him about the other Boston Stranglings. It was a chess game that—perhaps out of sheer boredom—DeSalvo was willing to play. Delaney knew that killers who are reluctant to talk about their own crimes will sometimes talk about them in hypothetical terms, and that was the approach he tried. He picked his way carefully around the topic with questions like, If a guy were going to kill that many women, how would he do it? How would he break into their apartments? How would he attack them without getting hurt?

  Whether DeSalvo was truly the Strangler or not, the questions were too much for him to resist. During his time in prison he had gone from insisting that he was the Boston Strangler to insisting—after his escape—that he wasn’t. His confessions had gained him nothing, and there was no reason to continue claiming that he had killed thirteen women. He had told Delaney point-blank that he was not the Boston Strangler, but he went on to turn the tables. If I were the Strangler, he said, how do you think I would do it? Delaney suggested some possibilities for killing women in their apartments and went on to ruminate on what might be the best way to attack someone, once you had them alone in a room. You would want it to be quick. You wouldn’t want to get hurt—even scratched—because that would be evidence against you. You would want to go from being a normal person to a killer and then back in at most a few minutes. It’s not an easy thing to do.

  While Delaney was suggesting various scenarios, DeSalvo got up from his seat and said, Stand up, this will only take a minute. Delaney stood up and glanced out the window to see if he could see the guard. There was no one in sight. The next thing he knew, DeSalvo’s arm was around his neck.
“He put his bicep and his forearm on each side and flexed,” Delaney says. “He said, ‘See how I’m not hurting any of the bones but I’m cutting off your air?’ And slowly but surely I could see: You know how they pump up your arm for blood pressure? It was the same kind of feeling but increasing; I think it was just the blood building up, you know? And I started feeling pain, and I was like, okay, I get the point. He said, ‘Go ahead, do something. Do anything you want. Kick me. Punch me.’ I couldn’t, I knew I couldn’t, I wasn’t about to stomp or kick him, I just wanted him to let me go.”

  DeSalvo had clearly discovered the carotid takedown, and now Delaney was strangling to death in the most secure prison in the state. The guard on the other side of the wall either didn’t know or didn’t care. DeSalvo finally let Delaney go and then went straight back into his denial that he was the Boston Strangler. He went on to tell Delaney that he knew for a fact that Roy Smith had flunked a lie detector test. He even boasted that he knew which questions Smith had missed.

  Smith had begged to take a lie detector test in the Belmont police station, but the police had refused. Eight years into his sentence—just a couple of months before Delaney’s visit to Walpole—he finally arranged for one at Norfolk, but according to Delaney, the results were unusable. When people take lie detector tests, they also answer a series of mildly provocative questions—Have you ever lied to a friend? Are you ashamed of anything you have done?—to establish a baseline response that the crime-related questions can be measured against. If a subject’s blood pressure rises to a certain level when answering a question about lying to a friend—something virtually everyone has done—it shouldn’t rise much beyond that when saying that he didn’t kill Bessie Goldberg. If he’s lying because he did, in fact, kill Bessie Goldberg, his blood pressure will skyrocket. It is a physiological response that almost no one can control.