A Death in Belmont

by Sebastian Junger

  The problem comes when a suspect is so upset about the circumstances he is in that that every question, no matter how neutral, is wildly disturbing. He becomes an “untestable subject,” and according to Delaney, that was what happened to Smith. When the tester gave Smith the control questions, his physiological responses were so extreme that no baseline could be established. The technician who administered the test had a much more skeptical interpretation of Smith’s reactions, however. He reported that the test results “did not support his account of his activities, especially relating to…the death of Bessie Goldberg.” That still did not necessarily mean that Smith had killed Bessie Goldberg; it just meant that the test would not help him get out of Norfolk. Lie detector tests are good investigative tools, but test results are not admissible in court because their error rates are on the order of 30 percent. There was still a one-in-three chance that Smith was telling the truth.

  But it was interesting that DeSalvo knew about Smith in the first place. When he first confessed to thirteen murders, he denied having anything to do with Bessie Goldberg. He did, however, describe the incident in our studio when he was on the ladder and my mother came in back to tell him about the murder. He told investigators that he was so shocked he almost fell off the ladder. He also described the Goldberg house to John Bottomly, though he said that he knew what it looked like because he had seen a photograph in the newspaper. “It was, like, a two—a single family home, the shades were all down, white shades,” DeSalvo told Bottomly. “It was brick, a red brick house and it had the drainpipes on the right, square type.”

  Boston had a murder a week in those days, and of all those murders, DeSalvo had chosen to memorize the newspaper photos of that one. Whether or not DeSalvo had ever been at the Goldberg house, the newspaper photo was clearly the source of his description. All the shades were pulled down because police investigators were in the house, and that was when the photograph had been taken. And DeSalvo’s description was supremely detailed: Israel Goldberg himself probably didn’t even know whether he had round gutters or square, yet DeSalvo did—and he did despite the fact that it was almost impossible to tell which kind they were from the photograph. DeSalvo would have had to study it very, very hard.

  His fascination made sense, though, no matter what his relationship with the Goldberg murder might be. If DeSalvo had killed thirteen women but not Bessie Goldberg, his fascination would lie in the fact that another man had committed a copycat crime a mile away from where he was working. If DeSalvo had killed all the women, including Bessie Goldberg, his fascination would lie in the fact that an innocent man was doing time for a crime that he, DeSalvo, had committed. (If he was sufficiently racist or hard-hearted, he might even find the situation entertaining.) The scenario in which he would be the least fascinated would be the one in which he hadn’t actually killed anyone but claimed that he had. In that case a solved murder that was not considered part of the Strangler series would be of absolutely no interest—or use—to him at all. It would be a waste of time, a dud.

  Even to begin evaluating whether DeSalvo is the Boston Strangler, one has to decide whether one man could be capable of all the murders he claimed. If not, the very term “Boston Strangler” is a false proposition. Some psychologists at the time felt that the diversity of victims—young and old, black and white, strangled and not strangled, raped and not raped—meant that several murderers were at work. That conclusion fits the classic model for serial killers, who tend to not vary their routine, but doesn’t encompass all of them. In the 1920s, a former mental patient named Earle Leonard Nelson went on an eighteen-month rampage around the United States and Canada that left over twenty women dead. Nelson initially preyed on elderly women who ran boarding houses—just the sort places where he could easily pass unnoticed—but then he started killing young women. All his victims were first strangled and then raped, and some were found with a belt or dishrag wound tightly around their neck. Nelson was dubbed the “Dark Strangler” because of his swarthy complexion. He was finally caught in Manitoba, Canada, and hanged on January 13, 1928.

  So the age range of the Boston victims does not necessarily mean that there were multiple killers; they could all have been killed by one man who switched propensities the way Nelson did. The next question is timing. The psychological mechanism that compels a person to commit a sex murder is not in a constant state of readiness; it waxes and wanes like every other form of mental illness. When a sex murderer loses control of himself, murdering one person does not necessarily stabilize him again; if anything it may open the door to other—sometimes worse—possibilities. If, for argument’s sake, you include Bessie Goldberg in the list of Strangler victims, a pattern starts to emerge. Of the fourteen murders attributed to the “Boston Strangler,” the first ten occurred in distinct groupings. Slesers, Mullen, Nichols, and Blake were killed within a two-week period at the end of June 1962. (Mary Mullen was the woman who DeSalvo claimed had died of a heart attack when he started to strangle her.) Irga and Sullivan were killed within hours of each other in early September 1962, Clark and Bissette were killed within three weeks of each other in December 1962, and Brown and Goldberg were killed within days of each other in March 1963. The next four murders occurred individually and months apart, until they stopped altogether with the killing of Mary Sullivan, on January 4, 1964.

  If this was the work of several men, it is almost certain that some of them would have been caught. In those years the Boston Homicide Division was solving roughly half of all murders, and there was no reason for the Strangler murders to be any different. One could make sense of this pattern, though, by seeing it as the work of one man. Whoever he might be, his initial loss of control was the worst and most savage, resulting in four murders in two weeks. Subsequent binges of violence were limited to pairs of people and then, finally, to one person at a time. The killer looked very much like a man who was wrestling with the demons inside him and needed a year and a half finally to get the upper hand. After that he may have lived in terror that “the feeling” would overwhelm him again and he would return to killing. The fact that he had deliberately murdered people did not necessarily mean that he wanted to be doing that; like an abusive husband, he may have been secretly horrified by his crimes. Such a man might well ask for help before it happened again. Such a man might well beg to be stowed away in a secure place, like a hospital or a prison, until the problem was under control. Such a man, in fact, might well ask for life in prison—as DeSalvo did—rather than risk an outbreak like the one he had just been through.

  DeSalvo—with his brutal childhood, sexual obsessions, and history of rapes and assaults—was an excellent candidate for such a person. The problem was that his confessions were both somewhat inaccurate and hopelessly polluted by prompting from John Bottomly, and there was no physical evidence, not one shred, that linked him to any of the crimes. And yet. How can one ignore a man whose confessions to thirteen murders are even somewhat accurate? How can one ignore a man who asks to be incarcerated for life so that his psychological problems can be studied? The authorities, at least, could not. On September 17, 1965, days after DeSalvo had given his last confession to Bottomly, J. Edgar Hoover received a cable about DeSalvo from the Boston bureau of the FBI. The cable left the alleged confessions completely unaddressed, but said that the Massachusetts AG’s office was “pretty much satisfied” they had identified the Boston Strangler. “He had picked out of a large number of photos the ten women he had strangled,” the cable read, referring to DeSalvo. “This individual also advised that there was an eleventh person whom he had murdered, the picture of whom was not in the group.”

  This was no great feat; photographs of the victims had appeared in Boston area newspapers, and anyone with an even passing interest in the Strangler cases could have done the same thing. What was more impressive was that DeSalvo had known what was not in the pile. There was only one murder victim no one would recognize because her brother had refused to release her photog
raph to the newspapers. It was Mary Brown, who had been beaten, raped, and strangled in Lawrence, Massachusetts, several days before Bessie Goldberg was killed. The crime was so savage and bloody that the police did not classify it as a Boston Strangling, and they had to go searching their records when DeSalvo brought it up two years later. DeSalvo’s unsolicited claim that Mary Brown’s photograph was missing from the pile sent investigators back to her brother, who finally gave them a photograph. Investigators inserted it into the pile, and DeSalvo picked her out “without delay.”

  Other than DeSalvo’s guilt, there is only one explanation for how he could have identified her photograph. It would require either staggering incompetence or intentional fraud on the part of John Bottomly of the attorney general’s office, but it is possible in the sense that all things are. Dr. Ames Robey, who was the medical director at Bridgewater prison at the time, testified at DeSalvo’s rape trial that he was not insane. Privately Robey was convinced not only that DeSalvo had not killed anyone, but that he hadn’t raped anyone either. All DeSalvo’s rapes, Dr. Robey believed, were actually seductions, and the supposed rape victims had simply regretted their decision afterward and called the police. Decades later this was Dr. Robey’s explanation for DeSalvo’s performance with the photographs:

  “Bottomly got very involved in [the Strangler investigation], among other things showing pictures to Albert, much like a lineup, of pictures that had not ever been published of the victims. We heard about it later because Albert couldn’t help boasting, you know. Let’s say you lay out a bunch of pictures, okay? And ordinarily I would go down them, and you’re watching the pictures. Bottomly’s face would have lost him a fortune in poker. DeSalvo just watched Bottomly’s eyes and would go back to the right picture. I thought this thing smelled, so I called up Ed Brooke, [who] got the Supreme Court to issue a gag order on everyone concerned until they could hold a hearing. And, ah, no one ever bothered to get back to me on any of this.”

  Dr. Robey was not at the photo lineup, so it’s unclear what he was basing his theory on. His theory also does not explain how Bottomly could have signaled with his eyes that a photo was not there. Nevertheless, doubts persisted about DeSalvo’s guilt, and they only increased after the prison break. Distraught that he had not been sent to a secure hospital to be studied as a serial killer, and unable to obtain a lucrative book deal about his life story, DeSalvo started denying that he was the Boston Strangler. True or not, the claims weren’t gaining him anything, and there was no reason for him to continue with them.

  DeSalvo’s retreat spawned a host of conflicts. He tried to sue F. Lee Bailey for five million dollars after Bailey referred to him as the Boston Strangler on national television. He wrote a furious letter to the attorney general’s office after Donald Conn, the prosecutor who had put him in prison, tried to run for attorney general on a platform that included claiming credit for putting the Boston Strangler behind bars. It was an audacious move, considering the fact that Conn had blocked any mention of the Stranglings during DeSalvo’s rape trial. DeSalvo also hired another attorney to try to extract from Bailey money that was due him from a movie deal based on the Strangler murders. During all these convulsions in DeSalvo’s prison-bound life, George Nassar remained his close adviser and confidant. They were always together in prison, speaking in low tones in the corridors. Nassar helped DeSalvo with his legal problems. Nassar gave him advice about how to promote himself in the outside world. Nassar, in the eyes of some, virtually became his literary agent.

  In late November 1973, DeSalvo said something vague to his brother Richard about working on a manuscript that would reveal the “truth” about his life. About a week before Thanksgiving, DeSalvo checked himself into the prison hospital, which was a secure ward, complaining of stomach pains. Something was going on in the prison, though, and it was possible he had done that simply to stay out of harm’s way. On the evening of November 25, which was a Sunday, he called Richard and had a lighthearted conversation with him and then called Dr. Ames Robey—whom he had never liked—and asked to meet him the following morning. He said it was urgent. The date was two days after the ten-year anniversary of Roy Smith’s conviction. Sometime after ten o’clock that night, a man passed through four locked doors, entered DeSalvo’s ward, stabbed him sixteen times in the chest, and then covered him with a hospital blanket so that no one would see the blood. DeSalvo wasn’t discovered until the following morning.

  Whoever killed him had to have had some help; no one can get through four locked doors at Walpole without someone else knowing about it. The prison warden thought that the murder was related to DeSalvo’s drug dealing in prison. Others thought he was killed to keep him from revealing that the “real” Boston Strangler was actually George Nassar. The fact that he was stabbed sixteen times—often a sign of rage—suggested that revenge could have been the motive. When my mother heard the news, she assumed DeSalvo was killed by a black inmate in retaliation for Roy Smith’s conviction ten years earlier. Three inmates at Walpole were tried, acquitted, tried again, and acquitted again for DeSalvo’s murder, and the case was finally dropped.

  Like much about DeSalvo’s life, his death remained a mystery. DNA evidence was not yet something that investigators could make use of, and when DeSalvo died, he took his secrets with him.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ROY SMITH WAS in prison ten years, a quarter of his life, when something shifted. Lifers generally do their time quietly, and Smith was no exception, but he somehow managed to distinguish himself in a way that most lifers don’t: People started seriously to consider the possibility that he was innocent.

  It is a quirk of human nature and maybe the justice system that—at least in Massachusetts in the 1970s—lifers were thought to be the most promising candidates for commutation. Most crimes, like robbery, assault, and rape, are committed by habitual offenders who have serious difficulty functioning peacefully in society. If they are released, around 50 percent of them go right back to committing their crimes. Murderers are different. If you exclude professional hit men and the insane, most murderers are in prison for a onetime eruption of violence that they themselves are often shocked to have committed. Once released, they have a recidivism rate of 2 percent. In a strictly statistical sense, murderers are much better candidates for judicial mercy than men who have committed far lesser crimes.

  During those years the Massachusetts prison system was severely overcrowded, and the Advisory Board of Pardons was actively trying to release more lifers and low-risk inmates back into society. The board was traditionally composed of five members who were drawn, for the most part, from people in law enforcement jobs. In 1972 Massachusetts governor Francis Sargent expanded the board to seven members and made sure that three of them were reform-minded people who came from the civilian population. One of his new appointees was a former public defender named Paul Chernoff; another was a black minister from Roxbury named Michael Haynes. The Attica massacre had happened the previous year, and a wave of prison reform was sweeping the country that the law-and-order types couldn’t hope to block. The Advisory Board of Pardons went from commuting one or two life sentences a year to commuting as many as sixteen.

  In the fall of 1972, after the reforms had kicked in, Roy Smith sent a letter to a friend of Nanette Emmanuel’s named Mrs. Joan Stevens. Stevens was married to a science reporter for the New York Times who had also taken an interest in Smith’s case. “I am sorry to say I am not doing no kind of way good,” he wrote Mrs. Stevens on October 13. “I am half out of my mind. I got myself enough time in—ten years, almost, and very easy Cohen could put in for a commutation. This year’s the best I ever seen for people with life sentences, they are getting out right and left. The parole board is new and they believe in giving a man a chance, this year’s been like cake and honey for lifers. All I want to do is get out and get me a job and get married and settle down. This year sure was a good chance for my freedom. Oh well, I don’t know any more, I should be crazy by now
.”

  Several months after he wrote that letter, his lawyer filed a petition with the Advisory Board of Pardons requesting a commutation hearing, and a date was eventually set for the following November. Smith wrote a letter to Ed Brooke, the former attorney general of Massachusetts who was now a senator in Washington, and persuaded him to put in a call on his behalf. He talked to George Bohlinger about giving a recommendation. He convinced several prison guards to write letters of support. One member of the advisory board even promised him a job if he got out. “Every move I made turned to gold,” he wrote proudly to Joan Stevens after listing his small triumphs. “I sure been thinking about all of you, you can bet on that. Your letter found me hacking and coughing and I couldn’t talk for a few days. Smile. This cold or whatever I got is something else, I got it when I went on leave for four days. Oh, you don’t know, I been in Boston, this is the second time.”

  Smith’s record at Norfolk was so clean that he had been included in a furlough program that gave him fourteen days a year of unsupervised time on the outside. He used one furlough to see a woman in Boston whom he described as his “girlfriend,” and another to visit his lawyer, Beryl Cohen, at his home on Christmas Day. His ability to stay out of trouble on furlough was essential to being considered for commutation, and Smith went into his hearing with a record that was beyond reproach. His hearing was held inside Norfolk prison walls at 11 a.m. on Friday, November 30. The ten-year anniversary of his guilty verdict had passed a few days earlier, and Albert DeSalvo had been found dead on his hospital bed the previous Monday. The first hearing, for a small-time gangster named Joe Femino, ran an hour and a half late, so Smith’s hearing didn’t start until 12:30 that afternoon. Nanette Emmanuel, who had made the trip from Virginia for the hearing, testified about how hard Smith had worked to improve himself in prison. A friend of hers named Bill Parker, who was blind, told the board that Smith’s first letters had shown “a certain immaturity,” but that in the last three years he had undergone a profound change for the better. Theodore Restaino, assistant superintendent at Norfolk, testified that Smith was “the kind of guy he admires” in the institution. Beryl Cohen stood up and read letters that the guards at Norfolk had written and then described how Smith was erroneously thought to have been the Boston Strangler when he was arrested.